Random Civs and Teams

[Lord Yanaek]

OK, one neat new feature of BTS is the ability to set teams right from the game creation screen. I really like it because i often play with another human player who only agrees to play in a team with me, never against me (i'm not that good, but she got the WRONG feeling she's a bad player ...) So our games are often we against AI civs. Before BTS, once we were able to make a team, we became nearly unstoppable, as AIs didn't form permanent alliances between each other anyway.
Now, we simply start out as a team, and i set the AI civs as 2 civ teams as well. That's a nice addition.

However it will bring some issues to FFH. If i simply put 2 random civs in a team, i could end up with one evil and one good civ in the team. Well, it can be strange to have Mao allied with Lincoln in standard civ, but it would be even stranger to have the Bannors allied with Calabims, or Elohims with Sheaims in FFH.

Is there a way, and a plan, to add some sort of function that checks for random civs in teams so that evil civs don't end up allied with good civs, or even have only civs sharing the same alignment be allies (evil with evil, neutral with neutral, and good with good).

I'm not sure all this team stuff really fits FFH very well but this function made our games much more interesting. In a recent game we barely won a space race victory a couple dozen turns before the end, and we would have lost on any other victory condition, it was much more of a challenge than civ 4 ever been before.

 

[Pandemonis]

Roll dices and set it up yourself from the beginning ?

Thats a good suggestion, but I think neutral could go either way.

 

[Nikis-Knight]

It is on the wish list, but unlikely. That section of code (selecting random ais) isn't open to moding or something like that.
So you can either know who your foes are, or live with some quirks.

 

[DeaExMachina]

Considering how the Calabim is only evil in there oppression and feeding habits but don't like Civs that are destroying the world I can see them in an alliance with the Banner against the Clan very easily; the same goes for the Belseraph since Perpentarch has a strange insane sense of honor.

Personally I usually set up my game alliances before the game begins, if I'm going to play with the alliance option (I have seen them the AI form permanent alliances actually, it happened in a game of mine just last week between Viconia and Shelba) on. Remember that they normally won't form an alliance if you don't click the Permanent Alliance option!

But I digress...while the Good/Evil on the same team can be conflictive I'm sure there are cases in which you can put most of the teams together. However it would prove problematic if they did simply due to research conflicts. Can you imagine a Good/Evil Civ that has summoned Hyborem and built the Mercurian Gate?

 

[loki1232]

Considering how the Calabim is only evil in there oppression and feeding habits but don't like Civs that are destroying the world I can see them in an alliance with the Banner against the Clan very easily; the same goes for the Belseraph since Perpentarch has a strange insane sense of honor.

Indeed, the way I see it you can write the story yourself, explaining why your alliance exists.

 

[Sureshot]

atleast BtS allows you to pick a Civ without choosing a leader, so you can get random leaders and just pick the civs in the alliance. Its part of the way towards Random Goods, Random Neutral, and Random Evil.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

I guess i'll have to stick to roll dices then. It's a pity firaxis did put some hard-coded function there when they allowed so much modability.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

OK, i thought of something that might (maybe) work. It's pure theory, as i have no skill in programming (duh, i made a little "turbo pascal" programming at school, but it was quite some years ago).

If there is no way the random civs can be adjusted to have random evil, random neutral ... to ensure civs of the right alignment would end up in a team, and if teams can be created after game setup (and they can, it's not much different than a perm-alliance is it?), maybe it would be possible to have a script that creates teams immediatly after game setup.

I see it this way :

• At game setup, human players choose their civ, and their teams as they see fit.
• An option to "create FFH teams" is added to the new options, it will tell the game to run the script.
• AIs are left as lone players (no team for them yet)
• Then after game setup and civs are randomly generated, the script is run.
• The script looks in a data file somewhere for the civs that are present in the game. In this file civs are sorted by "most fanatical" and then have a list of "favorite allies".
• The civ with the highest fanatical value is evaluated first, it's closest friend (most favorite ally) among the other civs is added to his team, and eliminated from the available civs.
• The next "most fanatical" civ in the remaining available civs is evaluated, and it's favorite ally added to it's team ...
• When there is only two civs left, they should be the less fanatical of the bunch, they are allied together.

This way, we have the most fanatical civs allied with civs that share some of their points of view, or at least not swarn ennemies. Each team will be made of compatible civs.

I don't know if this can be done (well, i guess it can be, but it might not be worth the trouble), but it might be a work around to create coherant teams.

 

[MrUnderhill]

It would take a bit of jerry-rigging, but could you add "dummy" civs like "Random Good", "Random Neutral", and "Random Evil", then replace them with real civs once the game starts (like with Hyborem and Basium)?