Working Maps and Map Issues

[Lib.Spi't]

Technically it is the west and the bit more west

Although technically it also depends where you place you starting pin.

 

[Kailric]

Yeah, I proposed this too in my WHM musings.

Having a terrain type like 'Here be dragons' where you need certain ships or units or even better promotions to be able to cross it.

For WHM you could even have promotion levels, and higher grade HBD tiles, so you first can travel to america, then to south africa, and then round the bottom of the americas and africa to discover the orient.

If you could add a tag to tiles, something like need promotion X to enter.

Well considering that we know the Vikings made it to the New World in their little but sea worthy boats it is not so much a matter of tech, but a matter of Knowledge. Once people knew the New World existed then every body set sail, it was the fear of the unknown that kept people back.

That seems odd to us as we no longer are under this fear, but it would be interesting to be able to see into the minds of the great thinkers back then as that stood on the coasts looking out across that great ocean and wondering what was out there. We do that now with space of course, but they had that as well.

So, kinda like how in one of the Civs when you built the Manhattan Project everyone had Nukes, it could be that when Christopher Columbus is acquired it opens up the New World to everyone, but with a bonus to who ever has ole Chris.

Or, Players can go on "Explore the Unknown" missions with a squad of ships with a chance to discover the New World based on Ship types, Ship Promotions, Tech Level, etc.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

Well, with the profession system, you could recreate the Viking and Renaissance voyage.

As the vikings can have a unique longship unit with the promotion and no one else gets a ship with it till say caravels. So as the vikings you can sail out and be all vikingy in the New World!

Long before those Southern panzies got their act together!

The idea of the 'black jumps' to cut down on the amount of ocean on map is interesting, the only problem isit would make automating shipping a problem..

 

[Nightinggale]

Already talked about? Man, its hard to come up with an original idea these days

I don't think it was discussed in great detail, but the concept of regions of space, which becomes available later was a topic at one point.

Yes, I have my map flip flopped, that being I meant West when I said East

Remember the eastern states are in the western hemisphere, but the western states aren't in the eastern hemisphere

This sounds like the most logical solution. There could be plot type "high seas" or something. But instead of unlocking tech/civic, there would be new type of ships that can enter it. Those would be unlocked by tech of course.

I want to be more original than that. Thinking about it, I came up with a new ship system.

We create a new unit type. It can't move and is build with hammers. It can be loaded onto ships and while the unit is in the cargo hold, it provides a promotion to the ship.

Ideas for "ship unit addons"

• Sea rations
  Can move into high sea plots
• Long oars
  Extra movement
• Crow's nest
  Increased vision range
• Longboats
  Can drop units onto land without a port
• Balista
  First strike, possibly attack bonus
• Shield wall
  Defence bonus

This way it is possible to take a standard ship and customize it into what we need. Say we need a great explorer, we take Sea rations, oars and crow's nest. The ability to move everywhere, high movement and 2 plot vision makes it great at exploring the sea. However it has used up all 3 cargo slots and if you want to explore the land you discover with it, you have to send another ship with long boats, sea rations (if needed) and the scout.

Likewise it is possible to sacrifice the entire cargohold for increased combat stats, making it a pure warship. On the other hand, adding nothing provides a good sized cargo capacity and you can move stuff around. Also take into consideration that the addons aren't free. This will really add something to the currently oversimplified ships.

We can prevent some ships from gaining certain promotions and some gain them even without a unit in the cargo hold. For instance a viking longboat doesn't need longboats to drop berserkers on the shore.

One bonus with this approach is that a fair amount of code already exist for promotions meaning most of the coding is "just" to add a promotion to a ship when the unit is loaded. Once that is possible, the code for most of the promotion ideas are already present and will be pure XML coding.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

That is pretty cool, I like that idea a lot, especially if we can xml it so that the unit gets a tag like ispromotion, and everything else is purely xml based i.e. make the unit, make the promotion.

This will be cool for WHM when you get to the stage of planes, tanks, helicopters and cars, as you can add stuff like bombs, missiles, machine guns, up-armour, all terrain suspension...

Nice!

If it could also be made that certain units can only carry 'promotion units' this system could be expanded to include even human units, so infantry could be given tower shields or body armour, or gps navigation, or workers could carry dynamite for mine work.

The possibilities could just go on and on!

 

[Kailric]

Did FFH2 have a system of Items being carried by Units? I know they had magical items but not sure what they did with them. Anyway, I love this idea and I had similar ones for a Fantasy based mod with the above mentioned Magical Weapons/Relics.

I am not sure about the implementation of some of the more command items that units could carry. Like for the examples Night gave, the Sea Rations and Balista would be a good addition but more minuscule items like crows nest or body armor would seem to work best as a Empire wide Tech addition.

