TACTICAL TARGETS

[shamrock]

In order to improve my recent scenario, ALLIED FORCE, I'm trying to introduce the concept of tactical targets. The key premise of this scenario is that NATO forces are restricted to using airpower only. Currently I have a number of "bridge" units that lie along rivers (with roads) throughout Serbia. If a bridge unit is destroyed, then I'd like to make the terrain more difficult to pass through. Ideally, this would merely involve using the events editor to remove the road from the river terrain once the bridge unit was killed. Is this possible or does the events editor only allow terrain types to be changed, not improvement modifications like roads? And, of course, "river" is not an allowable terrain type when selecting a new terrain. What other options does this leave? I GUESS I could change the terrain to grassland or ocean, but then this creates an odd discontinuity to the river.

Another idea I had was the "fuel depot" unit. I would like to have several (about 12) of these units spread out around Serbia. If a certain percentage are destroyed, say 25%, then there should be some detrimental effect on Serbian units, like movement rates decrease accordingly. The only way I can think to accomplish this is to reduce the road movement multiplier in the rules.txt file and require the user to load up the new rules.txt file when enough fuel depots are destroyed. Is there a better, cleaner way to do this? Is there a way for the events editor to esentially "remember" how many fuel cells have been destroyed?

Any comments or ideas would be greatly appreciated, either on the above tactical target ideas/implementations or any other tactical targets that you can think of.

[Cam]

Just off the top of my head...

Road and River problem

I sure that you're right in a 'change terrain' will not allow you to build a river square, and therefore if you want the river to continue uninterrupted, you will either need to (a.) not use a change terrain event or (b.) commit forest, mountains or hills to being rivers in appearance (and therefore not having one of these terrains in a string) and then doubling up rivers and (say) mountains. It's pretty clumsy, but when the event happens, you change the river+mountain square into a straight mountain (that appears to be a river), and you might be able to get away with it. Because rivers appear over the top of mountains and hills, you might have a river-swelling effect either side of the square in question, although the river will continue to flow uninterrupted (because of the mountains appearing to be a river chain). Confused yet? You can then lay a zero-move Domain 3 unit over the top with a 'create unit' command to represent an impassable demolished bridge if you want.

Fuel Depots

Again, a quick 'off the top of my head' suggestion would be to progressively make Serbian Wonders go obsolete as each depot falls making life progressively tougher. Another suggestion would be in one case to use Leonardo's Workshop to cut all two-move units down to one-move units through a 'give technology' event. I've not attempted this in practice, so I'll be the first to concede if this doesn't work. As for making 12 events of this nature, it's a challenge.

Another approach may be to create a tribe that are allied to the Serbians, and have their cities as fuel depots, and make their cities the 'objective' cities. By giving them a city size of one and placing them in terrain that won't allow growth, the cities would be wiped out by NATO bombers. The Serbians would need to ensure that there are 12 objectives at the end of the game for a decisive victory, 9 for a marginal,...etc.

Unfortunately in some cases, the nature of Civ2 (pre-ToT versions) is developmental, and it's actually pretty difficult to penalise a tribe other than through a small handful of techniques such as making WoWs obsolete or using 'take money' events.

Well, there's a few ideas to begin with. I look forward to other people's thoughts.

[ZhugeLiang]

Those ideas sounds pretty good. I have an interesting though about how to represent the fuel depots though. I don't know if you are using city walls for the other serbe cities, but since that would be hard to represent in the game anyways, you could use them to represent fuel depots (since a walled city can be made to look like anything). Make each depot city size 1. Give them a wonder, like Adam smith's and rename it like Fossil Fuel market or somthing (the loss of the serbian oil refineries and dumps was a large economical set back). You could make a special looking terrain square, called "wrekage or debris" or somthing. Build all the depot cities on these squares. Make them produce 0 food, 1 resource and like 20 trade. Have your cities make carvans and get trade routes with each of the refineries. When they are destroyed the serbs will lose not only the wonder, they will lose the trade and lux from the routes, which may cause disorder (representing the serbian people's protests towards the end of the war) and the wreckage square will be already be there. All this and you don't have to take up space in the events.txt, or you could use the give tech for obsoletance idea in conjuction, to make the refineries big time targets. Beware though, this is all theory, i've never done any of it, and it may have some strange and undesired effects on the game. THe scenerio sounds like it's going to be fun, let us know when it's done!

