Anyone fiddled with the "pop. cost" unit flag?

Colonel Rhombus · January 8, 2004, 09:12

Currently only the Worker and Settler cost units of population to build. To breathe a bit of new life back into Civ3, I've decided to shake things around a bit, and maybe introduce a 1 population cost for all/most combat units as well.

Has anybody tried this already, and if so, what were your impressions of it? How did the AI handle it? Were there unforseen problems?

I'm considering this to reduce the number of military units the AI builds, especially late in the game, and probably also to better reflect the population drain of a prolonged war. Already I've tried making them more expensive and reducing the number of free units per town/city/metropolis, combined with increasing unit cost to 2 in republic/democracy (the two governments with trade bonuses).

:) Smiley · January 8, 2004, 16:33

Would you be able to join all military units to a city then?

Colonel Rhombus · January 9, 2004, 17:48

It's an option. There is a "join city" flag in the Unit Editor. I would probably include this option so as to give the player (me) the choice to either disband (for shields) or merge back into the population.

My biggest concern, as mentioned before though, is the affect it might have on the AI. Will it curb their excessive militarism or will they just build heaps of military units anyway and end up with all size 1 or 2 towns?

Since nobody seems to have tried this before, looks like I might have to be my own guinnea pig.

Azeem · January 10, 2004, 18:52

Actually some people have done this before. But that was quite a while back. You'd have to search the forums to find out their results.

Colonel Rhombus · January 11, 2004, 13:45

I'm 3/4 of the way through my first game with these settings. There are no obvious ill-effects with the AI yet. I'll need to playtest some more before I know for certain.

I started one fairly large war that, while it did not gut my population, it did lower it noticably across the board. It inhibits your ability to wage war early on when your cities are small, but as soon as you have some established cities (i.e., early Medieval age) it's not too bad. Nevertheless, long, prolonged wars like the one I had in my last game before making these changes would have seriously buggered me up. I had no tanks because I was fighting for oil and it was just an infantry meat-grinder. I would definitely have been tried for mass-murder & war crimes in real life.

:) Smiley · January 13, 2004, 19:34

How does the ability of units with movement rates>1 to carry population have on gameplay? In an extreme case, does this allow "instant metropolises" to be flown in with potential for player abuse?

Colonel Rhombus · January 19, 2004, 22:12

I hadn't even considered that. But seeing that all military units that can move >1 (scouts, explorers, siege weapons, etc. don't cost population in my mod) are more expensive than workers (especially during the later stages of the game when hospitals are available to make metropolises a possibility), it's probably less effective than having a flood of workers do the same thing.

Colonel Rhombus · January 19, 2004, 22:20

[double-post]

Antrine · January 20, 2004, 03:06

Colonel Rhombus,

I am doing things a bit differently, however what I am running into may be of interest.

As far as the AI building a lot a small sized cities, I mostly cured that by beefing what the tiles, luxuries and resourses returned back without the necessity of having to tile the soil.

I pre-built all main roads throughout the world. So the AI could concentrate on upgrading cities and still have large sized forces I set a lot of building improvements to spitting out various units every so many turns.

At start the AI's get 12-15 settlers. After that they cost 3 pop to build. Has not slowed any thing down though, we all get to 35 cities fairly rapidily.

As point of reference the map size is 360 by 306

MqsTout · January 22, 2004, 14:12

This has been tried to varying amounts of sensed success by various people at various times. Search the old posts.

asleepathewheel · January 22, 2004, 15:16

If I were to do this, I might double the food output of certain terrain, as well as raise the caps at 6 and 12.

What would then be great is to mod in more units having enslave ability, to perhaps warrior or something, then assimilate them into your cities and then into more units.

Justin69002003 · January 23, 2004, 03:00

I have done a 1 pop. cost for all combat units.

MoonWolf · January 23, 2004, 12:51

I've done this too. It's a long time ago, so I can't remember why I didn't continue. I don't think the effect on the AI was too high, but I also think I quit the game before it really got going. I also added the abbility to add units to cities. I remember I was think of this: as armies are traditionally men, meaning adding a lot of units to a small city will outnumber the women and should prevent growth, it should maybe loose people after a while as the birth rate should drop.

However, I do strongly agree that losing units should mean loosing population somehow...

Antrine · January 23, 2004, 13:27

//However, I do strongly agree that losing units should mean loosing population somehow...// Quote, MoonWolf

Additionally, I have dreamed to have 'morale slammed back home' when battles and/or too many troops are lost in fighting. Right now you just keep producing more and more without regard to the impact of losing units. Some kind 'impact' or penalty for 'losing troops' willy nilly could be useful to game play.

Bane Star · January 29, 2004, 01:00

I have been working on this quite intently

all 'footman' units (i.e. not siege weapons) require 1 population. mounted I'd like to get 2 (food required to keep mounts etc etc)
City sizes are now 10 and 25,
Food required increased to 3, with a +0 to +2 to all food producing tiles, with an increased emphasis on specialty foods...
3 pop required for new cities... with an advanced settler later costing 2.

But of course to combat all the other problems that result from each tweak...

I also had to add an extra corruption reduction building, an extra Forbidden palace,

increase the required culture needed to increase border sizes

still looking at how each step changes the game dynamics.....

Antrine · January 29, 2004, 06:34

Bane Star, I have a lot hours clocked with '3 pop required for new cities' and I really like it. However I did it mainly to force expansion to be specialized and/or occuring just prior Aquaduct and Hospital improvements. City sizes are set 9 and 15, however I moved Sanitation to the early Middle Age with same cost though just after Engineering. So essentially, moving past 15 occurs from early on.

Other than the worker and an engineer unit with 1 pop cost no other units are set up to cost pop. Here my philosophy is reverse than the intent of thread, namely to decrease the AI's from making hoards. I prefer to encourage that along with encouraging development so they compete better. So instead I have many a improvement spitting out various units every so many turns. In fact, I am getting more comfortable with it each game-testing.

Happy Gaming, (or modding)