Wonderful progress! Instantly had some ideas about this:
iCulture - the amount of culture per turn it produces (equivalent to that from buildings in a city)
So will a nomad tribe going into a cave have a certain out put of culture there then? Nice! When he wanders back to the cave, the tile and the tiles surrounding (Perhaps think of early culture more like a property?) would still have certain yields of the last visit there.
A certain tech could then make the cavesite permanently habited which would allow your tribe to keep culture in the cave even when the nomad tribe wandering somewhere else. This way you could, although still wandering around a lot, also have some early outposts for info whats going on around you and also for defense, to retreat to, when in danger. Building a "
cavekeeper" unit enabling to keep culture on a cave while away could be possible after having researched both shelter building and fire making?
The "cavekeeper" would then increase the cultural output of the cave over time as certain techs and resources are researched and yielded.
Think of having access of "furs", making the cave more comfortable or think of "tracking", making it easier to access its surroundings, so that its "culture" is extended, but not like all 9 plots a time but like where a "path" is built, culture floods the tile. (is there a tag like that, granting cultural ownership to a tile near a certain improvement X (inhibited cave) , if another improvement Y (path) is present on it?)
iCultureRange - the range at which at last one culture is exerted
Perhaps this tag could be applied what I just described?
iVisibilityChange - extra visibility range units occupying the fort get
I would like to see it not for range units inside forts (caves, outposts) but for scouting units and hunters maybe as well.
iUnique - the minimum distance from another fort
I think we really should use this tag to limit the number of forts efficiently, maybe an alternative to paying per turn for (later) forts which was not yet possible, as I remember (cost of improvement: X gold/turn).
- I'd say we should also try to have the fort work like a cottage ("hamlet" outpost upgrades to "cottage" fort and then "town" castle) but only if it is "worked" for some time which in this case the RequiresFortify tag does only do so far as it has "yes or no", not "yes=X turns", right?
So in short, what I would like to see is a combination that means working tile by fortifying makes it upgrade after X turns instead of just have a military unit in there and having
instant upgrade...
bBombardable - can be bombarded to reduce defense value
Will caves be bombardable - or, even better, will they be able to be smoked out with special arsonist troops that later would upgrade to ancient flamethrower or how the grenadier is called? We could create a special type of firekeeper unit that, if brought to enemy caves could do that job.
But it would have to be protected because it has very low defense... Basically the "
firekeeper" would be a pre-wood-working siege unit so caves dont become impenetrable. It could have an additional purpose of giving your caves fire as long as you don't have a steady method of making fire - there would be events for caves losing their fire due to stupidity or natural desaster, flooding etc [Forge has burnt down - like] having your initial nomad tribe to 'construct' the "captured fire" (maybe by quest-like having been near a vulcanoe or near a bushfire) would enable to build firekeepers etc.
I think the idea how important fire in the early ages is is not yet exploited enough in this mod;
a much too short period of time in the early gameplay is spent on that. Also, the aspect that fire makes animals go away will have to be stressed more, I think. Firekeepers could build
fireposts (bonfire graphics?), unlike forts, providing no defense but drive certain animals away (new animal frontier method, as they can enter cultural territory then). These special improvements would then be able to be destroyed by storms, big herds (Elephants, Bison etc) but keep lions, tigers etc away. Firekeepers, Cavekeepers and Nomad Tribes would make it able to have a semi-nomadic initial early gamepaly.
Yes, you have your caves , on which you can rely and which you can upgrade with certain features but you also have a nomad lifestyle at the same time, finding new food resources and exploring a bit. caves and fireposts would perhaps uncover parts of the map in which sense we could reform the way the exploring takes place. Early units would not longer able to reveal territory but improvements instead?
Territory could then be revealed in the fashion of cities doe now, first flat lands, then the hills etc. So having knowledge of the highlands (and thus be able to travel there and hunt) would be much harder to achieve, if the realistically expanding borders of sight would be going the most "easy" way first.
A "reveal" property value could be created by caves and fireposts, spreading this property to the surroundings, more property to low lands, thus the surrounding lowlands hit a certain treshold limit first, being revealed first. "Outsourcing" the exploration in early times makes the nomad lifestyle a bit more structured, I think. Of course, not only caves and fireposts would influence the property value of the surroundings to reveal lands but also the initial Nomad tribe as well.
Lots of ideas, but you see Koshling, your work always inspires us to move even further with this game!
. What is the evolving mechanism? Cottages etc need to be worked by a city. I assume that would not be the case for forts.
