Army Workshop? Straight from SMAC!

[Destroyer]

Some liked SMACs workshop, some didnt.

If it could be made optional, how could it be converted to function in Civ?

Perhaps you could chose types of weapon, shield armour, equipment and training the same way. Perhaps number of people comprising the squad. Perhaps even combined arms.

This idea may even need a complete overhaul to the combat mechanics, although I wouldnt mind that as I think the combat is a bit "eighties".

It would allow your army to be a little less generic, and allow you to develop a little more tactical freedom on the battlefield.

Thoughts?

[iapetus556]

This is something I've been thinking about for a while. (In fact, probably since my never-completed-or-released "Civ2 for SMAC" mod).

You would need more "chassis" - at least several for each of infantry, cavalry, and especially ships, and would affect what weapons and equipment/special abilities they could be given.

Possible "chassis":

Infantry:
"Company": the basic infantry unit.
"Small squad": a smaller unit, has fewer hitpoints, but is cheaper, and more importantly can (or can more cheaply) by given stealth / ignore ZOC / paradrop etc abilities.

Cavalry:
"Chariot"
"Elephant"
"Heavy Cavalry"
"Light Cavalry" (faster moving than HC, but cannot be so heavily armoured).

Weapons and armour may be rather difficult to implement. One problem with the SMAC system was that weapons made no contribution to defence, so your Graviton Radar Marines could be taken out just as easily as a Scout Infantry. Now that Civ4 has dispensed with separate Attack and Defence scores, maybe weapons and armour could both contribute to the combat value. Or maybe Weapon determines combat power, and armour increases hit points (maybe at the expense of movement).

That said, I haven't got Civ4 yet (hopefully I will within a week or two ,once I've bought at laptop to play it on), so I'm not entirely sure how the Civ4 combat and unit upgrades work, so cant' really say more on how to design units SMAC-style.

[Solver]

I personally view Civ4 promotions as the next step for the SMAC unit workshop, an evolution. The promotions actually let you take your units in very different directions, so there's almost as much freedom as SMAC, but the whole system is far, far more intuitive, and the AI can handle it. This last point was the weakest part about the SMAC workshop, the AI absolutely couldn't deal with it.

[iapetus556]

Originally posted by Solver This last point was the weakest part about the SMAC workshop, the AI absolutely couldn't deal with it.

Especially that it never worked out how useful Convoy ships were.

Or Colony Needlejets.

[Solver]

Pfft, Colony Needlejets. It didn't even understand much simpler units like rovers with powerful armor or any sort of crawlers (ever seen the AI use crawlers effectively? no...) Probe Team ships were another good unit design.

[Jvstin]

Originally posted by Solver
Pfft, Colony Needlejets. It didn't even understand much simpler units like rovers with powerful armor or any sort of crawlers (ever seen the AI use crawlers effectively? no...) Probe Team ships were another good unit design.

Oh yeah, a *must* when playing as the Pirates.

[Lemmy]

I bet the SMAC AI also would be unable to deal with Promotions.
The AI wasn't a weak part of the workshop, it was a weak part of the entire game.
There is no reason why any AI associated with a workshop would be incompetent.

[Solver]

But writing the AI for different things is of different difficulty. Writing an AI that could deal with the workshop is harder than making it deal with promotions. At least the Civ4 AI mostly does well with promotions; I doubt the AI, for all efforts, would be made able to deal effectively with the workshop.

[Unimatrix11]

Yeah i think with promotions, even if the AI picks them by mere random chance, something more or less useful comes out of it - with unit workshop... not so much...

[LordShiva]

Will we get to use the "Animal" chassis?

[Lemmy]

But, you see, i don't think it is absolutely harder to write one for a workshop, or that much harder than writing one for promotions. I believe most views on this are distorted because SMAC couldn't handle workshops and Civ4 could handle promotions, but comparing the two AIs is unfair. I don't believe any of the AIs in previous Civ-games have gotten as much attention as the Civ4 AI.

I think the promotions system in general is somewhat overrated, and it's success is more due to the specific promotions available and the effort put in the AI, ie its implementation, rather than the system itself being that much easier to deal with. Likewise, for SMAC it's the exact opposite, the specific implementation of the workshop was more complicated than necessary, and the AI was worse in general.

It's probably possible to add more promotions in such a way that the AI won't be able to cope with it anymore. Would that mean the promotions system is too complex and should be forgotten?

[Unimatrix11]

OFFTOPIC: Hey Lemmy, (edited) thanks

[Lemmy]

I sent you a private message with some usefull links instead, you can check your PMs at http://apolyton.net/forums/private.php?s=

[Blake]

While I liked SMAC a lot, I have to say that the Promotion system is better than the workshop, especially given the context.

The SMAC workshop concept of Chassis/Weapon/Armor is all good (for a sci-fi game, anyway), but the special abilities would be MUCH better suited as promotion style upgrades since pretty often a unit would be designed then only one or two of it actually built! I could easily have half a dozen variants of the plasma armor rover, with various configurations of ECM, AAA, Trance and Clean.

[player1]

I only see two problems with this system:

1) AI not good enough to adapt like human
2) Generic graphics, since units won't be modeled as whole, but per body and equipment parts