I think it is cool to come up with names to help them get around building a civ successor. Some I have heard are:
…………..
my fav:
- Sid Meier's Diaspora Earth
Wouldn't it be nice once that FTL communication/travel get discovered that SMAC colonists go back to earth and reconquer?
I’ve always thought that playing on an Earth map is too constricting: you already know the layout of the continents. Also, what would be the 8th Faction then? Barbarians from the fallen global civilizations?
I do like the theme of “Diaspora” you mention above, but on a more galactic level. Say once the Factions re-discover spaceflight they stumble upon how the Progenitors were able to roam the galaxy back in their day: wormholes! Once the Factions are able to understand how to navigate these wormholes they then start exploring the galaxy en-masse, i.e. a Diaspora of Humanity as each Faction seeks out their own version of Eden. Conflicts would arise as Factions battle over more choice real estate, or squabbling over artifacts from ancient alien civilizations. This approach could also be used to explain why the Progs never visited Earth – simply say that no wormholes connect to the Sol system.
This approach also lends itself better to the game's worldbuilder being able to generate a myriad of different planetary maps: from tiny rocks to huge waterworlds, and everything in between.
The other piece of the puzzle is the 8th Faction. Since the PlanetMind and its related denizens (mindworms, Fungal Towers, Sealurks, fungus, etc.) were only resident on a handful of planets, then I think having another option available is viable. What I’ve played around with in the past is a variant of the von Neumann machines.
For those unfamiliar with von Neumann machines, here is an explanation:
In theory, a self-replicating spacecraft could be sent to a neighbouring star-system, where it would seek out raw materials (extracted from asteroids, moons, gas giants, etc.) to create replicas of itself. These replicas would then be sent out to other star systems. The original "parent" probe could then pursue its primary purpose within the star system. This mission varies widely depending on the variant of self-replicating starship proposed.
Yet another variant on the idea of the self-replicating starship is that of the "seeder" ship. Such starships might store the genetic patterns of lifeforms from their home world, perhaps even of the species which created it. Upon finding a habitable exoplanet, or even one that might be terraformed, it would try to replicate such lifeforms — either from stored embryos (see: embryo space colonization) or from stored information using molecular nanotechnology to "build" zygotes with varying genetic information from local raw materials.
Such ships might be terraforming vessels, preparing colony worlds for later colonization by other vessels, or — should they be programmed to recreate, raise, and educate individuals of the species that created it — self-replicating colonizers themselves.
The variant of von Neumann I envision for SMAC2 falls in line with the “seeder ship” theme in that the probes enter a solar system, locate a “habitable” planet, and establish themselves on it by terraforming it to an ideal state (i.e. vegetation and humus on land, as well as generating a corresponding aquatic ecosystems to their masters pre-programmed needs). The von Neumann probes would then go dormant and await the arrival of their masters. The humans who would then stumble in and colonize these worlds would then be the “fly in the ointment” as it were, as their own terraforming would conflict with that of the von Neumann machines: the more heavily the humans terraform a world, the more it would conflict with the ideal ecosystems established by the von Neumann probes, thus reviving the probes and their mandate of terraforming to their own ideals. The darker side to these von Neumann probes would be that they have programmed into them the capabilities to destroy existing civilizations on targeted worlds: these would manifest themselves via analogies to the mindworms, spore launchers, sealurks, fungal towers, etc.
D