Some more random ideas:
Have city defense generally be weak, so they just provide a little fire support, and are fairly easy to capture. Make it so buildings are never destroyed after city capture (except maybe some faction unique ones), and that population only decreases by 1.
This way, the game is really more about war and conquest and controlling territory, which seems to fit with the Warhammer theme.
Maybe tie heroes into the Great General mechanic. So when you get enough points, you get a hero, who is an actual combat unit (not a civilian great general) and can then be upgraded using promotions with hero-specific promotions.
Use the promotion system for equipment upgrades. So for example, I might upgrade a tactical squad with a missile launcher, giving it a bonus vs vehicles. Or I might upgrade it with bolt pistols, or power swords, giving a bonus vs melee units. Or a plasma gun to give a bonus vs infantry units. There is room for a lot of fun customization here, which is one of the best parts about Warhammer.
You could also have multiple levels, and have promotions require tech requirements. So maybe bolt pistols are the anti-melee units level 1 promotion, and give +20% vs melee units, and then chainswords are the anti-melee level 2 promotion, and give a further +20% vs melee units, and require bolt pistols.
I could conceive a simple tech tree then that basically has 3 tiers of advances across a range of different categories; light vehicles, heavy vehicles, melee, equipment, religion/pskyer/hero stuff, infantry, economy, production, growth, support weapons, etc.
Another idea: you could use strategic resources for heroes, and make them buildable units.
There could be an "HQ resource" that gets placed by the mapscript on the starting tile for each player's city, that gives 2 of that resource. And then every hero unit requires an HQ resource, so you are limited to 2, unless you conquer another faction's capital.
The Palace building in the capital could also add to city defensive capability, so it is easy to capture most cities but still hard to capture the capitals.
You could have a Relic strategic resource on the map that might also limit some units, so you had to control that area in order to field the super-elites.
One thing that might be useful to know; is it possible in XML to have a unit that is both melee and has a ranged attack? Is it possible to get the AI to recognize that? Is it possible to have a ranged attack added by promotion?
I'd suggest starting with a simple 3-tier unit structure, for early game, midgame, lategame. Most units in each tier would upgrade to similar units in higher tiers, though not everything would have to work like that.
For example:
Spoiler:
Unit classes:
Recon
Melee
Infantry
Vehicle
Support
Tier1:
Scout marine squad. Class: Recon
2 moves, terrain does not affect costs.
Can upgrade to scout bikes
Though maybe "support class" is a bit problematic, since weapons teams and artillery shouldn't be able to get the same upgrades.
With a fairly simple setup like this, you could have Infantry, Melee, Light vehicle, Heavy vehicle, equipment, economy, industry, science, culture, hero, etc. tech lines, each with 3 techs in them, maybe a total of 40 techs.
Having a fairly generic tech tree ("Armored operations", "Equipment", "Heavy infantry", etc.) might also be quite important if you hope to later add non-marine factions.
But the key is: pick a core design first, start with that, get it working, then expand from there. Use placeholder art.
Don't start with a 100+ tech tree and some unit names and art! It's not going to work.
Well, you CAN start with a tech tree plan and figure out how to tweak it into a usable game. If you figure out that you need X ranged units, Y buidings, and so on, then the tech tree makes a pretty good planning baseline for distributing these. And obviously in the case of this particular setting, there's a very specific list of units and such to be implemented, in a fairly concrete order, so a lot of the design has already been done for you.
The trick is not to get too attached to any one piece. If techs A and B lead to tech C in your design, but then for balance reasons it turns out that you need A to lead to B to lead to C, then don't be so stuck on the original concept that you ignore this sort of fix. If you decide that you need more anti-air capability in your infantry units, don't keep from giving an anti-air promotion to Terminator units just because the official WH40k units didn't have that. Top priority should be making a mod that's fun for the player, not just one that looks pretty and adheres to the official lore.
Agreed. The biggest weakness in Warhammer games and mods in general is when they try to stick too closely to canon lore. For example: its somewhat silly to think about tactical marines upgrading into Terminators, but this seems likely to work best in a gameplay sense. Its a bit silly to think about "building" dreadnoughts in-situ, but again, its likely to work well in a gameplay sense.
