UNITS (ver1.1): Hosted by JT

[Isle]

I was going to descripe how I envision custom designed units, but so many others have already presentet so many incompatible ideas, that adding one more wouldnt add anything but more confusion, there is though a couple of details that could be used in most models.

Train-artillery: Awailable well before tanks, since prereq is only steamengine, and can carry much larger weapons. Was widely used in WW1, before tanks became effecient enough.

Jeeps and trucks: Modern infantry is moterized to keep up with the tanks, its really stupid having to wait for to your infantry to catch up in SMAC/CIV2/CTP.

If a unit design screen should be implemented, it should definitly not look anything like the one in SMAC. One: because the units of history vary much more than those in SMAC, and two: because it wasnt even good to design SMAC-units with.
A better solution would be, first to have a screen were you choose the base-unit/chassis, and then a screen were you only have to deal with details relevent to that base-unit/chassis.(e.g. no 2 feet steel armor for infantry, no leather armor for tanks and NO swords for jet-fighters.)
You would neither have to worry so much with having to many diffent base-unit/chassis, since you would have an entire screen to order them nicely and intuitively in.

[This message has been edited by Isle (edited May 24, 1999).]

[Kropotkin]

ON GUERILLA/PARTISANS AND REFUGEES

Refugees If a city is caputed by the enemy i think that if a Refugee unit is to be used in the game, it wouldn't be under player control.

The refugee would move a couple of tiles and then set up a refugee camp. This camp would work as a city in the sence that it would take up space and use the tile that it's situated on thus stopping any civ to use that tile for production (if two refugees in the same tile then they would use two) and just be generally irritating.

After a couple of turns the refugees would give up its chances to move back to their home city (these refugees wouldn't be allowed by the new ruler for some reason) and would then start to move towards friendly teritorry. If the home city is liberated then the refugees would return.

When attacking a refugee you would be able to chose to kill 'em (bad for your rep.) or force them to move.

Partisan

I would like to see any partisan unit (if used) to have some special abilities.

* Some spy abilities, that is, terrorattacks or to start uprisings.

* Double terrainbonus when defending

* The ablity to, when attacked, to chose to move away and thus avoiding combat

* In Civ2 the partisans one got when a city was captured by enemies didn't need any support (no productionshields cost). I would like to take this one step futher; The support for the partisan would be paid by the city now controlled by the enemy. Other persons in the city that supports the partisans would help them with equipment and the partisans would also steel from the new ruler, attacking supplytrains etc.

[Utrecht]

One thing to keep in minf with all of this chassis discussion is the ability to customize.

So far all of your discussions have been great for an out of the box game, but run into some difficulty when I attempt to create a scenario.

IMO that is one advantage that the standard units have of the chassis/weopon model.

Consequently, I still have to vote against the workshop model. I think that it introduces to great of a level of complexity without adding anyting of substantial value. There are other areas in Civ where the complexity should be increased. We have to remember that the average gamer does not want combersome gameplay.

[Diodorus Sicilus]

SMAC had "default" standard units, and I use them about half the time. The CivIII model should be something like that, in that most units are not that varied unless you want to play Trivial Military History Pursuit: every variation of sword and shield alone would give hundreds of combinations. The game model will have to be a lot simpler.
Example: I foresee, for ground units, the following basic "chassis":
Foot
Mounted - Horse
Mounted - Elephant
Chariot
Railroad
Motorized
Mechanized
Ground Effect

