Minor Civs, Nation States, and AI

[Kailric]

Here we discuss the new Minor Civs, Major Civs and their AI

I moved this conversation here:

I am currently working to add "Minor Civ" types to the mod. They will be different than normal natives in that they will construct several buildings, build defensives, etc.

They will have larger towns, currently Natives only have about 1 or 2 sized towns on average.

They will have two new Strategies, build infrastructure and once that is done they will stock pile weapons. They will also be able to produce their own weapons, armor, and horses.

They can Research some of the basic techs and trade them. They will however, be prone to stick to their old ways so advance techs do not really appeal to them.

Other than that they will function like Natives. I am attempting to leave the Native code alone so there can be more primitive Tribes still. For Minor Civs to function correctly they still need to be set as natives as well.

Also, I've add a combat bonus for minor Civs based on difficulty, set in Handicap.xml.

I've added another test code help text to city screens. In vanilla you can press ctrl-z to reveal the map for testing mode. In this mode you can click any city and open it's city screen. If you hold control and hover over a unit you will now see help text on all the professions the unit can have and the AI values for them. This can help you determine what professions the AI unit is preferring. If you add new professions and yields this info can help you determine what settings in the XML you need to make in order for your professions to work correctly.

Any other ideas minor Civs?

That sounds cool, it is always good to make the vanilla natives more interesting. How about adding a few Techs and/or Civics that enables you to advance from Native to Minor Civ status, and that enable you to advance from Minor Civ to regular civ status. After all most of the minor or barbarian civs realistically did advance to regular feudal kingdoms within the time frame of the mod. This would also be good for mods like World History in which all civs can undergo a gradual process of enlightenment and industrialization if successful, and aren't arbitrarily blocked from making any attempts at industry, trade, or progress. Games like Victoria 2 are good at this, in that you can start out as an initially backward country like Japan, but can still achieve industrialization and development if you plan well and eventually become a Great Power equal to Western civs (just like happened in real history!)

There could be certain steps along the way, such as a tech Feudal Land Tenure enabling you to change from native "invisible borders" to having regular borders, and a tech Organized Trade that stops citizens from wandering off to give gifts for free to your neighbors, so you can instead start to trade and earn money from that. At the end of the chain would be a tech allowing you to advance from Minor to regular Civ, and you cannot get access to the most advanced techs until you reach this status.

These kind of social advancement techs should be non-tradable, and maybe also require some advanced yields to achieve. That way the more primitive civs would be demanding your advanced goods and willing to pay a high price, but you'd have to keep in mind the strategic trade-off in profiting from selling advanced goods to them while you may also enable them to gradually advance and become less easy to take advantage of, and eventually potentially become your competitor. Also, in reality Missionaries were important to stimulating backward tribes to advance themselves and transmitted a lot of knowledge; building a Mission in native settlements could give some bonus research points to that civ as a side effect, which are otherwise hard for them to get on their own. That way you're not simply getting an endless free stream of converts, but are gradually helping that civ to advance somewhat as well.

I think most of the native-specific vanilla code seems pretty useless and largely meant to cripple them. Ie many of them make it impossible for them to make anything at all but Braves and Mounted Braves, make them focus only on Food and Horses, and there is a function "native yield destruction" that basically destroys excess yields they produce, where it would be more realistic to have them trade the surplus to neighboring civs. In the old 2071 DLL after some long tinkering I managed to deactivate most of the vanilla native-specific functions and they became more able to build buildings, produce and trade more like regular civs do.

Some excellent Ideas orlanth, and I really love the idea of missionaries adding research and I'll add that in pretty soon. I'll make a check to see if they have a research project then add some bonus research form the missions, for Natives and Minor Civs.

Also, Natives do auto simulated trade with most of their goods. Those goods are turned into cash, so its not all wasted. They will also simulate moving goods around from one Village to another so if one village has a stock pile of Weapons some can be auto moved to another village.

Edit: I have already added new Professions for Natives/Minor Civs, they can use Tools now for Military Professions like the player does.

On Nation States (major civs). Byzantine will be my first convert. I discovered that if you add AdvanceStart points to a Civ, that AI civ will always start out advanced. So, getting the Byzantines up and running will be no problem.

