TAM for CIV5

[thamis]

Hello friends!

Yes, you read right. We are indeed planning on making another TAM version for CIV5, and we are confident that it will be the best TAM version ever.

The team has gathered experience with TAM since 2002, when TAM for CIV3 first launched. We've got some excellent people on board, and the CIV community as a whole has also grown and vastly improved its modding / modelling output. I personally now have much experience in professional game design and production, and I certainly plan to re-join the TAM effort. Together we will make a TAM like you have never seen.

But wait, let us not forget another factor! TAM would never have been what it became and would never have received awards, top scores, and praises, without the great feedback, enthusiasm, and support from you -- the players!

Now we would like to ask you:
- What did you like about TAM?
- What did you not like?
- What did you feel was missing?

We're looking forward to your feedback!

Thamis & the TAM-Team

 

[ambrox62]

Just to start this discussion...

I'm reading the Civ5 manual.
It seems that most of the Civ5 features could be implemented also in Civ4 through XML changes. Then, what's the real news in Civ5?
Furthermore some of the real changes (like one unit per tile, no units on ship, no stack in cities, no close combat for ships, and so on) go in the opposite direction compared to a ancient warfare system.
Am I wrong?

 

[thamis]

I think the no stacks part of CIV5 is what makes it great. The big piles of doom are what always destroyed the game. In terms of gameplay, it's much better, regardless of what history says.

 

[Agent327]

Just to start this discussion...

I'm reading the Civ5 manual.
It seems that most of the Civ5 features could be implemented also in Civ4 through XML changes. Then, what's the real news in Civ5?
Furthermore some of the real changes (like one unit per tile, no units on ship, no stack in cities, no close combat for ships, and so on) go in the opposite direction compared to a ancient warfare system.
Am I wrong?

Pretty much. For various reasons ancient armies generally weren´t big armies and ancient warfare was about strategy and tactics more than about throwing alot of units against the enemy.

Oh, and Thamis!

 

[thecivdude]

Really looking forward to tam for civ 5

 

[thecivdude]

ok, one of the main things i didn't like about TAM c4 was that conquering the entire med was a real B because of the inherent way civ4 worked. the more you conquered, the more your economy waned and all of those cities had to start over basically from scratch AND managing all of those cities became a real boring drag. i think civ5 found a good way around that by making cities you take "puppets" with the option to annex or drop. good move. however, i think there should be some way to contact these cities and tell them to give you more food or a warrior - or else. they are your puppet after all. maybe you can't manage them, but you should be able to make demands, no?

one other thing was seige weapons. alexander the great had them, persia had them. maybe they can only be used once at the beginning of seige, early in history, but then later seige weapons evolve beyond that and can be used each round. rome and others in their time were virtually perfecting them long before there was such a thing as gunpowder, so they should matter more. looking closely at history, there were truly great advances made by ancient civilizations in both warfare and engineering, only to move into the dark ages when much of it was lost. i'd like to see something more than warriors, galleys, archers. maybe there are basic horsemen, basic seige weapons and flotillas for early invasions. maybe there are great armies lead by a religious movement giving them inspiration and perhaps there are civs you must choose in order to give your civilization a religion-centric culture and military purpose.

i think some of the city states should also be somewhat more like barbarians. for example, attilla the hun is one... maybe vercingettorix? or ancient chinese states that were eventually conquered by chinese dynasties would be a good candidate for an organized military city-state? and, as in ancient times, their invasion might be halted by buying them off with gold.

i'm bothered somewhat by the generals in civ5. there's a bonus given to units, but they were the ones who brought tactics and inspiration to the battlefield. maybe a general makes it possible to stack on a tile, at a 2 per tile limit... something that adds a tactic to the battlefield. also, if there's a way to add a roll to create the small chance that a unit could attack twice in one turn, thanks to the presence of the general - a small chance, but a chance none the less. it would also be nice if a general could somehow advance in level and TRULY become a great general in time. perhaps allow greater distance for attack and seige, etc., or even making basic walls ineffective for the defenders. i'd also like to see some way to generate 1 elite fighting unit, like the sparta 300, perhaps lead by a leveled great general who doesn't effect any other unit, but gives great bonuses to that 1 unit.

