FrankenCiv: a hypothetical

[onodera]

pffft, like any cossack slut

And you're a hajduk slut!

[Sava]

man, i don't even know what i am (aside from an asshat)

my mom is a "militant" serb (RAWR RAWR SERBIA LIVES) even though her mom was half-croat

my dad was not "ethnic" at all. his dad was from macedonia... so southern serbs, I guess.

[onodera]

I wonder if my job and my kid will leave me enough time to help with this. I haven't finished my CKII map mod yet, so I dunno. Sava, do you have any relevant experience, or are you just an asshat?

[Elok]

More seriously (CHILDREN!), I'm now leaning towards iso, for the rather weak reason that, again, there's a lot of CivII art floating around. The easier we make it for amateur developers, the better our chances for building up a community in the early stages. Now, for all I know, there are a billion tilesets hanging around from hex-tiled wargames, so . . . weak. But there's still the nostalgia factor; a lot of the game's potential "market" grew up playing iso on CivII and SMAC. Its biggest downside is the wonky zig-zags on map sides.

My main objection to hexes is that it pisses me off when a game won't let me move troops north, south, east and west. I realize this is also weak.

Other, not-solicited advice: how about three distinct classes for units, a movement type, combat type and function set? So a knight would have a movement class of "horse" (no terrain defense bonuses, not on water), a combat class of "melee cavalry" (pikes hurt it), and a function class of "combat" (cannot form/settle/spy/trade/crawl/whatever, can pillage). The purpose being much the same as CSS's purpose for HTML, to reduce the need for designers to type the same crap over and over again, or even copy-paste, while preserving versatility. Yes, I realize I'm looking ahead a fair bit . . .

[Sava]

I wonder if my job and my kid will leave me enough time to help with this. I haven't finished my CKII map mod yet, so I dunno. Sava, do you have any relevant experience, or are you just an asshat?

yes!

[Ben Kenobi]

One of the important breakthroughs that I believe only one scenario did, was the ability to raise the sea. Yes, it opens for shenanigans (like Alexander!), but I think it would be important to be able to alter the terrain.

The other thing that could be done is to have a third tier of engineers.

[Ben Kenobi]

it would be cool to liberate the concepts of fuel limits and transport from air and sea units, respectively. There's no reason why either needs to be hard-tied to its real-world

Game balance.

[Elok]

One of the important breakthroughs that I believe only one scenario did, was the ability to raise the sea. Yes, it opens for shenanigans (like Alexander!), but I think it would be important to be able to alter the terrain.

The other thing that could be done is to have a third tier of engineers.

My inclination here is to "de-bundle" wherever possible, with default bundles prepared for people who don't care to deal with the nitty-gritty. So, yeah, have a bundle/class with all engineering options included, but also make it possible to set military engineers who can only build roads, forts, airbases and such.

Game balance.

Is the designer's responsibility. I'm talking about giving people a toolbox here, not a nanny. Back in the days when I mucked about with CivII scens, I was constantly irked by the game's limitations forcing me to jury-rig or exploit weird bugs. If modders get the power to break the game, so be it.

[Sava]

so we're talking a simple game with easy access modding... so mod tools, too?

[Felch]

For our purposes, the free version applies.

I mean, if you want to make an iOS or android version of this... sure. You'll need to pay the $50 for the commercial license.

Stupid as it sounds, I went and sprung for the master version and then never bothered to really learn how to use it. I'd love to jump in on this project. It'd be a nice goal to help me learn to use this thing I bought.

[Elok]

If we could swing it, sure. I'm somewhat leery after the data-mixing fustercluck Microprose packed with Fantastic Worlds, but I'm sure Aeson could do better. I imagine this is the sort of thing where we could start small and add increasing layers of complexity without too much hassle as far as backwards compatibility is concerned?

