New Promotions, Civ specific and ideas

[Kailric]

This thread is dedicated to all things promotion. One new promotion that is already in the game is the "Hound Companion" promotion as screen shotted below. Hounds protect you from dangerous animals. I removed the weird and creepy ability of Great Generals to tag along and watch every moment of your unit and in it's place I have added this promotion. You can also hire guides from villages that become your companion, increasing your moment and protecting you from bandits, as long as you can afford to pay them, of course.

Anyway, to start us off drjest2000 has posted some good suggestions and art below.

Art for a cold weather/ice and tundra fighter promotion, inspiration (and basic art) taken from Le Sage's Civ 4 Fairy Tale mod (LINK)

I figure the Vikings and some Viking Age natives would have this. And Col lacks a specific tundra & ice terrain fighting/movement promotion

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=356883&d=1375106820

I was looking through the CIV4PromotionInfos.xml of M:C and saw that all the Huntsman promotions were using the same icon, so I pirated these from Le Sage's Civ 4 Fairy Tale mod (LINK)

http://forums.civfanatics.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=356932&d=1375155209

 

[raystuttgart]

I removed the weird and creepy ability of Great Generals to tag along and watch every moment of your unit and in it's place I have added this promotion.

Does that mean that you completely removed Great Generals as a game concept ?
(Maybe I misunderstand.)

 

[Kailric]

Does that mean that you completely removed Great Generals as a game concept ?
(Maybe I misunderstand.)

Heh, I am currently writing a post about Great Generals so you can check that out in a few.. I just had a brain storm for another "companion" and that is Squires for your Knights.

We could add a new command available to Squires and they could then tag along and gain experience and when they had enough they would be promoted to Knights themselves... brilliant

Also, I just watched the "Secrets of the Viking Sword" and the famous Ulfberht sword. That was a really cool and inspiring show. I remember in Civ4 they add a patch where you could actually modify a units look by the promotions. It would be cool to add this to M:C and if they had a Ulfberht promotion it would change out it's weapon. Regardless, Ulfberht promotion could be something very unique, maybe only available from an Artisan Weapon-smith, a very rare and unique unit...

Edit: The weaponsmith would actually build a Ulfberht "unit" and then the unit could be added to another unit as a promotion... maybe

 

[drjest2000]

Heh, I am currently writing a post about Great Generals so you can check that out in a few.. I just had a brain storm for another "companion" and that is Squires for your Knights.

We could add a new command available to Squires and they could then tag along and gain experience and when they had enough they would be promoted to Knights themselves... brilliant

I am totally in love with this idea.

Also, I just watched the "Secrets of the Viking Sword" and the famous Ulfberht sword. That was a really cool and inspiring show. I remember in Civ4 they add a patch where you could actually modify a units look by the promotions. It would be cool to add this to M:C and if they had a Ulfberht promotion it would change out it's weapon. Regardless, Ulfberht promotion could be something very unique, maybe only available from an Artisan Weapon-smith, a very rare and unique unit...

Edit: The weaponsmith would actually build a Ulfberht "unit" and then the unit could be added to another unit as a promotion... maybe

I really liked that episode. Also, it impressed me was the fact that they talked about the "cheap knock-offs" that were being manufactured >_<

I also recommend you watch National Geographic's "Living Treasures of Japan" and Nova's "Secrets of the Samurai Sword". They both show a good deal about how things were done "back in the day", like smelting iron from black sand (hematite ore) - which it the predominant kind of iron ore you'd find in an alluvial bog/marsh.

I'm pretty sure I remember that the "change the look" thing was kind of buggy. It's been a good long while since I actually played Civ 4, so my memory is not to be relied upon as a fountain of undisputed truth. I think I remember that it used a lot of unit meshes like the natives in Civ4Col, basically each "promotion" was in truth just a new unit, but within the game it looked like the unit had changed outfits or weapons.

 

[Kailric]

I am totally in love with this idea.

It's on the to do list

I really liked that episode. Also, it impressed me was the fact that they talked about the "cheap knock-offs" that were being manufactured >_<

I also recommend you watch National Geographic's "Living Treasures of Japan" and Nova's "Secrets of the Samurai Sword". They both show a good deal about how things were done "back in the day", like smelting iron from black sand (hematite ore) - which it the predominant kind of iron ore you'd find in an alluvial bog/marsh.

I'm pretty sure I remember that the "change the look" thing was kind of buggy. It's been a good long while since I actually played Civ 4, so my memory is not to be relied upon as a fountain of undisputed truth. I think I remember that it used a lot of unit meshes like the natives in Civ4Col, basically each "promotion" was in truth just a new unit, but within the game it looked like the unit had changed outfits or weapons.

Yes, I am anxious to watch those episodes as well. Ahh, kk, well I actually have done something like this already for Promotions with the Companions and also with the Saracen. A Saracen changes its graphic depending on whether he is on land or water. So, I am fairly certain I could add this as well. Just thinking it through... graphics are tied to two things, Units and Professions, so when you change a unit's profession he changes graphics, so in the case of the Ulfberht there could be a new profession that is only available to Units with this promotion.

 

[orlanth]

I really like the changes toward more diversity in promotions. It's much more interesting to choose from among tactical options like first strikes, withdrawal, advantages versus armored units, cavalry or bowmen, rather than the vanilla "Combat".