I have a special idea with the Byzantines and people who play them. According to history, in the year 447 AD, a series of catastrophic earthquakes rocks the city of Constantinople, leaving their once impregnable walls exposed. Attila the Hun, gets wind of this and begins to assemble his army to assault the city. It is up to You to repair your walls and prepare for this imminent invasion(in actual history they managed to do so just in time). Once, that is done and you survive you must then find a way to survive the next coming invasion, the Ottomans and their devastating Cannons.

AI Nation States will be part of the playing field and can not win a Conquest victory. They will have advanced techs that they will guard closely.

 

[orlanth]

How about if building a Mission in a native city actually constructed a Mission Building in that city; this could give the city a small amount of research points and/or Crosses which could be modded as desired in XML. (This would also have the advantage that this could make a mission building graphic appear within the city realistically, instead of a superimposed cross icon and no building). Once the barbarian civ ruler gradually accumulates enough knowledge and decides to start a process of converting, there could also be a Monotheism Tech or Civic choice that unlocks an Acolyte Profession that can work within the Mission building to generate more Research/Crosses for that civ.

 

[Kailric]

That could work to orlanth. Establishing trading posts actually adds the building to the town too, maybe that building could help in ways also because trade stimulates ideas.

I wonder also if you could have some kind of mercenary or auxiliary style contracts with minor civs, so you could buy or rent units from them? These could then give rise to 'minor nation specific units' so some nations could have particularly skillful units of one discipline or another that would be desirable to acquire for you military machine, but of course would require vassalage or good standing with that particular minor nation?

I've had this idea also. It would virtually be the same as "summoning" a unit except as you say you would need good standing. These units could only be military and perhaps cost gold per turn. Or, to go with the "barracks" idea they could teach promotions to other units.

About Natives giving gifts. This should probably be changed to not happen unless they are in awe of your civilization. They already "gave" you a plot of land and that's probably more than what you'd expect from rival barbarians

 

[Kailric]

I have made some progress on this. Doing some trial and error I discovered that if you give the Pope some Advancedstart points and remove his "isEurope" tag he will spawn on the Map with several cities.

I did a search of all places that is "isEurope" and thankfully there wasn't that many. I adjusted were it needed adjusted and now the Pope will spawn with several advanced Cities, with Rome his Capitol. He will also spawn a REF as before.

I am thinking we can still make it impossible to declare war on Rome until you are at 50% Fealty as always. But you have a choice, you can attempt to appease the Pope and keep him happy or plot to take him down. If you declare war on the Pope, or if He declares war on you the REF will spawn as normal, perhaps reinforced with the Pope's sympathizers. So, it will be important to use your diplomatic skills to turn as many Leader's against the Pope in order to reduce the size of his REF.

I sadly discovered that we can't dictate which Leaderheads are in the initial setup as that is all handled in the exe file. We can add players after all the initial ones are in place but this causes issues with finding starting plots as the initial world gets populated with Natives and such. So, I will have to do some magic coding to get these features to work bug free.

For a Victory Condition, once you Declare war on the Pope or the Pope crowns you Emperor a REF will spawn to attempt to take your crown. Historically the Byzantines under Emperor Nicephorus I protested the coronation of Charlemagne whereby "Nicephorus ravaged the coasts with a fleet, initiating the only instance of war between the Byzantines and the Franks." So, this would seem to fit historically also.

 

[Kailric]

I am beside myself in excitement, perhaps only a programmer could appreciate.

Ever since I started coding Land Starts I have had issues with the None Natives finding a good place to start because of all the damn Natives populating every corner of the whole map. So, I finally took some time to see how things were built, then in a stroke of genius I set it up so that the Civs are setup in reverse order. None Natives are placed first, then them land hording Natives. Who cares if some Native Civ has 8 towns instead of 9 right?

That is until I discover this breaks something else, let's hope not

 

[Kailric]

Ok, I have added all together 3 new attributes to Civilizations:

Players: these are the Civs that compete to win. I add this for clarification.

Minor Civs: Advanced Natives
Nation States: should start the game with several Cities, they do not compete to win but are part of the playing field. They can be set up in XML to be very advanced.
Religious Centers: This is also a Nation State, but if a game has a Religious Center, then there is no need for <DerivativeCiv> and they should be set to NONE. The Game will assign all appropriate Civs the Religious Center Player as their Parent. Parent players work as before, they doPrices which causes the prices to fluctuate. However, each Player's buying and selling will effect Prices for every Player instead of individually with separate Kings/Popes. There should only be one Religious Center and you will get a Failed Assert if there is more than one.