Possible additions/changes might be to add Mounted-Camel for some very specialized units for a desert Civ, and Wagon for Supply or Trade units (road bound). Ground Effect borders on the Dual: Sea-Land units. Future Chassis are up for grabs.
Motorized and Mechanized are general/generic terms for All Wheeled Vehicles and All Tracked Vehicles. Light Motorized would be jeeps and motorcycles with low carrying capacity but high speed, Heavy Motorized would be trucks to speed up your Foot/Artillery weapons. Light Mechanized would be self-propelled artillery, air-droppable tanks, etc, while Heavy Mech would be your basic Tank Chassis.
Some units would require not only purely Technical weapons Upgrades, but also 'soft' Upgrades. Best examples that come to mind are the Phalanx and Legion in ancient times: not everyone with Bronze weapons formed phalanxes, and no one with Iron/Steel weapons formed Legions except Romans. Why?
Because the Phalanx also required the concept of the Citizen or other large group of infantry soldiers, organized and trained and expensively equipped. The Peasant-Noble model of Social organization wouldn't support this: the nobles were too few to form phalanxes alone, and the peasants too close to subsistance existance to afford the time for training - or the expense of the weapons and armor. The Legion required a concept of extensive discipline and drill - time consuming occupations that required in turn a large class of people to support it - again, a Citizen group.
One addition to the game would be the Diplomatic possibility of selling or trading the Training required to form a Legion or Phalanx - Carthage hired a Spartan general and drill masters to whip part of her army into shape during one of the Punic Wars, and the Romans incorporated numerous non-Roman states' forces (the Italian city states before they became part of the Empire/Republic, furinstance) into the Legions.
The Standard units for a simplified Unit/Combat system would, like SMAC, reflect the standard historical models: Spearmen, Light Chariots, Heavy (scythe) Chariots, Phalanx, Bowmen, Legion, Pike Phalanx, Armored Lancer (with Fuedal Social = Knight), Musketeer, Riflemen, Infantry (machineguns), Tanks, Motorized Infantry, Cannon, Artillery, etc. The "build your own" option would give you those Patterns as Advances allowed them, and allow you to use them "out of the box" or modify them - trade armor or armament for speed in your tanks, for example, or provide Steel Plate (personal) Armor for your bowmen (not precisely historical, but possible).
There's no reason why a modified SMAC system of standard (historical) models plus restricted variations won't work.
The earlier post is dead on: your Armory screen will have to restrict possible Upgrades to the Possible, not the Fantastic. If you get Iron Weapons, you can build Iron (stabbing) Swords, Iron Pikes, or Iron Lances. Lances go to Mounted to form Mounted Lancers (unarmored Knights, if you will), Swords go to Mounted or Foot, Pikes to Foot, but neither Mounted nor Foot can carry both Swords and Lance/Pike as their main armament, and neither Mounted nor Foot can have Cannon as an armament and also have Armor of any kind or any other weapon - for that you need a Motorized, Mechanized, Railroad (armored trains, railroad guns - another good idea from Previous Post!), or Ground Effect Chassis. The limitations aren't hard to work out.

[don Don]

I think it's better to stick with the civ2 system of fixed unit types with special properties flagged in the rules.

I don't think we need ambulances on a strategic scale battle.

Diodorus: Yes, the English soldiers found punctured armor on the fallen French cuirassiers. However, the heavy cavalry had charged the crack English infantry squares 12 times that day. Witnesses reported that the battle sounded like a hailstorm on a metal roof. The cuirass was 75 pounds, covering the torso front, thighs, and knees, and was generally proof against musket shot. I'd bet every surviving cuirassier had a handful of dents in his armor, and appreciated it mightily. I'd bet a few Civil War cavalrymen would've liked that kind of protection. The cuirass was really expensive, and no army wanted to pay for outfitting a whole regiment with them. They'd rather have two unarmored regiments.

[Harel]

I would like to discuss something. The SMAC workshop.
People said it was a "nice" idea, could make it easy to build special units.
People, civ is about history! And according to history, we MUST have a SMAC like-workshop.
Along history, every nation made different kind of units. Same technoloy, different aspects.
Warriors used a combantion of hellbirds, swords, short bows, lances, spears...
Archers used cross-bows, longbows, shortbow, sometimes with swords, without swords, with big shield, small shields...
Chest-mail, ring-mail, leather armor...
So many options!
Every country had a different espect.
And every weapon had it's use.
I suggest several things.
A. Add the workshop.
B. Add accuracy and reload attributes to units.
C. Have a specific advantge to every weapon:
Longbows would be more accurate and cause more damage, but will fire slowly.
Short bows would be just the opposite.
This customing ability becomes even more important in the modern era, with infantry and planes designed to a specific purpose.

