{The List-} Movement, supply, etc.

[lajzar]

One, and a form I will only mention slightly as it is really not related to this thread. That is the idea they used in SMAC with weather effects on terrain and terraforming.

This isn't really weather so much as disasters and random events. A lot of people are against random events (either good or bad) unless the probabilities can be controlled by player decisions somehow. Nothing is less fun than losing the game because of the random number generator.

The second is something that has been mentioned in relation to naval travel. Ocean winds and currents. Have lines of wind flow and current, that mostly stay the same from turn to turn. Maybe the occasional shift in the strength or position of a wind/water current. And its one that could make the naval part of the game more interesting and realistic. The trade winds and doldrums were very important to sailors for centuries. Even the name trade winds tells you how important those flows were. Everyone knew that to ply the triangle trade route with any speed, you had to catch the trade winds. Indeed the winds themselves probably shaped the triangle trade as much as the commodities traded.

This could be more easily implemented as a terrain feature. Over the game timescale, ocean currents and trade winds don't change. And the amount of human intervention needed to make a lasting change is ridiculous - we are talking filling in the gap betwen south america and antartica, or dredging out the whole of central america.

There could be a number of ocean tiles; doldrums, normal, wind (direction). These can affect sail power ships appropriately.

[wrylachlan]

Originally posted by keybounce
[Incidently, while reading more topics/threads, and a lot more pages, I've seen a few posts from Wrylachlan that I really like. Are you an SPI board game vet?]

erm... what's SPI? Sorry but I generally don't have enough patience for board games that require the kind of micro of civ. Even a simplistic game like Risk gets kind of long when you're moving all those pieces manually and rolling dice.

The current system doesn't have enough retreating, nor anyway to say "Don't retreat".

I agree that the addition of "standoff" to the two current possible battle outcomes "he dies" and "I die" would be welcome.

A unit that has taken damage still has full offensive and defensive ability, just less duration. How about some sort of "This unit is damaged, and fights weaker"?

This is the way it is currently. The chance of a 2hp unit winning a battle vs a 4hp unit is less than half the chance of a 4 hp unit winning the same battle.

Years ago, in the days of the Atari 800, there was a war game with an interesting twist. You gave your units orders -- they did not move during the order phase. You took as much time as you needed; the AI plotted its movement orders at the same time that you were ordering your units. Eventually, you said "Go", and your units did your orders.

While interesting, I have a feeling this wouldn't be particularly fun.

[Fosse]

Originally posted by wrylachlan

You gave your units orders -- they did not move during the order phase. You took as much time as you needed; the AI plotted its movement orders at the same time that you were ordering your units. Eventually, you said "Go", and your units did your orders.

While interesting, I have a feeling this wouldn't be particularly fun.

I'd have to say that this idea alone would make Civ 4 the best we've ever seen. Simultaneous movement, like what's described here, has two fantastic advantages, and many smaller ones as well.

Firstly, strategic considerations become much more important. In the current turn model, when you're up to go the enemy is frozen and completely unable to respond to your unit movements. Unrealistic and kind of boring. Workable, yes. Horrible, no. But unrealistic and kind of boring.

With simultaneous moves you have to react to what you think your opponant will do in the next turn. You can move to head off an advance, guess which way his defenders are going to zig so you can zag around to their backsides, etc. You'll never be able to have an encounter be exactly the way you want it (i.e. your troops on mountains every time, with theirs on grass) every time.


The next big thing... a huge boon to multiplayer. Now I usually don't argue for including something simply for the sake of multiplayer, since I still think those are the minority of players. But this makes such a change to that realm (while also having huge benefits for SP) that this cannot be ignored. In network or internet games, everyone can take their turns at the same time, without any sort of rushed feeling that comes with "turnless" or RTS games. You simply issue your orders, tend to your empire, and then click "End turn." When all turns have ended, the computer runs the moves, checks for combats, and sends the results to all of the players. This means a lot less downtime.

Everyone in a PBEM could take their turns [i]at the same time!![/b] As long as one computer runs the movement phase before sending the next orders phase out to everyone.


You've brought up the fun factor though. Would simultaneous be fun? I think so, but that's why I'm arguing for it. Was this Atari wargame any fun? What, wrylachlan, doesn't sound appealing about it to you from this perspective?

