New and Unique ideas for mods or scenarios

[GaryChildress]

Was sitting here this evening thinking of a new twist for an ATG mod and came up with the following:

1. Rig it so that cities ONLY auto produce a resource called "manpower" which would be needed to produce most subformations.
2. All production would be carried out by factories which would ONLY be buildable on "urban hexes", meaning only in suburbs outside cities.

Now I have a question, is there a way to create an event code that would guarantee that every city on a randomly generated map had exactly 3 suburban hexes next to it, no more and no less?

Also what are the thoughts of others on this new scheme? Would the AI be able to handle it do you think?

Thanks.

[Ormand]

The answer is yes. It is possible to make an pre-event that does just that. It is a bit tricky to do, and some checks would have to be implemented. Basically, you cycle over all the location types, and if it is a capitol or city, then add the extra suburban hexes. First, you have to check for existing suburbs, and then add them. Pick three of the six hexes at random to put down the suburbs. There are some special cases where you can see you could have trouble. They are probably fairly rare, but you'd have to consider them.

As for the AI, this is a good question. I don't know how it would deal with production. I mean, I am not sure that it would have an algorithm to know what to do with the factories. Especially, if the factories were general production facilities, i.e, able to build anything, and not specific like tank, aircraft, and artillery. The trouble is that at some point the production has to be coded, and I suspect that internally, the engine knows what to do with cities and the current factories. Something outside this might be hard for it to handle. You could check this by making a generalized factory in the editor, and then make a scenario with these factories, and see what the AI does. (But, you should disable the other factories). It might work.

An alternative is to keep the cities as production centers and add manpower centers next to the centers based on the size of the city. I actually started a scenario like this. It is easy enough to do. You could then make cards that increase production at a city, or in the regime in general (I think this would be much easier).

From a game design perspective, you have to ask what it is you are trying to model and do with the manpower concept. And what is it that would make it fun to play. It can be used to put a cap on units or unit production, much like raw is. But, you could also think of it as the current enlistment, or even conscription. Events along these lines would make something that could be interesting. Also, you could have a maximum population that sets an absolute manpower limit. You draw off the total for every manpower produced. You would need two regime variables for this. I looked at various things like this for a random WW2 type game, but stopped working on it because other things had a higher priority for me, and it was clear that making the AI work was going to take some work.

All this stuff is easy to do for human vs. human games, but the AI is not so easy. You will have to code it in with events.