Clash of Civilizations - "The Big Picture"

[Traian]

One problem is that 'fundamental' unit types change over time, so until guns really take off 'spearmen' for example can just change in name, stats and cosmetically (pikeman, halberdier etc) but then what does the spearman change to? Musketman? That's a ranged unit, and so would be in the 'archer' family.The 'spearman' family is totally obsolete and stops evolving at around the point guns start comming into heavy use. Shock troops (swords, axes, maces etc) would also stop evolving around this point or earlier.

SPEARMEN----------0----------1000AD-------
SHOCK---------------0---------1000AD------
RANGED-------------0----------1000AD------------2000AD---
SKIRMISH-----------0----------1000AD------------2000AD---

At a certain point the game has to recognize that 'ranged' is no longer a distinction for infantry, as guns eventually cause all of them tobe ranged.

My suggestion is that once the bayonette is implemented the old infantry classes are grayed out as obsolete - this is asort of new military level which can last till the 21st century.

OLD BASIC INFANTRY UNITS

SPEARMEN
SHOCK TROOPS
RANGED
SKIRMISH

NEW BASIC INFANTRY UNITS

REGULARS
NON REGULARS

or perhaps

ASSAULT INFANTRY
DEFENSIVE INFANTRY
NON REGULAR INFANTRY

Still need to think things through more for the new list.

[Traian]

Heres a new list of the basic root unit types as I would have them. This only deals with infantry for the moment, but will expand:

MOB
A highly disorganized group with varied weapons -common in pre-historic times and in civil unrest etc (the peasants are revolting!!!)

SPEARMEN
A group of men armed mainly with pole arm weapons like spears, pikes or halberds etc.

SHOCK TROOPS
A group of men armed mainly with close up fighting weapons like clubs, axes or swords etc.

SKIRMISH TROOPS
A semi independent loosely ordered group of men armed with easy to use contemporary ranged weapons (in other words skirmishers early on might have javelins, but later on use assault rifles). This troop type will give us our partisans, irregulars and militias of later warfare.

RANGED TROOPS
A group of men armed mainly with ranged weapons like throwing spears/javelins, bows, crossbows, slings, primitive guns etc.

TERCIO
A rigid group of men armed with a mixture of polearm weapons and ranged (generally gunpowder) weapons

REGIMENTAL INFANTRY (or just INFANTRY)
A disciplined group of men armed with contemporary mass produced firearms and other weapons that become available in time (machine guns; grenades; anti tank etc) To this basic category belongs all 'regular' infantry types from napoleonic massed flintlock battalions to the infantry squads we see on CNN.

I'm exploring the 'mixing' of weapons types in entirely new 'groups' for example the 'TERCIO' which consisted of pikemen and muskets. Alternatively the 'TERCIO' could be dropped and absorbed into
'REGIMENTAL INFANTRY' as the 'unit type' was only prominent for about 200 - 250 years.

The way I see it, you would create as many sub unit types as you want and name them using sliders and selections in a 'unit creation' panel. So to create a roman cohort you would select:

UNIT TYPE: shock infantry
TIGHT FORMATION <----0------------> LOOSE FORMATION
SOLDIER FUNCTIONS:uniform
PRIMARY WEAPON: sword
SECONDARY WEAPON: Javelin
PROTECTION <-----------0---------------> MOBILITY
UNIT SIZE: medium

This would create a reasonably well protected (armour; shield) but mobile soldier with the ability to use a javelin and sword in combat. But to create a unit that resembles a roman cohort, filled with tough legionaries there would still be more to do... you would now go to a general military panel which governs overall army policy:

SERVICE: professional [set only for 'cohort' unit]
TRAINING AND DISCIPLINE: harsh

etc etc etc

Thats the basic idea...

another example; for a WWII american infantry unit...

UNIT TYPE: regimental infantry
TIGHT FORMATION <------------------0> LOOSE FORMATION
SOLDIER FUNCTIONS: mixed

1) PRIMARY WEAPON: assault rifle
SECONDARY WEAPON: grenades
PROTECTION <----------------------------0--> MOBILITY
RATIO: 60%

2) PRIMARY WEAPON: submachine gun
SECONDARY WEAPON: machine gun
PROTECTION <-----------------------------0> MOBILITY
RATIO: 30%

3) PRIMARY WEAPON: submachine gun
SECONDARY WEAPON: bazooka
PROTECTION <------------------------------0> MOBILITY
RATIO: 10%
UNIT SIZE: small

So now you'd have say 100 men with little more than a helmet for protection but pretty fast moving and flexible in combat. 60 or so would be riflemen, making them good for defence and combined assault operations, while the 30 machine gun soldiers add to their anti infantry defence and the 10 bazooka soldiers add to anti tank defence.