It's only a matter of degree. My own mod added 48 techs to the game; the vanilla game had 74, but I removed 4 (the Future Era) when I added my own set, bringing the total to 118. Those 48 techs covered three complete eras, plus a little extra, so nearly all of the same balance issues that would apply to a 100+ tech tree applied to my mod as well. In fact, it probably would have been EASIER to balance a 100-tech tree of new techs, rather than try to splice 48 techs onto the end of the existing tree. The reason that I talked about being willing to change things from lore after the fact is that I speak from experience on this. In my mod, I took about 2/3rds of the techs and nearly all of the buildings and wonders from the SMAC game, and laid them out in a tech tree. In theory, then, I could have just built everything identical to the layout and effects of SMAC, using its lore and design for everything.
But I had to think about things like:
> Are there enough +food buildings, and/or are there too many +production buildings? And within each category, are the options spread out enough, so that a civ that focuses on production won't get bogged down at one stage and then have nothing to build later on?
> Are there any buildings where culture makes sense (since SMAC had no Policies, instead using Social Engineering with VERY different rules), and if so, what would this culture be at the expense of? Likewise, since Happiness is now global and not local, how does this change the dynamics? (Subtracting happiness from a city for building a Genejack Factory is now VERY different in effect.)
> Which Wonders' effects are possible within the context of Civ5's existing XML, which ones could have a similar effect added through Lua, and which require starting from scratch?
> Which wonders/buildings should become National Wonders, a concept SMAC didn't have?
> What about strategic resources?
> Does the order of techs in SMAC's tree make sense applied to the end of the existing tech tree, or should some things be moved earlier/later? SMAC had some convoluted tech dependencies, things which wouldn't look good at all in Civ5's tech tree format (which doesn't handle crossing lines), so you'd need to rearrange things regardless.
> Once the tree has been laid out, ask yourself what the "flavor" of each era would be. Given the benefits of each era, would AIs be concentrating on infrastructure, Wonders, military, or expansion? It really helps to make each era FEEL different, and a lot of that will depend on what unlocks at each stage.
A lot of these issues would be encountered by anyone designing a full-tree mod like what has been proposed in this thread. The point was just that beyond a certain point, you can't feel restricted by the existing lore, since first priority is making an entertaining and balanced mod.
As another alternative, you could have things like "vehicle bay" as strategic resources, that limited the number of vehicles you could have.
The idea of "Control Points" has been proposed a few times on these boards, as a strategic resource generated by military buildings that is used by all military units (or at least the good ones). There are just three major problems with it:
1> It's tradeable and scaleable. I'll go beat down a civ, and in the peace treaty take all of their CPs, allowing me to make an even bigger army. Bigger empires would also mean bigger armies, which while realistic is horrible for game balance, so there'd have to be a diminishing returns aspect.
2> City-states and Barbarians can't build units that require a strategic resource. Barbs have no strategics, and city-states' resources can't be consumed locally, and are instead given to their allies.
So, you'd need to make duplicate versions of every unit you wanted the minor civs to use, with the duplicates not requiring Control Points. Now, in my own mod I already did this, creating "Secondhand" versions of the Tank, Fighter, Modern Armor, Rocket Artillery, and so on for use by city-states, but you'd have to do the same for the Mechanized Infantry and such, anything that's currently resourceless.
3> The AI generally consumes all of his available resources. So right now, if you capture an Aluminum deposit, suddenly all of the AI's Modern Armor and Stealth Bombers will be fighting at -50%. But at least his other units would still fight at full strength, long enough to get that Aluminum back or find a new source.
Since every unit would consume these points, then capturing any developed city would remove enough points that every unit he has would be now -50%, with no way to make up the gap except to disband units. This'd make wars even more lopsided.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's not trivial to balance.
My own mod added 48 techs to the game; the vanilla game had 74, but I removed 4 (the Future Era) when I added my own set, bringing the total to 118. Those 48 techs covered three complete eras, plus a little extra, so nearly all of the same balance issues that would apply to a 100+ tech tree applied to my mod as well.
I disagree. There is a *huge* difference between a mod that extends or adds things to am existing core game, and a mod creating a new game from scratch. In the former case, the core design is already there, everything you add is already just there to make changes relative to the existing content.
This difference is precisely why I recommend starting small. It is much easier to start with a small, manageable design and then iteratively extend that than it is to try to start with the big thing from scratch.
Iterative changes are much easier to make, particularly if you can start from something that is playable.
Yes, you had to think about all the issues you listed, but you still started from a well-established design core.
The idea of "Control Points" has been proposed a few times on these boards, as a strategic resource generated by military buildings that is used by all military units (or at least the good ones).
I agree that these are concepts to worry about.
The main concept I have is that only a fairly small number of your units should be the really cool ones, and that the core of your army should be standard troops.