also, most battles were fought on the battlefield right? i think civ5 is now ready to set up great battles and strategies this way, but it is still, very much, a siege-the-city game, and that's it. maybe if you declare war, the opponent will challenge you to a battlefield and if you agree, you'll have to choose units which will meet just outside the city.

famine, plague, religious events, slave trade (as a commodity, including gladiators - i was always disappointed in the slave market, which did add gold, but ... blah...) - or perhaps, an option where a veteran warrior can be added to a city's culture ranking when made a gladiator (and no longer part of the military) or something like that. experimental medical techniques that are somewhat a wildcard, either they help or they hurt. dunno, just throwing out ideas.

also, i'd like to see more wonders of the ancient world. maybe even military wonders. wasn't it archemedes who developed a great mirror that set the sails of invading vessels on fire? perhaps that was only a legend, but that would be a very interesting military wonder, for example. something no version of civ has done before that is not really a re-skin of what they already do, but a fresh concept. i have yet to see a great prophets in civ5, but maybe they should appear often in the ancient world without the option for new techs, but for new religions and culture bonuses and defense against plague, etc... maybe a "random event" where a rogue prophet actually leads some citizens astray? and, maybe a great prophet could cancel out that event by bringing them back?

one of the MAJOR things i do not like about civ5 is the disproportionate time it takes to build anything. it will take 15 turns to build a silly monument, meanwhile i can research engineering in 7 turns. i'd like to see that change drastically. in TAM, i'd like to see the time set back to 6,000 BC, with warriors, slingers, horsemen and great monuments like stonehenge and early pyramids and burial cites.

to me, it seems you have to sacrifice other research to get to swordsmen early, but then in a few more turns, they're basically obsolete to the next military advanced unit. i'd like a little added time for these units to matter the way they did in ancient times.

well, i'll keep thinking on this and post ideas. eventually, i stopped playing vanilla Civ4 altogether and only played TAM. i like the slower ancient development and historical elements to it. i found it far more interesting than bombers and tanks. please, by all means, do NOT feel the need to rush past the early ancient cultures and sprint into more advanced times.

i look forward to it. thanks

 

[Laurino]

Nice ideas so far, I can assure you that they'll be discussed.

I got this one :

What if Cities could actually get xp and promotions? A city that is used to fight off invaders could become better at it as it fights more and more, to reflect the fact that its citizens get used to repelleing invasions.

Another idea: Negative "futur tech" to reflect the degradation of civilizations as we knew them around the 5th century. could be called something like "darkening tech" thus the more you'd progress into the "after-TAM" eras, the harder it would get.

 

[thecivdude]

interesting!

 

[Karhgath]

As usual my time is limited, but I have a slew of ideas and getting more everyday as I understand the system underneath civ5, so I'll be able to help out, maybe the usual techtree and all TAM is pretty much the only version of Civ I play since the good old days of TAM Civ3, so when I play vanilla I only see it through TAM eyes, hehe.

I've already peaked a bit at the files and all to see what can be changed and what is set with the XML.

A good thing in Civ5 is the unstacking, which can allow for battles outside the cities as you can have just one defender leaving the rest of the army outside. Battles can now be about proper tactics, and emphasis already made in the previous TAMs. We need to tweak it so it isn't just about siege, make siege longer and allow to break siege easily. Adding diseases, starvation, etc. until powerful siege weapons that can break walls.

Now our unit types can get an upgrade and probably can be better modeled with range weapons and all. Also, I don't know if it's possible yet, but having ranged triremes that could ram (melee) as well as go ranged might be possible.

Without religion, we need to see what can be implemented instead and how, but I love the city states (maybe transfering some civs to single/multiple City States) and the simpler happiness/gold systems instead of all the previous interweaved systems (complex maintenance and cost, health, religion, city happiness, etc.)

The strategic resources qty are nice, but we'll need to see how (and if) we can implement the copper/bronze/iron/steel weapons upgrades now. Maybe that's not gonna be needed anymore.

The new socials are great, but I believe it could be limiting compared to civics, depending how it is implemented under the hood (what is hardcoded or not).

