Future Mod

Tholish said:

What do you mean by organizing the future units into tiers?

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I was speaking more of the resource requirements for future units progressing (approximately) from plasteel through fusion and lithium, ending up at duralloy and antimatter. They're not really unit tiers, that's just how I thought about it.

I'm working on redoing the UnitCombats right now. For example, since Tank had been weakened I made AT tank have 100 percent versus Armor and Tank have 50, then made Mechanized Infantry and Mobile Artillery have Armor as unitcombat. Along with the existing changes (blitz for Mechinfantry rather than Tanks, artillery with 90 percent retreat, that makes the modern units really well balanced,so you will want combined arms stacks, and even some good old foot soldiers out there, especially fortified with slightly bolstered AT Infantry and SAM Infantry.

Also, various great people upgrade to missionaries if you have the tech for the religion, so you can build Software studio even if nobody has sent you a virtualist missionary, just by using up a Great Engineer.

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Sounds great.

Where I am now I have slow internet, and when I get back at the end of the month I will indeed put the polished version on the finished mods forum, with a front page as well. But first I will put it here and maybe you could use it to create my first page.

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Well if you want me to help with advertising, the key is to keep it simple. So my thought above for future units was really more of a brainstorming idea than a practical one. A good spoiler tag might be something like:

A Few of the Future Units added:


The flavor text for warbots could be done for all of them and shows how you can explain little details in a way that newcomers to the mod would see. Post about 1/4 to 1/2 of a list to let players find stuff out for themselves.

I'm kind of all over lately, so if you want me to try to put some stuff together you'll have to remind me or I'll forget.

I've also done some work on documenting stuff in the civiliopedia, and that brought me to the issue of leaderheads, where I am at an impasse. I want to supply all the leaderheads of the regular game, tio have them available for scenarios, but want a bunch of future and modern types so that the future mod isn't dominated by Shaka and Montezuma (who are now both ardent Environmentalists).

I'm thinking about going to one leader one civ, and having multiple civs of each nation, so that there would be 4 Americas, so you could have Lincoln versus Roosevelt. Also I am using ancient civs, like Byzantium, to represent say Yugoslavia. The question is, how much should I put fiction into this basic game and how much should I leave to scenarios? Should I keep Gilgamesh as is, or make up a fictional future leader based on him? Should I just name these Americas "America" or make up factions of a fictional future divided America?

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Just worry about the main game. Everything else should be done on a scenario by scenario basis.
One thing about the civs is that they're all the same right now so I feel like they're completely interchangeable i.e I just choose my favorite personality traits and go so I'd like to know if that's gonna stay that way?

But your question is about leaders so I would say that since all the leaders in BTS are past leaders (and this is the future mod) maybe a future project (no pun intended) could be redoing all the leaderheads (likely the civs themselves) with modern leaders of today to give a better feel to late game diplomacy? there's the World 2009 mod under construction that might have some synergy here.

Also, I encountered an issue where the game stayed on other civs turn indefinitely, and I believe it was related to global warming, so I removed the global warming mod and started from a WB save and had no more problems with that game. May be nothihng wrong with he global warming mod, probably a synergy with mine, since there are really just gobs of nuclear blow ups. So, that frees me up to put in an SDK mod (just one, since I'm not up to merging them). What would you recommend?

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I haven't been on the site long enough to have much of an opinion. Do you use Blue Marble terrain? I would highly recommend it for space stuff.
I also tend not to report bugs as I have an old, bugged out comp. A few ctd's for me, but nothing that got replicated.

Not to bump myself. This beta is really ridiculously bad compared to what I am up to now. I have so fixed so much and added such cool stuff.

However this pertains. I got tired of relic sailing ships in the future era and made them have a LateArt look, along with the land units, and while I was doing that I noticed the scale discrepancy, so I adjusted all the naval units to match nicely. They and spaceships are on the same scale as cities.

This leaves the question: should I rescale all the other land units to be on the same scale as the improvements? This gives the game basically two scales. See attached pictures for some of what this might look like.

Also, I'm thinking maybe I'll just leave land units normal for the regular release, but include a patch with 1.00 (that being 1.01) that provides the rescaled look.

Of course, as you can see in the second picture, I also allow the camera to zoom in to 100 instead of 700.

More zoom is great! I've never seen another mod that has that.

Providing rescaled land units in a patch (Maybe a modular patch just for that?) seems like a good idea since you know at least some people won't like the change. I'm on board though.

Cool stuff? Does that mean the other planets idea is making progress?

