Design questions for a galactic civilization game (long)

[Lincoln Peters <peters2000 at mindspring dot com>]

I've been trying to create a Space Civilization game (after having given
up on making the AI understand "Cave of Amazement"), and I have run into
several rather unusual (and apparently new) issues. 

First, some background: 

The game is set up to be similar to "advances" or "3rd-age" in that it
uses lots of advanced and/or acp-independent units.  I defined all
planets as terrain types (most games define them as units) and defined
civilizations that can exist on those planets.  There are 14 types of
planets, a civilization unit, and (so far) 8 facilities for those
civilizations.

I also found that, in order to make a space game that would be any more
believable than "Star Wars", I would need a complex set of materials as
well as advanced Civ-style units.  Therefore there are a total of 8
materials defined.  Five of them (food, fuel, ores, solar, and
personnel) are produced by the environment, two more (matter and
antimatter) are generated by special factories, and the last one is
petroleum, which is only included as a time-bomb incentive for level 0
civilizations to upgrade to level 1.

The resulting game turns out to merge all the complexities of "empire"
(i.e. lots of distinct material needs for everything) with those of
"advances" or "3rd-age" (i.e. cities that depend on their terrain for
materials)!  Needless to say, I ran into problems when I set this up.

There are three materials needed to build anything:
a. Ore; required in large amounts for facilities and starships
b. Personnel; required in large amounts for armies and engineers
c. Solar energy; required across the board
Only civilizations, artificial settlements, and space colonies can
obtain those materials from the environment.  They can also build
armies, engineering teams, and small spacecraft on their own, but only
an orbital shipyard can produce anything bigger than a space shuttle. 
Shipyards cannot produce anything, but they can automatically receive
any material except food (which isn't needed by starships) from a
friendly unit up to 2 cells away.  Therefore, they are able to build
starships (assuming an adequate supply or ore), but they must get the
necessary supplies somewhere.
In case you're wondering, I decided to require multiple materials to
build things in order to create a limited-reagent problem that would
slow down production of any one unit and prevent it from using up
everything in a single turn.  For example, if a planet builds engineers
and an orbiting shipyard builds Galaxy-class starships, they won't
conflict over materials.

1. This is a futuristic game, so I want to require units to tool up
before they can build anything (except maybe a level 0 civilization). 
However, because I'm using lots of advanced, acp-independent units, I
need to limit tooling up using materials.  There do not seem to be any
tables that would let me set that up.  At the moment, I have the tool-up
code in working condition, but no matter what the tooling requirement
is, any acp-independent unit completely tools up in 1 turn!

2. Is there any way to set up a unit or terrain alteration with the sole
purpose of increasing the production of that cell?  An example that you
can find in Freeciv is irrigating land so that it produces an extra unit
of food each turn.  What I want is to be able to create terraforming
facilities that could transform an inhospitable would (e.g. Mars) into a
hospitable one (e.g. Earth), but not in a single turn!!!

3. I want to set up spaceports as facilities that quadruple the reach of
a civilization from 1 cell to 4 cells.  However, all I can figure out is
how to quadruple the number of cells that are within the 1-cell range of
the civilization.  Do you ever expect that to be possible?  I could just
increase the reach of a civilization to 4 cells, but it would be quite
unrealistic if, for example, Earth could mine resources from Pluto
without a decent spaceport.

4. Is it possible to tell units exactly what they can and cannot share
with other units, short of disabling it in the out-length table? 
In most games, that is not a problem, but in this case, it becomes
desirable to control what materials are going where, depending on what's
in short supply and what's plentiful.

5. I want to define nebulae as either a terrain coating or as a cloud
cover, but I've never seen any game that demonstrated cloud cover, nor
have I ever seen anything that makes sense of coatings.  Would either
system work for nebulae?  How would I set it up?
My idea for the properties of nebulae is that they would interfere with
line-of-sight vision and/or make it difficult to see units in a nebula,
but they could produce scarce resources like hydrogen fuel.  However, I
also want them to slowly move over time (you couldn't expect a nebula to
stay in the same place for all eternity).