[EnochF]

Harel: And would you also like Helicopters and Submarines with Chain Mail?

SMAC Customizable Units sounds like a good idea as long as you're stuck in the Middle Ages, but then along comes the Modern Age.

Honestly, people, let's think about this!

[Trachmyr]

A unit workshop can be created with out to much difficulty by simply not allowing absurd combinations... in fact many componets should become obsolete as time passes (not just units). This will add much more micromanagement to those who WANT to use the workshop... if you don't want to use it, then just use the default units (but I'll bet that you'll use the workshop at least a few times per game). As long as the workshop is optional (and can be turned off in by scenario editors) then what are you complaing about?

[Fugi the Great]

I was throwing around in my head, the idea of an expanded unit designer something like they did in SMAC. This would then satify me about getting to use the units I really wanted to add to Civ2. You would need a lot more types of chassis, capable of more options than SMAC, but you could then get exactly what you want. Example: Start with tracked tank chassis, armor is steel grade 3, add reactive armor, turret gets two main guns both are 135mm standard with automatic loader - good punch twice as fast with less people, add M93 machine gun - for ground troops, add QPW23 missile launcher - for air defence, add AGC123 rocket launcher - long range artillery, add laser range finder - for better accuracy, diesel engine mod 2 - more range and more speed, add AG-63 mine sweeper, and hazard environment module mod 3 - chemical and radiation protection. Total price: 3692 credits each. If you purchase 10 or more, the price is only 3521 credits.

Types of chassis:
man, horse, elephant, jeep, tank, chariot, planes, ships, subs, cannon, missiles, helicopter, ...

Another thought is, if you would use a toned down version of the unit creater, do you use this above in the game, or outside the game as a unit creater to make the units you will use in the next game/scenario. If you did it out side the game, units could then be designed and play tested by other people, stuffed into scenarios, and placed in a download area here at Apolyton or where ever. The trouble with that is, it ends up being the same thing as Civ2 is now, its just in 3D.

Upgrading units:
Should not be totally automatic. Must at least move unit back to city/fort/base/port to receive new weapons/armor..., unless the use of supply is used, in which case, if a unit is surrounded or behind enemy lines it can be not upgraded unless in the modern era you use supply planes to give them what they need to upgrade. Maybe would have a supply wagon/truck sent to military unit to receive upgrades for units in the field.

The only thing I see wrong with the constant upgrading of the same unit is that once your phalanx ends up being an Elite unit it will always be an elite unit even when you end up upgrading it to a Storm Marine or Swarm or whatever in the far future assuming it lives that long. Once it upgrades it should take a small/medium morale hit since it may be very good at throwing spears, it does not know how to use a gun or any other new weapon it gets and have to learn new tactics with this new weapon. It would also have to learn how to fight in the newer armor, it might be heavier or bulkier, not see as well, not move as well. Morale would then increase over time because of training, but not reach the highest unless it was tested in combat. Maybe several morale levels for combat veterns.

Then do you do anything different with repairing a unit? In the real world, a military unit goes to war, get several people killed, and gets new people added to the unit. Now a certain percentage of the unit has been tested in war, and another part is still untried in combat. Adding green troops to a combat vetern elite III should not keep it there. Some of the experience of the vets will slowly rub off on the greens, but the unit is still not as good as it was before because some of the troops have never experienced the horror/glory of war. Now if you could maybe make one combat unit out of two badly damaged ones, like a vetern and a green, the morale should end up maybe alittle above the average of the two, the vets boosting the morale of the greens because of experience.

