Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Emigration 6

Finished working on the next version of my most successfull Emigration mod. It is available in the Steam Workshop.

It took longer than i expected (as always, lol).

The whole migration system was reworked, as i felt the old mechanic based on probabilities was too much of a black box. Now i'm pretty satisfied with what i have. Not ideal though, as the AI doesn't know about it. I had to give happiness buildings and policies a growth flavor but forget about it.

Friday, March 11, 2016

Military Doctrines

Idea is to replace individual promotions with Military Doctrines, which would be promotions applied to units of certain level (green, tried, veteran, elite) empire-wide. Doctrines are created with Great Generals and hosted in military buildings (just like great works). E.g. Barracks for level 1 doctrines, which give bonuses to level 1+ (tried and above) units, Armories for level2 doctrines, Military Academies for level3. Pentagon or West Point also may have doctrine slots.

So there will be something to do for those excess great generals. Btw GGs may also have levels (like in my Commanders mod for civ4) so having a higher level would allow to create a superior Doctrine. GG promotions may help certain unit types so when your army upgrades, an old GG will have little use on the battlefield and should be better spent for a MD.

Individual units may still receive "occasional promotions" (like in my mod for civ4) which would be rare (depending on the chanse of surviving combat).

Military units also should be more expendable so the player could not conquer the whole world with his initial army of 5 units. This means more fragile, easy to die. There should be situations where the player have to sacrifice units (maybe even elite) to achieve tactical goals.

Rubber bands

Civ needs more "rubber bands". Currently there are only tiny tech discounts and espionage which is limited to midgame, when runaways dont have anti-espionage buildings yet. But even if there was a powerful mechanic like tech diffusion (actually there is a mod by Afforess), that still was not enough.

My idea is investment - trade routes to backwards civs are more profitable than to same level ones for the owner, and the destination civ gets even more. E.g. trade route owner receives much gold, and his underdeveloped partner gets alot of production and faster tech acquisition. Developed nations could even wage wars for markets, if incoming trade routes were limited.