More forms of Commerce

[Impaler[WrG]]

My next large project is going to be an expantion of the types of Commerce that can be created. Currently theirs Research, Money and Culture (yawnnn). I plan to implement 3 addition ones Happiness/Entertainment, Health and Experience. The main interface will alow you to slider each of these around though not right from the start of the game, like culture you will need to open them up with Tec. Medicine->Health, MilitaryTradition->Experience (this will all be modable ofcorse) likwise their will be a tec to alow Building each of these at the standard 2:1 ratio. Experience is the tricky one to do as it will involved Units stationed in a City to gain experience points up to a maximum cap (I was thinking of double the base experience a unit is built with so if you have Barracks +4 experience for new units the cap is 8, the more exp bonus structures/wonders you have the higher the cap in that city.

 

[Samuelson]

This mod look promising. Maybe you should make researching more effecting though so you can do other things at the same time.

 

[Samuelson]

This mod looks promising. Maybe you should double the research effectiveness so that it youre researching at 30% it would be as effective as 60% in the normal game for example. This would allow you to have more money to spend on your new things.

 

[Impaler[WrG]]

Actulay I think I might try the system in SMAC ware you get waste when you move a slider much higher then 40%, it would basicaly keep you from pumping out 100% Science in the Early game. Early tec costs might be lowered in compensation or some buildings could produce small quantities of research to get you through the early game.

 

[woodelf]

Another great looking project. Looking good!

 

[Padmewan]

Impaler, cool ideas. Seems like you could refine this concept if you move it up a level of abstraction. "Commerce" is the basic wealth of a civilization, which has the option of expending that wealth on various priorities. The slider concept would be an interesting way of modeling those priorities, which could be:

1. Knowledge (research slider)
2. Culture / Happiness (culture slider)
3. Power (military slider, new)
4. Health (health slider, new)
5. Industry (my proposal)
6. Wealth (???)

(In many ways, the SMAC agenda civics). A few notes on some of these:

2. I find it hard to distinguish between culture and happiness because that's what Civ3 drilled into my head... maybe there's a reason to separate the two, other than game balance? They seem to fit naturally together. Does the Civ4 culture slider, like the Civ3 one, affect happiness, or only through buildings like the Collosseum?

3. One way you might expand this is to incorporate the unit support model -- for example, eliminate free units, make unit support more expensive, or make it so that letting the slider go below some % would lead to the military losing XP (as American Republicans were claiming under the Clinton administration). See points 5 and 6 below as well.

4. This is very interesting, esp. in modern times (given the huge % of wealth that most modern nations spend on health care). How to keep it from being overpowered, tho... I always found health to be the ultimate limiting factor in Civ4.

6. Before going to 5, I wanted to put out there the question of what "Gold" actually does for you in Civ4. For the most part, it seems Gold is really only helpful as a way to run a negative budget (e.g. get a lot of gold from plunder, then research at 100% or support your huge army) or to rush production later in the game. So Gold is actually not that useful at all, except as a placeholder for other things (mainly, military support and production). "Wealth" as a concept of "luxury" is actually already modeled in "Culture," IMHO. Radical as it sounds, I would suggest eliminating gold altogether, and pumping any "gold" you receive from trade or plunder directly into the stream of commerce. Which leads me to:

5. Industry. The main purpose of Gold in the late game, assuming you do subsume military maintenance under a military slider, is to rush buildings/units. Well, creating a production slider could replace this. This would make the modern relationship between production/commerce a lot more realistic, as production nowadays doesn't seem to be based on the presence of "hammers" around a city. (Then again, the city concept is pretty flawed in modern times, too). Now, what you would lose in this would be the ability to rush a particular unit or building in a particular city, so I admit this proposal has some flaws. Still, play with it and see if there's a way in which it could work.

 

[Dom Pedro II]

Well, I don't know about losing/gaining XP for the military, but seems to me that a CtP2 system of mobilization wherein you could reduce readiness at the expense of HP is good. If you halve a unit's strength during peacetime when maintenance is minimal, that might work better than causing them to lose XP. That's very final... that XP is gone and can't be recovered... whereas a cap of 50% unit strength (or whatever the percentage might be in correspondence to the place on the slider) would leave you weakened while in effect but would get you back up once you increased the spending on the military.

Of course, I suppose you could also do the same thing with XP wherein setting the slider above some threshold would generate more XP and get you back to whatever your unit used to be. You could make it so that the more units you have, the higher the costs become.. in other words, if you have 10 units, a military spending of 15% would be enough to maintain the units' XP. But if you have 50, you'd need to have military spending of 60% or something in order to keep them from losing XP. Anything about those thresholds would increase XP.

I think it'd just be better to go with reducing fighting strength, however.

 

[Impaler[WrG]]

People could mod these features in Python, they would just need to call the getCommerceRate( CommerceType ) to see how much Experience the city is producing, From their they could modify units how ever they like.

This mod is about half done, it turned out to be suprisingly easy to do, everything runs off arrays so you just tack on 3 more Commerce types on the XML and enum.h files then call them up fo bosting a cities health and happiness. I still need to get someone who can tweek the UI (or I need to figure it out myself) and I need an Icon for experience (I am thinking of a little medal).

Now for the actualy Mod type stuff, what tecnologis do yall recomend as the unlocking of the 3 new Commerces? My thoughts are to bump Build Culture off of Drama which would now unlock Happiness (Build Culture might go to MassMedia or PrintingPress). Medicine is the rather obvious unlocker for Health, Build Health could be Genetics. Unlocking Experience should be in the MiddleAges possibly Fudalism, Build with Military Tradition.

Their are ofcorse possibilites for Building interactions as well if anyone has some ideas. Note that your currently getting 1:1 returns, 1 commerce = 1 happines, health, experience (experience dosn't currently do anything though). I will likly have to reduce that in the future or else I risk totaly eliminating happiness and health as significant hurdles.

 

[Padmewan]

I would strongly recommend leveraging building interactions as much as possible (you'll need to mod the Python and XML for those too, won't you?) as they really work for all the other commerce values. A lot of buildings would then need to change, e.g. the Hospital, rather than provide +2 health, might provide +50% health, basically operating the same way as a Library.

I've found in our mod that giving buildings straight bonuses (e.g. +2 hammers) rather than % bonuses (+50% hammers) can be quite unbalancing and remove a lot of flexilibity / opportunities for interesting decisions, because you are stuck with the +2 hammers or +2 health or whatever, which makes the sliders (or moving around your citizens) less relevant. By multiplying the power of each "tick" on the slider, by making buildings a % rather than +, you make the sliders that much more relevant to the game.

In fact, now that you have brought up this mod concept I think that you've identified a fundamental inconsistency between how Civ4 handles health vs. science, which removes the opportunity for an "interesting choice" (one that the U.S. will be facing IRL).

To make this happen, when you reach medicine Granaries and such should go obsolete and your cities' buildings should switch from a +X bonus to a +% bonus.