Units Disscusion

Think of it as the ability to completely control ground.

You're right, logically speaking you could wipe out the town if you stayed there for months smashing everything down to a pile of bricks with a sledge hammer and hunting down every last survivor. Like I said right now I haven't really graphically represented it, but the later units are 'larger' and so have more man power to do a proper capture or destroy mission.

However that would make for a pretty boring game as you could wipe out half the factions before they have got anywhere, if you are lucky to start with a beneficial bonus resource close to you that allows you to get better units early compared to your enemies. (Something which is fairly easy for a Vault Civ to do.)

This way every faction gets the early half of the game to build themselves up before you get to start taking control of them or wiping them out completely.

If you are a war monger there is still plenty that you can do.

Burn their farms and quarries and such and bring home the spoils. Defeat their guards and soldiers and drag them home as slaves. Then go home, wait for the civilians to crawl out of their hidey holes and rebuild, then do it all over again!! For even more spoils!

Or you can be more subtle and not declare war and send in Operatives to burn their farms and quarries and such and bring home the spoils, as well as kidnap their workers and bring them home as slaves! Then wait for them to make some more workers and rebuild their improvements and do it all over again for even more spoils!

In terms of space, there is plenty of room to expand on the map, as it is almost entirely land. (I am still trying to get the AI to be better and braver with it's expansion plans. It still seems to be a little slow and unwilling to send in a big sacrificial stack for a land grab..compared to what a player can do but I think it is better than it was, I am just trying to discover and change the underlying factors)

Or simply lead expeditions to expand around them and then 'annex' them when you research Conquest.

I think I now have both the unit tags I need to be able to implement this a bit better.

Now I can set a prereq population size, and a pop. consumption size.

So the early units cost 1 pop. (1-10ish people) and can be built at like 4 or 10 or 20 size cities.

A (City Capture) Version (Which I will eventually get around to calling something like a squad/regiment/battalion or whatever takes our fancy) will take say 5 or 10 pop cost (5-100ish people) and can only be built in a city of say size 30 or 40 or 50. As that will have the kinds of production capacities to make armour and weapons and handle supply chains for that many people at a time.

So the idea of Annexation and Total War does not come into play until the end of the F1/Start of F2 Era in Fallout games.

Which would be the end of the classic era or start of the one after that (I think it is still renaissance? Eventually I will get around to renaming and graphicing them).

It is in the time between the end of F1 and the start of F2 that the NCR comes into existence and starts annexing territory and FTactics where the brotherhood provide 'Security' for towns and villages in exchange for resources and manpower.

Before then it is mostly just raiding parties smashing up other peoples stuff, but no real conquest.

If you want to reduce a city and it's population to it's knees, you could station a unit on every tile around that city so that they cannot work the land. Even with a number of specialists active, I don't think they would be able to sustain more than maybe 2-10 city size because most of the pop would starve to death.
(Even that would need to be a well developed site before you arrived as most food comes from the tiles from gardens and farms.)

It is conceivable that in the later versions internal buildings and specialist slots could sustain a base food level of 10-20(maybe some more??) in the early pre-conquest eras, but a size 10 city will not be that capable or have that many unit types available to it and would probaly need half that pop count at least to bring in the food without external tiles. A Vault city will probably be able to sustain much more than this internally, but then it is a vault so that makes sense!


So although not 'dead' a city could be rendered down to 'virtually useless' by surroundng it with enough men to mount round the clock patrols of all of their land.

Technically speaking a single square of land would be large enough for it to take days to a week (1 turn game time) for a person on foot to cross it, so imagine how many hidey holes there would be for that cities population to hide in until your people go away, or for you to effectively cover all that ground with a patrol.

It is all a bit 'fudgey' as is the nature of civ, but I personally think it works as a system that is already present in the base game, so if it ain't broken, don't fix it.

Now that being said if there is something that should be upgradeable to (City Capture) and isn't, then that is broke and should be fixed pronto! I just haven't found that case in any of my recent tests. My tests are hardly exhaustive though... I do miss Grey Warden and Deadomancer...

 

I am currently trying to think up some ways of making use of both 'Unique' Texts on the Faction Selection screen so that people can see the sorts of special Units they have.

This is complicated by a game mechanic that I have had in mind for a long time, which is the difference between Vault and Non-Vault Troops and Recruitment.

The basic premise was this:

Vaults have more advanced Tech and therefore stronger units. With Lower Numbers available.

Villages have more man power but weaker units, but they can have more of them.

For Vaults to get access to larger quantities of troops they need to capture Village Towns from Non-Vault Factions.

For Non-V Factions to get access to stronger units (Power Armour, etc.) they need to capture Vault Towns.

One thinking I had was to make it so that V-factions can build 'recruits' in village towns and these have to travel to a Vault to become proper soldiers. I don't know how to set up a system where the unit cannot be built normally, but also costs money to upgrade..not yet at least..

Wheels In wheels...

 

That sounds like unnecessary micromanagement

 

Well that is something to be debated, but the idea is to:

1) Add a limiting factor to the strength of Vault Civs.

2) Create something of the environment where in Tactics for example, the Brotherhood needed manpower and they recruited from the various towns and villages that they had brought under their protection, but the actual training seemed to occur in the bunkers, which were the centres of Brotherhood Operations, these were the Brotherhood 'homes' where as the defence of other towns were 'Operations'.

 

Alternative and one I think I had thought of long ago but forgot again.

Villages can have a building that produces a bonus resource 'Recruits'.

'Recruits' are used in Vaults as a prereq for various units, many of which will be UU's of the existing normal units.

Most other units will either have national limits, or perhaps have very high requirements, like pop size set to much higher, or consume more pop. per build. So a 'Non-Recruit Vault Soldier' will require a pop of 30 (compared to say 15 for Non-Vault) as well as consume 4 pop. instead of 1.

Thus by getting a supply of 'Recruits' you are able to make more units and multiple sources of 'Recruits' increases production of hammers.

The Source of 'Recruits' Would also produce negative food, representing the loss of one or more potential population points.

Something like that.