Units Thread

[BurnEmDown]

I thought the spartan UU could replace hoplite and be called something like a "spartan elite" which will be one of the strongest UU's but would cost a lot of hammers.

 

[Bonci]

the hoplite a generic unit? O_O so there are going to be celtic hoplites? omg *_*

 

[Arkaeyn]

Hoplite is the term for the greek heavy spearmen unit. Phalanx could work as well, but that's actually a term for the formation that hoplites used rather than the unit, or members of the unit, themselves.

The Celts did have heavy spearmen, though not necessarily hoplites in phalanxes. But assuming they're primarily Gaulish, remember that the Greeks had colonies in southern Gaul, so they would have had access to the military tech.

One thing that we might be able to do is have flavor units for each civ. Their stats would be the same, but the names could be different. Research for this would be pretty easy - all of my friends in the still-active Rome: Total War community are still working on variations of the Rome: Total Realism mod with PhDs researching their units. http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=26

So the Greeks could get Peltasts, the Romans Velites, the Persians skirmishers, etc.

 

[Cethegus]

If they're going to be essentially the same unit in the end, isn't that going to be super-confusing even to the more experienced players?

 

[The Q-Meister]

I definitely agree we need more naval units/techs. How about a "Greek Fire" tech that opens up a couple light vessels like Lembos?

 

[Cethegus]

I definitely agree we need more naval units/techs. How about a "Greek Fire" tech that opens up a couple light vessels like Lembos?

I don't think it would suit well as a tech. The original (?) Greek Fire was used by only few peoples in the Greek World's timeline and still remains unexplained to this day. I think it could be much better used as a hard-to-get promotion, like in Rise of Manking (IIRC) and a few other mods. The Athenian UU could even start with it.

 

[BurnEmDown]

I'm pretty sure it won't be confusing having different names for units for each civs (or culture groups).
For example if we borrow a couple of names from RTW would "spear warband" for the Celts be that different from "Hoplites" of the Greek area (With one of the Greek civ having a true UU for this unit), or "Immortals" for the Persians, or "Triarii" for the Romans? out of these I'm guessing only the Immortals will be a true UU with bonuses over the other 2nd tier Polearms and maybe the Celtic version will be slightly weaker but cost less hammers.

 

[Arkaeyn]

I'm scanning the units forum for some graphics to use for the generic advanced units.

Noble Cavalry

Javelineers

I'm having difficulty finding a good hoplite/spearmen differentiation. There doesn't appear to be a quinquireme skin yet, but someone is working on it. Made a request for a battering ram. Not bothering with a generic legion just yet.

 

[Rathaus]

I have a suggestion to fix the hoplite/spearmen dilemma that BurnEmDown mentioned. Instead of giving unique units to certain civilizations that are based off some base units, I propose that each group of civilizations should have its own generic units.

This is tied in to Leoreth's suggestion on the Religions discussion thread, that I will post here so people understand what i'm on about.

Though I'm not an respected poster like most other persons in this thread, I dare to suggest something radical:

Scrap the whole religion concept as it is implemented in vanilla civ and RFC, and replace it with a concept of cultures spreading between cities.

Let me explain why this is both more accurate and more interesting for the game:

First, it has already been discussed that ancient religions were always tied to certain peoples or cultural groups: the Romans had Jupiter's pantheon, the Greeks had Zeus' pantheon and so on. For every ancient polytheistic religion, there are no historical examples of religions spreading to another culture and becoming its dominant religion. So if we'd want to represent them correctly, we would have to code them to be restricted to their respective civs. That's silly if you consider the gameplay reasons for having a religion (see below).
Judaism behaves also like this, although it later spread to Rome. But it would be really weird if we represent small Jewish minorities in cities with its religion being there. Did a Jewish temple really increase the Roman's happiness?

Instead, there is something that played a much bigger role in antiquity: cultural groups and their extending influence. We have several examples for this. When Persia conquered Mesopotamia, its way of life and government spread there. Even more notable are of course the periods of Hellenisation (after Alexander's conquests Greek culture came to Asia Minor, the Levant and Egypt) and Romanisation. Naturally, this also meant a spreading of this culture's corresponding religions, but it was always the religion spreading with its culture, and never alone.

So I think we should start with the following "cultures":

Egyptian culture: Is founded when Egypt spawns.
Mesopotamian culture: Is founded when Babylonia/Assyria spawns.
Persian culture: Is founded when Persia spawns. Note that this also includes Zoroastrianism (which was the religion tied to Persian culture, it simply wasn't polytheistic).
Greek culture: Is founded when Athens spawns.
Roman culture: Is founded when Rome spawns (debatable how big the difference between Greek and Roman culture really is, but I think it would be fun to have a culturally divided Roman Empire like in reality).
Celtic culture / Germanic culture: Don't know if they are really necessary, although the spread of Germanic culture into the Roman Empire was very important in the Dark Ages.
Judaism: Founded when Israel spawns.

Of course, temples like in vanilla can still be built and give the normal +happiness bonus. They are now only tied to cultures, not to religions (e.g. Romans can build "Temple of Zeus", Egyptians can build "Temple of Ra" etc.).
Adopting a culture to be your "state culture" also gives the usual benefits.

The only difference is how culture spreads. When you found a city, it immediately gets your state culture. But conquered cities keep their culture and get an angry face for every present culture as long as your "state culture" isn't present as well. Each time you construct a building in this city, there is a chance that your "state culture" is spread to this city (the smaller the city, the higher the chance). This represents efforts of the conquerors to establish their way of life.