6. Can I set up terrain to exchange material with adjacent cells?  My
idea is that I would define stars as cell terrain, set them up to
produce enormous quantities of solar energy (abbreviated as "solar"),
and that the material would diffuse through space.  That way, a planet
close to the star, such as Mercury, would be able to draw lots of solar
from the environment, but farther away planets, such as Pluto, would not
be able to draw as much solar.

7. Are there any plans to set up Xconq to allow players to choose which
cells an advanced unit is drawing resources from, like a player can in
Civ?

8. Are there any current plans to work on the AI "Improving" code?  In
"advances" or "3rd-age" it can get away with building facilities
randomly, as it can produce everything it needs without any facilities
(although not as much), but it's not that way in the game I'm writing. 
If a player neglects to produce an antimatter plant, it becomes
impossible to power starships.

9. Is there any mechanism I can use so that, if a starship enters a
shipyard, it can be upgraded?  I imagine that it would be similar to
when in Civ, if an obsolete unit is in a city, it can be upgraded (e.g.
cavalry to armor).  Of course, in this case, it would be like the
Starship Enterprise being re-fit with more powerful engines and
shields.  Of course, such an upgrade shouldn't happen instantaneously
like it would in Civ. 

10. Are there any plans to implement any kind of semi-AI-control, so
that a player could assign a "Defensive" plan to a star fighter, an
"Exploratory" plan to a Constellation-class starship (the kind of ship
with 4 warp nacelles instead of 2), and a "Colonizing" plan to a band of
settlers, and then let them act automatically?  This would be like in
Civ if a fighter was set to "Auto-attack", a destroyer was set to
"Auto-explore", and a team of engineers was set to "Auto-settler". 

11.  I have seen that the computer always plays especially badly in
other space-themed games (e.g. "space" and "galaxy"), probably because
it can't figure out how to transport armies across terrain that is
inhospitable to the armies.  Are there plans to create a "Transport"
plan any time soon?

12. Is there any way other than doctrines to tell a unit how many of
another unit to build?  When engineers are building space stations, or a
shipyard is building starships (e.g. the starship Enterprise), it makes
sense to build only one when given a "build" command, but with armies,
engineering teams, or space shuttles, it can be inconvenient to
repeatedly issue "build" commands (they take less time to build than
starships). 

13. When an advanced unit grows, it appears to decide what new cell(s)
to use based on the materials that it needs to live and grow.  It does
not seem to consider materials that are indirectly useful (e.g. ores) or
that are useful for other units (e.g. fuel).  In this case, a
civilization only seems to consider planets within its reach if they can
produce food; that limits its choices to G-class H-class, L-class,
M-class, and N-class planets.  It only will extract resources from other
planets if it can't find any more of those kinds of planets within its
reach.  Can it be instructed to consider materials available from
terrain that are not necessarily useful to it, but useful to other
units? 

14. In this game, outposts are essential to a civilization's ability to
conduct trade.  A civilization can send and receive supplies up to 8
cells away (if it has a spaceport), but it is quite rare for
civilizations to be that close together.  Outposts solve the problem by
sending and receiving anything (except food) up to 8 cells away.  Can
the AI figure that out and take advantage of that and build outposts
between its civilizations?

15. When a game reaches a scale this big, Xconq's user interface seems
to make things somewhat difficult.  Are there any plans to incorporate
any sort of city dialog like the one in Civ?  If you're interested, I
could design some dialog boxes with GTK+ that might be appropriate.

16. Sometimes I want to be able to build multiple facilities of the same
type (e.g. 15 antimatter plants on 1 planet).  It seems to work, but it
grows unwieldy rather quickly (try figuring out at a glance what
occupants are in a unit with 15 of *any* facility).  Could I define
facilities as being multi-part (like infantry in "napoleon") and still
get the same combined production or effect as I would from the
individual small parts?


If you're having trouble visualizing what I'm talking about, I could
send the current definition and/or a screenshot.