Each Player Civ will still have it's own REF as these units are stored per player on not on the Parent. So, I am thinking that the "Revolution" will still work as before and you still win when all your REF has been eliminated.

Can anyone think of any wholes in my ideas so far, or potential problems?

 

[orlanth]

whoa u are blowing my mind with all these outside-the-box developments Kail!

In vanilla I thought REF units are stored on the Parent not per player, but I'm assuming you changed this specially for this feature. If there is a Religious Center player who is Parent of several of the civs, is it still possible to have other civs which have their own unique King as Parent?

One flaw is that it would be a drawback for the realism of the economy that all the pricing lists in every city of every catholic nation become totally linked together, and the vanilla system of semi-random price shifts with parent civ doPrices is lame anyway. Is it possible to let there be an independent price list for each Plotgroup which gets affected by local supply/demand in that plotgroup, and also an independent price list for each Trade Screen which gets affected by sales into that Trade Screen? This would make trade way more interesting if prices were really determined by local supply/demand, and give an important balancing feature by depressing local prices where you're minting money too easily by oversupplying a good, pushing you to seek out undersupplied markets elsewhere.

For Parent civs that have some cities and units on the map, it would be cool if their "child" civs can ask them to attack other civs through the Diplomacy interface, though this would come at a cost in gold and relationship (just like asking other civs to declare war in the vanilla diplo system, only it would be analogous to petitioning to call a Crusade against one of your foes.)

Awhile back several people had posted some ideas about making a game option to play as a Europe King player. That wouldn't work in vanilla, but maybe if a Parent player can have some units/cities on the map it could be an interesting twist to play as them (ie enabling your subordinate civs to grow and pay you Taxes, while not letting them become too powerful to declare independence and beat you ) Also it would be a unique and interesting challenge to play as a minor power or advanced natives and attempt to win.

I am beside myself in excitement, perhaps only a programmer could appreciate.

Not true. Speaking as the Siamese twin of a cloned alien cyborg, I am literally beside myself all the time

 

[Kailric]

In vanilla the REF is stored per player, not on the Kings. It only stores Class and Profession and only creates the units when the war starts.

The code really wasn't all that complicated, and I was glad of that.

Your ideas on the economy are great but that will be in the next project, but keep them coming

Yeah, I thought about the linked markets. I been looking at making the markets per player, and I think that will work for the moment. I think all I will do for this release is adjust the Price adjusting code, maybe use a formula that you suggested.

I haven't tested it yet, but the new religious centers should work like other Civs. They are no longer labeled as "Europe" and therefore are not restricted in all those areas. They will have lot more options for diplomacy. The Pope may not like you very much depending on your Civic choices, so if you want to remain under his blessing you best be a good little pious peon

Hmm, playing as the Pope or King, that does sound like an interesting twist. It could be more about Diplomacy than anything else. That gives me the idea though, when the Pope increases your tithes, all tithes paid actually go to the Pope player for him to spend as he wills.

And yeah, you'll be able to have the derivative civ set up as before. I am attempting to preserve as much of the vanilla options as possible.

 

[Kailric]

Ok, progress, there is a new Civ type, Invasion Civs.

InvasionEra: if a Civilization has an Era set here they will appear at that time. Any number of Invaders can bet setup. They will appear with their Units and start to setup base camps to spawn new Raiders. This is all setup in the XML.

So far I have reprogrammed the xml of the Scandinavian Vikings to act as these Invaders during the Viking Age, starting at Sea. We can already adjust the LeaderHeadInfos to make sure Invaders are very unfriendly, anti diplomatic, and more inclined to War.

I am thinking we can make these guys Playable also. If you play as a Raiding Civ, the game will autoplay to the specified starting Era, such as the Viking Age, then you can begin your carnage. We can set up Victory Conditions specific to Invaders, perhaps you need to Conquer a certain percent of the Territory, or a Number of Civs, along with Gold Looted perhaps. Then when you play against these guys you have to Prevent them from winning as well.

I am going to set it up so that you can have a land start also with Invaders, ala Mongols. They will start in the Silk Road territories as if Crossing from the Mountains and Barrens.

 

[Kailric]

Welcome to Rome my friends, 476 AD. Maybe I should set it on fire, as it was just sacked actually

 

[Lib.Spi't]

"InvasionEra: if a Civilization has an Era set here they will appear at that time. Any number of Invaders can bet setup. They will appear with their Units and start to setup base camps to spawn new Raiders. This is all setup in the XML."

