MOD Suggestion: Early exploration slowdown

[The Rusty Gamer]

In another thread (re Civ 5), someone pointed out that early exploration of the whole world is unrealistic. I mentioned that a MOD could probably be quite easliy made for Civ 4 to facilitate this.

My simple idea is this. If a unit does not have as many movement points as the space it is entering demands, then it cannot enter it. It becomes impassable. For instance, currently a scout with a movement of 1 can enter a forest (which requires 2 movement) if he hasn't moved anywhere else that turn. This would now be impossible.

This means the unit has to get an upgrade to increase movement, either in battle, or from a goody hut, or techs need to be researched to enable faster moving units. The idea is to slow down early exploration and I think this simple change will acheive this.

BUT, I personally don't realy know how to MOD much so...

Is the idea doable? Ir is there already a MOD somewhere doing something similar?

 

[Fimbulvetr]

You could slow down exploration with lots of strong animals, like Pie's Ancient Europe mod does.

 

[Afforess]

In another thread (re Civ 5), someone pointed out that early exploration of the whole world is unrealistic. I mentioned that a MOD could probably be quite easliy made for Civ 4 to facilitate this.

My simple idea is this. If a unit does not have as many movement points as the space it is entering demands, then it cannot enter it. It becomes impassable. For instance, currently a scout with a movement of 1 can enter a forest (which requires 2 movement) if he hasn't moved anywhere else that turn. This would now be impossible.

This means the unit has to get an upgrade to increase movement, either in battle, or from a goody hut, or techs need to be researched to enable faster moving units. The idea is to slow down early exploration and I think this simple change will acheive this.

BUT, I personally don't realy know how to MOD much so...

Is the idea doable? Ir is there already a MOD somewhere doing something similar?

Yes, it is do-able, and an interesting and not-previously suggested solution. I'm going to be bringing it up in this thread. If it is well received, I may add it to my mod.

 

[Fimbulvetr]

So a warrior can't enter forests while a Chariot can? That makes absolutely no sense.
A forest is no boundary, it is not impassable terrain, it just slows units down. Following that train of thought, you'd simply have to glue the 1-move unit to the forst tile he just moved to for another turn, so it would take 2 turns between moving to the forest and moving away from it again. Iirc there was one random event that could bind a miliary unit for multiple turns, maybe that code part could be used for that.. on the other hand, I find it very intuitive that even mounted units are no faster than footsoldiers when moving through forests, so I wouldn't want that either unless most 1-move units get an ignore movement cost upgrade.

 

[The Rusty Gamer]

Follow the discussion at http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=9204248#post9204248

The idea is to have the basic movement ability of the unit (as now), plus a new variable - a max allowable square value. So you can forbid a chariot to enter a forest by setting the max to 1 for the unit but give a basic movement of 2 (assuming that's what it is now).

 

[Fimbulvetr]

Yes I saw it and I'm not interested. I just wanted to say that I didn't like the idea - movement slowing down ok but making tiles impassable is a bit too much.

 

[The Rusty Gamer]

Having only a certain chance of entering "bigger movement required than the unit has left that turn tiles" would certainly slow things down.

 

[The Capo]

I don't know if this will work, but why not have the unit slowly lose health per turn to emulate fatigue, so you have to stop and heal them sporadically which would emulate them camping and eating and so forth. Just an idea.

I guess what you would do is have this only work on land units (human ones) and it only happens when they are out of your territory or at least x tiles out of your territory. But it starts up after a unit has x turns of movement in a row, we can say two or three or something. So if you move one turn, and then stay put the second, the count doesn't start until you make two moves in sequence. Then maybe you lose something like 10% of your health per turn. So if you go ten in a row your unit dies, or it just won't let you move after your unit has taken a certain amount of damage or something. I don't know.

Then maybe make a promotion like survivalist or something like that which negates this. Maybe give this to Explorers for free or something.

 

[The Rusty Gamer]

I'm thinking of other ideas too. That percentage value could be a chance or portion of health that is damgaed when making movement bigger than the unit is capable of. But stopping to fortify and heal could be fiddly, game play wise.

Another possiblity is for the computer to sinply calculate the number of turns it will take to enter a tile. For instance, if your unit has a movenet of 1, entering a forest tile requiring movement 2 will take two turns.

