Re: Uses for change-type action?

[Stan Shebs <shebs at shebs dot cnchost dot com>]

"James R. Dunson" wrote:
> 
>   Civilization (II+) does *not* have a choice, but I've occasionally
> wished it did.  The Leonardo's Workshop will auto-upgrade units,
> and sometimes there are two possible choices; however, the game
> can only handle one fixed "successor" unit, and will always upgrade
> to that.  IIRC my Frigates can end up converting to Galleons, which
> improves their cargo capacity but looses their combat ability; if I
> was using them for strike rather than transport, I might have rather
> left them as Frigates, or taken them to Ironclads.  Note that this
> is not intended to be a *realistic* use of upgrading, as opposed to
> the above two, which at least vaguely attempt to model swapping the
> contents out of a fixed hull; however, it is still irritating.

When I see this kind of thing in a game design, I feel pretty sure
that we're seeing the compromise outcome of a lengthy and heated
internal debate.  Real-life technology is a lot more complicated
than the Civ2 tech tree, but if the designers had tried to include
everything, the game would have been heinously complicated and
boring to boot ("Your wise men have achieved Riemannian geometry"),
and at that level of detail, the relationships are not at all
obvious - shipwrights were building galleons whether or not they
had heard of Leonardo, but where did their knowledge come from
exactly?  In Civ, they basically opted for advances and wonders
that were familiar to a large audience and that had positive
associations - once they did that, they had to force the relations
to make the game play "feel right", even though individual rules
are often ridiculous.

Stan