My Random Ideas

Lib.Spi't

Lib.Spi't

Overlord of the Wasteland
Joined
Feb 12, 2009
Messages
3,708
Location
UK
The place for me or anyone else to put random Ideas they have and don't know where they would fit.

Captured Robots:
Gain a Broken Robot on Robot defeat
Can be upgraded/repaired in towns.
Requires 'Repair Shop'
No bonus prereqs to repair.
Slightly weaker than a brand new robot.

Pillageable Map Improvements:
Improvements that start on the map, that can be pillaged.

Scavenger Specialist: Only Produces when scavenging/survival type civics are active.

Doctor Specialist, Entertainer Specialist(Yay Civ 2!), Super Mutant Specialist, Ghouls Specialist.

Bonus Resource Electricity: Produced in various Quantities by Power Stations, provides boosts to buildings that can use electricity. (Allows the electricity concept to not only affect hammers but all other yield and commerce types.)

Bonus Resource Electric Consumption: Produced by buildings that use electricity, a negative bonus that is the opposite of the bonus for electricity.
 
Scavenger Specialist: Only Produces when scavenging/survival type civics are active.

Bonus Resource Electricity: Produced in various Quantities by Power Stations, provides boosts to buildings that can use electricity. (Allows the electricity concept to not only affect hammers but all other yield and commerce types.)
 
Lib.Spi't said:
Scavenger Specialist: Only Produces when scavenging/survival type civics are active.

Bonus Resource Electricity: Produced in various Quantities by Power Stations, provides boosts to buildings that can use electricity. (Allows the electricity concept to not only affect hammers but all other yield and commerce types.)
Click to expand...

You could even model power consumption with negative resources on buildings. I don't know how the AI would handle that, but it would help to portray the power scarcity of the waste lands.
 
You are going to need to elaborate on exactly what you mean..

Do you mean like a 'no power' resource that is produced by all buildings that need electricity, that gives negative yield/commerce, that is then negated by an equal number of 'power' resource?

That would take a lot of xml work.. I think it would be easier to just have the positive of giving power.

(Edit) Like you say, I am also not sure how the AI would deal with it.. I mean possibly if it already had enough 'power' that the negative and positive worked out to a net gain it would all be fine and it would be happy.

It might be interesting, as it would help to illustrate a net gain issue, as every building would get a boost of all power bonuses available, so if you had 15 power every building would get +15 boost and making more consumption buildings would mean you are magically making more power... where if every consumer made a consumption resource, your net gain would diminish with every new consumption building you made.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea.. (Edit)

So the negative of not having power is that you massively fall behind those who do have power, and the more power you produce means your powered industries can run more equipment and be even bigger.

I plan to make power plants big expensive and hard to get, so many of your towns will be without power unless you get them connected to your big cities.
 
Hi! I love you're mod and i am willing to help.

I was thinking about making a giant canon map of the wasteland but there is on probleme : too much empty space, especially to the east. So i propose you some idea who was able to add faction from the fallout 3 and NV.

Fisrt, the brotherhood of the east, who is simillar to the original brotherhood but can build settelment outside vault, have not access to t-51 power armor, maybe cheaper light unit but more costier heavy unit, and can build the dreaded liberty prime.

Then i was thinking about integrate the legion to appear and not existing at the beggining of the game. So what if a tribe of the wasteland is able to invade two capital (or more) then you have the choice wia event of becoming the legion and access to unique unit and civic restriction.

I apologize for my bad english.
 
Hi Kollr, welcome to the forum. Your english seems fine to me, I am sure it is much better than my ability to speak your native language! :D

I am always glad of more help!

I do hope to one day make a scenario map, but right now I am still focussed on building the structure of the the game, there are still lots of mechanics that I want to build and implement.
This is the map that I plan to use eventually, because I think it is very good (once it is converted, which I have done in the past, but never completely)
Ozzy's North America Map

Someone once built a scenario map, but it was reported to be too unbalanced, and unfortunately later on a build of the mod broke the compatibility.

I do plan to add more civs eventually, or some system that can perhaps make factions split into different sub factions. (like the mid-west and eastern brotherhoods, and the Outcasts)

That is still a long way off though.

I have looked at some modcomps for founding new civs based on certain things (like tech discovery) but I have not pursued that yet, as I want to get other core features implemented before adding more civs that will make things more complex.

Right now I am designing things to try and implement for the A6 build, which is boggling my mind a bit at the moment.

