Mod: UnitGen - Random nations with procedural sprites!

[elmokki]

Originally Posted by Valerius

Several years ago DrP was working on a price list for designing your own nation. So, just like you spend points on your pretender you could do the same for your nation. I don't remember how far he got in that project, and in any case I don't think there was a program that would generate the nation in the way your programs do.

So it occurred to me that randomly generated nations are fun but I can also see designing your own nation, in the same way you design your pretender or a character in an RPG, could be quite fun. I mention it because it seems like you've got a lot of pieces in place for such a program. You have a routine to generate sprites (that's a big one), to create the mod nation, and even a weighting system to assign values to different aspects of the nation.

Could you use that core and have a different front end that would let you build the nation to your specifications? For instance, you could choose Caelians as the race, F and N as the magic (cost would vary depending on path, highest level possible and if it was a cap only mage), and specials such as magic weapons or a boar riding wingless sacred unit.

Of course players would try to game the system but they'd be working from the same set of rules and you could always adjust point values if, for instance, everyone ends up with flying astral nations.

I'm sure I'm making it sound simpler than it is and it would probably require a lot of work but I know you work on things when you get bored so if you get bored and want try something new I think this could be interesting.

It's been suggested a couple of times before already, but essentially such system would require so much user interface coding that it's fairly unlikely I'd ever bother.

I mean, it'd be all about a) tons of user interface code and b) tons of code that tries to keep the nations balanced

Even if I bothered making the user interface, the balance code itself would be hell of a lot of work. UnitGen has very few balancing code lines and even Randomocalypse only took very little into account to prevent too powerful synergies. Those synergies would be all over the place with design-your-own-nation system.

Of course if anyone wants UnitGen source code to work with - I do warn though, many parts are totally uncommented and the code varies from terrible to decent - I'm happy to share it.

What it will do without a hitch is draw anything current UnitGen is equipped to draw and write units with given commands. Nations themselves are doable, but would need some tweaking.

EDIT: It's in Java, but I'm pretty sure any potential person knows it already.