Collapse of the Dark Ages here we come!!

Some exciting stuff coming out here

 

[Kailric]

Progress Report:

Nations States or Civs with no Parent(Europe) can now begin Trading with the Trade Screens. I had to make several changes and additions to get them to function as all Europe Trading was associated with a Parent Civ.

I need to add code to the XML for Advanced Civs to start with some essential goods as they start with nothing. Anyway, I gave them some goods in the DLL but I need to make this XML values for FreeInitialCityYields. I also am going to give them a XML number of free Techs, instead of choosing which techs and making a huge long list I'll just set a max number they can have for free and let the AI choose for themselves. Perhaps some techs can be set as None Free so they will have to research them. I need to do this for Trade Techs also.

I am thinking it will be an easy Fix to get the AI Civs to use the different Trade Screens. We can create a new function that looks for the best price with travel time and cargo space as factors. And once a Trade Screen is chosen just apply it to the Unit like we do with the Player.

We could setup Trading Civs and that is all they do. Think Chinese Junks appearing, buying and trading goods, then selling off over the horizon.

The Question is, should the Minor Civs (Natives) be allowed to start trading? Only makes since that they should. With everyone Trading it would perhaps create a really cool Economic Model for us to play in

 

[orlanth]

wow, sounds awesome as always

Sure, getting AI traders stopping by from time to time sounds like a fantastic twist It seems that it would take a lot of work to get working smoothly though; are the traders able to plan their trips reasonably to bring goods from low-priced cities to high-priced ones? Do trade agreements like Open Borders affect their ability to trade like this? Would be kind of cool if they did (could choose to let foreign traders in to supply your citizens, versus using embargos or Mercantilism to close off foreign trades and keep tight monopoly over your local economy).

About your native question, it would be cool if primitive natives with really high diplo relationship with you could still have a good chance to Give Gifts (especially to weak/new neighboring players just starting out, or if you have a Tech or Father with a bonus to gift-getting); but as the natives get more advanced (maybe discover Barter techs etc) they become more apt to send traders instead to haggle with you

For Advanced Start, I wonder if there is some way to tweak the vanilla Advanced Start Setup system (which is really kinda cool btw) to also let you choose to "buy" some yields to start out with.

 

[Nightinggale]

I am thinking it will be an easy Fix to get the AI Civs to use the different Trade Screens. We can create a new function that looks for the best price with travel time and cargo space as factors. And once a Trade Screen is chosen just apply it to the Unit like we do with the Player.

There are two issues to consider here:
1: which dock do the immigrants appear on? (if they appear on a dock)
2: The AI buy yields after selling.

What could happen (if we don't plan ahead) is that the AI produce mainly 4 specific yields. They happen to be more expensive at trade screen A than on trade screen B and the AI always head for A. Tools and weapons and half price on trade screen B, which is also where the immigrants appear. If the AI only considers the sale price of the yields it wants to sell, it will never head for B.

You are thinking in the right direction. However we need to figure out some "lure" for trade screens with immigrants waiting and stuff like that. In fact the AI may want to send empty ships there to pick up cheap yields/people.

 

[Kailric]

There are two issues to consider here:
1: which dock do the immigrants appear on? (if they appear on a dock)
2: The AI buy yields after selling.

What could happen (if we don't plan ahead) is that the AI produce mainly 4 specific yields. They happen to be more expensive at trade screen A than on trade screen B and the AI always head for A. Tools and weapons and half price on trade screen B, which is also where the immigrants appear. If the AI only considers the sale price of the yields it wants to sell, it will never head for B.

You are thinking in the right direction. However we need to figure out some "lure" for trade screens with immigrants waiting and stuff like that. In fact the AI may want to send empty ships there to pick up cheap yields/people.

The way I work the AI is until we have the Human way of doing things set in pretty good solid stone I don't attempt to get the AI to match with humans, so I allow them to cheat. Having them not cheat is my goal, but it all takes time and effort. At the moment we are working on what's cool for Humans.

Anyway, what I will probably do, for #1, is just allow the AI to pick up Immigrants no matter what Trade Screen the AI is in.

For #2, How did the great Traders of the day decided which trade route to take their goods? They had to weigh all the factors; time, costs, danger, etc. I figure we can simulate this for the AI and have them use Trade Screens a bit random, even if they would make more profits at a single trade screen, they will sometimes use others.