In vanilla Civ5, the strategic resource concept is a failure, because the resources are much too common relative to the number of units you have. One of the big successes of Thal's Balance mod for Civ5 is that it significantly reduces the number of strategic resources available, but makes sure that the strategic resource units are really worth building.
I think this is key, and I think there is potential here for somehow adapting this to a Warhammer context; I think it works well with the very Warhammerish design of a limited number of elite unit picks. So the player has some flexibility in how they want to spend their elite slots (super vehicles? super-terminators? super-heroes?), which is can be an interesting and fun strategic decision.
You may be right that "vehicles" are too broad a category for this to work well, but the idea could still be kept for elite units somehow.
My worry with vehicles is; if vehicles are tough and fast, why would you build regular infantry? It doesn't really work just to make the vehicles more expensive in terms of production, there needs to be some kind of limiting factor so that a vehicle-heavy army isn't a good idea. Strategic resources seem like a possible way of doing this. What other possibilities might there be?
What I really want is to somehow get something like what Thal's mod achieved; most armies are primarily made up of "core" units; spearmen, archers, etc. Or here; guardsmen/marines, weapons teams, and so forth. Units like swordsmen and horsemen and tanks should be powerful but rare; this makes them feel more special, and it lets you have superior-units without allowing the player to spam just those units.
I don't see a problem with tradeability. I think scaleability is ok, particularly if the resource is limited to Civ capitals. I think it's fine to gain extra super-unit slots from capturing another capital, particularly if capitals are made tough to capture.
If it only really applies to elite units, then I see no problem with denying it to city-states and barbs. The Imperial Guard barbs probably aren't there to pose a threat, they're there to provide token resistance and to be conquered. In any case, creating alternative units is certainly possible, it's just minor XML work. This has already been done to make barbarian swordsmen, horsemen etc. for Civ5.
I suspect that in order to capture cities, you will probably need to destroy more enemy units than would be supplied from that city. In general it's not worth trying to take a city until you wipe out the army defending it first.
I agree that it's potentially tricky, but it's worth considering. I think it is a superior use of the strategic resource system than is actually making the resources into some kind of rare metal or whatever.
Btw: while I'm just trying to throw out ideas, I thank you for the critique and encourage more of it. I think it's very important to think hard in early design stages about which ideas are actually good or not and whether they will work well. It is poor design to let ideas into a mod and then see if they work; thinking about they work before trying to code them is really important.
That's my point, it's actually HARDER to do the latter, but you might not realize this until you actually try to do it.
When you modify an existing tree, you have to take into account what's already there, and that limits what you can do. You have little control over the progression leading up to your new content, which throws all sorts of balance headaches into the game when you try to extend the progression further.
For instance, the late Industrial and Modern Eras of Civ5 includes the Broadcast Tower, Research Lab, Stadium, etc., all of which are really balanced around the idea that the game is nearly over by the time you unlock them; it's okay to add +100% to culture or research if the game will be over by the time you build them in your largest cities. But if you intend the game to last for hundreds of additional turns, then that just won't work any more, and those buildings need to be altered. Likewise, nuclear weapons have no countermeasure in the vanilla game, but if you intend the game to still be competitive an era later, you NEED some way of stopping them. And units; you go from infantry in the 30s to tanks at 50 to Modern Armor at 80, a MUCH faster acceleration of strength than can be found in any previous era. Trying to preserve that trend just won't work.
And the list goes on. Diplomatic victories need to be harder, so that the game doesn't end in that era; if you were designing your own tech tree, you'd make sure to put the UN-equivalent wonder later in the game, but that's not really an option for what I did. Likewise, military victories need to be MUCH harder, so that the game doesn't end as soon as one person gets tanks (like it nearly always does in the vanilla game); it's not just about the raw unit strength, but about how XP scales and how little advantage there is to being the defender in a fight. Cultural victories need to be harder, because the amount of time it takes to afford 30 policies wouldn't change otherwise. Bombers and Artillery that reach the Logistics promotion are twice as useful as those that don't; an existing game ends before that's a real problem, but add a couple eras and soon every existing ranged unit will be attacking twice as much, which is a huge advantage for the player over the AIs (who lose units left and right and so have a harder time accruing XP). And so on.
Or consider Wonder effects in general. I couldn't use the stub for the Forbidden Palace's effect for one of my own wonders, because what would be the point of duplicating an existing effect? So with so many options off the table, it makes it that much harder to flesh out a tech tree expansion; you'll have to improvise more, code more Lua, and so on. Starting from scratch would allow you to repurpose all of these effects into whatever wonders you wanted.
