Planning for D6

[Mark_Everson]

I am finishing up the civ-level military supply stuff. The way I would like to do it is have the economy assume the player wants military supplies at 100%, and automatically generate a civ-level order to do this. Otherwise the player would have to continuously tweak the amt of the order. It is possible to do something with an ROI setting at some point, but I think it isn't as important as other things now.

Does anyone think its a Bad idea to have military supply level automatically taken care of, at least for the near future?

[Richard Bruns]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
I could put in an Education infrastructure class now rather than later, and give RPs for the amount of Education.

That sounds like a good plan. The player would use the economy interface and infraclass to adjust the total input to the whole system, and the tech interface to adjust the relative inputs to the individual technologies.

There is one potential problem. We have to make sure the RP inputs add up to 100%. So what happens when the player bumps up the spending in one technology? The slider in civ2 could be annoying, and it only had three categories.

Perhaps we could write an algorithm to drop the spending of all other techs equally. So if there were 10 techs each getting 10% of the RP's and the player increased the RP of one tech to 15%, all the other techs would drop to 9.44%

There should also be the ability to lock a tech's spending so it can't be affected by this algorithm. I'll edit the table to reflect this.

Something like this would also be very helpful in the economy interface. Now, if I want to bump up sending in one category while keeping total spending the same, I have to manually decrase all the otehr categories a little. This algorithm would do that automatically.

[Gary Thomas]

What does the Lock/Unlock button do?

Cheers

Gary

[Mark_Everson]

Lock/unlock: There are n techs and so n percentages that add up to 100%. when you change a percentage, the others rebalance proportionally so that the total is still 100%. If you lock a value it is not changed in the rebalancing. Hope that's clear.

[Gary Thomas]

Yep.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Roads for Demo 5.1

Here is what Gary and I have come up with:

Building roads: There will be a gui that works like movement allowing road routes to be planned. The resources to build roads will come from a civ-wide roads budget, just like I'm handling Army Supplies. Once you put resources into the Road Building infra class you are allowed to build until the class runs out. You can have planned roads automatically fill in, maybe starting at a city. Just plan the road and allocate resources and the rest will be done automatically.

Of course in the future it could be much more automated, but I think it's good for now. Any big issues?

[Gary Thomas]

The roads will be built strictly in the order that they are planned. So if the GUI is used to build a road from Rome to Naples, the part nearest Rome will be built first. There is no provision (or planned provision) to allow cancellation of road building orders.

In fact, road building ought to be quite slow. The roads are military roads. In the whole history of the human race, the only people who built military roads were the Romans. By the time technology had caught up with that of the Romans, railways had arrived.

Cheers

[Gary Thomas]

Rivers.

Yes, there will be rivers.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Gary Thomas
In fact, road building ought to be quite slow.

Slow by making them very expensive, or by imposing some sort of other restriction?

[Gary Thomas]

By some other means. Even if you put a huge amount into the kitty it doesn't mean that you can make a road from Rome to Shanghai in one turn.

Cheers

[Mark_Everson]

Its getting to be demo 5.1 time. Here is what we had a ways back, modified as appropriate. We are hoping to have it out this coming weekend.

1. Roads -- Perhaps to build them just have player draw an outline on the map and return a cost? And you'd only be able to build roads within your civ.

Gary is closing in on this.

2. Civs with real provinces and territory in the scenarios. We will implement Gary's idea for borders (From map graphics thread).

This has yet to be implemented, but should be relatively easy.

3. Merchants (at least an alpha version)

Not finished, but most of the way there, including rudimentary AI to find the best trade routes.

4. Archers in the military model. I don't know about the status of ships. Laurent?

5. New info screen that shows the big things that happened in the turn with links to more detailed info if the player desires.

Gary has this mostly going.

There are also some GUI improvements like turn numbers displayed on movement paths, and some bug fixes.

Did I miss anything big, and does anyone think 1-5 aren't achievable by the end of the weekend? I am now on a 4-day weekend so I'll pick up my pace and expect to finish merchants and do some debugging and manual updating. After that I'm going to start on the tech hookups to econ for D5.2.

[LDiCesare]

Ships model is in and seems to be working, but I don't think we have an interface for boarding ships, and showing/moving them. Gary?

[Dale]

Come on guys, hurry up!

The Plebs are getting restless.

[Mark_Everson]

Yeah, yeah, we're woikin' on it already

I have pretty much finished implementing merchants to my 5.1 spec. Merchants are created, one per city, and they automatically search for the best inter-city two-commodity trade they can arrange. The search is intra-civ only for now, and based purely on economic value, since the merchants *teleport* their goods for now, without need of transport capability. Harry Potter eat your hear out

I will be working on a bit of bug-finding next. After that tech-econ hookups.

[Mark_Everson]

On the issue of support for 800x600 resolution, Laurent said in an email:

I would like to point out that under 800x600, D5 was
playable, but with the additional Road button in the top
bar, the End Turn button almost vanishes, and only
intuition allows one to click on the small bit of screen
over there... Windows are not catastrophic, but buttons
are. One question: Do you use the Move/End Move button? I
never do. It could be a way to gain some space on top?

In response:

I use the move button. Since the econ orders buttons take up nearly half the real estate, I think those are the ones that should be put on a diet. I think the buttons could be changed to say "Square Econ Orders", "Province" and "Civ" without much loss of clarity. (They're already separaged from the others) For that matter, econ orders just aren't going to be issued all that often in the game, so they could be put in a drop-down menu to make room for other more-often-used features.

I guess we should also work out a set of default sizes for the frames for 800x600 and switch to them when that resolution is detected on the monitor. Is there anyone that still uses 640x480? I'm not sure we can fit everything in that size screen without reworking a bunch of things, so I'd prefer to avoid it.