Starting as a Tribe, a gameplay loop preview

[Gedemon]

That's something we've discussed a few time in this section: what to do in a a pre-city gameplay ?

Here is a 30 minutes preview of what I've been working on since February, based on various ideas, as a starting gameplay for my overhaul, where the goal is to gather enough population to create a Settler or a City of your Civilization ethnicity.

 

[Ryansinbela]

Cool my dude

also what are the tribe names used

Sambians
Semigallians
Skalvians (German)
Yotvingians

 

[Zegangani]

I prefer this kind of Tribal start over starting as Tribal Units who wander around and collect resources/hunt Animals. I also like how the Tribes (and the Barbarian Camp) spawned adjacent to lakes and rivers.

I only have one suggestion: Combat Units that get trained in a Tribal Village could have Extra strength on the same terrain/feature type of their Trival Village. Like a Tribe that is on a desert Tile will train Units that have +x Strength on desert/desert hills.

Did you change something about the Barbarians too?

I hope someday Firaxis will hire you (and let you fee hands to do anything you want). Great Job (as always)!

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

I only have one suggestion: Combat Units that get trained in a Tribal Village could have Extra strength on the same terrain/feature type of their Trival Village. Like a Tribe that is on a desert Tile will train Units that have +x Strength on desert/desert hills.

Maybe even the Tiles immediately adjacent to the Village could give some boosts to those Units.

 

[Zegangani]

Maybe even the Tiles immediately adjacent to the Village could give some boosts to those Units.

Could work aswell. maybe even better, because it would represent the Environment of a Tribe much better (instead of the 1 tile of a tribe that might be i.e. a plain grassland while most surrounding tiles have also rainforest on them. So a +x CS in Rainforest would be more reasonable than a +x on Grassland).

 

[Naokaukodem]

Impressive work knowing how Civ6 is difficult to mod such as. Some change in the realm of Civ, at last. It might give ideas to Firaxis ! Maybe an ancient era focused game before Civ7 ?

I don't get why the units starve though. They can die even in a tile of cows. Unless they have a lifespan like heros in NFP ?

I would love if once you have cities you can revert back to camps due to collapse.

 

[Gedemon]

It's a lifespan of 6 turns , then they disband in 2-3 turns depending on the HP left

 

[AsH2]

Have you been looking At the Gates?

 

[CalebR_300]

I'm liking what I see... good work.

It would be cool for the mechanic that allows you to place a satellite village also be applied when placing improvements around a city... could do away with builders, plus have a handy dandy road to the improvement.

As far as I can tell, resources collected by a unit are lost if the unit doesn't manage to transfer them back to a village... I propose a movement distance-limit on units (say 6 tiles from their spawn point) instead of a turn based limit... or the unit becomes passive and is forced to return to base and disbands on arrival... or transfer all resources on the unit to the closest friendly village on disbanding... or is immune to disbanding (or slowed) whilst in supply range of the main village.

Now this is just speculation, but I foresee a potential imbalance of an established civ being able to dominate a village civ by simply having units that don't time out... but that may be part of the incentive to establish a city.

Anyway, I'm just nit-picking. Otherwise this is great, and I look forward to giving it a spin in the future!

 

[Gedemon]

Disbanding units are sending back all equipment and personnel to the village they are linked to, even if there is no supply route (assuming the surviving conscripted soldiers always find a way back home to their family, with their shields/weapons), number of resources is dependent on distance, with a minimal of 10% if there is no supply line (or too far) so you don't lost everything.

I don't remember if that was coded correctly at the time of the video, did a lot of bug fixing since, I think there is a scout that didn't get back in range in time then, which pushed me to implement the 10% minimal value for resources transferred back to village on disbanding.

That mean you can recruit back any units that has just disbanded while being a tribe, something a city may not be able to do with its conscripts.

Distance limit will be implemented with unit's loyalty value, at some point.

 

[AntSou]

The amount of detail in this is insane. Good luck with the project, I hope I get to play it.

 

[Gedemon]

It would be cool for the mechanic that allows you to place a satellite village also be applied when placing improvements around a city... could do away with builders, plus have a handy dandy road to the improvement.

I'm almost certain there was at least one thread somewhere in this section about removing the worker unit, but I don't seem to be able to find it...

Anyone remember how it was working in CTP ?

 

[mitsho]

Very cool and interesting. Though it seems quite complex, I like simpler systems more.

Having said that, two questions:What about Archipelago? I believe there should be some way to island hop and get out there. A canoe unit would be suitable, nothing fancy needed, but I feel getting boxed in could be frustrating.

And how‘s the transition to the real game afterwards?

I'm almost certain there was at least one thread somewhere in this section about removing the worker unit, but I don't seem to be able to find it...

Anyone remember how it was working in CTP ?

Each city contributed a share of their production to a central pool called „public works“. There was a slider that affected how much of it went there, I‘m not sure right now if that slider was empire-wide or city specific. The latter would be more flavourful, simulating either rural cities sending workers to the capital (for building Ziggurats) or the capital city sending its surplus to build up a endangered border town. Then you just go into a menu, chose the UI (inlcuding roads) and place it where you want.

