Minor Civs, Nation States, and AI

[Nightinggale]

I just encountered another reason to want to control Borders.

CivEffects adds a new reason as well. Since the current implementation of route movement bonus is poor (at best), I decided to reimplement the bonus part. Movement cost will be the slowest bonus from plot owner and unit owner. This mean if you travel through foreign lands, you slow down to his speed. If you want to travel faster, you have to give him the secrets of plot hole fixing (or whatever tech increase road speed) and his roads will improve and you can move faster. However if you own the plot, you don't have to care for the tech level of anybody else, you just move faster.

If there is no owner, you don't get any bonus.

That should really encourage you to own your own transport network

I guess there could be several approaches, where the Minor Civ could gain Techs, and build Improvements to help maintain his City's Borders. Perhaps we could send Diplomat Profession Units there that would help do this as well, perhaps boosting relations with the Avars and hurting relations with the Turks in this instance. Turks, "Hey, we don't like you interfering with our territorial affairs!"

Something like a unit with a function, which can kill cultural influence for a specific player in a plot
If it is a hidden unit, like a spy, it could kill off 50 points in one go, risk being detected and if so, possibly killed and/or hurt relations. This could also be used for faster plot takeover if you want to make a cultural takeover to make a fortification next to a city before you declare war. If you own the plot, you can declare war and attack during the same round.

Alternatively it could be a unit, which does a task each turn where it moves culture just a little bit, possibly modifies culture points gained by a player.

Using units to shift borders could be really important since borders appears to become more and more important as we implement more and more features, which takes borders into account.

 

[Kailric]

In my latest play test I set out to build a road to a far off tribal village that had spices and I was excited to see that the AI had met me half way The AI wasn't attempting to meet me half way they was just concerned with connecting their own villages by road, but I benefited from that notion. Tribal (Native) AI improving their land and connecting villages with roads needs balancing as well, like how much improving and how far should they be allowed to go in order to keep things interesting and balanced.

However, they are building Stone Paved Roads it seems so I need to investigate and see how they are doing that.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

Yeah that was one thing I commented on in my own playthroughs, that the AI spent all it's bag of money (that you used to be able to trade for beads) on roads and improvements, making trading with natives much more difficult, this was not necessarily a bad thing, as it created a barter economy, and for a gold economy you had to get to the trade screens.

 

[Kailric]

There should be a limit then to how much a Minor Civ is allowed to improve (besides roads to connect its cities) so instead of improving every plot they may tend to use the land as it is. We could also adjust their build rate so it takes them longer.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

Maybe if we follow that plan of minor becoming major civs, it could be that they 'unlock' everything besides roads (which they start with) when they enter their major form.

 

[Nightinggale]

At some point we talked about making a "native trait" or "minor civ trait" or whatever we called it. The idea being that with CivEffects, we can set all sorts of rules without dll modifications. Improvement build speed modifiers is one item, which we could set this way.

I'm not sure if you have discovered it, but there is a CivEffect xml file called something with Default. It's a CivEffect, which is given to all players and contains the default settings, like number of units on the "dock". Not only can this one change a lot in the gameplay without dll modifications, it is even xml, which mean mods will not have to use the same numbers.

We have CivEffects. We just have to remember to use it.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

2016... it was the year of civeffects...

 

[Kailric]

Yeah, making mod mods is going to be so easy once we get this where we want it.

As far as Minor Civs go we just need to test things and see just how advanced they need to be to keep the game fun and balanced.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

Yeah in my game, I quite liked the amount of development they were doing, I couldn't comment on how effective they were exactly, but it certainly didn't look 'spammy' or that they were just plopping down random stuff, the world looked like it was developing and becoming more and more lived in.

I quite like the barter economy as well, where it is much more like for like trading, with just a little gold changing hands. The trade screens being where the real money is!

One irritation for stupid players like me, is a keep trading for two types of yield, but my peddler only has one space! so the other yield gets lost! Doh!