Another way of slowing exploration down is something akin to Settlers. Under this idea, no unit can venture into unexplored territory (it is impassable) unless that unit is an explorer specialist (a new XML flag). I don't know if unexplored tiles can be given a movement value to slow explorers down which would work if using previous paragraph movement system. you could then add (say) +3 movement to unexplored tiles. However, because visibility makes tiles around units unexplored, whci would appear to undermine the whole idea, you could give early units ZERO VISIBILTY. So they only see the spot they are on.

Yet another intersting idea would be to have a tile EXIT movement cost as well as an entering cost. For instance, it takes 3 movement to scale up a mountain but only 1 to come down. That would probably mean rescaling the the movement of just about every unit however.

 

[The Rusty Gamer]

Yikes! I just looked at the scout unit XML and I couldn't believe what I saw - the scout has 2 movement points. Change it to 1. Simplest change ever!

 

[ripple01]

I've thought about this as well, and one way to implement this that I came up with is to have units locked to a radius from a city until a certain tech is discovered. For example, in the beginning of the game you are locked to a 5-tile radius from a city in all directions. When you research <insert tech here> that radius expands to 8-tile, and then when you research <insert tech here> the radius is removed entirely.

Any thoughts on this?

Cheers,
ripple01

 

[The Rusty Gamer]

I've discovered a bNoRevealMapb flag for units in the XML code which hasn't been used. When you switch it on, the unit cannot move into unexplored territory!

I created a little MOD for testing. The scout movement is reduced to one but that doesn't slow it down much. It still move two spaces through a forest after it gets double movement. Go figure. I don't think it is quite calculating movement as one would expect. I'm putting it back to 2, as the scout is suppsoe to be a superior unit in this regard in any case.

However, I made warriors, workers and settlers unable to reveal the unknown world. This has definitely slowed the whole thing down in the first stages. You have to build scouts, which you can't necessarily build at first, in order to explore, or later military units like archers to explore.

Only thing - at the start, you can't really move the starting settler to look for a possible better location, so you have to take the immediate surrounding area to settle.

Warriors can be seen as just defenders of the locally owned area then.

Interesting that the bNoRevealMapb flag hasn't been used at all in the standard game but wasn't included in the original Civ 4. Presumably it was requested or has been used for a scenario somewhere.

I also made the scout to have no nationality but that didn't stop the first encountered nation from contacting us. Guess it doesn't work properly or as I expected.

You could make just about every non-scout unit limited to revealed land. That would be interesting. So then you would build lots of scouts I guess, but you could increase the maintenance points for them from 1 to (say) 2.

 

[ripple01]

Neat find. I would suggest making work boats unable to reveal unexplored tiles as well. Nothing annoys me more than seeing a workboat explore the whole coastline of a continent in 2000 BC.

Cheers,
ripple01

 

[Afforess]

I've discovered a bNoRevealMapb flag for units in the XML code which hasn't been used. When you switch it on, the unit cannot move into unexplored territory!

I created a little MOD for testing. The scout movement is reduced to one but that doesn't slow it down much. It still move two spaces through a forest after it gets double movement. Go figure. I don't think it is quite calculating movement as one would expect. I'm putting it back to 2, as the scout is suppsoe to be a superior unit in this regard in any case.

However, I made warriors, workers and settlers unable to reveal the unknown world. This has definitely slowed the whole thing down in the first stages. You have to build scouts, which you can't necessarily build at first, in order to explore, or later military units like archers to explore.

Only thing - at the start, you can't really move the starting settler to look for a possible better location, so you have to take the immediate surrounding area to settle.

Warriors can be seen as just defenders of the locally owned area then.

Interesting and simplistic. I like it.

Interesting that the bNoRevealMapb flag hasn't been used at all in the standard game but wasn't included in the original Civ 4. Presumably it was requested or has been used for a scenario somewhere.

Probably for FFH or RFC. There are a couple tags that are never used in BTS for them.

 

[The Rusty Gamer]

I added work boats, archers and longbowmen to the list of those unable to go beyond explored. I don't know enough about the basics of just which units are from the early era and it would be a pain to go though and change but I would suggest every unit besides the scout from the early era should have this restriction.

I though of a blanket global replace (excepts for scouts and explorers) but that would also restrict all ships and planes, so I think it's gonna have to be done manually.

Two possible new units - scout boats and scout planes. Then all other units are restricted. It would be a game changer.

 

[The Rusty Gamer]

I'm looking for a way to allow settlers to explore but zero line of sight (can only see the current square). Unfortunately there is no variable to do this. The only way this is changed is through promotion. So the idea would be to automatically give a specific promotion to a settler every time it is built, which would have the variable iVisiblityChange set to -1. I don't know if this would work or not.