It was so much better than Civilization‘s Worker/Builder Units. Less clicking.

 

[Galvatron]

That's something we've discussed a few time in this section: what to do in a a pre-city gameplay ?

Here is a 30 minutes preview of what I've been working on since February, based on various ideas, as a starting gameplay for my overhaul, where the goal is to gather enough population to create a Settler or a City of your Civilization ethnicity.

Are you a wizard

 

[Gedemon]

Very cool and interesting. Though it seems quite complex, I like simpler systems more.

Having said that, two questions:What about Archipelago? I believe there should be some way to island hop and get out there. A canoe unit would be suitable, nothing fancy needed, but I feel getting boxed in could be frustrating.

And how‘s the transition to the real game afterwards?

One of the thing I'd like to have in my mod is a mechanism to acquire traits during the game instead of selecting a civ based on its traits before starting the game.

I'd like to implement the selection of one trait for this Era, that you have to select from a few, and unlocked based on your surrounding. One could be a naval specialization allowing embarking unit, unlocked if you have villages along the sea.

Transition is, when the conditions are meet, by an action to spawn a Settler unit (then settle somewhere else on the map) or an action to replace the central "fortified village" by a City.

 

[Zegangani]

One of the thing I'd like to have in my mod is a mechanism to acquire traits during the game instead of selecting a civ based on its traits before starting the game.

I'd like to implement the selection of one trait for this Era, that you have to select from a few, and unlocked based on your surrounding. One could be a naval specialization allowing embarking unit, unlocked if you have villages along the sea.

I had the same Idea. Traits should basically be acquired based on Experience/Environment/Circumstances of a Civ. You can make that via Policies that are locked, and unlock them via lua (there is already a "ExplicitUnlock" Column in the Policies Systeme that's used by a Scenario - That's how I plan to, and probably, do it). So that a Civ could end up with more than just 2 Traits. But AI again... So perhaps Policies aren't a good Methode for that.

 

[Ryansinbela]

Boris also did, because a tribe didn’t randomly spawn saying “You know what, we are the Chinese”

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

Boris also did, because a tribe didn’t randomly spawn saying “You know what, we are the Chinese”

In fact, if you started playing in 4000 BCE or so as a tribe named the:
Daxi
Majiabang
Yangshao
Hongshan
Dawenkou
How many would know that those are the early archeological groups in, respectively, the Three Gorges area, upper and lower Yellow River basin, northeastern coast, and the Yangtse Delta of China?

Yeah, we need a Pre-City (I'd say Neolithic but Humankind has that locked up for the moment) start in which you Develop your initial Traits, don't get handed to them based on what you Will Become several thousand years later . . .

 

[nauberry]

Looks very promising and I hope at sometime we will get to try what you have created. As I'm inexperienced in the mod creation side, is it possible with the current tools to create an AI that can use these new mechanics?

 

[Gedemon]

Looks very promising and I hope at sometime we will get to try what you have created. As I'm inexperienced in the mod creation side, is it possible with the current tools to create an AI that can use these new mechanics?

One of the reasons I've started this gameplay implementation is to have a (relatively) simple environnement (before cities and territories make it a lot more complex) in which I could try to answer that very question.

In the current state of the tools, you can tweak the AI behavior for existing mechanisms, but you can't really change neither the AI nor the mechanism.

On the other hand, a new mechanism, that's something else, what I can do for the human player (pressing a button to spawn an unit if some conditions are meet for example), I can make the AI do it too.

I don't plan to have a complex AI in my mod, I will rely on the default AI when I can, but I'd like to completely remove the current diplomatic AI (and diplomatic gameplay) that can't be modded and write my own from scratch.

And I'll start with inter-tribes relations.

Nothing coded on the diplomatic side yet, but I've started a framework to handle decisions with this gameplay.

For example, the AI currently weight and apply the following decisions in a central village:

"Defense":
- try to spawn a melee unit if the central village is undefended
- try to spawn a ranged unit over the melee unit if its health drop below 50% (ranged and melee stacks in my mod)
- try to spawn additional units if there are more enemy units in the range of the central village than it has

"Offense":
- try to spawn a skirmisher unit if there isn't enough active

"Homeland":
- try to repair pillaged villages in range

All this using the same rules as the human player.

I'm not sure yet if I'll try to code the Settler/City gameplay for the AI Civilizations, as it's more complex of course, and civ6 Lua is fast, but not fast enough for everything going on in the mod already, and also because one of the goal here is to implement True Starting Dates, with the tribes doing a "soft-reservation" of a Civilization Starting Position until its spawning date, which would of course be very variable if the AI was using this mechanism before being able to spawn a city. The possibility of the tribe loosing the position will already be an important factor for a Civ to spawn or not.

I've already decided that I'll use asymmetrical gameplay for the human vs AI anyway, my design is to have the AI providing a interesting background for the player to develop its Empire and reach various goals, with Rise and Fall of other Empires around him.