Upgrading units

from Elemental Forums

So in 4X games if you're going to upgrade a unit to a design in a compatible series (may not apply here) it's a variation on something like going to a base with a barracks and then paying a lump of currency to turn your old unit into the new unit (with the same experience level as the old unit).

On the premise that Elemental may have an economic system where all the unit equipment is being produced as goods and then shipped to the city where units are being trained with it, the above model would be cheating! Instead I propose one of two (or both) ways to deal with this.

1) A unit enters a city with the necessary equipment for the upgrade and then instantly upgrades, taking a small experience penalty for being unfamiliar with the new gear (proportional perhaps to the gulf between the new and old gear equipped.)

2) A unit enters a city with the necessary equipment for the upgrade and then spends a few turns retraining to equip the new equipment with no experience penalty.

The option to do one or the other of these two would give some flexibility when the pressure is on, and the mechanic opens up exciting possibilities for conquest. Imagine that with your superior numbers of spearmen you have overwhelmed a small city on the edge of a kingdom with superior technology. In fact, you've also captured a warehouse full of magic swords they were going to use to raise an army against you, and now you can equip your spearmen with them, despite not being able to make the swords yourself. I imagine the spearmen picking up the swords and shouting "oh hooooo!" and then, you know, arms accidentally get cut off. This gives you the edge you need to make deeper incursions into the magic sword kingdom, capturing more of their equipment as you go (perhaps even some as loot in battle.)

This is more of a goal than anything and I realize it raises a lot of questions in other parts of the game.

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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I really like the idea of being able to capture military equipment from your enemies. It could lead to some really interesting strategies, and puts more importance on defending your trade routes. Instead of just losing income, now you lose income and the enemy takes your weapons. Not good.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

they (the  devs) have mentioned a few times that there should be a way for units to automatically upgrade themselves when better equipment becomes available.    Next major beta release is supposed to have the actual "skeleton" of the gameplay, rather than just a  "does it run" test.   So we'll have to see what it looks like  from  there.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I like the idea of soldiers having seperate experience amounts with different forms of equipment, as well as general soldier training.  The thought that you could equip your pikemen with swords to go dungeon crawling, then pull their pikes back out to deal with some incoming calvary.

The good system scares me a bit, because it sounds like it will be overwhelming.  But as long as Frogboy's terrifying AI can be scaled down to my level, I'm okay with that. :)

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I think that routing would be the most terrifying thing about the goods system. I think there's gameplay advantages to equipment = goods in this fashion (bringing the economic weight of your empire to focus on one city to produce units with great efficiency vs. needing to defend all your supply lines vs. interrupting enemy supply lines vs. capturing stockpiles as above) but the absolute nightmare of course is if the game turns into Sid Meier's Colonization and we're pushing wagon trains of magic swords all over the map manually. Anyone remember Warlords 2 and 3 where you had unit vecotring after production? I'd like to see something similar to that but instead of a billion arrows, arrows that automatically develop roots to combine shipments on the way to the destination. I should draw this on a napkin.

Agreed as above, we'll see how it is in the skeleton, but this is also the sort of idea I hope it's not too late for the devs to consider. I was dismayed in the economy journal post to find so much support for what I felt was an overly simple system.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I like the idea of being able to get equipment you can't make yet from conquered cities. It could also give you a boost when it actually comes time to research it as some of your men will already have experience using it.

The real question is will they even allow your units to use technology they don't "understand" yet? Most games of this kind won't let you use tech or magical items you find until you research them.

Here's a question for you. In Pen and Paper D&D would you put on a Magical Ring without casting "Identify" first? I wouldn't. There's a high chance it won't be beneficial. Perhaps even cursed. I wonder what the chances are that Stardock will take that into account?

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

I like this idea.


I was just commenting in another thread I think it'd be cool if Civilizations that don't have the means to manufacture or produce certain items could still use them.


Say one large empire produces the finest horses or weapons, the other empires uses their horses and weapons for battle amongst eachother, making the first empire rich and indesposable to the others.