The current Demo of Clash of Civilizations has this kind of movement implemented. Right now the scenarios are small and the feedback you get is pretty unintuitive, but I think the system shows itself as having lots of potential for fun.


The system would be more like calling a football play and then cheering from the sidelines as the team carries it out. Instead of now, where you have to manually control every single player from snap to tackle.

[wrylachlan]

There are a couple of reasons I don't really like this.
1) In order to see the results of your actions you are doubling the number of times you zoom around the map. If I have 20 units in different places, I have to zoom to each of them to give them orders of where I want them to go. Then, when they move, I have to zoom back to them to see all the results.

2) How do you determine when there is a battle? When they move onto the same tile? That could lead to units circling each other which could become monstorously tedious. If they get into battle when in adjacent tiles, who is the attacker, and who the defender? And what if I don't want to attack, I just want to walk on by on my way to a different target? If you allow the player the choice of, "attack" or "don't", then you have to add another step to combat resolution. If you make it automatic then there will be cases where your units do things you don't want.

3) multi-movement point units are stuck to a set pattern for all their movement points. Currently if you have a three movement point unit, and it moves one tile, if you see something in a different direction from the one you were going in, you can changer direction, veering off to the new target. This becomes impossible if you have to specify your full movement before-hand.

There are other arguments against this style of play, but I think those are three strong ones.

[lajzar]

Probably belongs in the list of bad ideas, but here goes:

When you want to give a unit an order, you plan it out in detail, then a messenger unit is generated, who finds a path to the last known location of that unit. If the messenger is killed or the unit can't be found, the orders are lost. If events make the orders irrelevant, the orders are still carried out, but might appear crazy. The player could allow the ai to control the unit (odering the commander to use his initiative).

I think this would be not fun.

[lajzar]

To compensate for little piece of overwhelming stupidity above, a modest proposal concerning transport tile improvements:

Have the following:

Tracks - 2/3 movement. Reflects dirt tracks basically. Available at start. Can only be built next to a city or an existing track.

Road - 1/3 movement. Reflects roman roads, requires a late classical era tech. Note that roads are available much later in this model.

Highways - 1/5 movement. Reflects 1950s tech. Can only be built over an existing road.

Undersea tunnels - 1/5 move cost. Allows land units to enter sea tiles. All land units in connected sea tiles are destroyed if a connecting tunnel tile is pillaged. That should discourage paving the oceans too much. Can only be built on shallow tiles.

Canal - Allows ships to enter land tiles. Can only be built on grass/plains/desert next to a sea tile. Ships in tile defend as if in a harbour, due to lack of maneouver space. If this connects a city to the ea, that city can now build ships. The largest ships (ie battleships, dreadnoughts, carriers) canot use a canal.

Railway depot - A city improvement. For a small fee, allows a unit to instantly jump to any city that is connected by the road network and has a railway depot. This uses all the unit's movement for the turn.

Maglev depot - As per rail. Cheaper move cost, but higher maintenance. Requires a near-future tech and highway connections.

Airport - A city improvement. For a small fee, allows a unit to instantly jump to any city that has an airport. This uses all the unit's movement for the turn.

Note that rails and airports are not limited by number of units per turn, but by cost. This cost should be relate to the weight of the unit - diplomats should cost less to transport than armoured battalions.

[Xorbon]

Ship Movement

I posted an idea back in December in another thread. The idea is an alternative 'fix' for naval movement in Civ. The idea attempts to solve the problem that increasing movement rates allows one civ to easily bypass another civ's naval defenses. Anyway, here it is:

Originally posted by ME
There's an idea that I got from a crappy strategy boardgame called "Onslaught - D-Day to the Rhine". In that game, you can move units in one of two ways: either by normal movement, or by strategic movement. Normal movement is similar to Civ movement in that each unit has its own movement rate (in hexes) and can go their movement rate or less each round. Strategic movement gives a 3x multiplier to a unit's normal movement rate. However there are restrictions as to when you can use strategic movement. Basically, the restrictions are that your unit has to start-off being a minimum distance from any enemy units, and the unit cannot come within another given distance of an enemy unit at any time while moving. This was to allow far-away units to catch-up to the frontline units.