 

[Hybrisma]

Looking forward to it..City-States (nerfed that is) will make the map very interesting.

 

[thamis]

You mention some very good points here. I have not had the chance to play more than the demo of CIV5 (because I ordered my collector's edition from the UK, I want it in English, goddammit).

The following points are things that I really want to remedy in TAM:

Units are obsolete too quickly, they take too long to build, techs are researched too quickly. I believe that we need less units spread over more techs. The relative times it takes to build and to research needs to be slanted towards more time researching, less time building.

Cities take forever to conquer. I envisage a map of the Mediterranean where we historically place all the cities as city-states. Players go and conquer cities, make puppet states, etc... For that to work, cities need to be much easier to conquer. I want to focus more on the battlefield, less on city sieges.

That's it for now. I really hope I'll receive my copy of the game today....

 

[Karhgath]

I've been thinking about 2 things for units:

1- Units are more valuable individually now in Civ5. It started with Civ4 with promotions, and now without stacking, you need to conserve elite units as they are more vulnerable; I hate losing a single a unit. I want to see less unit types as you said Thamis, but I want promotions related to tech as an emphasis now, and buildings that gives promotions. So instead of having Spearman and Armored Spearman as seperate units, you could have an Armorer building that gives the armored promotions. Or make promotions cost money depending on socials?

I also know now that every single units have 10 HP (and it is strength vs strength that tells how much HP each side loses), maybe promotions could give additional HP if possible. A weaker armored unit could still take longer to kill. However, I want to find a way to remove unit healing outside friendly territories. for example, no healing in foreign lands, but Forts or Army Camps and such in neutral territories could provide healing, so you fall back there after an unsuccessful attack, you need to build a front for your army.

2- I want diversity in armies composition of each civs. Maybe making a choice between 2 units in the tech (so if you research a tech, it disables another one). That might not be feasible. Also having unit synergies and experience building unit types might be interesting. I know Great Generals have an aura now that gives bonus, maybe we can filter that bonus by units type. We could mock moral and such that way There seems to be a lot more tactical options on the battlefield now.

Also, maybe each time you build a certain unit/type, you could gain experience in building it and each subsequent build costs less (up to a certain point). So the first spearman might be costly, but not the 10th. Or have choices with building (Archery Range or Armorer, but not both) that gives production bonus for certain unit type. Civs could specialize in certain units.

We'll also need to do something about the AI, the new combat is great but the AI doesn't seem to understand simple tactics and common sense.

Also trade routes will have to be overhauled, they are too simple now (only between your civs).

Any, enough brainstorm now, gotta work

 

[Karhgath]

Another thing, we need to find a way to model variables that affected tactics and warfare back then.

Lets take the roman army. They went through reforms and changes along the way that came back to the following:

First line units (hastati) engaging while skirmishers (leves or velites) covered the advance.
If unsucessfully, first line would fall back, second line would engage (principes).
Then if it comes down to it, triarii would engage.
(then you have equites and all flanking)


This means a couple of things:
- We could model each lines as different units and have 3 tiles deep legions instead of one general legion unit.
- Skirmishers could maybe "stack" like non-combat units and thus could be "attached" to front line units, if such a thing is possible. Or "abstract" them with promotions giving a free ranged attack to units or something.
- Either the falling back occurs in the same round (you can move back after attacking and switch with the unit behind you) or you allow the enemy to counter attack and, if still alive, move back the next turn.
- This means units must be more resilient, and a decisive victory against undamaged units must be nearly impossible (wiping out the opposition in one turn). Even an higher tech unit should required 2+ rounds against a lower tech unit, but wouldn't take much damage in return.
- Terrain needs to be very important and have tactical importance. We need big maps with open aread, cities must be spaced a lot more, chokepoints needs to be reduced since they become highly powerful (battle of thermopylae), etc.
- The AI must understand frontlines and those tactical element (that might be hard)
- What would make you and the ally put your weaker units in front and best behind (costs, promotions, investement and value) like roman did, and not just put your most powerful units in front. Heck, why build lesser and cheaper units at all? Maintenance? Costs?
- Healing units and reforming ranks might cost money instead of being automatic and free. If possible, when hurt, a unit could be able to use the Instant Healing promotion automatically (no Xp requirement) but it costs money depending how much you heal.
- Why did they reform and needed to be flexible, what kind of opponent tactics cause their defeats and required adjustments : that need to be modeled in game somewhat.