But this would be a cool way to customize units for certain roles and not have them locked into those roles. Ships were "refitted" at all times. In my Privateer mod you could take any Ship and refit it to be a Privateer.

 

[Nightinggale]

Did FFH2 have a system of Items being carried by Units?

They did it in a totally different way. A magic item is a unit. If you have another unit on that plot, it can do a command to pick up the item. If it does, the item disappears and the unit gains a promotion. If it drops the item (command available if it has the promotion), then the promotion is lost and a new item unit is generated.
There are 3 ship promotions, which can be selected in port. They give +1 power, movement and cargo respectively and selecting one will disable the two others. You can switch in cities.

(at least that's how I remember it)

I am not sure about the implementation of some of the more command items that units could carry. Like for the examples Night gave, the Sea Rations and Balista would be a good addition but more minuscule items like crows nest or body armor would seem to work best as a Empire wide Tech addition.

Those were examples on what the concept can handle. Figuring out actual addons and how to balance those might take more than the 2-3 minutes I spend on the examples.

As for stuff like crow's nest being empire wide.... I kind of like the concept of having too few cargo slots for what you want and hence have to decide tradeoffs when outfitting your ships. Maybe it isn't totally realistic that a crow's nest takes up a cargo slot, but I think it will work well from a gameplay point of view.

Considering that all they do is to give promotions, we can let addons give promotions, which can be gained in some other way too. Say we can build crow's nest addons at turn 50, but at turn 200 we gain a civic (tech), which gives a free crow's nest promotion to all ships or certain ship classes. We also have the option of allowing the promotion though experience, which will make the ship keep the promotion even if the addon is put back in the city. We can also limit the experience promotion to certain ships while more ships can use the addon etc. The feature design allows an extreme degree of freedom when setting up in XML.


If I read the replies right, we all agree on the DLL part of this feature. However the XML part is more vague. We need to figure out what specific addons we want and their effects.

AI is an entirely different problem. Not sure what to do about that one yet.

I added a ticket for this idea:
https://sourceforge.net/p/colonizationmodcollection/sourcetickets/1/

We should add tickets for all feature ideas as well as bugs. That way we have a searchable list and we have less risk of forgetting good ideas. As it isn't meant to run in parallel to the forum, I just linked to this thread for details. I assigned myself as owner of the ticket meaning I will be the one coding it (once I get my compiler up and running again).

It would be nice if people would add ideas and bugs to SF.

 

[Kailric]

Those were examples on what the concept can handle. Figuring out actual addons and how to balance those might take more than the 2-3 minutes I spend on the examples.

Yeah, I knew that I just wanted to put my 2 cents in, you do me the same way

As for stuff like crow's nest being empire wide.... I kind of like the concept of having too few cargo slots for what you want and hence have to decide tradeoffs when outfitting your ships. Maybe it isn't totally realistic that a crow's nest takes up a cargo slot, but I think it will work well from a gameplay point of view.

Yes, its simply things like this that can really make the game fun. I am sure we could all come up with some cool ideas on how to work this. We could also have Human Units that give Promotions to Vehicle units like Ships when traveling on them, like an Expert Seaman promotion.

Considering that all they do is to give promotions, we can let addons give promotions, which can be gained in some other way too. Say we can build crow's nest addons at turn 50, but at turn 200 we gain a civic (tech), which gives a free crow's nest promotion to all ships or certain ship classes. We also have the option of allowing the promotion though experience, which will make the ship keep the promotion even if the addon is put back in the city. We can also limit the experience promotion to certain ships while more ships can use the addon etc. The feature design allows an extreme degree of freedom when setting up in XML.

Yes, this would work great for the WHM and also in the Miniaturization effect where techs makes things easier, smaller, and sometimes menial. So you want have to worry about equipping your Battle Cruiser with a Crow's Nest

AI is an entirely different problem. Not sure what to do about that one yet.

We could probably come up with a simply solution to start with that simulates the AI using this system, and then as the system gets more complete and tested we can code the AI for it.

We should add tickets for all feature ideas as well as bugs. That way we have a searchable list and we have less risk of forgetting good ideas. As it isn't meant to run in parallel to the forum, I just linked to this thread for details. I assigned myself as owner of the ticket meaning I will be the one coding it (once I get my compiler up and running again).

It would be nice if people would add ideas and bugs to SF.

Those are a good way to keep track of the additions. If Lib doesn't post the new features we are working on there, then I'll do it.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

Yes, I like Nights suggestion with the idea of 'early prototype upgrades' (like a crows nest) being available to some early ships (via upgrade blocks), and then eventually (with technology) these effects can become standard promotions for all ships.

Principle works the same in cases like body armour too. You could have it collectable, then in the future a tech or civic (or even a profession types) could gain the body armour promotion as standard (allowing them to take something else) It would be like Infantry(no body armou) Storm Trooper (Body armour as standard).

