An evolution of the city: the region

MrBaggins · February 20, 2003, 14:52

There are 6 different growth stages a city has, defined in (citysize0.txt thru citycity5.txt)

The first 2 are the size 0 and size 1-6, center ring, and 1st 'ring' of tiles. Each subsequent growth stage adds to the range of influence that the city has. The last is pretty much unused.

I suggest that we use this last city size to denote a new type of 'city' a metropolitan region:

City's sprawl and merge. At the moment, when two cities grow large, they eventually run into one another and stunt each others growth.

What I am suggesting is that when the two cities grow to the maximum for the size5 growth AND they both have a particular city improvement (so that player an AI could prevent this happening should they wish to,) the two cities are 'destroyed' and merged into one, with a greatly increased radius of influence (and border and vision range to match):

* Wonders are combined in the new city.

* Where both have the same improvement, it is created in the new city.

* Troops are moved (and extras beyond 12 are placed closeby)

The other aspect to this is migration:

Cities within the new large radius will be subject to migration. This will be lessened and/or prevented by the building of certain improvements (or use existing improvements to lessen or negate migration.)

The flexibility 'problem' with a large city is the fact that there is only one build queue. This could be solved by having 'unit packages'... minature armies which are created when a unit package is built. The AI could easily be tasked to build these, and handle the change just fine.

Thoughts anyone? Its achievable as of now... although it would improve by being integrated with the colonization concept.

MrBaggins

HuangShang · February 20, 2003, 21:05

i have only one question right now: how large is the new city, is it much much bigger? and does it keep the shape of the original 2, or it is still squares (like normal cities)

i'd love to see anything new and this one sounds very tight

Peter Triggs · February 21, 2003, 18:08

Interesting ideas, Mr Baggins. I especially like the one about 'unit packages'.

BTW, you mentioned in another thread:

Quote:

Regarding the UI being text defined (with templates)... thats how its done where the intent is to allow for user defined UI's... as per Mirc and, say, CtP2.

Could you please expand on this. AFAICR, no-one's had any luck playing with CTP2's UI.

MrBaggins · February 21, 2003, 19:38

I was playing around with it dealing with a problem I was having.

Its pretty straightforward, since I have some experience with text defined dialogs anyway...

Our only problem with doing 'useful things' is that we can't add functionality, only take away, because the inheretence of the numbers comes from CtP2.exe

Dialogs can't 'ASK' for information. We can make them more pretty, and tabbed and stuff though

MrBaggins

MrBaggins · February 21, 2003, 23:27

BTW... its pretty clear that the original intent was to have fully modable user defined dialogs, but they ultimately never finished them, like so much else in CtP2.

Martin Gühmann · February 22, 2003, 17:09

Quote:

Originally posted by MrBaggins
BTW... its pretty clear that the original intent was to have fully modable user defined dialogs, but they ultimately never finished them, like so much else in CtP2.

Well then it is a left over from CTP1 there we have actual the same scripted UI system, and there is of course a limited possibility of modding it, for example we have the bigger trade screen in CTP1.

Quote:

Originally posted by MrBaggins
Our only problem with doing 'useful things' is that we can't add functionality, only take away, because the inheretence of the numbers comes from CtP2.exe

Well if you are able to add to your new UI components a string then you could add some information to it, for instance we have all the build in arrays and build in strings, and we have the action array that can be loaded with a string. So far it is only theory but I think it is possible to tell the player more then an opponent has accepted or rejected his diplomacy proposal. Exspecialy we don't have to add something new here to the UI, just modify two strings.

-Martin

MrBaggins · February 22, 2003, 17:13

Yes, the strings defined in the can include built in variables, and can be altered, the problem is that the variables you want are often (or usually

) out of scope.

Martin Gühmann · February 22, 2003, 17:19

Quote:

Originally posted by MrBaggins
Yes, the strings defined in the can include built in variables, and can be altered, the problem is that the variables you want are often (or usually

) out of scope.

Yeah that could be the problem with the action array. But it could be possible to use the accept and recect events to change it, and hope that the variables are in scope.

-Martin

Maquiladora · February 22, 2003, 17:25

Regions eh, has someone been playing Sim City 4? I have, i just got it today

Like the idea.

HuangShang · February 22, 2003, 20:05

Quote:

Originally posted by HuangShang
i have only one question right now: how large is the new city, is it much much bigger? and does it keep the shape of the original 2, or it is still squares (like normal cities)

i'd love to see anything new and this one sounds very tight

is it just me or did u miss my question?

Peter Triggs · February 23, 2003, 08:49

Thanks. I had a feeling that it was going to be something like that.

Quote:

BTW... its pretty clear that the original intent was to have fully modable user defined dialogs, but they ultimately never finished them, like so much else in CtP2.

It looks like CTP2 is doomed to go down in history as 'the one that might have been the best civ game ever'.

The Big Mc · February 24, 2003, 13:36

Well I have a suggestion which i came up with will dealing with city expansion and that was the city never seamed to expand right it was we have a new pop lets whack a city imp at the side and were ok.

Well the idea i had was of a city having six city step up and then we have to move to the next tile. before you ask this would also give us the opportunity to fix a bug or too.

we all know that you can only have a limited number of cities well if we convert every city to a tile imp we can use these cities and a pile of slic to allow for an increased number of cities to be made available for moding. The secondary benefits of this is colony’s as colony’s can be assigned a different tile imp and they look better.

MrBaggins · February 24, 2003, 16:30

I reached a point designing various functionalities... specifically game state discovery and alteration, that whilst I could achieve a lot of it, the actual tools provided were pretty pitiful, in comparison to a mature programming language, that I'm used to, and that I'm doing kludgy workarounds to solve problems that should be simple... given a mature development environment.

Admittedly, you have to give some large amount of kudos to MrOgre and the team for developing a remarkably flexible game. They were subject to limitations that ultimately produced a suboptimal product though.

I decided that, rather than continue to wrestle with the SLIC engine any further, that my time and energy would be better spent developing a new environment.

The project name for this is Catapult. It deviates from most designs in that the game engine does not include game logic, or even game entities (such as cities.) There is a staggered isometric map, but thats about all that is predefined.

This logic and these entities are defined and created in a macro language, which is then parsed by the parsing engine and rendered by the graphics engine.

Thus, to make a game, you hard code (as in compile) nothing... and anything that was done to create the 'original' game as was, you will be able to change, remove or extend.

MrBaggins

The Big Mc · February 27, 2003, 08:42

Catapult what about son of slic

MrBaggins · February 27, 2003, 10:51

can you clarify what you just said? (Big Mc)

The Big Mc · February 27, 2003, 12:08

its a joke you know it is soposed to be funney.