(as a note, with the way it works now (land units can embark on water, unstacking, etc.) we can have scenes like the battle of thermopylae in the 300 movies where you can see tons and tons of boats and the huge army of Xerxes landing and setting camp.)

Also, I've had a thought. Since auxiliary archers and such in the roman army were recruited from the middle east, maybe having city states gift specific types of units and you could conquer City States (instead of only Annex/Ally, we add Conquered, which is a 'forced alliance' maybe?). Legions would be built in your roman cities and auxiliaries recruited from conquered states.

That's only after checking out general roman tactics (and I'm not the best roman warfare scholar around), we need to analyse how other civs fought and if we can model those tactics and make the AI and players make those choices in Civ5.

So many ideas...

 

[Laurino]

1- I too hate loosing a single unit now in Civ5, and like the idea to pay for healing/promotions. If the hero units make their way in TAM5, it will be an even more powerfull tool to make these units hyper-important.

The idea of having healing forts/bases outside of empire is interesting, especially if units can't heal outside borders. I think this should also be countered by the hability to pay for heals, coupled with the fort heals. Also, depending on the way tis can be implemented, unless the forts have some kind of radius for healing, it would become painfull to heal all units only trough letting them be in the fort for a turn. We could also make it so that a fort never completely heals a unit, maybe to a limit of x%, this would speed up the healing process, also, a fort could make units heal faster, as they would be "made" to do so, ie: military geared, so quicker, but not as "polyvalent" as a city, thus the max heal never being 100%.

2- If techs preventing another one to be researched not being feasible, we could always do it trough buildings. I still need to tackle those building files.

Building certain units/buildings making your city better at it is similar to my idea of having cities geting XPs. All these could be included in some kind of cities being modded to act a bit as units. I'm speaking in terms of possibilities here, and don't know how it could be implemented, but if cities would have a "separate" set of xp/promotions, it could then make them be more effective at one or another aspect of the game. Each city would get xp (or something similar) trough building things, or fighting/defending. Then, trough promotions, faster building capacities even maybe special buildings allowing any thing imaginable, or simple better defense/attack could all be choices. Also, this way of implementing it, trough promotions, would leave some flexibility to players/AI, as cities could simply choose most needed promotion at any time. A city with 3 building promotion that then faces combat could then get a "battle" promotion.

3- trade routes being improved??? of course... even be boosted, especially if we implement money costing stuff

 

[Laurino]

Another thing, we need to find a way to model variables that affected tactics and warfare back then.

...............

This 2d post is just great, really nice guidelines, as always

Thigns in TAM should me more "large scale"... More space between cities, more movement. I also have been thinking about the Javelineers, about ways to mod it's guerilla-style behaviors, enabling them to stack, giving them an attack/retreat behavior. And about this, what if we allowed more "stackable" units in TAM. We could have "main" and "auxilliary armies" for ranged units, it's easily feasible, but then, it could be implemented for melee also, with stackable units that would defend, but not attack, or attack at a real low lvl. You could then have a legion accompanied by some auxiliray archers, or a siege unit stacked with some auxiliary melee that would defend it well, while having low attacking capacities. With the same lines in mind, this could be reflected in naval units, so landunit boats could be protected, as could merchant ships (IF they make their way into TAM, wich I woud like)

As for city-states giving "special" units, this would be simply great. We could also diversify the citystates "types".

 

[graywarden]

Right now Im absorbing everyones thoughts and comments, still waiting for my copy to arrive. In the meantime I am continuing to test my two favorite mods ;O)

this was posted on the Wild Mana Civ5 thread, from a post on FFH by Kael

thought it would fit well with the discussion.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9682679&postcount=1

 

[Karhgath]

I already tinkered a bit, feels more natural now with the IDE (as a software architect), but the basic are the same. However, I do hope they will release the source code like they did with Civ4 (CVGameCore.dll), as some changes will probably need to be made there, or maybe combat hooks in the lua files are gonna be enough (not much info yet), we'll see.

 

[thecivdude]

Cities take forever to conquer. I envisage a map of the Mediterranean where we historically place all the cities as city-states. Players go and conquer cities, make puppet states, etc... For that to work, cities need to be much easier to conquer. I want to focus more on the battlefield, less on city sieges.

i like the idea of cities being easier to conquer, BUT perhaps that is earned by refining your military. either by gold, or by ancient ruin bonuses, advancing your units in levels, and more importantly, making a general worth something. i mention above that a leveled general could make basic walls useless, or allow siege weapons to fire from greater distance and give a slight chance that a unit could strike twice in one turn. these are promotions that would have to be earned and therefore make your armies able to conquer cities easily. in the ancient world, generals had real influence and often their ruler WAS their general, like Darius and Alexander.

so far, to me, i haven't thought cities take too long to conquer, in fact, what i've noticed is almost a complete lack of any effective counter attack, aside from the city itself. if a civilization is simply unable to mount a counter offensive then so be it. but, playing civ5 for awhile now, i really have never experienced any real counter attack. in civ4, if you declare war and invade, you best have a some sort of solid defense in other areas because the enemy nation will send a stack you didn't see to a different area away from your main force. i haven't seen anything like this in civ5 - playing on prince and king levels, nothing. just the occasional unit here and there, but not a tactical counterstrike. weird.

it should not be all about a siege on one city, then a siege on the next city, methodically, one to the next. battles should shift. there should be a surprise and some sort of risk. and units shouldn't be sooooo valuable that you can't lose even one. there should be maintenance in gold for the number of units you have, to prevent you from getting carried away in producing them, but if you lose a few, building more should not take 24 turns each. so the real deterrent to building too many units is cost, not an extremely long time to build them. and what happened to drafting citizens? if you're country is under attack, some citizens could fight as units?

i also like the idea of declaring war, then getting the option to meet their army on a battlefield (away from the city) to duke it out with your army, face up, unit vs unit, and utilize strategy, terrain and tactics to win a traditional, ol' fashioned battlefield victory. to do this, units would have to be able to retreat by swapping tiles with fresh units, and a real cavalry strike would have to come quick and ride back around. maybe there are supply units that help melee units heal in the back if they retreat from the front (maybe you have to research a "Disciple" military tech). stacks should be able to rally to a flank that is under assault or losing. there might even be units (that could be just out of view) saved for a surprise attack (researched?). heck, there's a lot that could be done. the consequence for the enemy losing is becoming a puppet or vassal state, without having to attack their cities at all. that would ultimately take away the same-old, same-old city siege, in some cases.

another way to weaken cities is to research a bribe. maybe 12 or 15 turns to research an insider in an enemy city which gives you an edge in a battle on that city, like the woman who aided the Hebrew in the battle for Jericho, or the trojan horse in troy?

i also really like the idea of military wonders - the trojan horse, the sparta 300, Archimedes mirror, Alexander's cavalry, heck, who knows? fun, ancient, historical, good stuff.

 

[NULLARC-X]

I really loved TAM for Civ IV. Can't wait for this mod : D I can't actually think of anything specific about it that I would prefer different for the Civ 5 version.

I really don't like that one can't choose ones government and policies in Civ 5 like one could in Civ 4. The culture system is cool for different bonuses etc but it shouldn't be used for ones governing system, social policies etc. Those should be chosen as one researches new tech, not awarded for culture points or w/e ^^

 

[Maniac]

Another thing, we need to find a way to model variables that affected tactics and warfare back then.

Lets take the roman army. They went through reforms and changes along the way that came back to the following:

First line units (hastati) engaging while skirmishers (leves or velites) covered the advance.
If unsucessfully, first line would fall back, second line would engage (principes).
Then if it comes down to it, triarii would engage.
(then you have equites and all flanking)

Sounds like a unit performing an attack and then switching positions with the unit behind it. This could be represented by late game melee units being able to move after combat, like horsemen can.