At the moment, my goal is to make it so that the game is all about moving from the West to the East (just like the Brotherhood did) to discover what lies out there. At the moment there is not the necessary motivation to 'go east' as east is much the same as west, but I do hope to change that eventually. With locations like Vault 0 and the Citadel providing access to amazing technological oppurtunities as well as new terrifying threats. Again that is in the distance for now though.

Making new factions is relatively easy, and you are welcome to do it to make a scenario set to begin in the F3/NV Period.

Right now my focus is on remaking the civics and taking full advantage of the new Dyn. Traits content to make evolving Civics and Synergies (Where the mind begins to boggle!!)

Your help is welcome in anyway you can offer, or anything that you would like to do.

Feel free to open a new thread here to develop and discuss your work on a scenario of your choosing as well. (If you are too new to open a thread, feel free to tell me the proposed title of your scenario, and I will make a thread for you)

My hope eventually is to add in a modcomp that gives Civs unique Civics as well, that can replace any of the existing civics. Making them more unique and diverse.
 
Lib.Spi't said:
This is the map that I plan to use eventually, because I think it is very good (once it is converted, which I have done in the past, but never completely)
Ozzy's North America Map

Someone once built a scenario map, but it was reported to be too unbalanced, and unfortunately later on a build of the mod broke the compatibility.
Click to expand...

Did you ever include that map of the west I made way back when? It had the civs we have so far in their proper places, I think it was packaged with the resource icon update.
 
No I keep forgetting...

Does it still work since A5? as the whole mod pretty much got rebuilt I don't think it will work anymore.. All of the rules and mechanics changed how they work, so I think it might explode?

Like for example we don't have a vault and village building anymore, that mechanic was moved to the .dll by archid and turn into boolean markers in the xml instead...
 
As far as I know the map just gives everyone a settler. If there are settlements though we could just wipe all of the civs out of the scenario and replace them. I marked all of their starting locations with "landmarks"
 
While attempting to install FTTW on my new PC I was informed of something disturbing

1FDlrCc.jpg


I just upgraded my GPU, have a newer processor, 6 gigs of ram and it still isn't enough for the behemoth of a game civ 4.
 
After starting several games, I've noticed that around turn 200 or so, the non-animal barbs stop just hanging around and get serious about attacking. Not a problem, in and of itself, but couple it with the fact that they show up in SoD's that include quite a few gunpowder and robot units, and the fact that it seems almost impossible for me to get the strategic resources activated and connected to more than one city by turn 200, and the game quickly skips from "fun", straight past "challenging", to "exercise in frustration". "Challenging" is good, "frustration"...not so much. ;)

I understand your reasoning behind the cost of improvements, and I think most are actually pretty well balanced, (wait for it...you know its coming) but pathways should not cost as much as a road. They don't require the time, energy or materials to produce and maintain, and they don't provide the benefits (increased movement) of roads. I think cutting the price of pathways at least 50% (maybe more, but as you point out, the wasteland isn't supposed to be easy), would make a big difference in balance at this point in the development. Not to mention being much easier to implement than balancing barb spawn/aggression rates, I should think.

If you could make the pathways and roads separate entities, with regards to pillaging (pillage a road it leaves a pathway, which must be pillaged to cut connection to next city or resource), you make things more rewarding for the attacker, while possibly giving the defender an extra turn to get forces to the scene to protect the link. If you make a pathway a requirement for building a road, then you could adjust the cost of both in such a way as to make the pathway (simple connection) affordable, while making a proper road (with its movement bonuses) even a bit more expensive. If you carry this on to the more advanced routes, it becomes much more interesting to decide where you actually need to upgrade to that highway, and where you can get by with a simple pathway to connect that non-essential resource, rather than simply spamming the best available all the time.
 
The problem I think is that roads, etc. are routes not improvements, and they use the routeinfos.xml so things like the upgrade/downgrade of growth and pillage are not available..

The major cost of routes, is the cost of 'security' of a route, rather than construction or materials costs.

So making a path and a road are nominally the same thing.

I am still looking at barb 'difficulty' I already removed some units from their roster because they were monumentally hardcore, stuff like the Mk2 Securitron.

One thing I need to look into as well is what effect 'lairs' have on spawning and spawn rates, whether a unit only spawns from it's lair, or if it spawns from lairs and randomly like normal barb spawning.

If the former is true then I may be able to more accurately limit certain unit types from spawning too much, rather than making it on or off.