Xpost

[Aeson]

Other, not-solicited advice: how about three distinct classes for units, a movement type, combat type and function set? So a knight would have a movement class of "horse" (no terrain defense bonuses, not on water), a combat class of "melee cavalry" (pikes hurt it), and a function class of "combat" (cannot form/settle/spy/trade/crawl/whatever, can pillage). The purpose being much the same as CSS's purpose for HTML, to reduce the need for designers to type the same crap over and over again, or even copy-paste, while preserving versatility. Yes, I realize I'm looking ahead a fair bit . . .

I like it ... but I think it works better if there's no set restriction on classes other than restrictions specifically within classes.

Say for instance you have

Horse
- no terrain defense bonus
- land only

Melee Cavalry
- weak vs Pikes

Combat
- cannot form/settle/spy/trade/crawl/whatever (probably better to define things by what they can do and assume everything else is not possible)
- can pillage

But a modder wants to change Knights to have something else ... like requires an extra food upkeep when out of borders so their page boys can eat leftovers after setting up the pavilion. They could define a new class:

Hoity-Toity:
- +1 food upkeep outside borders
- cannot add [whatever gets -upkeep outside borders ... woodsman or whatever]

And then Knight would look like:

Knight
- Horse
- Melee Cavalry
- Combat
- Hoity-Toity

If a modder tried to add Woodsman, the engine would mock them mercilessly for trying to make a Hoity-Toity Woodsman unit without first modding what Hoity-Toity and Woodsman meant. (Or maybe adding one would grey out the other as an option... but I'd prefer mocking)

[Sava]

Stupid as it sounds, I went and sprung for the master version and then never bothered to really learn how to use it. I'd love to jump in on this project. It'd be a nice goal to help me learn to use this thing I bought.

[Aeson]

So does the master version allow other team members to use it, or does every member need their own license?

[Felch]

I like it ... but I think it works better if there's no set restriction on classes other than restrictions specifically within classes.

Say for instance you have

Horse
- no terrain defense bonus
- land only

Melee Cavalry
- weak vs Pikes

Combat
- cannot form/settle/spy/trade/crawl/whatever (probably better to define things by what they can do and assume everything else is not possible)
- can pillage

But a modder wants to change Knights to have something else ... like requires an extra food upkeep when out of borders so their page boys can eat leftovers after setting up the pavilion. They could define a new class:

Hoity-Toity:
- +1 food upkeep outside borders
- cannot add [whatever gets -upkeep outside borders ... woodsman or whatever]

And then Knight would look like:

Knight
- Horse
- Melee Cavalry
- Combat
- Hoity-Toity

If a modder tried to add Woodsman, the engine would mock them mercilessly for trying to make a Hoity-Toity Woodsman unit without first modding what Hoity-Toity and Woodsman meant. (Or maybe adding one would grey out the other as an option... but I'd prefer mocking)

Absolutely, the mod tools should be more like a grammar for the modders to work with than a catalog of options. A modder should be able to create whatever options they want, within certain parameters.

Example: Let's say you want to recreate Civ2 Partisans, but make their auto-generation vary based on the sophistication of the government. Now the game doesn't have any sophistication level built in for the government, but you could tag each government type with a score, 0 for Anarchy, 2 for Monarchy, 5 for Communism, 7 for Democracy or whatever you want. You'd just go to the "Republic" screen in the mod tools, click some [Add Attribute] button, and type something like "Sophistication = 3" and do that for every government. Then go to the Partisans screen in the unit section and click the "Auto-Generation" attribute there, and it might say something like:

IF city IS captured:{
FOR city.size
CREATE [unit] AT city[3,3]
}

You could change that to

IF city IS captured:{
FOR int[city.size * government.Sophistication / 4.5]
CREATE [unit] AT city.location(3)
}

That's obviously not real, but the basic idea is that the computer would look for the condition to be fulfilled, then it would create a number of units within 3 tiles of the city's location equal to the city's population. We would change that to multiply by the sophistication of the government and then divide to bring the total back down to Earth.

This is just a stupid example, but I think it's important to let people use some scripting to create things we can't imagine.