I should port in my Pirates mod. In that mode you could prowl the high seas and actually intercept units as they where trying to cross the oceans, that would make them think twice about which trade screen to visit.

 

[Nightinggale]

The way I work the AI is until we have the Human way of doing things set in pretty good solid stone I don't attempt to get the AI to match with humans, so I allow them to cheat. Having them not cheat is my goal, but it all takes time and effort. At the moment we are working on what's cool for Humans.

We agree on that part and that isn't the question. You proposed a change and I note a few potential issues with the change. I'm all in favor of getting the AI use features made for humans without special rules, but adding one feature and break two is not really an option.

I should port in my Pirates mod. In that mode you could prowl the high seas and actually intercept units as they where trying to cross the oceans, that would make them think twice about which trade screen to visit.

That should certainly be optional, either by XML, game option or both.

 

[orlanth]

I see what youre both saying in that it's probably the hardest aspect of modding to really get the AI to plan appropriately especially knowing what to transport and when. But the vanilla AI has been so bad in this area that if it's possible to carefully work out how to really improve its yield and transport planning in a generalizable way, it would be a great modding achievement worthy of raising both your Knight Dubbing Weights for sure

So here are some overall ideas about possible ways to address whats been mentioned (which I realize may be too vague or too hard to implement, or both):

* when it is planning transport trips between cities on the map, my impression is that NG got it to consider Yield needs when planning the trip and that this did help a lot. Ie it effectively remembers what its needs are for Yields (IIRC this is done by considering net yields being used by professions in the city, yields needed to complete buildings/units under construction in the city, plus a buffer for yields used by possible professions that could be adopted). It can then be able to plan a transport trip between somewhere with a large supply of Yield X, and the city where Yield X is needed. If this kind of thinking is already involved, maybe a similar approach could be used to help in planning for potential tradescreen trips.

* Since you're planning to make trade between cities on the map a bigger part of the mod, in many cases it could be able to satisfy many of its needs through this kind of trade/transport; but it could also still occasionally have situations where it would make a Tradescreen trip to import yields that are currently hard to find on the map. (the perfect case in point in M:C being Spice, where having high unfulfilled Spice needs for awhile would start raising the likelihood of making a Spice Route trip. It might also need to make such trips from time to time for Tools or Weapons yields in cases where enough cannot currently be easily obtained from its cities or others on the map.) If there are Immigrants waiting at a particular Tradescreen, that would also be a factor that could affect it likeliness to make a trip there to pick them up. Conversely if it has a lot of another Yield that it wants to sell, that could also be a factor making it more likely to consider traveling a Tradescreen with a high price for that.

* A possible way to achieve this could be:
For each player, store a single array of all Yields which represents the degree to which that Yield has an overall oversupply or undersupply on the map. Ie when it sees a lot of YIELD_TOOLS needed to complete buildings under construction but cannot find a way to transport this from other cities on the map, this would add to its perceived undersupply of YIELD_TOOLS making its cached value for YIELD_TOOLS a negative number. (ie it would effectively be thinking "can't find Tools anywhere! need more Tools!". Then when the time came when it could consider a Tradescreen trip, the need to import Tools from somewhere would be something that can enter into its decision appropriately.)

When it was time for it to plan a Tradescreen trip that could import needed Yields/citizens, it could pick the Yield where it currently sees the most global undersupply on the map, then iterate through the Tradescreens its currently eligible to travel to and rank these in order from most expensive to cheapest price for that most-needed yield. Then you could use some formula along these lines to consider which Tradescreen is best to travel to:

yieldcheapnessrank * (1+units waiting in tradescreen)^2 / (time to travel to tradescreen)

Once it decides to go to that tradescreen, it could check the oversupply cache to see if there's an oversupplied yield it could bring along to sell at a good price there. Or if you want you could try a more complex weighted average where it would consider undersupply and oversupply of every Yield and weight these to determine the single best Tradescreen to go to at that time. Anyway you probably wouldn't end up using exactly this system, but this kind of thing where it remembers yields with global undersupply / oversupply , then considers this and units awaiting transport when planning a trip, might be overall way to think about helping it plan for transport.

 

[Kailric]

Some good thoughts orlanth. Man, why aren't you programming? You think like a programmer, may as well go all out How much do you already know anyway?

I'm not sure what all we can do for the Advance Start and it's interface, but I'll look into it.

 

[Kailric]

Ok, I am wanting to do some AI improvements to get the AI to better handle the Pope being on the Map and needing to capture Rome. I remembered there being some AI improvements in TAC and looking through the docs I see these potentially..