So robots will only come from 'abandoned factories' and gun barbs will only come from 'barb forts' or whatever, so that the content of your average barb stack will be far less spectacular.

I also need to look again at the tech levels of robots, to make sure they are not unlocked for barbs too early.

I also don't know what the trigger for barbs turning aggressive is, so I don't knowhow to tweak the moemnt that they start coming at you..

Changing the cost of routes is an easy change you can make yourself to experiment with, it is just changing the number in the routeinfos.xml file.

I played a few tests thinking about the idea of making routes cheaper, but when I played I kept feeling like it was at the right point, to make it less would leave you with less hard choices as to what to build and when to build. I found it was making me ask myself hard questions and made me feel like the choice was a genuine struggle.

It may well be rather than changing the routes, that we just need to look at barb tweaking again, just so they are not totally insane from day one.
 
I am mostly writing this down so I don't forget it.

It relates to the idea of Bonus Resources and having Negative and Positive Resources that counter each other.

This is my thinkings on some kind of a solution for the AI to be able to handle it.

Introducing some new tags to the bonusinfo.xml like:

bIsNegative
BonusNegativeFix
iNegativeFixWeight

Then in the Dll it would have something when thinking about bonuses like this:

OnBuilt (Or whatever the right term is for when a building is finished by the AI/Game)
Check In BuildingInfo.xml
<FreeBonus>BONUS_RESOURCE</FreeBonus>
<iNumFreeBonuses>1</iNumFreeBonuses>

Then Check BONUS_RESOURCE in BonusInfo.xml
If Bonus bIsNegative = True
(Focus on getting
  • BonusNegativeFix Bonus)
    Spoiler :
    I am not sure how the AI thinks about getting bonuses at the moment it could be piggy backed on something like the priority of getting 'rush' bonuses like Iron from vanilla AI, or if the Fix is gained from a building, it could inject a number to build priority to any building that makes a bonus from the
    • BonusNegativeFix

    • Then there would need to be something that stores <iNumFreeBonuses>1</iNumFreeBonuses>
      OR
      Something like a store for the number of each negative resource of a type you have.
      (This must be available for something like the corporation code, it would just need an extra IsNegative check. Right?)
      That the AI checks against the BonusNegativeFix Resources, until the two types become equal or greater than the Negative Bonus.

      iNegativeFixWeight would then be used to say that one Fix Bonus is worth 1xiNegativeFixWeight so you can have bonuses that are even more effective at fixing and the AI would know it too, this value can also be used in the 'Focus' math as well, so the AI will always get the better one if it can find it.

      If this setup was able to be implemented, we could introduce concepts like:

      Thirst (negative)
      Water (Fix =1)
      Clean Water (Fix = 2 (or more))
      (Even Nuka-Cola and Booze could weigh in on this one)

      Electricity Used (Negative)
      Electricity (Fix = 1)
      (Even further we could have something along the lines of Intermitent and Reliable Electricity that carry different fix weights)

      To make this really good we would also probably need to have a free bonus to the resource output code for buildings, so that you can make say 1 Electricity per Coal.
      (I know Bts has Aluminium produced by a Corporation, but I think that is just a 1 and done, rather than scaleable per resource. I can't imagine it being much harder than what is already done though..)
 
Isn't iNumFreeBonuses just an int? If it is, then it can be negative. If it is, then all you have to do is to add up the resources from all buildings and then add resource requirements to building requirements. That way the AI will only build a building requiring such a resource when it has a surplus to use it.

Alternatively the AI can be changed in the function where it assigns value to each building and builds the one with the highest value. It sets value to 0 if the building requires electricity and there is none. Electricity producing buildings gets more interesting the less electricity the city has. I think the correct place for this would be CvCityAI::AI_bestBuildingThreshold().

CvCity::doTurn() or one of the functions it calls should also be updated to handle the case where electricity is negative. Maybe the best solution is to loop buildings and disable them if electricity is less than 0. It should likely be stored in a bool array if a building is disabled and if there are true values in that array, and positive electricity, buildings should be looped to enable to reach 0. the BoolArray class from M:C would likely work well for this task.

The GUI needs updating as well. Pedia is fairly easy to fix, but the city screen needs updating as well. I haven't looked at that one though.
 
Ah sorry, you might have missed how it is working, or I might have not explained it properly, or I might be misunderstanding you.

