SUGGESTION: Artifact Trading.

[Deon]

Dear Kael.

I highly love your work and I don't want to try to sound intimidating/overimposing, but we need a feature to trade artifacts.

Today (well, tonight) I was playing the game with 2 more people and I tried to trade my protection (2 promoted warriors and an axeman with bronze weapons in his borders against possible foes/barbarians) for Orthus's axe. It's a long story but the axe was lost (in a few words: you can't present units, you can't capture allies' equipment if they dropped it in your city, if you declare war with enemy equipment in your border IT WANISHES? (I looked around borders but it was nowhere)

A suggestion: let one "present" equipment as it was made with units in vanilla civ. It doesn't add a lot to single player but is a key feature for roleplaying and fair trade in multiplayer which is the best played with YOUR mod.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Someone is going to bring up some heinous exploit that could be done with this, and Kael will listen to that above all else and refuse to implement it, since that's why gifting was scrapped completely in the first place.

 

[Deon]

It's better to fix the exploit than to remove such needed possibility.
And it's not an issue with national units etc., artifacts are unique and can be created just once, so this is not those old issue. We really need it.

About issue: we have a spell "take artifact" which is not exploited. Why not to give a spell "give artifact" in someone's borders?

 

[Blackmantle]

If you want an equipment of a player your not permanently allied with (there nothing will work to my knowledge sadly.), take a unit with HN and let the player drop it in the open. Should work. (if you got no HN-unit go catch some animals or go get CoE. Should be doable...)

In case of CoE you can also try to directly steal it if you have adopted the religion... (that might backfire if done with a not-so-strong unit though...)

For (non-animal, non-beast) Units its far harder to set up with Command 4 + the Crown of command but still a possibility... (you will still need to be at war with them though.)

 

[Deon]

Man, it's an epic game, festivals just researched. No religion is founded, so you offer workarounds while I ask for some simple solution .

Example (as you did a nice suggestion here): a button to turn "hidden nationality" on equipment, quite elegant decision.

 

[Blackmantle]

Another way: "Feed" the sacrificial scout with the Axe to a barbarian (in question if the odds on defense are to much "in the axe-wielders favor" by attacking it, while it is in defensible terrain, the barb will take care of capturing the axe alright i believe.) and capture it back. That should work right from the start. (and is definitely better than sacrificing a carrying unit in your borders and then declaring war...)

Not exactly as elegant from a players perspective as what you suggested but i think its such a fringe thing that Kael might not want to invest much time on it, given he's started the opposite process of clearing up the loose ends and streamlining / polishing the game now that its more or less finished.

(Something similar is in the game for golden hammers where putting those down has been juged to much hassle by Kael to code it in... Sometimes we players must do with what options we have. Here it very much seems doable.)

No barbarians in the game = sad panda. Sorry, nothing can be done there...

 

[Deon]

Fringe? Do you ever see barbarians on standard maps when everything is taken?
I haven't seen a SINGLE barbarian this game . And yeah, it's just multiplayer-related, but a VERY easy fix.

 

[WarKirby]

what's wrong with gifting units ?

why can't we do it ?

 

[Fafnir13]

It bugged with national units or something like that, allowing Civs to have more then they should. Perhaps if there was a way to only allow gifting with non-national units it could be implemented...
But I suspect such avenues were already exhausted. I do miss the ability to gift, but I'm willing to take the hit if it's needed to fix an exploit.

 

[MayNilad Man]

Don;t the Svarts have a spell that allows them to steal equipment? Is that also disabled in multiplayer? Maybe they could restructure it so you can trade artefacts.

 

[Deon]

As I told . Gifting is obviously not an option, but it can be done via spell.

 

[Blackmantle]

You mean the combination of multiplayer (with what seems like at least some PVP bent and also some RP involved), epic gamespeed and a map crowded enough to totally drown out barbarians at the very early part of the game (i haven't! actually not seen barbarians in any of the host of games of FFH i played where they where not actively disabled. Ever. And I'm not sure i ever played one with barbs disabled.) before HN units appear is not a fringe event?
(Doesn't mean its a bad idea to play such a game by any means of course, myself being rather fond of slower games with a fun bent as opposed to quick ones with pure focus on outcome.)
I have my serious! doubts about that.

But still, dropping the equipment out of someones borders and declaring war then might be yet another option that still should work even in that setup if declaring war is any option at all. (or did you cover all terrain in someones borders on top of what you described...? Just make sure the equipment is not "expelled" and thus vaporized.)


But for purely practical reasons, given the chances of success, it might be a far better idea to move such a suggestion to the modmods and scenarios subforums (i don't doubt it has quite an appeal for the situation where something like this is acutally desirable.). Honestly i doubt Kael will devote his time for something like that for various resons beyond what Monkeyfinger mentioned right at the start of this thread (a desire for slim / more polished design and cluttered code for a feature which might be used in perhaps one of ten thousand games played being quite prominent among them.).

It seems not all such hard a change (and if it would be that might be another reason for the team to shy away from it given the number of other ambitious objectives they have set themselves.) and thus its likely some mod-modder will try it if you ask nicely enough.

 

[Fenboy]

what's wrong with gifting units ?

why can't we do it ?

You could constantly gift and capture Hidden Nationality units for free XP.

 

[Deon]

Well yeah, but I've just checked it and you don't get XP for capturing artifacts. So your point is not working here .


Anyway, it's just a suggestion, so don't try to gang on me . I don't think that someone who wasn't in my pants (losing an artifact in a stupid way) is going to do it, so maybe at some point I will do it myself . I can write some python code to give unit HN promotion, I just don't know how to avoid AI casting it on artifacts.

 

[zup]

I very rarely lose artifacts. Maybe it is because I dump them all on my will-be-immortal-eventually warrior. The one unit that warrants a reload when I lose at 99.9% win odds.

 

[Kael]

what's wrong with gifting units ?

why can't we do it ?

There are a lot of exploits opened up by allowing gifting, more than just getting around the national unit limit (though that was a large one).

I really wanted equipment trading as a part of diplomacy, but I could never get it to work. I had a bunch of code in to do it at one point but I had to pull it all because I could never get the actual diplomacy options to work correctly.

 

[Deon]

I had a bunch of code in to do it at one point but...

Oh, I hope one day it will be done. Thank you for your reply .

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I really wanted equipment trading as a part of diplomacy, but I could never get it to work. I had a bunch of code in to do it at one point but I had to pull it all because I could never get the actual diplomacy options to work correctly.

Have you looked at Dom Pedro II's Conquerors' Delight code? It allows you to trade any unit via diplomacy, which I quite like. I don't think he had updated it in a long time and the last time I played it the AI hadn't been taught how to value its units, but I would really like to be able to trade units like once things are polished up a bit.