[EnochF]

Okay, so let's grant, for the sake of argument, that the chassis you just listed cover the gamut of land units, from half-tracks to horses. (This is only for the sake of argument now; I'm not ready to say a catapult is the same basic chassis as a cannon or howitzer.) Okay. Now you've got the air and sea to deal with. Even if, as some have naïvely suggested, you accept that somehow destroyers, cruisers and battleships are all made from the same chassis, then you've got to have separate chassis for carriers, transports and submarines. (And anyway, you go aboard a battleship sometime and tell me it's no different from a cruiser.) Then there's propeller fighters, jet fighters, stealth fighters, jet bombers, stealth bombers and helicopters, and each of those chassis has effectively only one relevant unit to affect. What, you thought you could upgrade your prop fighter by sticking a jet engine on it? I suppose you were going to modify the Wright Brothers glider to make it invisible to radar, too? While your idea would certainly cut down on graphics (what with phalanxes, legions, fanatics, marines and everybody all based on the same model), it just doesn't hold up. Looking at it from the standpoint of realism, it's woefully inadequate, and from the standpoint of gameplay, there isn't enough to be gained from the system we already have in place to make such a grandiose change. Okay, so you can design a mounted soldier with a crossbow, or a cavalry spy. Is that so spectacular?

[rainer]

MESSENGERS / DIPLOMATS / SPIES

As dips and spies are the strongest units in Civ2, they should be more balanced. A third diplomatic unit (messenger) could be added.

Messenger: available with Writing; like the old diplo, but cannot bribe cities; chance of failing when attempting to bribe units.

Diplomat: availabe with Diplomacy (Renaissance tech); replaces the messenger; can bribe cities but at huge cost and with significant chance of failure; some chance of failure when attempting to bribe units.

Spy: available with Espionage; does replace the diplomat; chances of failure for bribing tasks further reduced but still present; viz range 2.

Whenever diplomatic units move/act/do not reside in a city, they cost maintenance that turn (the maintenance of good intelligence does not come as a free lunch).

This transcends the unit thread a bit, but it is part of the topic I have raised here, so I'll add it anyway: the quantity and quality of information you get from embassies should increase stepwise. For instance, in the messenger era, an embassy does not provide the complete list of the other civ's techs, only a rough estimate of their treasury and imprecise information on the tech they are researching right now (military, applied etc). In the diplo era, you get more and better info, but only when spies are available will embassies provide the full range as in Civ2.

[BigBopper]

First post on Thread

Unit Ideas,

1. MERV Warheads: stronger nukes, tone down the original nukes so they are more like early or tactical warheads (one square affect and a much less diplomatic negatives) and kick up MERV Missles to be true city busters. (perhaps destroys most or all population, units, and buildings in and around a city).

2. Gas Warfare: a missile? damages all units in stack/square, but is most devastating against cities. unless the proper city improvement (bomb shelters?) is built in a city each population has a 25%? chance of being killed. But the gas attack does no damage to improvements.

[CormacMacArt]

I like the multiple chassie idea, even for modern units, if its done right. In short, avoiding any unlikely scenereos.
Note for Diodorus Sicilus: During WWII, the Battleship was the FASTEST ship (not counting PT boats) on the water.

What about SLAVE units? Give all units (until ENGINEER) the ability to do civil-service jobs (roads, etc). SLAVES would be 3x, half support (money or shields), would increase production when inside of a city, but would be liable to revolt civ-wide after EMANCIPATION.

[Harel]

EnochF, are YOU thinking along?
How said you will have the option to combine subs with chain mail?
Did I say that? How said that it has to be JUST LIKE smac workshops?
The chassis you select dictates what options you will have. This IS quite obivous.
And, like Trachmyr said, it IS optional.
Just like you can't select torpedoes with infantry, only available with subs.
Quite elegant.
If you would have think straight, you would have known that in the modern era, custom-made and mission-specific units are more frequent then ever.
You re-design subs, planes, helicopters and more, to be good for a certian task:
Stealth helicopters, anti-infantry, anti-tanks, scout, transport... Lot's of options. We DO need the workshop.

[Jason Beaudoin]

The only thing that I ask is this: Make sure that there is enough time between time periods to actually do things. Sometimes I feel that there isn't enough time between the periods to really enjoy the era.