16-11-2003 02:12									#1
	DESIGN: Designing units Support Apolyton

What would be the people's general thoughts on having something like a unit workshop from SMAC? For those unfamiliar with the concept, and to make it more clear, here's the idea.

You don't have units like Marines or Paratroopers or Tanks. Instead, you have a Unit Workshop (UW) where you create your units. Technology gives you tools, not the units. So, when you discover a tech that gives you automatic infantry rifles, you can design a new unit in the UW. You open up the UW, generally, and see the following fields:

1. Base type. This indicates whether the unit you're designing is Infantry, Mounted (Horse), Armored (Tank), Hover (Hover Infantry), Aircraft (Jet), Helicopter, etc...

2. The weapon. This depends on the base type, but you can choose from a lot of weapons, depending on tech. For instance, for an Infantry unit in the early 20th century tech level, you'd be able to choose between semi-automatic guns, the WW-1 style rifles, pistols and maybe carabeens (sp?).

3. The armor. Your units can be ecquiped with medieval style plate armoring or the futuristic energy armor types... yuor choice.

4. Special abilities. Suppose there could be room for 2 or maybe 3 of these. They include the already present abilities in CtP, such as enslavement, franchise, file injunctions, etc., but would also include things such as Parardop, Amphibious Landing, free movement over mountains, ability to move in shallow (a la Fusion Tanks), for air units things like extra fuel tanks (can spend more time in air), or a see submarine ability for sea units. Transports would also be sea units with the "Transport" ability... Carriers with a "Transport Air" ability, etc.


Of course, the betterthings you add, the more expensive this unit becomes. You can create a tank that can move in shallow water, as well as Bombard, etc., but you'll wind up with something very expensive. Or, you can create units with the best armor out there but only pistols for weapons to have a reasonably cheap defensive unit...

Generally, implementing the UW, using the above ideas as merely an indication of what it could look like, would give the player more flexibility and add depth to the game. A problem, of course, would be to get the AI to design various unit types.

	16-11-2003 03:21									#2
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

While the SMAC system has wonderful potential, I can't imagine it in CTP. I once considered to mod SMAC to create a regular earth Civ game but the work would have been too daunting (if at all possible). SMAC also had interesting climatic concepts which would be nice to implement in CTP. Yet, for most of our games neither of those features is necessary and a good modder will probably create realistic units anyhow. One other problem would be the graphic system as I bet the SMAC units don't use sprites of a type similar to CTP. You'd need different grapic elements for each base type, weapon, armor and for the special abilities. So each unit would need 4 files to represent it graphically. And that is assuming 4 definition fields was enough to define all potential units over a span of 6-8000 years.

Right now I'd say the work is too daunting to consider. Maybe later once the basic game has been updated and slightly improved something like this could be considered.

Marc aka Caran...

	17-11-2003 03:50									#3
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

Right I will have a hover tank with a 500 mm plasma canon really heavy armour extra fuel enslavement capability shallow water movement as well as mountains. automated fusion powered and I want it by next Thursday

So how much will that be

In a nut shell to complicated to implement could be to time consuming to paly

	17-11-2003 03:54									#4
	Full PM-box? Change here!

Well, not too complicated for sure. SMAC implemented that... and this thing alone made the game much more fun. It was great fun spending time in the Unit Workshop, designing various types of units for the tasks.

	17-11-2003 04:20									#5
	Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

could you save the unit design

	17-11-2003 16:16									#6
	Increase the size of your Attachments

Yes, you were able to save it for the currecnt game (AFAIR).

But, this I think would be a too much advantage (again) for the human player.

	17-11-2003 22:23									#7
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

Yeah, you saved the unit types as you wish...

And agreed, AI adaptation would be the biggest problem. It would probably just be able to build three types of units - uber attack, uber defense, and uber both. It would hardly understand when it's better to design a cheap unit with middle-of-the-road stats, but spam it in numbers - and it wouldn't certainly be able to combine the special abilities creatively.

	17-11-2003 23:59									#8
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

it would be cool if features like attack, defense, bombard and especially special traits like enslavement etc was something you could select instead of having to juggle certain units with those abilities, it would give the recreate history a better feel, but I guess I'm concerned about the AI too.

	20-11-2003 20:45									#9
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

The unit workshop is a nice feature... in a tactical micromanagement game. CtP2 is a strategic macromangement game however, so the UW has no place in it.

Plus, it's would require a complete overhaul of the game engine (graphics, AI, combat, city management), I think we might as well design a game from scratch if we want to go that far.