// TAC - AI Assault Sea

UNITAI_ASSAULT_SEA imported from Better BTS AI. It makes the AI loading military units on a transport ship and send it to an enemy target city. Technically it is working. Unfortunately ingame the AI makes rarely use of it, often failing to provide the prerequisites for a naval invasion.


// TAC - AI Assault Sea Fix

This was a vanilla bug with UNITAI_ASSAULT_SEA transports being trapped in Europe forever.


// TAC - AI Attack City

UNITAI_ATTACY_CITY imported from Better BTS AI. This makes the AI creating stacks of Cannons and Cuirassiers to attack target cities over land.


// TAC - AI BTS Groups

Adds compatibility for processing selection groups from Civ4 BTS. It is needed for importing UnitAIs from Better BTS AI. Groups in Colonization can now have multiple units, allowing the AI to create stacks.

// TAC - AI Escort Sea

Simple UnitAI for escorting transports in naval invasions. Ported from Better BTS AI.

// TAC - AI Improved Naval AI

UnitAI improvements for sea units. I fixed some bugs (especially CvUnitAI::AI_transportSeaMove()) and created a basic strategy for transport ships to avoid foreign pirates.

// TAC - AI Military Buildup

A new strategy (STRATEGY_MILITARY_BUILDUP) to teach the AI to save up money for buying an expensive unit in Europe by cutting all other spendings (e.g. hurry buildings)

// TAC - AI purchases military units

It helps the AI to decide which units to buy in Europe.

Also, I saw...

// TAC - AI Economy

Decides which goods to buy and sell in Europe. Changes the AI behaviour of import and export settings in settlements. Most Yields are transported now to a central habor city (choosen by the AI) before sent to Europe. This is an idea from Kailric's Custom House mod and makes AI sending its ships to Europe more profitable

Which is funny cause I did not write the Custom House code, it was Aymerick. But they gave Aymerick soul credit for the Whaling mod which I mostly wrote the code for so we're even I miss Aymerick, wonder were he went off too. I remember he was in school to learn programming.

Edit: Actually, looking back at the whaling thread, the whaling code may be a good base for the Wrangler profession I mentioned. Totally forgot about that.

 

[Nightinggale]

* when it is planning transport trips between cities on the map, my impression is that NG got it to consider Yield needs when planning the trip and that this did help a lot.

I have put it on hold right now as I'm looking into making a savegame format, which is more failsafe than the current one. If we had this already, then 2.5.3 wouldn't have been released as the bug would have been caught right away.

It turns out that I need a JIT array of JIT arrays to do that. I decided make one (called it 2D JIT array) and it sort of works, but it still needs a lot of work before it can be used for anything. There is a reason why I postposed it plenty of times before. I will make a post about it in the DLL thread once it actually works as a few words on how to use it would likely help quite a lot.

* A possible way to achieve this could be:
For each player, store a single array of all Yields which represents the degree to which that Yield has an overall oversupply or undersupply on the map. Ie when it sees a lot of YIELD_TOOLS needed to complete buildings under construction but cannot find a way to transport this from other cities on the map, this would add to its perceived undersupply of YIELD_TOOLS making its cached value for YIELD_TOOLS a negative number. (ie it would effectively be thinking "can't find Tools anywhere! need more Tools!". Then when the time came when it could consider a Tradescreen trip, the need to import Tools from somewhere would be something that can enter into its decision appropriately.)

I have considered something like that as well and it is likely the best solution. There is one drawback through. Either it is slow or it will need some clever cache. I'm thinking something like having a cache in each city and whenever a city updates the cache, it will update the player cache with the difference between the new and old values for the city.

Some good thoughts orlanth. Man, why aren't you programming? You think like a programmer, may as well go all out How much do you already know anyway?

There are a number of different people involved in designing new features.

1. Game designers
2. code planners
3. programmers
4. gameplay testers

It may come as a surprise that people in 2 can't always do 3 and vice versa.

Having said that, I would welcome any coder at any skill level as long as the motivation is present. Sure I may have more work proofreading inexperienced code, but that's not the worst problem we can end up with.
Sometimes even the simplest code can be beneficial. Look at imports/exports in cities. They can be red/green depending on feeder service. Adding small graphical additions to tell data, which is otherwise unreadable in the GUI may not be a hard thing to do from a coding perspective, but it sure helps in gameplay.