Or buildings. Remember that nearly all of the multipliers in this game are additive. The first +50% bonus might be huge, but the fourth building to add +50% is a lot less important. So when you're adding new buildings in future eras, you HAVE to do more than just add more percentage points to keep things worth building. A cleanly-designed tree doesn't have that issue.
(This is part of why the Research Lab, etc., added +100% instead of +50%; while it might sound huge, it actually had less of a practical effect on research times than the +50% of the University.)
Get the idea?
Iterative changes are much easier to make, particularly if you can start from something that is playable.
That only applies for very small changes. Once you hit a generational point, where you're expected to add a new element in every niche, the fact that you're building on an established core becomes a liability, not a benefit. I tried to explain this above, but if you've never added more than a few elements here and there, it won't be easy to understand. Adding one era is fine, but once you start going above that, all of the balance effectively starts from scratch; the previous content no longer helps, while still limiting you in content for the reasons explained above.
The fact that the future eras are contiguous also makes it worse. Adding a few new units and such mixed in with the existing tree won't seriously impact the pacing or balance of the game.
And the existing units just don't scale up much further without causing probems. For instance, you'll note that in the vanilla game, artillery and ship ranges continued to increase, as did air units. Land units increased in movement. So what happens when that trend continues? When units' range gets even larger, while cities' defensive attacks continue to have a range of 2? When units can now strike deep into enemy territory on the very first turn of a war, capturing all of his defenseless workers and pillaging the key strategic resources? (Or just nuking him?) When barbarians can no longer spawn anywhere on the map, because it's all claimed or observed, and so no longer provide a counterbalance to military expansion? When one civ is 30+ techs ahead of everyone else on Prince, and is claiming every single Wonder in the game? When nuclear missiles destroy all units, regardless of HP and power, and cost cities so much population that they'll never recover?
These issues do not occur in a tech tree that starts from scratch, or at least they can be avoided by an intelligent modder far more easily in a new tree. They're generally a direct result of trying to extend a game designed around an existing set of buildings, units, and technologies. I spent SO much of my time trying to add things like nuke interception, because it was absolutely necessary for a game that was still intended to be playable after the advent of nuclear missiles; if I was designing the tree myself, I'd just move them later in the tree.
Bottom line, it is NOT easier to just keep expanding the tech tree indefinitely. Try it sometime.
I think we will have to agree to disagree here.
Perhaps this is because we both think the thing we have done is harder? Your main mod is building on an existing core, while my main modding work (the canceled Civ4 Warhammer Fantasy mod, and the Civ4 Dune Wars mod) were total conversions.
On Dune Wars, I found the creation of the initial tree much harder than the iterative updates to it.
@rezaf: I have no idea what you're talking about. The Asset Importer in Nexus have never worked but the IndieStone-one have always worked. The game can also read the GR2-files it produces. I also read a lot of weird stuff in threads like people being unable to add eras but my secret ingredient is just that I try it out for myself. Most of the time I think it's just things Firaxis quickly fixed.
@Ahriman: I think you misunderstood something. It's as I said in the OP I kept the names in the tech-tree vague so it wouldn't matter if the pipes were changed. I could also add that the names aren't that much tied to each-other so techs could be removed as needed. If anything it should be seen as a concept of the beginning, middle and end, or just a chart of what tech-names comes when.
I just think it's best for the kind of mod I had in mind that still has "some" connection between the lore and the game-play to get something that feels coherent and well-paced. Name-wise that is, no-one's disagreeing that it should be a mod that's fun to play and that you can't let the fluff-elements control the game-play if it doesn't work.
Anyway, some random answers...
I've also been thinking about the fluffy sounding HQ- or Hero-units but I'm not sure it's such a great idea to build the main-part of a mod around them.
The main reason being that there's no system for magic-abilities built-in to the game. Though I'm not shying from making one I think it would be best if it's just a late-game psyker-unit that gets to play with them as it'll probably be pretty weird (no pretty effects), buggy and just hard to balance.
Take a heal-spell for example, if I recall correctly the heal-promotion is already pretty unbalanced. Slow-spell (I'll just fortify that unit) or something too could be hard. Fear-spell could work if I had already made a system that fear-points are built up in units and so on. There's no point in offensive-spells as that's just bombard... Speed-spell? Maybe not that hard.
I think this would really require that I begin coding a magic-ability system and try to make it work, then wrap the mod around that... It might be better as a mod-mod, or even if someone made a scenario they could use whatever code I manage to make for that psyker-unit.