The average player would not have to go into so much detail but it would go that far for the more experienced player to experiment, and the 'historical scenario' builder can tailor units to be like their historical counterparts. The grenades, bazookas,machine guns etc may begin seeming like too much but each has adistinct function. Here are the weapon types I'd put in.

POLE ARM WEAPON (best in anti cavalry role)
Spear
Pitchfork (?)
Pike
Halberd

SHOCK WEAPON (best in anti infantry role)
Short Spear
Club
Mace (perhaps combine with club)
Axe
Sword

TRADITIONAL RANGED WEAPONS
Throwing Spear (javelin)

Simple Bow
Composite Bow
Crossbow
Longbow (tough one as yew is only found in wales)

GUNPOWDER WEAPONS
Arquebus
Matchlock
Flintlock
Breach loading rifle
Assault Rifle

submachine gun
machine gun

HEAVIER WEAPONS
grenade
bazooka
mobile mortar

All the weapons here are listed with infantry in mind but may be used by some other unit types too.

[alms66]

I suggest moving the unit-type discussions out of this thread and into a military-type thread, as it's grown far beyond what it was intended to be. It was just a small part of a much larger post on "bigger isn't always better", that has hijacked, what is supposed to be a "big picture" type thread.

[Traian]

You're right alms; I'll start up a military thread

[Lord God Jinnai]

Originally posted by Traian
One problem is that 'fundamental' unit types change over time, so until guns really take off 'spearmen' for example can just change in name, stats and cosmetically (pikeman, halberdier etc) but then what does the spearman change to? Musketman? That's a ranged unit, and so would be in the 'archer' family.The 'spearman' family is totally obsolete and stops evolving at around the point guns start comming into heavy use. Shock troops (swords, axes, maces etc) would also stop evolving around this point or earlier.

Spearmen stopped evolving yes, but shock troops continued to evolve for some time because ranged combat wasn't always as good until some time during the 19th century.

However, shock troops merged with ranged troops in a way in that they carried both firearms and learned to use melee combat. So you could say they didn't so much become obsolete as a seperation between ranged and shock blurred until it became pointless to seperate them on a troop level.

[Traian]

Agreed. You could say that in fact all of them - shock spear and ranged - mixed down into 'infantry'. I would say more specifically though that those bayonette wielding chaps from the napoleonic era were spearmen/ranged more than they were shock/ranged as they were less good at holding ground against experienced shcock troops (like scottish claymore wielding clansmen) that they were against cavalry. The main use of the bayonette was defence as opposed to offense. Thier attack was more in their ammunition weapons. The bayonettes acted as a kind of spear wall against attack.

[alms66]

Map Generation

Something that is desired by many Civ players today is much more realistic maps and most people agree that to achieve this you must use a plate tectonics map generator, along with climate, erosion and other models to be incorporated as the generator is run over the approximately 4 billion years of time to create a world the same age as the Earth. This type of map generation, unless extremely abstracted, however, contradicts one of the mainstays of Civ-like games – on-the-fly map generation – because they take a lot of time to run if done in a good amount of detail. Usually in Civ, when you start a game, the map is generated right there in less than 60 seconds. When you consider the fact that universities run programs to simulate plate tectonics (along with climate, erosion and other models – just assume these when I mention plate tectonics from now on) on supercomputers that run for weeks at a time before producing results, you can clearly see that 60 seconds doesn’t really do this type of simulation justice.

So, for EIT, we discussed it and decided to do something a little different. We created a tectonics model that was extremely in depth and would take much longer than 60 seconds to generate a map, but we knew players would never want to wait that long for it to generate, so we created a background application to run this model, accessible in the user’s system tray to adjust various settings, and generate maps continuously. This only increased the amount of time it took to generate a map, but it was ok, because we were going to have a hundred or so pre-generated maps installed with the game so that users could get started right away, while they would continuously be generating more maps with any available time on the computer in the background.

So when a game was started a pre-generated map was loaded instead of creating the map on-the-fly. Once all pre-generated maps had been used, it would go back to the first map and load that one, restarting the cycle. But we tracked all this activity, and whenever a new map was ready, that newer map was loaded instead of one that’s already been used before, regardless of where you were in the cycle. So, for example, if you had maps 1-100 that shipped with the game, you’d play, in sequence, all those maps ending with map 100, at which time, assuming no new maps were generated, you’d go back and play map 1. Since new maps were slowly being generated though, if you were on the second cycle at map 67 let’s say, and map 100 was finished being generated, the next game would load map 100, then map 68 (picking up where you left off), assuming no new maps had been generated in between those games. The plan was to also release map-packs periodically, so that the users would, hopefully, never have to play the same map twice. The map files themselves were simply named for the seed number used, so users could easily trade map packs as well.