It could be even more interesting to allow successful Noble and clergy units to gain some promotions that don't have purely to do with combat. There could be a direct line of Titles you can progress though for Nobles (Baron, Count, Duke, Archduke) and Clergy (Prelate, Bishop, Archbishop, Cardinal) plus some choosable specializations like Stewardship, Piety, Patronage, Scholar, etc. At lower levels these could take the form of a slight bonus to the amounts of Fealty or Religion produced by that unit himself, at higher levels could apply a +5% or 10% bonus to production of Fealty, Religion, Education or Culture for the settlement the unit is in. (IIRC, some of the modmods of Fall From Heaven 2 in Civ4BtS had Promotions whereby some of their "Hero" units can grant local benefits to cities they're inside. ) Then there'd be a strategic tradeoff between enjoying the benefits of your Noble at governing a settlement versus the military benefits when sending him off to war.

 

[Kailric]

I really like the changes toward more diversity in promotions. It's much more interesting to choose from among tactical options like first strikes, withdrawal, advantages versus armored units, cavalry or bowmen, rather than the vanilla "Combat".

It could be even more interesting to allow successful Noble and clergy units to gain some promotions that don't have purely to do with combat. There could be a direct line of Titles you can progress though for Nobles (Baron, Count, Duke, Archduke) and Clergy (Prelate, Bishop, Archbishop, Cardinal) plus some choosable specializations like Stewardship, Piety, Patronage, Scholar, etc. At lower levels these could take the form of a slight bonus to the amounts of Fealty or Religion produced by that unit himself, at higher levels could apply a +5% or 10% bonus to production of Fealty, Religion, Education or Culture for the settlement the unit is in. (IIRC, some of the modmods of Fall From Heaven 2 in Civ4BtS had Promotions whereby some of their "Hero" units can grant local benefits to cities they're inside. ) Then there'd be a strategic tradeoff between enjoying the benefits of your Noble at governing a settlement versus the military benefits when sending him off to war.

Yes, I really like this idea. Just how to "grant" titles is the question. We wouldn't want to use combat of course sense that wouldn't really fit. We could add some kind of Nobility Title points the player can accumulate based other certain factors. Also, maybe Piety points where he can grant Clergy titles, but then again the Pope is greedy with the right to "lay ventures". Anyway, this way a player would have to chose how to spend his points wisely. This would create a more personal relationship between the player and his favorite units. "I dub thee Sir William, Count of Yorkshire", now grow me some tomatoes!"

I'll be thinking on this...

 

[orlanth]

Yes, I really like this idea. Just how to "grant" titles is the question. We wouldn't want to use combat of course sense that wouldn't really fit. We could add some kind of Nobility Title points the player can accumulate based other certain factors. Also, maybe Piety points where he can grant Clergy titles, but then again the Pope is greedy with the right to "lay ventures". Anyway, this way a player would have to chose how to spend his points wisely.

Yeah I agree; Experience would have to also be earnable by other methods especially in the case of clergy members. I think it's already possible to have Buildings give some free XP to certain units; but if that happens on construction it wouldn't work for citizen units which emigrate. Maybe some buildings could give a small amount of experience per turn to certain unitclasses in their city. Alternatively you could allow the conversion of Education or Culture produced by the city into experience for those units.

This would create a more personal relationship between the player and his favorite units. "I dub thee Sir William, Count of Yorkshire", now grow me some tomatoes!"

I'll be thinking on this...

I had once tweaked a python name generator for the WHFB mod of Civ4 to generate unique names for hero units, e.g. it could generate random names like "Duc de Couronne" "Sieur Etienne de Ganet" or "Abelard the Chaste" for the French-ish faction. If I can find that somewhere could be possible to adopt something like that.

 

[Kailric]

I would like to have a way to sort certain promotions. Perhaps in Military Adviser there could be a new "sort by" added for promotions. This would be to keep track of say very specific promotion types such as units with Surgical promotions, so you can keep track of how many Surgeons you have. What would also be helpful is if the Choose Promotion popup had a count of how many units you already had with certain promotions.

We could create a new cache that is saved to the player and then have new attributes added to Promotions, such as bAddToPlayerCount, so that it would add this Promotion type to the cache. Each time a player gave this promotion to a unit it would increase the count. This count would then be used for information purposes. When in the Choose Promotion popup the count will be displayed next to each promotion. Also, in the Military Adviser this count will determine how many groups there are. Units without any of these promotions would be added to the No Unique Promotion group.

Edit: The AI actually manually counts promotions when choosing a New Promotion for a unit. It takes the plot the unit is on and counts the Promotions of units out to a certain range. The range being 1 or 2 it looks like, so this may even be a better way for the AI to determine what Promotions it wants to choose.

 

[Nightinggale]

So you are saying that we should have a PromotionArray in CvPlayer. Each time a unit adds/removes a promotion, it affects this array. That should be fairly easy. Just hook into CvUnit::setHasPromotion() and modify the PromotionArray by +/- 1. We would likely need an init function though to start the game correctly (start includes loaded games). The init function I'm making for CivEffects should deliver what we want in this regard.

You want to somehow display how many units have this promotion already when selecting new promotions. That shouldn't be that hard either.

The AI could use it to get more diverse units due to promotions. That would probably work, but iValue plays a big role here.

I don't get what else you want to do with it. The advisor should make some groups, but how? Units can easily have multiple promotions and would belong in multiple groups. Filtering units based on promotions could be interesting though.