I think a similar ability could be given to Civ sea-based units. The multiplier could depend on map size (eg. from x2 for tiny maps to x6 for huge maps). First, for a unit to use strategic movement, it would have to be put in "Stategic Move Mode" (SMM) (there would be restrictions as to when you could go into SMM). Further, there would be restrictions on where you could move the unit while it is in SMM.

Restrictions could include: a) the unit can't have already performed an action (including moving, attacking, etc.) during the same turn before being put in SMM (to keep the unit from hitting-and-running);
b) the unit is restricted in what actions it can perform while in SMM (eg. no attacking, bombarding, unloading troops, etc.);
c) units being carried by ships in SMM are unable to perform any actions (other than rebase - for air units);
d) you can't start-off or move to be adjacent to another non-allied civ's unit*;
e) you can't start-off or move through another civ's territory unless you have a ROP with that civ;
f) the unit can not move into a tile that would cause a previously unexplored (i.e. blackened-out) tile to become 'explored' (to keep units from exploring the world using Strategic Movement); and
g) galleys and caravels (and other units with sea/ocean movement restrictions) aren't able to travel across terrains in which they have a chance of sinking (i.e. seas or oceans).

*not including unseen subs

Ships in SMM are still be able to move (of course), disband, and upgrade. Units can load onto transport ships in SMM (but can't unload from them).

[Arrian]

I don't currently have the energy to read the whole thread (got to page 2, after going through a bunch of other threads, and have given up for now), but I wanted to add a to this:

I had a thought about a way to make scout/explorer units more useful and desirable in the early game. Have a movement penelty for moving into unexplored squares for regular units.

So a civ would have the following mapsquare statuses.

Unknown: Completely black. Here be dragons. No clue at all.

Unexplored: Squares that have come into the LOS of a unit, but your people have never travelled into the square. You can see something of what's there, but it's not mapped and the first unit to move through there is gonna go slow cause they don't know the best routes, watering holes, etc.

Explored: Been there, done that, got the tshirt and the stupid bumper sticker.

Of course, Fog of War would also be overlayed on this too. And any territory inside a civ's cultural borders would be automatically explored.

Blyen

-Arrian

[Xorbon]

Arrian: Yeah, I spent several hours last night going through this thread. A lot of it seems to be a debate CtP-style combat mini-maps and 'flanking', both of which would fit better in the 'combat' thread, IMO.

Anyway, someone mentioned the idea of adding 'cliffs' as a terrain-type which would prevent beach-landings. I think that's a neat idea. The way I'd implement it would be to have cliffs as a tile "boundary-type", like the way rivers are done in Civ3. The cliff boundary-type would be impassable (except for units flagged to ignore cliffs). Cliffs could be found inland as well as on the coastlines.

Of course, the map generator would have to be designed so that 'cliff-encased islands' wouldn't happen.

[Xorbon]

Securing Land

OK, here's one more idea that relates to movement.

The idea is based on the fact that, in Civ3, you can't use enemy roads/rails. My idea is to introduce a new unit command called "secure" (or something similar). Units with this ability would be able to use 'secure' when occupying an enemy tile. A player who 'secures' a tile in this way would be able to use the enemy road/rail in that tile. Securing a tile would use up a units remaining movement, and would put that unit into "secure mode". The player would have to keep the unit in 'secure mode' in order to keep using the tile's roads/rails. Having multiple units in 'secure mode' in the same tile has no cumulative effect. A unit in 'secure mode' will defend last if it's in a stack.

Units with the secure ability would include most 1-move units from the gunpowder age on. Musketmen, riflemen, infantry, guerillas, marines, paratroops, and TOW infantry would all have this ability. Because they are 1-move units, they would have to move onto the tile on one turn, and secure the tile on the next. Paratroops would be quite useful since they can drop several tiles into enemy territory.

Securing land in someone's territory would be an act of war (if you weren't already at war with that civ).

Optionally, securing could be required in order to be able to get the defensive bonus from fortresses in enemy territory. Airfields could also be 'securable' in a similar way (instead of being destroyed by moving onto them).

[Patroklos]

Supply!!!

Units should have to be supported via resources. On top of the operating cost in gold (which should btw be a editable field, why does a destroyer and an aircraft carrier cost the same?), it should have a cost in strategic resources.

