Some sort of unit design allowed?

[Adagio]

One of the reasons why I'm not playing SMAC anymore is because of the unit workshop... it only added more annoyances to the game

[Epistax]

Originally posted by Adagio
One of the reasons why I'm not playing SMAC anymore is because of the unit workshop... it only added more annoyances to the game

I really do love SMAC for everything it tries to do (get some balls, Civ!). I can understand what you mean though. I'd always have (what's the max, 50?) different units available, maybe 10 useful. Marking things as obsolete was quite tedius.

That's why I propose something inbetween the two. You have all the default units, but you have options to make little tweaks. Maybe some units can get a speed boost, others can heal at unusual times, another gets a bonus when in a friendly city under we love the king day, etc. etc. Just little tweaks you can buy on a unit by unit basis, or set as the default increasing production costs by some %.

[Ijuin]

That's an idea--have a list of "enhancements" that you can choose when you build a unit (or you can add an enhancement to a unit at a cost of, say, one gold per each shield the unit originally cost). Units would be allowed one enhancement at the start, while units built at a Barracks would be allowed two, and you would get one more after building the Military Academy.

Possible enhancements:

Frontline Defender--gets chosen as first defender against enemy attack no matter what, even if enemy attempts to assassinate a specific unit in the stack (Warrior Code)
Double police power--unit pacifies twice as many citizens (Code of Laws)
+50% defense (Feudalism)
+50% attack (Iron Working)
+1 movement land (Horseback Riding)
+1 movement sea (Astronomy)
Double cargo capacity--transport units only (Navigation)
Amphibious--infantry units only (Navigation)
Blitz (Military Tradition)
Invisible/detect invisible (Espionage)
Assassinate--gets to select which unit in a stack to attack (Espionage)
"Colorless"--no national identification (Nationalism)
+1 vision radius (Radio)
+1 bombard radius--vision radius will increase to match (Radio)
Double Operational Range--air/missile units only (Adv. Flight)
Double rate of fire--any bombard unit (Mass Production)

[Tall_Walt]

Originally posted by Epistax


I really do love SMAC for everything it tries to do (get some balls, Civ!). I can understand what you mean though. I'd always have (what's the max, 50?) different units available, maybe 10 useful. Marking things as obsolete was quite tedius.

That's why I propose something inbetween the two. You have all the default units, but you have options to make little tweaks. Maybe some units can get a speed boost, others can heal at unusual times, another gets a bonus when in a friendly city under we love the king day, etc. etc. Just little tweaks you can buy on a unit by unit basis, or set as the default increasing production costs by some %.

It's just my guess, but playing SMACX recently, I think the reason they don't do SMAC2 or have Wonder movies in Civ3 is SMAC spent huge amounts of money on the movies. Some of those movies are pretty amazing. Though I'm sure it's a lot CGI and file footage, the cost to produce it into all those movies must have been horrendous.

To the point, I like the idea of small increments if a full workshop isn't available, but I like the full workshop: I love the ship building in MOO2: it's a major plus for the game.

However, the upgrade process can be tedious. Even in MOO2, where upgrading is cheap and ships are few, it takes some time to move all the ships back to bases. Fortunately, you only do a few refits per game.

In the case of Civ, though, I think you could look at things differently. Consider upgrading knights (say 9th century) to Cavalry (19th century). You're talking about an upgrade that took 1000 years. Historically, what happened is little changes in technology and tactics added up to that change: No knight went back to his barracks and traded in his plate armor for a Winchester! That suggests to me that at the Civ time scale, the change should just happen, without the tedium of moving units to barracks to upgrade them.

Even late in the game, with WWII airplanes changing to late 20th century versions, you're talking about two generation of people and many generations of weapons. And automatic upgrade would avoid the silly situation where you find that backup for your mechanized infantry is guys with pointy sticks--as if that could really happen.

[GePap]

I continue to push for my idea