Thursday, January 10, 2019

Fast Travel, by Land and Sea

It's silly how moving an army or a settler across the map takes ages literally. There should be a fast travel mechanic.

The first possibility is the rebase mission, like for planes. Units could be rebased to remote cities and forts connected by roads. The distance could be limited by technology. Railroads should have unlimited range. It won't be game breaking as it will only be possible to rebase 1 unit per [destination] city/fort per turn. And maybe it should cost some gold.

The second is sea transportation. Similar to the Great Admiral's rebase, but not only to another port but any shore location in a certain travel radius. Enemy ships may block passage in quite an area (say, in the radius of their moves), or sink any transports in their ZOC. The transport capacity is limited by the number of harbors, technology and geography (how many ports can reach a particular destination).

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Ages of warfare: unit costs in the 1UPT system

Unit costs should not scale smoothly proportionally to the civ's tech level, but change relatively to it. E.g. there should be very few units in the earlier eras (done with maintenance costs), more in the industrial period and many in the modern -- thus, frontlines will appear. In the post-modern period, units should become expensive again. But powerful, to be able to take cities. In the ancient and medieval era, cities should be typically taken by long sieges (city under siege should not be able to work tiles and its health should decrease with starvation).