I always get tired of bieng the guy with 8 oil sources and having nothing to use them for becuase that 100 city 400 unit civ across the way happens to have one.

I say each resource should support 30 units using that resource. Not hard for the game to keep track of, just count the units with that resource requirement and the number of that resource available in the trade screen (obviously if your exporting it you can't use it yourself). This would make trade MUCH more integral as the superpowers fight or wheel and deal to secure their piece of the pie. Small nations with an abundance of a resource could build rich trade empires. Could have OPEC style oil wars. There would be an actual incentive to colonize actively, and then have 7 Year War style colonial wars.

The curently building units count against your resouce stockpile, and if you lose a resource and now have more units than you can support, it will work like when you go negatice on gold, you lose one random unit using that resource a turn (I would be up for just not letting you build more until the defecit is made good).

[Patroklos]

The idea is based on the fact that, in Civ3, you can't use enemy roads/rails. My idea is to introduce a new unit command called "secure" (or something similar). Units with this ability would be able to use 'secure' when occupying an enemy tile. A player who 'secures' a tile in this way would be able to use the enemy road/rail in that tile. Securing a tile would use up a units remaining movement, and would put that unit into "secure mode". The player would have to keep the unit in 'secure mode' in order to keep using the tile's roads/rails. Having multiple units in 'secure mode' in the same tile has no cumulative effect. A unit in 'secure mode' will defend last if it's in a stack.

Units with the secure ability would include most 1-move units from the gunpowder age on. Musketmen, riflemen, infantry, guerillas, marines, paratroops, and TOW infantry would all have this ability. Because they are 1-move units, they would have to move onto the tile on one turn, and secure the tile on the next. Paratroops would be quite useful since they can drop several tiles into enemy territory.

Securing land in someone's territory would be an act of war (if you weren't already at war with that civ).

Optionally, securing could be required in order to be able to get the defensive bonus from fortresses in enemy territory. Airfields could also be 'securable' in a similar way (instead of being destroyed by moving onto them).

BRILLIANT!!!

[Xorbon]

Patroklos:
Yeah, having a unit upkeep based on resources as well as gold would be a good idea. It would definitely make holding on to resources much more important during a war. There's some discussion on that topic on the {the list} for 'resources' thread.

BTW, thanks for the endorsement on my 'securing land' idea.

[Brent]

Gathering Units

Have a command to automatically send all your fortified offensive units to a particular enemy city or a city of yours on their border. Or the spot on the border each seperately can get to the fastest. Be able to specify to send all but a particular number that you want to keep using for defending the city they are in. Be able to specify to send only those offensive units in cities with a particular number of defensive units. Be able to automatically send extra defensive units to the nearest border city for each.

[La Diva]

Re: {The List-} Movement, supply, etc.

Big pet peeve: When a unit is on GoTo movement and encounters a unit from another civ blocking the developed road/railroad, it would be helpful for it to stop, center the map, and wait for my decision: to have it move off the road and spend movement points (sometimes critical), or to contact the alien, get it to leave, and then tell my unit to proceed as previously directed. Ideally, once the blockage is gone, the unit should finish its turn as ordered without further action by me.

Akin to that is the need to demand that any foreign unit get out of my way, including non-military units which now seem to be immune. Usually the first diplomatic request to leave is met with, "Okey-dokey," but it takes another turn before anything happens. There are times when this is simply not acceptable.

Let there be a feature that if you contact the same unit (not the civ leader) 3 times in the same turn, it will have to move or declare war. Add the option on Contact Number 2 for the unit to move off the road to an adjacent tile (no problem if the foreign travel rate stays at unimproved terrain rates); then the unit can retreat peacefully on its next turn but still be out of my way. Of course, if the unit is there to start a war, obviously my requests go unheeded until the ultimatum is issued on Contact Number 3.

For foreign units with RoP, we need to have the option to coexist on the same tile. Come on, people pass on roads all the time. And most rail lines have two tracks side by side, so the blockage is unrealistic. Let my unit still stop to ask what I want to do when the way is blocked, but then let me travel through or land on the square without incident.

Please don't tell me just to build more roads. There have been many posts complaining about the "ugly" look of a road-scarred map, while others favor eliminating extra roads built for the sake of higher trade points. Adding my suggestion to the solution would make a lot of folks happy - including me!