CIV4SMAC

[heardie]

Buster_Man I just meant can I have a look so i can play-test them if they are down. Looking at mp3.com now.
Do you know where Hugo_Rune is?
Heardie

[heardie]

deleted
[This message has been edited by heardie (edited December 18, 1999).]

[heardie]

deleted
[This message has been edited by heardie (edited December 18, 1999).]

[Krusty]

THIS POST RESURRECTED BY THE FIRST CHURCH OF APOLYTON

[AlexanderIII]

So has anyone managed to solve the max number of sprite units allowed in SMAC(X)? Great graphics BusterMan, but will you be able to use all of them? The only thing I can see is to put all of them in there, your 'guerrilla faction'/mind worms too, only as they advance in morale the unit changes to a more advanced unit/another graphic -- i.e. twin propeller plane to a jet aircraft. So 'morale' would represent less morale as the time advancement in technology of the unit in question. But that still severly limits your choices.

And about caviar files: In order to reduce the chance of SMAC caviar-designed units popping up, a few things you could do is:
1) disable all chassis, weapons, armors and abilities by putting Disable under the respective tech collumns. Disabling them prevents them from being accessed by the Design Workshop;
2) rig #RULES of alpha.txt so that techs cannot be stolen;
3) create the maximum number of new units, all using your new sprites, in #UNITS, which is something like 50 I think. Assign chassis, weapons, abilities etc. combinations to your preset units (it eliminates creative unit design, but it's the only way not to disable the Design Workshop.) Instead of Chassis, Weapons, etc. to techs, assign designated units to techs. You may have the same unit in your #UNITS listed ten times over -- all with different ability/weapons/armor combinations depending on the tech;
4) Now here's the catch: for units with particular abilities/chassis, etc., when listing a particular unit with a tech, it can only have those capabilities the particular tech would have awarded AND ALL THE TECHS DIRECTLY BELOW THAT CONNECT TO IT. You should not have a unit have an ability at, say, a C5 tech that is normally given when having acheived the B6 tech, or a D3 tech that is not directly below the C5 tech in its local tree -- it would screw everything up as far as capabilities assigned to particular techs are concerned. Nor can you have tech stealing going on, because the awarding of units is entirely dependant on whether a tech below it in the local tree has been acheived. If you did allow tech stealing, a faction would not merely get a hold of a capability (armor, weapon, ability or chassis), they would get a new unit with a GROUP of abilities, some of which he would not have normally gained if unit components were activated. You see, when you design units like this, you are not awarding unit components/capabilities anymore, you are awarding a group of capabilities -- each new capability building one the ones previously established in lower techs. So one has to be very careful when placing such units in the tech tree.
Sometimes you may come across a unit combination that is simply a must, and one particular chasis/weapon/ability combination is not attainable from within the local tree -- i.e. if separate capabilities were enabled the player would not be able to build sucha unit having only researched all the techs leading up to that particular tech newly acheived. So what do you do? As a rule of thumb any such units I place two tech levels above the one I would originally have put it, that way I could be fairly certain that by the time a player researched the more advanced tech to acquire this unit, they would have by then acquired all the necessary techs to make this unit 'legal'.
For example, I want to create a unit called a 'battle beast', and assign it a custom graphic. I want it to have a Needlejet chassis with Photon Wall armor. only problem is these techs are never in each other's trees until they join up at Graviton Theory, from tech lv 7 to lv 13, by which time the unit's capabilities would be obsolete. So what I do is pick a tech two levels up and assign it to that tech and hope for the best. These kinds of hard decisions will have to be made in orderto acheive this.


All this, for what you may ask? All so that no caviar graphics ever pop up in the game.

[SEE]

AlexanderIII --

Presumably Civ4SMAC will have its own tech tree, which will allow the problems you cite to be avoided for the units designed for Civ4SMAC.

(For SMAC mods, you do have 12 available tech slots to partially work around the problem -- you just have one of your new techs use the two techs needed for the unit as its prerequisites. So the Battle Beast would require "Industrial Photonics", which would have Doctrine: Air Power and Photon/Wave Mechanics as prerequisites)

[Patriqvium]

heardie, I read your base improvement list and found one illogical thing there: Why does the SDI defense give you a teleportation ability!?

[heardie]

Originally posted by Patriqvium on 12-23-1999 02:44 PM
heardie, I read your base improvement list and found one illogical thing there: Why does the SDI defense give you a teleportation ability!?

Dunno.....

------------------
-Chiron Creators-
"http://members.xoom.com/acchiron"

[AlexanderIII]

Originally posted by SEE on 12-23-1999 03:36 AM
AlexanderIII --

Presumably Civ4SMAC will have its own tech tree, which will allow the problems you cite to be avoided for the units designed for Civ4SMAC.

(For SMAC mods, you do have 12 available tech slots to partially work around the problem -- you just have one of your new techs use the two techs needed for the unit as its prerequisites. So the Battle Beast would require "Industrial Photonics", which would have Doctrine: Air Power and Photon/Wave Mechanics as prerequisites)

That's actually not a bad idea, now that I think about it. The reason I had not suggested that in the first place is that 12 extra techs would not be enough to cover all possible chassis,weapons, armor and abilities combinations. What I'm thinking that you could do is just Disable the prereq techs for all armor/weapons/chassis/abilities, and just have the techs list preformed units with their respective capabilities under #units. You could use all sprite graphics that way, though I think my previous statement of the design workshop not designing non-sprite units might not be entirely correct. You would not be able to design alternate units, and by deselecting Autodesign Units in Preferrences, the game would not design any caviar units for you. But the factions (AI) may just be designing and using caviar/non-sprite units, and I am not sure if you can do anything about that.