If on the other hand the HQ-unit had no special abilities and was just a strong unit, how could it scale up in strength when it's already built? Either it would be too strong or too weak. The Great General at-least isn't attacking so it can have to same bonus from the beginning to the end. It might at the same time have some hard-coded way to upgrade it's appearance even-though I want to remember I've seen separate units being defined for the ancient-era and modern-era generals, there might be something worth looking into how that's coded.
I think wargear as Promotions is a good idea. It's just too bad there's no system to "overwrite" promotions as to simulate the unit switching wargear... Or is there? I'll have to add on my todo-pile to check that out. I haven't really looked in any LUA-files that handle Promotions. If there are easy functions like "get promotions" and "remove promotion" I could keep a couple of arrays for what promotions cancel each-other out.
Otherwise just a minor thing I think it's better name-wise that the "wargear" are things that aren't that apparent on the unit-model like different grenades, purity-seals or ammo-type. It doesn't change anything game-play wise, it's just that a squad have many different weapons and doesn't change appearance with Promotions.
Anyway, I've been thinking about Chaos a little...
I was already thinking of having say the Great Unclean One as some sort of super-unit that's awarded at the end of the Nurgle-Policy Branch (with an expiration-timer perhaps to fluff and balance the unit). Then I was thinking perhaps it could be done for all Chaos-units, as a sort of merc-system where you trade "Culture" for a little more powerful units, but perhaps the Chaos Marines wouldn't expire.
I guess the most apparent problem is the same as HQ-units. There would be some scaling needed of all the strength-values for what era the unit is spawned in. Then I'm not sure what it would be upgraded to, but perhaps some of that could solve itself if the Chaos-policies aren't available until late-game (Heresy Era). There would also be some balancing regarding quantity of the same unit and map-size.
Another problem would be the team-coloring. Since there's no built-in system to switch textures between units using the same mesh all of these units are unique. I've read there's a way to separate tech-trees between civilizations so I could just copy that and let all build their own version of the Space Marines. However I'm not sure if that way can be used on the Social Policy-screen. Still I guess I could just make copies of all the policies for the different civilizations and hide the ones that's not part of your civilization. The problem being can the AI understand this? I'll have to look in to the way of separating tech-trees between civilizations and see how the AI understands that.
Also fluff-wise it could be based on that note that the Luna Wolves 1st Company looked like the Black Legion (the Chaos Legion the entire Legion turned into) during the Heresy Era. For balance reason I could also put in loyal merc-units naturally though I rather give everything about Chaos a little unique feel if possible. When I think about it I could probably have an extra screen for this, but it feels pretty fluent if it's part of the Social Policies. Another alternative could be that these policies give the ability to build these units, however that could work.
I think before you go any further you need to pick a general scale and design for your mod. Spatz did a good outline of the main possibilities:
Spoiler:
The way I see it, there are four ways you can structure this sort of mod.
1> The pure Civ5 method; each side goes through all eras over thousands of years, and yet it's all on a single planet. To me, this one doesn't work.
2> The "galactic" map, where each city represents a planet. This has been done for quite a few mods in Civ4, although 1UPT might cause problems here. But this has potential; if each "city" is on an island, and each island's size corresponds to the max number of units it can support (since each unit would only take up 1 hex and you'd disable embarkation), you could use this to make planets unique.
3> A combat scenario, i.e. a wargame with minimal tech increases. You wouldn't go through half a dozen eras. Analogous to the WW2 scenarios everyone loves.
4> The SMAC/SMAC-X model: colonists with almost nothing crash on a planet, and their "research" is actually just recovering the technologies that they already had previously. This gives an excuse to have all sides start off with almost nothing and still get tech progression, and also explains why the leaders of each side don't change from era to era. Unfortunately, explaining why each side reached the planet with equal forces and no technology might be a problem, unless you use the SMAC model and have them all be Human factions that arrived on the same transport. Sure, one group might have gone over to Chaos after crashing, but you wouldn't have Eldar, Tyrannids, etc.
Your choices on the above will significantly alter the balance on the rest of the mod.
I don't think you can make much progress until you settle on a core design. Also keep in mind what factions you plan to include. If all you are going to do is Space Marines/Chaos marines then that makes some things easier, but limits the scope of the mod. If you want to add the possibility for more stuff later, then you need to factor this in.
For example: in social policy and tech tree design, if you set these up in a way that only makes sense for Space Marines, then you have really lost the ability to put in other factions. And if all you are doing is with space marines, why are they fighting each other?