I say go on the implemtation of the system. Special effects, would come under development of new promotion tags.

TLO Tags Link

Would be a good one to look at for ideas on additional promotion effects. I have it implemented in FTTW and it has come in handy for a few different things.

I am still struggling to navigate SF.

 

[gay_Aleks]

Or maybe only ships with Great Admirals/Explorers (you have one of these, right?) can venture initially. Later on, more advanced ships can do so too.

 

[Kailric]

Just to make note there is a function in CvPlot called canSeePlot(), which uses <iSeeThrough> in TerrainInfos. This may could be used to perhaps hide areas.

 

[Nightinggale]

Or maybe only ships with Great Admirals/Explorers (you have one of these, right?) can venture initially. Later on, more advanced ships can do so too.

From a technical point of view, unitInfo will contain a promotion (default NO_PROMOTION), which is the one given to the ship when the unit is added. This mean we could add such promotions to all units. We could make a slaveship promotion for ships carrying outlaws. Also we could make some sort of admiral promotion if we like. It makes no difference to the DLL.

Maybe master carpenters would give a promotion to increase heal rate and possibly heal while moving.

One thing, which would affect the DLL is if professions would also give promotions. I'm thinking that placing archers on the ship would increase combat strength. I'm not sure about that because it seems to be a whole lot more work, not to mention potential slowdown.

Just to make note there is a function in CvPlot called canSeePlot(), which uses <iSeeThrough> in TerrainInfos. This may could be used to perhaps hide areas.

I have been thinking something like that too. However once you start looking at details, it starts to become more complex, partly because it is one of those functions where we have to pay attention to performance. With a more detailed design goal for what we want and possibly a cache in CvUnit, it should be able to deliver precisely what we want.

Another interesting function for a high sea implementation would be CvUnit::canMoveInto().

 

[Lib.Spi't]

The one thing I wonder about with this upgrade stuff, is a display issue, where will all these constructions be kept, as it could turn the build screen into a complete mess!

If we could make a 'blank' upgrade to be built and then have it changed to a particular upgrade through the professions screen, it would look cleaner..

But performance is also an important issue to consider. (I don't know about that junk!)

 

[Nightinggale]

Performance is not really an issue for the build screen. It doesn't really matter if it takes 0.02 seconds extra to open. However 0.02 seconds for each call to CvUnit::canMoveInto() would break the game as the AI might call it a million times each turn in which case the end turn wait will take an additional 5.5 hours. In other words, performance issues are mainly a question of how often code is called.

You are right that we should consider what to do about the build menu. I assume it is generated somewhere by looping all build options and store a list of available options. There is some sort of sorting as units and buildings aren't mixed together. I think the obvious choice would be to hook into the sorting code and group add addons together.

I don't think the build menu will really be an issue. Maybe we want to improve it, but then we shouldn't think how to add addons, but rethink the whole design and that would be out of scope for addons.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

My comment about performance was in connection to professions and slow down that you stated.

The benefit of being able to tie the specific upgrade to a profession is that that list filters from available supplies and such and is also disconnected from the build list.

You can also filter out professions based on certain things like promotions (Knights need the honoured promotion, at least I think that is still how it works.)

So we can have things like 'Ship Upgrade' and 'Troop Upgrade' and 'Civil Upgrade' promotions that would filter the list of Upgrade professions, so that you only get the list you want of upgrades. This way the building list does not get over cluttered.

 

[Kailric]

I am thinking that it would be cool to perhaps to add some randomness to Maps. Currently we have two Poles like areas on the North and South, and Open Ocean in the East and West every time you load a new map. So, I was thinking of a new map Script where there would be more randomness. Since we have a really good TradeScreen setup and I enjoy it like so, we can keep Maps where they don't cover the Entire world for the moment. Anyway, the idea is to have Random Terrain types for North South, keeping Ocean for East and West perhaps. North/South could randomly be Deserts, Jungles, Tundra, etc. It just seems like a cool idea at some point.

 

[Nightinggale]

If we really should make them random, we should place trade screens in a random direction. Vanilla had east and west and we more or less copied that concept. Imagine having a map where what is east right now could be placed in south-west and you don't know what unless you explore.

 

[Lib.Spi't]

Yes, I think both of those ideas are great, especially for replay/explore game play, it would pee me right off!

My strategy is always, go side ways, find coast, make city, make boat, go sideways, become Lord Mega Merchant!

If I went sideway and never found the ocean I would be like....... Whaaaaaaaaaaat! Jamn you Kailriiiiiiiiiiiiiic!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Tigranes]

Is there any working map with historical Europe?

 

[Kailric]

There's not any yet, but there are plans for some. If by chance you know a thing or two about map making then give it a shot. We'll help you best we can.