Civ4 has also shown another one of the innovations that EIT had in map generation – multiple generators that would produce various types of maps. What is described above was the standard random map generator, there were also fractal generators, flat map generators (for only a small portion of the world like the Mediterranean, the Sahara, etc.), and just plain bizarre (1-tile world generated a series of 1 tile islands, outworld generated a band of land on the edge of the flat map, etc.).

Another innovation (or at least I think it was) in map generation was one of my pet projects within the larger EIT project – the Earth-like map generator. The concept was simple – manually divide the world into a series of triangles that approximate the shape of the continents, map these triangles to an in-game map of the Earth while recording the coordinates of the points of these triangles, then use these triangle coordinates to generate a map that was always very similar to Earth in continental layout, though the details of those continents would change somewhat each time. North America and South America were single large triangles, as was the case for all continents except Asia. Asia was made up of three triangles, the eastern triangle, western triangle, and the Indian triangle.

So, starting with the triangles, a fractal algorithm was run to get the shape of the continents. Then another algorithm would take the heightmap of the Earth (pre-mapped manually) and randomize it somewhat, generating elevations for this map. Finally the climate generator would run and the generator would then determine what the final tile was to be whether it was a Desert Mountain, Desert Plain, Desert Hill or a Forested Mountain, Forested Plain, Forested Hill, etc. Civs were placed in near-historical locations and it generally had all of the good feelings of playing on an Earth map without actually knowing the map 100% beforehand.

[Lord God Jinnai]

Re: Map Generation

How long did it usually take to create a map like that?

As for the length of time, some of those university models take into account things we don't have to worry about (most of the time) for map generation, such as human impact, wobble of the earth, solar activity cycles of the sun, el nino/la nina cycles and other various climate cycles, wobble of the sun and earth in its orbit, wobble of moon, etc.

There is still plent we'd need to if we want realistic map.

I mean we could take into consideration all that (except human impact) as well...

[LDiCesare]

As for map generation, I like my own version for terrain (mountains/hills/seas) which is both in Clash (though it's an early version) and for Civ IV (tectonics). I think the tectonics part is not the hardest thing to do, though tuning the number of plates can be hard. More realistic models can be used, but may take longer, as alms suggests.
The real problems I see are with climate and rivers. River generation is really hard to code. To do it right we'd need weather patterns, with winds, moisture, and estimates of where the rains fall, so decide where rivers can start and have them flow. But then again, rivers create valleys and basins and change the landscape a lot.

[alms66]

Map Generation

Originally posted by Lord God Jinnai
How long did it usually take to create a map like that?

If you ran it in-game it was taking about 10 minutes IIRC, but there was still room for improvement, which could have lead to increased generation times. To run it as a background application, I can't really say how long it would take because it varies on how the user is using his computer during that time, but you can figure in at least a 10-fold increase in time, or about 2-3 hours, for most.

Originally posted by LDiCesare
As for map generation, I like my own version for terrain (mountains/hills/seas) which is both in Clash (though it's an early version) and for Civ IV (tectonics). I think the tectonics part is not the hardest thing to do, though tuning the number of plates can be hard. More realistic models can be used, but may take longer, as alms suggests.
The real problems I see are with climate and rivers. River generation is really hard to code. To do it right we'd need weather patterns, with winds, moisture, and estimates of where the rains fall, so decide where rivers can start and have them flow. But then again, rivers create valleys and basins and change the landscape a lot.

I do like your version as well (at least what I've seen of it in civ4). Overall it's quite good.

As you say, the biggest problem though is with the climate (including erosion and rivers) - that's going to be the hog that eats up the most time. Erosion alone must take into account the effect of rivers, wind, rain, vegetation and animals. With climate you've got wind patterns, rain patterns, temperature, water vapor (humidity), ocean currents and the effect of terrain. In other words, there are tons of variables to track and make use of. And then, there were resources for EIT also, but the resources were not like they are in Clash. In EIT there were dozens of resources on every tile since these resources (+labor), were the backbone of the economy.

As you say with rivers, they eat away at the land causing erosion to the landscape, which is why it's fairly safe to say they can flow anywhere they want to, except up hill. They will take the path of least resistance (preferring sandy soil to granite, for instance) though, so tracking soil types will help you there. In civ4, all grasslands are the same and all plains are the same, so there's nothing to tell you which tile you should flow into. If something like the Clash ecology model were available, you would have an easier time with that.

-Edit-
Added title... I keep forgetting that and I made the rule!