DESIGN: New Unit Abilities request thread

[The Big Mc]

How about

Propaganda

Increases vet level in allied units decreases it in enemy units

Medic

Heals all with it command use – 500 gold -10 food – 25 public works

Also medic unit increases heal rate of units

[Maquiladora]

Originally posted by Gilgamensch


you have to open the message, move the cursor over the eye, click and you have the city centered.

BUT, what is kind of strange, now you have to close again the message and you have to manually select again the city......

yep, we might want to do something in this direction

I meant the city list in the national manager.

[Ekmek]

hey guys lets stick to units! interface is another thread now!

[The Big Mc]

What about haven a communications black out were the city and units in the city has a view range of one tile for a few turns so you can get an army close without the city player knowing or just to put the fear of god in a person

[Ekmek]

I like that! Or something that brings back fog of war or undiscovered (a dark age effect)

[MrBaggins]

Cloaking would be a very interesting feature. Unbalancing. But interesting.

[Ekmek]

unbalancing, maybe for a short term, just to mess up enemy war plans or the players. I dont know if this is SLICable, it might be an ability someone wil want for a mod.

[The Big Mc]

there was a ctp unit which could clock perhaps the cod is still there

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by MrBaggins
Cloaking would be a very interesting feature. Unbalancing. But interesting.

Well, there is a currently a stealth flag for spies, slavers, etc., that can be used to give any unit a cloak.

[The Big Mc]

on ctp one hexagonian it was a little more then that I don’t even think that actual stelth units can find the unit

[J Bytheway]

Yes, in CTP there was a cloaking unit, I believe it was called the Phantom, but it was just about the last unit in the tech tree so it very rarely appeared in games. I've never built one, so I'm not totally clear on how it works.

[The Big Mc]

you have a clock button and then the sprite goes a bit off colour

other then that it is just a space fighter

[MrBaggins]

OK... pretty large, extensive and useful idea for units:

Several (like 6 or 8) extra undefined custom buttons for unit actions. Which:

* Units definitions have flags enabling these.

* They have definable icons, sounds etc.

* They can be disabled (greyed out,) and activated thru SLIC.

* They activate SLIC code, when pressed. The context passed is the unit. (from which location etc can be found)

* Optionally, the button should be able to target another location, army or city.

[MrBaggins]

If we got custom actions for units working, you could introduce additional "timers" to SLIC, other than happiness.

It might be nice to have food, production, commerce modifiers.

Imagine a terrorist (yeah... I know there is a bio-terrorist already). I think that in addition to causing just a happiness effect, we might want economic effects, and a "commerce" timer for that might work great. (There is a small knock on effect that happiness has on city efficiency and thus income, but its not enough, and increasing it to the point of rioting isn't reasonable)

[Caranorn]

Some suggestions, remember I'm no programmer so I might be asking for th impossible;-)

1) Create more unit sizes for transport, not everyone will have a use for this, but for more or less modern scenarios this could be handy. I'd sugest 8 or 9 sizes.

2) Split cargo type land/air/sea/special/total in so that a unit may carry different numbers of units (for a example a commando carrier like the old HMS Hermes, 1/3/1/1/3, in which case Hermes could carry 1 unit of any type and an additional 2 air units, some units might have multiple high cargo capacities which makes a total value necessary, which means said unit may never carry more then the total value). (Not sure CTP2 currently uses a special cargo type, I'm thinking of missiles, mines and such).

3) If this won't slow down the game too much, cargo capacity size might be split into 4 as well, but that would probably not be needed.

4) This has already been mentionned, but make it possible to tie unit (and other features like buildings and tile improvements) in with certain goods available in a city (or traded). Likewise, tie in production to existing buildings in a city and if possible wonders in a civ. (Example, 3000 BC, your capital city has a horse good, so you may build some Javelin Cavalry which has this prerequisite, 1000 BC you have just build some stables (horsebreeding) in one of your frontier cities, you may now build Theban Cavalry etc.). Possibly make it so that a unit may have up to 3 prerequisites (all could be empty making the unit buildable as soon as you have the tech), prerequisites could be goods (owned and/or traded), tile improvements, a building or a wonder. If more then one prerequisite is used for a unit, all have to be met, alternatively create an additional line and make this togleable by unit (and/or).

5) Now here comes the potential major change. Why limit armies at a fixed size, why not allow a gliding scale depending on technology and possibly leaders? That is at the start of the game you might be able to form armies up to lets say 5 units, with a standard leader (another unit type to be considered, let it increase army size and possibly raise quality rating (as we are now talking about possibel levels in addition to the existing standard/veteran), once you have gained certain technologies you could raise armies up to size 9 etc. Much would of course depend on how large a force the engine could handle, but I would definitelly try and go beyond the existing 12. Another thing to consider might be an entire revision of the combat system using a real small map, allowing player deployment (the ai would probably have a hard time though) and some added player control (turn or time based battles). But this I expect would be asking too much and might not even be of interest to most players.

6) The above mentionned leader functions. Army size modifier (instead of a bonus it could be a multiplier, but that might be harder to fine tune) and troop quality modifierwould be 2 special leader values, I could probably come up with others as well.

I will have to think this over some more. In the past I've come across many problems trying to design scenarios for CTP2 (and other civ games) because some features just don't exist in the game. On the other hand I haven't worked on a CTP2 mod for at least a year, so my memory of the game files is limited and I might be asking for already existing features.

Marc aka Caran...