I just think it's best for the kind of mod I had in mind that still has "some" connection between the lore and the game-play to get something that feels coherent and well-paced
I agree that some connection to lore is important and is a big part of the flavor, which is a big appeal of a warhammer mod. But you have to be very careful in how you do this.
I don't think heroes have to be psykers, they can still just be combat units - or psychic abilities can be modeled with a ranged attack. But heroes can be an add-on to the mod later, and I totally agree you should focus on the units first.
It's fine to leave them out to start, and then the simplest way to implement heroes would just be to have them as great generals (eg rename the great general to "force commander", and come up with a list of particular characters for the faction list to replace Robert E. Lee, Hannibal Barca, etc.).
If on the other hand the HQ-unit had no special abilities and was just a strong unit, how could it scale up in strength when it's already built?
Easily, it just upgrades to superior versions with higher level techs. We had a system like this designed for the Warhammer Fantasy mod for Civ4.
You could also possibly do it with promotions; I'm not sure what the limits of the Civ5 engine are yet, but in Civ4 it was possible to have promotions that directly affected core unit strength, and to have promotions that required a tech, and to have promotions that did not take a "level-up" slot (ie were free). So you could have a hero that was a strength 6 unit, and then have a free "Lord" promotion that was a mid-game tech that gave +3 strength that was only available to particular types of hero units, and then a "King" promotion that required some lategame tech, and gave +4 strength.
Alternatively you can just create multiple versions of the hero unit, and allow them to be upgraded.
It's just too bad there's no system to "overwrite" promotions as to simulate the unit switching wargear..
I don't think this is necessary. You can either arrange the promotions so that they are tiered, and so only the highest one really counts (eg rather than shock 1, 2, 3 you have bolt pistols, chainswords, power swords, or similar, so only the "top" one really matters) or you can just imagine that a squad might have multiple heavy weapons. Just because one guy in a tactical squad gets a plasma gun doesn't prevent some other guy in the squad from having a missile launcher.
Otherwise just a minor thing I think it's better name-wise that the "wargear" are things that aren't that apparent on the unit-model like different grenades, purity-seals or ammo-type. It doesn't change anything game-play wise, it's just that a squad have many different weapons and doesn't change appearance with Promotions.
I think its fine to have weapon upgrades that don't actually change the model.
What I would do is adopt a system like some one of the existing Civ5 modcomps, which creates improved promotion icons so you can easily see what kind of promotions a unit has on the main map. This is in Thal's balance mod (but may not have been developed by him).
with an expiration-timer perhaps to fluff and balance the unit
I think it's fine to include demons as super-units, but I think they can be balanced just by themselves. Remember, a demon unit can represent a single model, while other units might represent a squad or more.
I don't think an expiration timer is fun for most purposes, but I could imagine a social policy that is analogous to total war, that summons a single powerful unit that disappears after X turns.
A Khorne alternative might also work, but have him unable to heal, and to lose health on every turn that he isn't engaged in combat (but that might require C++ coding).
There would be some scaling needed of all the strength-values for what era the unit is spawned in.
This is why I really recommend getting away from the idea of eras. Have everything happening over a course of months, in a single campaign on a single world. Getting higher in the tech tree just represents more/better stuff arriving at the planet (and then you can bring them down onto the surface), or getting better at accessing/exploiting the resources on the planet (including the population). So rather than really trying to model the technological development of the socieities where they are inventing things, the whole mod occurs within the tech level where the tabletop game takes place.
So you don't have to worry about these issues, you just make it so that the superdemon requires a social policy tree which is only unlocked in the final third of the game.
You can still divide the tree into eras, but these basically mimic the tier levels of the Dawn of War games, and then have some policy trees that are only unlocked once you research a tech in a higher tier.
I don't really understand the technical issues here unfortunately, I can't help.
Still I guess I could just make copies of all the policies for the different civilizations and hide the ones that's not part of your civilization. The problem being can the AI understand this? I'll have to look in to the way of separating tech-trees between civilizations and see how the AI understands that.
I think this is an important design choice; do you create separate policy trees and tech trees for the different factions, or try to have them work during the main ones?
Or possibly you just have the same tech tree, and 5 policy trees for loyalist factions and 5 policy trees for chaos factions?
Again, I'm not sure whether it is technically possible to have more than 10 policy trees and to hide them, or to hide techs. I am guessing that it is not, or is not easy, which is why I recommend using a unified policy tree and tech tree.
It really feels like I've already said this a couple of times (everything I've said so far have also had this premise): The mod will play out as a normal Civ-game... That is number 1 is Spaz' list (there's also a slight hint of number 2). In my reply to Spaz I also said what issues I had with the other list-items and why I wouldn't go with them.
It's purely a matter of preferences of game-play and fluff: I like the normal game better than the WW2-scenarios as well as a tech-tree, resources etc. with "real" names like "Photon Lines" and "Adamantium" instead of "Vehicle Tech 2" and "Hero Resource". Also calling the eras "Tier 1,2,3" really seem like I'm making a DoW2-mod for Civ 5...
That said I'm still thinking about adding new game-play features like the magic-system, which is what we're talking about now.
I should also remind you I'm not really thinking of having a Chaos-faction. You'll be playing as one of those 18 Primarchs, one of which falling to Chaos would be comparable to a Civ-leader falling to Facism (that is why I'm thinking of a special way to handle Chaos-units). The main reason I'm doing like this is so the game can be played as a normal Civ-game where you have diplomacy between the factions. It's also why the Orks and Tyranids are barbarians and Eldar are city-states. You can't really have diplomacy with the first two and the last isn't that interested in expansion. The Tyranids would also show up later on somehow and be pretty powerful. It all really seemed to fit in some bizarre way. Though I understand from your posts you really, really don't like this
I think this is an important design choice; do you create separate policy trees and tech trees for the different factions, or try to have them work during the main ones?
Or possibly you just have the same tech tree, and 5 policy trees for loyalist factions and 5 policy trees for chaos factions?
Again, I'm not sure whether it is technically possible to have more than 10 policy trees and to hide them, or to hide techs. I am guessing that it is not, or is not easy, which is why I recommend using a unified policy tree and tech tree.
I think it was a little unclear in my post. The way I've done it now with the different coloured Space Marine-units is that they're their own unit-type and class. There's just no way to load separate textures for the same units, however now that I think about it I could probably use the built-in system for unique-units... However if that won't work I can still just have separate tech-trees that are mirrors but give different units (red Space Marine, blue Space Marine etc.) for the "same" tech. Hopefully that won't be needed, I'll add it to the todo to check it out. It's just that what the IndieStone-exporter produces is a XML-file for a unit with it's own type and class so it might actually be less work just going with it and have unique tech-trees.
Hmm, one problem of using the unique-unit system will probably be that every unit for a faction will be listed whereever the unique-units are listed... Though I guess I could just remove those icons where they're displayed or maybe do something pretty like adding a field in the unit-table for "real unique unit" and only show those. Failing that simply hard-code in an array in LUA with all the real unique-units.
Anyway, powerful unit that disappear after X turns is exactly what I meant with expiration-timer.
These are not the actual names; these are the placeholder labels that are useful in the design stage, so that it is clear what the tech is for. If you write down a tech tree that is just full of actual names, then it's not clear to anyone what that tech is actually supposed to do. It is far more important during the design stage to design the content of the tree first, so as to make meaningful but interesting decisions (do I go for vehicle techs, or economy techs?). The actual final names an come much later. You can call them anything you like - though as soon as you start getting into too specific names, you lose the ability to work well with multiple factions.
Basically what I'm saying; don't name the techs until you know what they actually do.
Also calling the eras "Tier 1,2,3" really seem like I'm making a DoW2-mod for Civ 5...
This is a convenient design shorthand. You wouldn't actually call them this. You would call them things like "Planetfall era", "Reinforcements era", "Conquest era", or whatever.
Dow2 is a great game, I highly recommend pillaging it for ideas.
Why are 18 space marine primarchs on a single planet fighting each other over the course of thousands of years?
* * *
It really feels like I've already said this a couple of times (everything I've said so far have also had this premise): The mod will play out as a normal Civ-game.
Actually it's not on a single planet. As I've said a couple of times the boats (probably modern boats) will be named after the space-ships in WH40K so each island will be representing a planet. I might even make a map-script for lots of circular islands to illustrate this point. In-fact I think I'll put it at the top of the todo as I've been wanting to check out how map-scripts work. Though it'll be more an alternative to the Archipelago-map then something I'll base the entire mod on.
This also lets me translate everything in the fluff about space and Warp-travel to the game-play about the "sea" (or the other way around if you rather work like that). Say stuff like the Astronomican can have bonuses similar to the Great Lighthouse. The techs Warp Engine etc. could also be comparable to Navigation and other sea-techs. Here I could also squeeze in why you'd be researching Mining etc. and be settling cities as well as building the infrastructure. It's all just part of the Stellar Exodus, you're really researching some kind of Terraforming and special type of Mining.