The Idea is to be able to introduce negative impacts for not having enough electricity to go round. (for example)

So in FTTW All buildings work like corporations, where a bonus resource adds yields or commerce per resource. So a Forge that has access to 2 iron produces more than a forge with 1 iron.

So what I want is to have a Negative Bonus Resource that can reduce the overall effectiveness of the building.

So Example:
Iron Smelter Factory
Produces 10 Electricity Consumption
+10% hammer
+10 hammer per Iron
+3 hammer per Electricity
-2 hammer per Electricity Consumption (Negative Resource)

So in this example without a power producing building you could end up with -20 hammers if it had no iron.
The problem would get even worse if you had another building that makes Electricity Consumption.

So the idea is that if you have too much consumption and not enough production bad things could start to happen.

So it is more than just being able to build or not build, it is the fact that building too much of something could lead to negative output. Rather than the reward for a good resource just being set to zero because you have a total of -2 iron.

So it is not just that you might not get +3 hammers from electricity, but that actually you get a worse outcome from the over extension of the infrastructure.

Simulating stuff like random blackouts, etc. because somethings are over taxing the grid. So something in mid smelt could be ruined (costing you something) because the heat suddenly gets cut off.

So it is opening up the power that we have with the new 'per resource' code to simulate the struggles of meeting the growing needs of a small post apocalyptic empire where resources are not always abundantly available.

So sometimes building 1 building and living with a slight deficit overall comes out positive, but building lots of buildings will accumulate an exponential deficit and crash the economy.
 
So rather than shutting down a building, you want the building to produce negative production :think:

It can be done, but it sounds dangerous. The production code is not written with negative numbers in mind and each production function will have to be reviewed for possible issues.

Apart from coding issues, I'm not sure the formula is right either. It somehow seems wrong that it always consume 10 electricity, yet it benefits from any number of electricity. This mean it will produce -200% and then +30% per electricity. With 30 electricity in a city, that's -200%+900%. It sounds like +700% production is a bit overpowered for a single building.

I would rather that it did something like +10% per electricity (max 10, though 10 might be pretty high) and each electricity can then only be used in one building. This mean if you produce 10 and you have two buildings using 10, they can get 5 each or 10 to one, depending on the coding.

Next step would be to add random events, which triggers on electricity production vs usage radio. Those random events can then remove production from the production queue or whatever. Events can do a lot of funny stuff, and if it can't, then adding abilities to events rather than hardcoding it for electricity is likely a better idea, because it will move design decisions to XML (looking at the FTTW team, that would be good).

Perhaps a city could go into "managed electricity mode" where some overseer is ensuring that nothing is overloaded. This will prevent random events due to overloading, but at the same time it will consume 10% of the power. Maybe 10% is wrong, as it should be something, where both on and off settings makes sense. Maybe the power loss can be reduced by building an emergency battery or something.

When the electricity is overloaded and only some buildings can get what they want, then it should have some sort of priority. The easiest way is to simply use buildingInfo ID (meaning serving the top of the XML file). However it would be nice to have some sort of priority setup. If that priority can be linked to the AI strategy, then it would be great. Looking up the strategies in AI_Defines.h, it does allow some room for priorities. For instance AI_STRATEGY_ECONOMY_FOCUS should try to supply research facilities with as much as possible while AI_STRATEGY_LAST_STAND should shut them down to supply defense grid and unit production instead. Emphasize could also be used to set a priority.

By hooking into existing AI code like strategy and emphasize, we can reduce the AI code for electricity to simply follow decisions already made, which is a lot easier to code. This mean the new code will only have to know what to do, not why it should do it and it would more or less be like coding for human players.

CvCityAI::AI_bestBuildingThreshold() would still need updating as it should consider electricity production vs requirements and increase the value of electricity producing buildings if other buildings would benefit from it and don't build them if the city produce more than it can use.

