Yeppers, mountain peaks and density as well as dustsea density are all customizable. Attrition is as well.

thie subject of "damage in the revised starting era" deserves its own thread since so many thay types of damage are possible.

however I personally feed attrition (ie a steady loss of health for time spent outside a city) while faithful to the actual uninviting conditions of the moon was a failure in terms of gameplay.

long suffering scout units who stayed out of a city the entire game were pitted against barbs who did NOT suffer attrition as far as I could tell.

however the kicker is that the attrition hardly mattered anyway. going down from a strength of 2 to 1.9 is not much of a reduction. for attrition to matter the rate of attrition damage would have to significantly increase over its current setting.

======================================

here are some ideas based upon a Disaster World starting era


1)
all cities must be underground, at least until the Isolation Event. they would have however at least one aboveground structure, namely a landing pad for communication with other cities and moon orbiting vehicles.

2)
all roads not in maria are underground, and so technically are subways.

maria (dust sea) units remain navigable but instead of being called these naval units skimmers are more realistically labelled Lunar Rovers, etc.

one fiction to explain this is that maria rock is much more dense than all the other types. however I do not know this to scientifically true.

why make this distinction then? namely Civ 4 has a vast substructure of naval units and their properties so we should strive to use it if at all possible.

3)
random acts of nature cause much damage, ie meteorites and solar flares.

after the Isolation Event new techs would be available to research in order to mitigate the harm done by these still occuring natural disasters.

thie subject of "damage in the revised starting era" deserves its own thread since so many thay types of damage are possible.

however I personally feed attrition (ie a steady loss of health for time spent outside a city) while faithful to the actual uninviting conditions of the moon was a failure in terms of gameplay.

long suffering scout units who stayed out of a city the entire game were pitted against barbs who did NOT suffer attrition as far as I could tell.

however the kicker is that the attrition hardly mattered anyway. going down from a strength of 2 to 1.9 is not much of a reduction. for attrition to matter the rate of attrition damage would have to significantly increase over its current setting.

Attrition was Belizan's baby and he never finished it the way he wanted. It has oodles of potential, but as is it needs to go.


here are some ideas based upon a Disaster World starting era

1)
all cities must be underground, at least until the Isolation Event. they would have however at least one aboveground structure, namely a landing pad for communication with other cities and moon orbiting vehicles.

2)
all roads not in maria are underground, and so technically are subways.

maria (dust sea) units remain navigable but instead of being called these naval units skimmers are more realistically labelled Lunar Rovers, etc.

one fiction to explain this is that maria rock is much more dense than all the other types. however I do not know this to scientifically true.

why make this distinction then? namely Civ 4 has a vast substructure of naval units and their properties so we should strive to use it if at all possible.

3)
random acts of nature cause much damage, ie meteorites and solar flares.

after the Isolation Event new techs would be available to research in order to mitigate the harm done by these still occuring natural disasters.
[/spoiler]

I fully agree with everything here, but by putting everything below ground we might be taking away the fun for the player. Graphically depicting the moon bases will be fun once Garret redoes the cities and only having the landing pad until era 2 could get monotonous. We'll need to see how this plays out.

I definitely want random acts of nature, but now we might be talking about BtS events...

That leads to a new thread soon. :D :D :D

long suffering scout units who stayed out of a city the entire game were pitted against barbs who did NOT suffer attrition as far as I could tell.

Barbs do suffer attrition, at least when entering a territory. I had oodles of 1.9 barb pistolman in my cityradius last night with the attrition feature activated.

======================================

here are some ideas based upon a Disaster World starting era

1)
all cities must be underground, at least until the Isolation Event. they would have however at least one aboveground structure, namely a landing pad for communication with other cities and moon orbiting vehicles.

I do agree with this, but since I'm not a graphics person I go out from the assumption I have to work with what's available so if Woodelf here teases Garnet or another artist in creating a cityset to his liking, I work with that.

2)
all roads not in maria are underground, and so technically are subways.

maria (dust sea) units remain navigable but instead of being called these naval units skimmers are more realistically labelled Lunar Rovers, etc.

one fiction to explain this is that maria rock is much more dense than all the other types. however I do not know this to scientifically true.

why make this distinction then? namely Civ 4 has a vast substructure of naval units and their properties so we should strive to use it if at all possible.

Underground roads from the very start? Nonsense! It would take a tremendous amount of time and effort to do that for no gain at all for an upstart lunar colony!

Maria and dust seas are two completely different things in my book. Maria is hard rock, dust is supposed to be a semi-fluid feature covering indentions of the landscape. In reality it doesn't even exist on the moon!

If you like to have a "naval" substructure, I recommend looking up instead of staying afloat. Long range transportation/warfare on the moon would rely on rocket-shuttles instead of any type of naval unit. I recommend improving upon the "air" part.

3)
random acts of nature cause much damage, ie meteorites and solar flares.

after the Isolation Event new techs would be available to research in order to mitigate the harm done by these still occuring natural disasters.

Protection against a random event like meteorites would involve a sort of SDI-initiative. Protection against solar flares (or at least their byproducts) is thicker isolation for the radiation (just a metre thick layer of moonrock will do the trick), and EMP-resistent equipment.

Underground roads from the very start? Nonsense! It would take a tremendous amount of time and effort to do that for no gain at all for an upstart lunar colony!


how about underground roads as a railroad-like improvement after the Isolation Event?

the result of all that dynamiting would be both faster transport and radiation protection.


Maria and dust seas are two completely different things in my book. Maria is hard rock, dust is supposed to be a semi-fluid feature covering indentions of the landscape. In reality it doesn't even exist on the moon!

granted. before the first moon landing the skeptics said the moon could be a vast dust sea and the lander would be swallowed up. it obviously did not happen.

if maria is the hardest moonrock it would provide the best traction to a land based vehicle?


If you like to have a "naval" substructure, I recommend looking up instead of staying afloat. Long range transportation/warfare on the moon would rely on rocket-shuttles instead of any type of naval unit. I recommend improving upon the "air" part.


if we do keep a terrain tile that provides isolation using lunar rockets as transport would be a way to conquer that isolation.


Protection against a random event like meteorites would involve a sort of SDI-initiative. Protection against solar flares (or at least their byproducts) is thicker isolation for the radiation (just a metre thick layer of moonrock will do the trick), and EMP-resistent equipment.

but would SDI help all civs on the moon are only the civ that built it?

@ woodelfs idea
I was thinking that with the random acts of nature we could have meteor showers which would have a chance to open up some sort of hidden resource below the surface of the moon which can only be extracted at a high tech level.

I see Boreholes are entering the quay! :D

Deep Lunar Mining sounds later than the first two eras though Geo. :p

@ woodelfs idea
I was thinking that with the random acts of nature we could have meteor showers which would have a chance to open up some sort of hidden resource below the surface of the moon which can only be extracted at a high tech level.

I think this was an idea at one time. Debris or whatnot from random impacts were going to leave trace amounts of something and could unLunar deposits that couldn't be reached prior.

Deep Lunar Mining sounds later than the first two eras though Geo. :p

Really? Could have fooled me... :mischief: