Managing 400 units

[MidKnight Lament]

I think my brain just rotated 360°.

Are we talking SMAC type upgrades here? ...except to existing units? I think I need more detail.

Good to see you back, buddy

- MKL
[This message has been edited by MidKnight Lament (edited April 13, 2000).]

[Slingshot]

Okay. You've got 40 cities, and 10 units per city.

They're a mix of everything.
- land
- naval
- air
- espionage
- trade

I got inspired when "lamenting" about not being able to see MKL's cool espionage features in CivIII.

Imagine unit feature/upgrade/management "screens" were a property of the unit itself.

Imagine that you could search for all units that were:
- defensive and transport
- naval

and that you could upgrade their speed all in one command?

Imagine that the programming for CivIII was structured in such a way that even if CivIII had no espionage units, you could 'program' custom units capable of performing espionage-type functions.

Imagine that you could make wildcard units.
- They would be depicted by an icon of your choice. (within limits)
- They would have any mixture of abilities (subject to your current tech level and subject to a certain price for each ability.)

Imagine a Firaxis programmer commenting on our ideas by posting a response! (Yeah baby, yeah!)

Imagine Slingshot not using the blasted bold feature all of the time.

[This message has been edited by Slingshot (edited April 13, 2000).]

[Slingshot]

It's nice to be back!

I might be talking about SMAC units.

My only SMAC experience is with the demo, so I don't know too much about it.

I was thinking more from an object-oriented programming angle.

More specifically, I was thinking about how, say 400 units could be managed withought making the game a headache!

As I mentioned once in the past, the best part about Leonardo's Workshop was the fact that units were upgraded automatically. Forget the fact that it was also free!

[Gord McLeod]

I've never had to manage 400 units before. My play style almost always results in very few units to micromanage... the vast majority of my "armed forces" in SMAC consist of 'Former units of various designs, transport vessels, the odd supply vehicle, and later in the game, probe teams. I call them armed forces as I generally equip them all with armour, which makes them infinitely more useful as defensive forces - they don't suffer the penalties associated with being non-combat units that way. They can't attack (except for the probe teams) but they tend to be pretty good defenders. I also build dedicated (usually non-lethal method) defensive units for my bases, but they don't tend to move around much, so I don't "control" them as such. By the time I'm ready to attack someone, I generally don't need many units to do it... I use high-tech to sweep them under the rug.

[Seeker]

Actually, considering the size a civ empire can get under communism or fundamentalism I must've been playing with much more than 400 units, it's just that the vast majority of units are fortified, I've only ever commanded 10-20 a turn at one time.

[Slingshot]

Okay.

So how useful do you think it would be to have a generic upgrade workshop?

(See CTP2-General for a more refined idea.)

[Gord McLeod]

Depends on how you mean a generic upgrade workshop... SMAC has a feature I like a great deal, which makes upgrading an entire unit class to a more advanced type pretty easy. It simply upgrades all units of a specific configuration to a new configuration, globally, at the cost it would take to do each unit individually. It's a great timesaver, especially for those of us who like to keep a few units up to date technologically on a regular basis.

[Slingshot]

So then, I take it that nobody has a problem with managing 400 units.

Wow, I must be the only one!