AI_Defines.h (why is this define and not an enum like in colonization :confused: Both work, but enums produce cleaner code)
Spoiler :
// Military strategies based on power, war status
#define AI_DEFAULT_STRATEGY (1 << 0)
#define AI_STRATEGY_DAGGER (1 << 1) // Aggressive early game
#define AI_STRATEGY_CRUSH (1 << 2) // Convert units to City Attack
#define AI_STRATEGY_ALERT1 (1 << 3) // Likely attack from neighbor
#define AI_STRATEGY_ALERT2 (1 << 4) // Seemingly immenient attack from enemy
#define AI_STRATEGY_TURTLE (1 << 5) // Defensive shell
#define AI_STRATEGY_LAST_STAND (1 << 6)
#define AI_STRATEGY_FINAL_WAR (1 << 7)
// Military strategies based on analysis of trainable units
#define AI_STRATEGY_GET_BETTER_UNITS (1 << 8)
#define AI_STRATEGY_FASTMOVERS (1 << 9)
#define AI_STRATEGY_LAND_BLITZ (1 << 10)
#define AI_STRATEGY_AIR_BLITZ (1 << 11)
#define AI_STRATEGY_OWABWNW (1 << 12)
// Domestic strategies
#define AI_STRATEGY_PRODUCTION (1 << 13)
#define AI_STRATEGY_MISSIONARY (1 << 14)
#define AI_STRATEGY_BIG_ESPIONAGE (1 << 15)
#define AI_STRATEGY_ECONOMY_FOCUS (1 << 16) // K-Mod - catch up in tech, at the expensive of military
#define AI_STRATEGY_ESPIONAGE_ECONOMY (1 << 17) // K-Mod - run high espionage slider to steal techs at a discount.
 
Those numbers were yields not percentages, so it would just be like +20 hammers, (The numbers would all need to be figured right) but when top tier units run into costs of 1000s or even 10000s or even in some cases 100000s (I forget where they are at and all will be balanced anyway) It is not so much, it might be 1000% of 1 but in the overall balance that would not be an abundant figure.

The bonus for having lots of 'spare' electricity actually only results in 10s or low 100s of hammers (In a really abundant economy which when balanced out would be a rare and impressive achievement) but those were somewhat quick numbers anyway.

The point is we already have the mechanics to simulate consumption/production and shortfall, etc. using the existing 'Corporate effect for buildings' code (except for the enhancement of being able to make an extra bonus per bonus available)

It would just need some kind of AI setup that makes sure that the AI doesn't try to get 30 Negative Resources, just because it thinks getting bonuses is always a good thing! :D

Like you say it doesn't really need to know what or why it is doing something, it just needs to know enough to not shoot itself in the head because it can't even 'see' what it is doing wrong.

Like how we added AI for building units because it can't see that everytime it builds one it's city loses one pop. so it would just constantly run cities into the ground by building units.

This one just needs to know something like if I have a 'bad' resource arrive I need to hurry to get the 'good' resource to make the numbers go to 0 quick! It doesn't even need to know that it is good and bad, just that X needs to be less than or equal to Y. Also what resource X pairs with which Y.

Hence the Negative and BonusNegativeFix tags.

So via the xml you can say
Thirst is bad and Water and Clean Water fix it.
Power Consumption is bad and Electiricty fixes it.
Treatment Need is bad and Medicine fixes it.

This way we can simulate any number of 'Needs' and 'Fulfilments' that the AI can 'survive' and it uses the existing code that we already have.

Eventually I would like to make a system of produced goods that get consumed by building and things (Platy made a Python mod component which is about half of what it would need to be) that would go along nicely with this too.

But for now this system would work, if we can make an AI upgrade so that it doesn't try to kill itself by getting as many 'Thirsts' as it can because all bonus resources are supposed to be good to have! :D
 
Lib.Spi't said:
Thirst is bad and Water and Clean Water fix it.
Power Consumption is bad and Electiricty fixes it.
Treatment Need is bad and Medicine fixes it.
Click to expand...
Sick people is bad and health fixes it. This is a bit different from what you wrote because this feature has working AI code.

However I still think you have the wrong code design for this concept. Imagine you have 3 buildings producing 10 electricity consumption each turn and you produce 30. Some shady characters blow up a reactor and your electricity production is reduced to 20 until you build a new one. Any sane city overseer would shut down one power producing building to ensure the other two works as intended until the power production is back to normal. Maybe it is right to get a penalty the turn the change occurs, but it would be stupid to get the penalty each turn until the new reactor is finished.

Also the bonus for each electricity seems a bit odd when you think about how it should scale. Imagine an electric bike. If it is supplied with power, it has the strength to carry two people (one with no power). Supply it with 100 times the power and you can fit 101 people on that bike. No, not on multiple bikes, but that bike alone. Naturally there is a max capacity for how much power you can add to a single building.

I like the idea with water. However to make that perfect, it should be a colonization style yield and a water caravan "wagon train". However that would be a huge task to implement and something else needs to be done.


I'm wondering about something else. Who is going to code this :think:
:hide:
 
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