Okay, now Christianity comes into play. Christianity should be the only religion that behaves as in vanilla. It should spread by itself (and rather fast) and be able to construct missionaries. As long as you don't adopt it as your state religion, it causes huge happiness problems (maybe two angry faces in every city). If its your state religion, you get an angry face for every other culture present in your cities (now representing oppressed pagan faiths). So you have to decide and clean your cities from other cultures (via an "inquisitor" unit), which causes "We cannot forget your cruel oppression".

I think you get my idea. Even if you don't like it, please consider there should be a distinction between the ancient, culturally tied faiths and Christianity. They are not comparable at all and the arrival of Christianity should cause a lot of domestic problems, just as it did in reality.

what I therefore suggest is that each 'culture' has its own generic units.
For example...
Civilizations that has mostly Greek culture (Macedonians, Athens, Sparta) can train Hoplites, peltasts, etc.
Civilizations with mostly Mesopotamian culture (Carthage, Babylon, etc) can train War Elephants.
Rome has their Legions, and so on

Under Leoreth's suggestion, culture can be spread which means civilizations can follow one culture initially and then change to a different culture, allowing them to build that different culture's units. For example, Macedon can expand into Persia and Egypt, spreading Greek culture. Once Macedon falls and the old civilizations respawn, they will adopt Greek culture, allowing them to build hoplites and such.

This means it's a lot easier to simulate history (e.g. the Diadochi kingdoms after Alexander's fall, and the Romanisation of Gaul and Spain)

There might be a problem thinking up the units for Christian states, but it's probably safe to make them something like the late antiquity Roman units. Once Christianity becomes dominant, most of the Mediterranean should be controlled by Rome anyhow.

 

[Arkaeyn]

I do like this idea, though it might be difficult to implement. Our coding abilities are rather hampered at the moment.

 

[Metal Alloy Man]

So do I but I don't believe it's that hard to do. The history in the making mod had every religion be able to build a different unit. All you really need to do is have the religion (culture in this case) be a requirement for the unit, which can be done by XML. The hard part is implementing the culture system itself which would really just be altering and restricting religions. Basically, having the units belong to different cultures isn't hard, it's implementing the culture system itself which once again shouldn't be too hard for someone with C++ knowledge like Rhye.

P.S.- Yes, I know Rhye's away but this would be something to incorporate once he's back.

 

[Arkaeyn]

You may be right - especially with Rathaus fiddling with the religions.

Rhye's still able to help, but most of the harder stuff, I think, is later in the mod or he can plug in and take out (like the settler/war/city name maps). I don't see any major reason why we can't have this into a very playable beta by the time he's done in Japan.


At any rate, I've messed with the XML and added five of the six units - javelineers, noble cavalry, legions, quinquiremes and hoplites. I'll save rams until we put in more buildings, like stockades for them to knock down.

If we can get the Rathaus/Leoreth culture/religion stuff going, then we can replace all these units. But for now, we do need more units and buildings to make the mod playable.

 

[Rathaus]

That's true, I guess it's also best to hear from Rhye before deciding on large changes, which means i'll try to restrain myself from screwing up the religions. =D but, in any case, don't feel obliged to add my files in since it only really took half an hour.

 

[Arkaeyn]

I feel like the religions needed dramatic changes anyway - either there's only 2-3 (Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism) or the definition of religion starts changing dramatically with the various pantheons.

In terms of units, it's more dramatic of a shift. So we can see how it goes with religions and move on from there.

 

[Rathaus]

Has it been suggested yet how many tiers of units there will be? By tiers, I essentially mean eras, e.g. in original civ4, there was the ancient age units (spearmen, axemen, archer, etc), which became obsolete by the time of the middle ages (longbowmen, knights, etc) and so on. If not, I suggest we have 4-5 tiers max since the mod only goes for 375 turns, compared to regular RFC which goes for 500 turns.

Four tiers could be something like: Bronze Age --> Iron Age --> Classical Antiquity --> Late Antiquity.

 

[Arkaeyn]

Right now, we're at three tiers, but we will need more late antiquity techs and potentially units.

 

[Arkaeyn]

Should we do anything with Horse Archers? In RFC, they're a bridge between Chariots and Knights, and worth about 2000 years of history. Are they the most accurate style of cavalry between Chariots and Noble (heavy, armored) Cavalry? Or would something like Horse Skirmishers be more appropriate?

 

[Rathaus]

I imagine something like this could work:

Chariot --> Horse Archer --> Noble Cavalry --> Cataphract?
Spearman --> Hoplite --> Limitanei? (roman garrison spearman)
Swordsmen -> Legionary --> Comitatenses/Imperial Swordsman??
Archer --> Slinger?/Javelineer?/Peltast? --> Composite Bowman? (although we could just make a seperate skirmisher line for javelineers and such)
Axeman --> ??? --> Francisca Wielder(throwing axe wielder)
Battering Ram --> Catapult --> Ballista/Onager?
Bireme? --> Trireme --> Quinquereme

However, this means some civs will be able to train units that really doesn't suit them, but I think that can be sorted out later.

 

[Arkaeyn]

From what I can tell, javelins actually surpassed bows as the main missile weapon of classical antiquity during the biggest wars (Alexander, the early Roman Republic). Maybe a Composite Bow tech after that to reflect the reemergence of the archer in late antiquity would work.

The big problem is the scope of the mod - between 200 BCE and 600 CE, the biggest military changes were slight alterations in the Roman Empire, not dramatic improvement in tactics or technology.

 

[Rathaus]

Fixed, so javelineers came later.

Indeed, but we can't simply make it so there are no technologies to be researched after 200 BCE which would really feel strange (unless researching Future Tech after Future Tech is your thing) There would have to be some sort of a balance as we don't want too much advancement in late antiquity too.