[lmstoudt]

Zhugeliang's idea sounds really intriguing, but I think if you only give city walls to the fuel depot cities the population of the real Serbian non-walled cities will be decimated by the end of a 100-150 turn scenario. Non-walled cities lose a unit population for each round of combat lost, right? Otherwise I think that's a great idea.

[ZhugeLiang]

Hmm, I thought city walls had no effect on air attacks, doesn't the city still lose a population point regardless of walls if its being hit by air?

[ZhugeLiang]

My bad, upon further testing I find that walls do in fact protect the population against air attacks.

In that case you can make the walled city graphic into the normal city graphic and the un-walled city graphic into the refinery graphic. Also you could just make the small size into a refinery graphic (since the refineries would be size 1 anyways)

[Djugashvili]

Sounds cool shamrock, but isn't Petroski and his crowd making a World War II scen involving strategic bombing? I don't know if they'd be willing to share anything w/ you, but they could drop a few hints...?

------------------
"When You Kill One, It Is A Tragedy. When You Kill 10 Million, It Is A Statistic"
-Comrade Stalin

[shamrock]

ShugeLiang-

Great suggestions, especially the idea of "debris" terrain - I may incorporate that elsewhere. Unfortunately, I don't want to represent the fuel depots as cities because my size one city graphic is used to designate Serbian barracks. And all Serb cities need to have city walls so that their population doesn't decrease on every successful air attack.

CAM-

Thanks for your great ideas as well. On the road/river problem, here is the solution I have arrived at. I have restructured all the ocean terrain to look basically like river terrain. I don't know if anyone has done this before, but it creates an interesting effect (though it was surprisingly challenging to get the terrain to stitch together smoothly). So now I've effectively created a true river border. Serb land units cannot leave the country because they are surrounded by ocean; however, to the user, it just looks like a river. This also solves the problem of replacing the terrain under a destroyed bridge. If anybody wants this modified terrain2.gif file, just e-mail me with the request.

Regarding fuel depots, I really like your idea of giving the Serbs Leonardo's and then give them a tech each time one of the fuel depots is destroyed. I figure I'll have 2 or 3 versions of each of the Serbian major units (mobile SAM, tank, jeep, howitzer, and APC). The subsequent versions of each unit will have a reduced movement rate so that when a fuel depot is destroyed and a new tech is given, Leonardo's will "upgrade" to the unit having the lower movement rate. Thus each time a fuel cell is destroyed by NATO, one type of Serb unit will have reduced movement. This should work, right?

How about a Milosovich unit that runs around everywhere? If you kill him then Serbia falls into chaos! HAHA!

You are talking about the former Yugoslavia, right?

[Cam]

Shamrock,

On the ocean-river idea - great! Good thinking!

On the Leonardo downgrades - all I can say is test it before getting too far down the track with it. I'm somewhat red-faced about dishing out a suggestion to Hendrik on another thread in this forum that would work fine in theory, however...

I have used Leonardo to 'downgrade' units in my Gangster scenario, although it did involve giving the new units some other characteristics, as I was fearful that the computer looks for some benefits to be derived from the Leonardo-effect before it takes place.

As before, best of luck with it.

[Hendrik the Great]

Shamrock:
If one makes ocean to look like rivers you would certainly have to make sure that there are no Battleships or so going along it.
Otherwise you might end up eith Battleships conducting shore-bombardment in the middle of the country.

Cam:
What suggestion? Dish it out, dish it out!
Every suggestion is a good suggestion. One might actually learn something...

[Cam]

Need I broadcast it any more ... I was unaware that you can't get a 'Unit Killed' trigger to activate an event if the unit is a missile. Oh - the embarassment! Well, you're right, I did learn something (although as SL's design tips guy, I should know everything by now)! again.

The 'fuel depot' dilemma is 'a monty' for a Test of Time scenario. Each time one's bribed (unlikely from what I sense of this scenario), captured (again unlikely - helicopters?), or destroyed (most likely), you can click over a flag (a new feature in ToT). When all 12 fuel depots are taken, an events mask can be used to end the scenario. Even if any six (say) fuel depots are destroyed, a similar mask can trigger an event such as our Leonardo's downgrade proposition.