As to why there are "Primarchs", well... That at-least I'll say it's the same reason you're playing Washington or any other famous leader for thousands of years. I suppose the biggest reason is that you're suppose to remember them, at-least in a single game from the beginning to the end. Even more so in Civ 5 with their supposedly personalities. Though it's really a non-issue if you've decided not to make a scenario that plays out in a single life-time.
I'll just add what I'm thinking about now if anyone want to add something...
The first thing is what to do about the Orks. As I've said I was thinking they could be the original barbarians but I'll look into what kind of twist I can do. They're described as this race that reproduce by releasing spores when they die in battle. I think it could be fun with something following the simple formula that a barbarian-camp is randomly spawned, then it spawns a barbarian and when that is killed it spawns two more until the camp is killed. Of-course the spawn-formula would be changed for balancing and eventually bigger Ork-models would be spawned (like first boyz then nobz) and finally the Warboss, maybe as a mechanic to stop the spawning at some point to balance it. I still think it would be fun if it's really dangerous, at-least on higher difficulties so you'll actively need to keep the Ork population down.
Anyone know anything about the mechanics of the normal barbarians? I've seen some XML-sheet about which turns certain barbarian-units should spawn and I really haven't noticed anything to suggest they're not just randomly spawning (opposed to say something similar to what I'm suggesting is already in the game). The only LUA-code of the barbarians seem to be about the popups. I guess the hope here would be to find a function like SpawnBarbarianFromCamp or failing in that just SpawnBarbarianCamp (maybe killing a barbarian would spawn a camp as an alternative). Then I guess I'll use the OnCombat-event to see if you kill a barbarian. There's the AddFreeUnit-function, so I guess a way is that every barbarian you kill spawn some more, but then it's really not tied to the barbarian-camp which could be fun to not make it seem that glued on... Maybe killing a Ork-barbarian only spawns more if a Ork Warboss is alive instead to make them a unit you need to hunt down and kill to maintain the Ork-population.
Another thing that's been on my mind are the Tyranids. They could show up late in the game, probably on some semi-random turn so you can't plan for them in detail, or is that bad for civ-mechanics? Anyway, I was thinking since the sea is space they would row in on boats (maybe I'll use a giant Spore Mine-model for those) and be pretty powerful. As for actually implementing it I was thinking the AddFreeUnit-function (seem to be two, one in ChooseFreeItem.lua that takes in the player-ID and one that I can only guess takes in coordinates in CivsAlive.lua) could work for some unplayable civilization that declares war on everyone (mostly so it also attacks the barbarians). Then I'll just let the AI do it's thing.
I think the real challenge will be programming something pretty for spreading out the Tyranid-units over the "sea" both so it looks OK but also so it's balanced for all players. For example it'd be a problem if they all spawn at 0,0 for the poor civilization that is closest to that spot. It would also be fun to make something special of them, like how they attack or take cities, at the least I guess they can just raze everything... In the fluff they really need to kill everything on a planet before they start feeding and become more powerful. In the Tyranid Codex there's this story of someone slowing the Tyranids down by wiping out planets in their path. Since the sea is space and islands are planets I think it could be fun to do something with that, maybe check if a island is cleared except for Tyranid-units and do something... On the premise that the AI cannot understand any of this it might be best just to spawn a bunch of additional Tyranids on that island and let the warring-AI do whatever it is that it does.
It might be too much, but maybe spawn more Tyranids after an island has been cleared based on the resources on that island and make an option to build a Virus Bomb that clears that planet... I'm thinking something that needs to be embarked and built like a city, then take turns before it's "active" to give the people on that island time to remove it.
Beyond that I've been thinking about the Eldar as city-states. It would be fun to add something extra to them or change how they work completely but I'm really not sure what that could be... The city-states making strange requests already seem pretty much like what Eldars would do. I wouldn't mind if that "Gift Unit" and "Gift Gold" is removed and instead something else is added for a more grimdark feeling. Not sure what though yet.
EDIT: Played around with the Unit-, Plot- and Player-objects. Found out that the InitUnit-function creates a unit by choice, the AddFreeUnit-function probably adds a unit from the free-unit table or something... Then I stored the starting-plot for all barbarian-units using the isBarbarian- and getPlot-functions on the unit in a SerialEventUnitCreated-event. Then on the RunCombatSim-event I can do whatever when the barbarian dies or survives a combat, as well as check the HasBarbarianCamp-function for the starting plot if destroying a camp will stop the Orks from respawning. I could probably also use the SetImprovementType-function for the plot to create new barbarian-camps if I'd have something like "when a Ork Warboss is alive killing Ork-units spawn new camps"
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