|
Bogdanovist
|
|
I can see some goods points rasied here about the promotions system, I like the idea of the frequency of promotions being linked to the level of military infrastructure, that would help balance things for builders.
But what i'm still wary of is possible annoying consequences of only getting special abilities through promitions. To try and explain what I mean I need to clarify some misunderstanding some people seem to have about unit design in SMAC(X)....
The beauty of the SMAC(X) system was that special abilities, like anti-aircraft, amphibious landing, hypnotic trance, transport abilitty etc etc etc are universal instead of being stuck to individual units. So the Civ II alpine skier was a good idea, but it's attack value quickly became too low so the movement bonus was meaningless. The marine in Civ III lets you do amphibious landings, but once the raw attack power of that unit it superceeded the special ability in nerfed as well, as the unit is useless anyway. The SMAC(X) system just allowed you to always have the latest weapon on a unit with any particle special ability. The costs of units were pretty well balanced so a 'super unit' that could do a lot of things was so expensive that you had to think carefully about whether cheaper more specialized units would be better.
Anyway, the unit design system was really really good in SMAC(X) however it seems far less appropriate in the Civ universe, because of the constraints of history. You might in Civ want to allow say an early viking unit to do amphibious landings, but then not have a unit that can do that again till WWII era tech. In the SMAC(X) system, once you've discovered the amphibious tech, you can slap it on anything. This would lead to Civ losing it's historical 'flavour' .
However, the promotions seem to move this way a little. As far as i can gather, once you have researced 'jungle warfare' or whatever, then you can promote units to get a bonus fighting in jungles. The same would seem to apply to the other promotions. Now, say the opponent you really want to take out is on a continent with a lot of jungle near his cities. You want to attack with a bunch of jungle fighters (as he probably has some already) but you don't have any. So you first have to make a short war against someone else for the sole purpose of promoting some units to jungle fighters, which you then heal and ship of to the "real" war.
This process of "practice" wars would need to be kept up in order to uitlise the abilities you keep gaining from research. It remains to be seen how it pans out, but I can see that it might lead to some annoying or even ludicrous situations, say in multiplayer, it would be benefit to have some "war games" (i.e. a war, but you do it by mutual consent) with a friendly opponent were you line up a bunch of your good units against his cheap ones (and vice versa) to get the neccessary abilities that will allow the two of you to then attack some third player. Seems a little weird.....
It would seem nice to be able to just build units with these abillites (but maybe lower level, i.e. a 10% jungle bonus that can be improved with promotion), but then we are approaching more of a SMAC(X) unit design system, which as I pointed out what potentially impact on the historically flavour of Civ...
So I don't know how to view the promotions system, but hopefully however it is implemented with at least add a new dimension of gameplay to keep us hooked for a little longer 
(wow that was longer than I intended, hopefully it made sense...)
|
03-06-2005 06:00
|
|