Spice Economy
I read up on spice at wikipedia. The "Little Maker" article has the best description. Fremen were able to mine spice manually throughout history. The best way to mine it is to wait for a "spice blow", like a small volcano, and find the rich spice deposit right afterwards. With technology, they would airlift a harvester there, collect until wormsign was spotted nearby, and then flee.
I am not sure how to fit that into a Civ mod. The airlift unit is late in the game, but we want to make spice mining important throughout the whole game. We can make desert generally give a high gold value (see 81 below). We can make the existing spice bonuses give pretty high gold, but deep desert ground units don't appear till mid game.
One thing I can do, after we get the windtrap integrated, is write some more python which will make "spice blows" randomly appear. There is a tornado minimod I can use. After the spice blow, a valuable bonus should appear. I was thinking that this bonus could remain for a number of turns and then disappear. But if we want some kind of "spice victory" based on controlling spice output, having them appear randomly may be a little frustrating.
I guess I am not really sure how to proceed on that. Any thoughts?
Hey guys. I'm re-reading the original book as research and I really think spice harvesting is one key feature that has to be present in this mod.
Personally, I think the way Westwood did it in Dune 2 was really faithful to the book. The harvester is ferried to and from the spice field by the carryall. You could see the wormsign as a ripples in the sand. Occasionally, you'd lose a harvester to a worm.
I think just having a passive resource or making a spice bonus doesn't do enough to capture the Dune theme, but I recognise that this is a Civ 4 mod not an RTS.
Some points on spice:
1) I think spice should be so important that it should possibly replace gold as the currency in the game. The only source of this currency is harvesting spice. This makes spice harvesting a vital and strategic part of the game. If you don't look after spice production then you will have no means of doing anything. The spice must flow...
2) The limiting factor on spice production in the book is that it is dangerous, due to storms, worms and the harsh conditions of the desert. How can this be modelled in game terms?
3) Is there anyway we can make spice something that has to be physically harvested from tiles? I like the spice blow idea - that is thematically strong. I am planning out worm animations at the moment and my plan is that the worms Idle and Run animations will just be a ripple in the sand. The fortify animation (which happens just before an attack) will be the dramatic burst through the sand in a cloud of dust. If we could actually have the worms and the harvesting linked so that occasionally you get a pop saying "There is wormsign near your harvester", and you can pick it up provided you have a carryall nearby, that would be great. Like they mentioned on the modcast, it is not much fun to have a pop up saying "One of your units was eaten by a sandworm" - there has to be at least the possibility of saving it.
3) On one hand you can make spice harvesting so abstract that there is no sense of the Dune theme. On the other you could make it faithful to the book and detailed like in Dune 2, but perhaps be left with a lot of dull micromanagement and an AI that has no clue what to do. Hopefully, there's a nice balance to be found though. I would rather that spice harvesting be something important, that the player has to be actively involved in, rather than something that just happens passively. This might be the difference between a game that just feels like Civ 4 with desert and future units, and something that really feels like you're inside the Dune universe.
4) All factions should start with a certain number of units, harvesters, carryalls, ornithopters allowing them to harvest the spice. This is consistent with the book where the Atreides inherent a limited amount of spice harvesting equipment when they come to Arrakis. These units should wear out after a time due to the harsh weather conditions - every mechanic unit should have a limited lifespan since the Dune environment is unbelievably harsh. Factions cannot build there own havesting units until they have the requisite technologies. I think there should be an equipment deprecation lifespan on mechanical units - it helps with the theme and could add an interesting dimension to strategy. Maybe units only wear down when they are outside cities.
5) Regarding a spice victory, controlling Dune and controlling spice production is one and the same thing. It would be hard then to separate a domination or conquest victory from a spice victory. Perhaps if there is a more sophisticated spice harvesting model, then you could get a victory for hitting a particular target.
In one game it even manged to conquer a city on another continent. I disabled some python comp (sandworms...) to make sure ai can handle dropships (there is a 'safe path' condition in better ai).
