Tweaks, Streamlining and Unsolicited Suggestions

[xienwolf]

The game cycles through all the units quite often actually. And there is already a loop through all units at the start of your turn. It is during this loop that Summons drop their duration among other things. You can pretty easily build it into this loop, or you could create a similar loop at the end of the turn.

Also, the AI tends not to care about micromanagment issues. So such a function would easily be limited to only happen for Human players.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

lots of great suggestions in here, nice thread

 

[jprc]

In the Streamlining part:

Forbid automated workers to build Forts!!!

I grow tired of FFH simply because of the extra management of always having to control individually each worker as they waste their time in making forts rather than production improvements....
Making all this manually is incredibly time consuming (especially as I like playing on huge maps...). And when the background changes (ex.: hyborem's landscape), it is visually very difficult to see what is the current improvement (I need to place the prompt on a grid, and read what it says... road, mine,...).
If I set them up in full auto mode for concentrating more on other aspects of the game, they start building pointless forts where a cottage (or anything else) would be just better on a medium/long term basis, and I end up taking back the control of a few workers for undoing what they did before, just for discovering a few rounds later that another worker came behind me and rebuilt a pointless fort!
In my games, I have the feeling to be in Albania!!! (there were about 700.000 blockhaus in this country...)
You can restrict on old/new improvements, removing forests, but can not have the workers restricted to real production improvements (mine, lumber/water/wind mill, farm, cottage). Building forts should be always excluded from automated tasks.

 

[Breez]

My automated workers make NOTHING but roads and cottages. I end up with cities have no farms and 1o cottages but no where near the population to use them all.

I use the Automated Network, so they will build roads connecting cities and Resources and they will develop resources, but I have found it MUCH easier to manually improve non-resource tiles.

 

[zup]

Worker automation worked in CIV3, there were so few options for them. In CIV4, well I prefer the insane workload to dumbass automation. There needs to be multiple automation orders.

And why not let workers plant new forests, only make it much, much slower than bloom?

 

[Kael]

Great ideas here. Some are somewhat tough to implement. One thing thats a little weird about Civ4 is it doesn't have code that processes at the end of a turn. There are python routines that are call "end of turn" but they actually trigger before a player moves. Add in simotaneous turns and multiplayer and it gets a little trickier.

Not impossible. But a bit tricky.

I did consolidate Govannon's train abilities all into one spell. So casting it will teach all his rank one spells (and all of them, not just the limited ones we had before) to all teamed units in his stack.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, a building tree with pre-reqs would be a great streamline and rather easy to implement.

Building trees are really cool for players and really tough on the AI. We have a hard enough time trying to teach the AI to build buildings now. Trying to get it to effectivly use a building tree would be even tougher and significantly weaken the AI.

Otherwise I would do it (it was in the design docs for the first version of FfH).

 

[Keeper_GFA]

I don't like the building tree idea. It messes up build queues. If the check to see if you are allowed to build something was applied when you tried to build it, instead of when you tried to add it to the queue then it would be ok.

 

[Schmoe]

I did consolidate Govannon's train abilities all into one spell. So casting it will teach all his rank one spells (and all of them, not just the limited ones we had before) to all teamed units in his stack.

I'm currently playing a game as the Amurites (first time in over a year), and I think this is an awesome improvement. I can't tell you how frustrating it was for me to pick up random spell spheres with Govannon and then not be able to teach them to other units. There's no documentation I could find that explicitly lists what he can teach, and it seems random as to which spells are allowable for teaching. Also, the reduced micro-management will be a very nice benefit.

Thanks!

 

[megamanx06]

I did consolidate Govannon's train abilities all into one spell. So casting it will teach all his rank one spells (and all of them, not just the limited ones we had before) to all teamed units in his stack.

so govanon willbe able to teach all spells? or just rank 1 spells?

 

[Zobo]

would it be overpowering to have player have building trees while the AI does not?

 

[nealhunt]

Building trees are really cool for players and really tough on the AI. We have a hard enough time trying to teach the AI to build buildings now. Trying to get it to effectivly use a building tree would be even tougher and significantly weaken the AI.

Otherwise I would do it (it was in the design docs for the first version of FfH).

Thanks for the response, Kael. I see your point. I always turn off all the building reqs precisely because the AI can't handle it. I didn't think about what it would do in other situations.

*sigh* I'll soldier on without it.

 

[notque]

Really like the ideas in here. Limiting micromanagement would be a really high priority to me. It gets really tedious and ruins the game when you are constantly casting spells just incase there's someone in the darkness that might attack you.

Auto-cast would be great!

 

[Grey Fox]

It would be nice with something similar to how you can automate transports in colonization, but for spells. So you could tell your adept to autocast a certain spell every turn, or maybe even make it even more advance and include conditions. You could have conditions required to be met in a scroll list and then pick one of the conditions and then in another scroll list with all the available actions, then you could maybe add several sets of conditions+actions.

 

[Yashkaf]

Continuing the idea of reducing MM, it would be nice if your units could have action queues, similar to building queues in cities. For example, after building 3 hawks to scout out the world, I'm stuck either manually finding a place for them to recon or just Zzing and forgetting about them. If I could just order the hawk to a simple rebase-scout peak between three cities, or just have it scout the same peak every turn until armageddon (to see barbs coming for example) that would be great.

Another option would be automation: if the AI can handle automating workers, a hawk should be able to do automated scouting (like the "explore" command), a PoL automated blooming, and the Mithril Golem automated kicking ass and chewing gum (if it can handle both simultaneously).