Other mods don't have that because they haven't equalized scales. Civ uses psychology to equate to zoom. Each unit fills its square and your eye and you learn not to notice that the scales don't match. Besides, we are accustomed to adjusting for perspective. So the discrepancy only strikes us occasionally. So it isn't necessary to make the change, but it's an extra fancification. However, it makes more zoom both necessary and beneficial. Now if only I could get units sharing a square to all show at once instead of just the best defender on top. I mean, if you have 12 tiny infantry guys per unit, and have three infantry units, it shouldn't be impossible to show 36 infantry guys in the same square. That's for the distant future though.

I was going to leave other planets to versions following 1.00. I'm keeping everything set up so that the same basic mod will work with the additions without too much retroactive change. Everything upgrades to versions that can work in Space. For example I now use a different city set (University from Planetfall) for the last two eras, without the plot grid (streets) so that there can be cities in space without looking ridiculous, yet they will also work on Earth or Mars. Just a matter of Buildings having late versions that fit in or going obsolete. Also most foot soldiers upgrade to stuff that doesn't look out of place walking around on Mars. The Hi Tech Infantry for example.

But 1.00 first. The mistake I made right after BtS first came out and I made my first attempt at this project was that I tried to build a skyscraper without a good foundation.

Almost done. This link gets you basically 1.0 without complete credits.

http://www.atomicgamer.com/file.php?id=76111

Maybe somebody can help me with figuring out why I can't add any more Features.

slight problem I found (with the pevious version so i'm not 100% sure its still their)

I remember noticing that problem and fixing it. The original idea was this backstory where the Hover Dreadnoughts were designed as hovering sea craft, but it was discovered that they could function (slowly) on land as well, so later versions were made as all terrain land units. So the Hover Dreadnought was a Sea unit with All Terrains and the later ones were Land Units with All terrains. I thought it wouldn't hurt anything, but it did. Game play is a lot more important. Domain issues are really a style cramper. I had to ditch the sea cities and fish farms as well. Though they could be implemented, the AI doesn't deal with them well.

Got v.99. Not too far into it yet but I like the tweaks I've noticed so far. Good placement of the Corp. techs IMO.

Anywho, my friend came over & I said we should try it & he said, "Sure! Let's do Advanced start!"
When we got going, we immediately noticed that we both lacked palaces & thus a capital. However, all of our rivals did have one. Just checked & single player Advanced start does it too.

The reason it sucks so much is that with an AS you have maintenance costs from turn 1 and not having a palace cripples you until you can build one. Plus you can't access the WB in a hotseat game to cheat one.

Since palaces don't work that way without using an AS I figured I should point it out.

Advanced start is absolutely recommended. If you are past industrial, all the religions will be randomly assigned, though. Also, pick a map script that allows you the mods full 8 square range for AP cities also. Some override the XML. Continents, for example does this, but Custom Continents does not.

Any civilization that did not have a true Capitol in the Rennaissance, such as Celts (based on available leaders), Babylon or Native America, starts without a palace and has to build one. If you do a default start they will also have to research "Age of Enlightenment." These are basically reactionary factions that have not established themselves yet as fullfledged nations. Maybe I should document that in the civilopedia. I guess you and your friend got unlucky. The way to deal with starting as one of those civs is to start by building the palace, preferably by building a farm on a riverside forest, while researching age of enlightenment. I know, one choice is no choice, but I figure you have a choice of Civilization. Its sort of a handicap option that also makes for a few weak civs in the mix initially.

The idea for this was that it would increase the chance of your seeing "The Babylonian Civilization has been destroyed." Yet I wanted to include these Civilizations as alternate universe possibilities. Also I wanted some civs to be a little more backward than others, which meant using the Rennaissance, which meant some decisively incorrect art for some civs, so I moved them back farther, which meant they had no city art at all, since I had eliminated it back when I was trying to make the whole thing fit into an attachment, so to be lazy I put back a minimal amount for them (default ancient) seeing as how it doesn't last long anyway. That made the palace, which I like as Versailles since it fits into almost all eras, be really out of place. So, I decided to just take palace away from these backwards civs. Yes, it makes them hard to play, but what are you doing playing Babylon in a future mod anyway? It doesn't last long, you build this palace so it doesn't look out of place because you built it, and you catapult from primitive into the Industrial era as many civs really did.

I noticed also that the existence of this sprinkling of weakened civs has a good effect on the game. It means some AI will be next to one and it will imbalance the whole international dynamic enough to keep it interesting. Prevents all these identical, evenly matched AIs from just establishing stable borders and working on spaceships. You get world wars instead. However, like I say, it should be documented. Maybe even in the name of the handicapped civs, with an article in the Future Mod Concepts. So, do you think its really so bad I should eliminate it?

OK, I thought about it. It should be an option. Here's a patch. Replace the other one with it. All it does is change the advanced placement cost of Palace from -1 to 1000.

Hey thanx for the option! And it was 'Future Celts'. I thought that sounded awesome.
Documentation of which civ is affected would be logical. Could you make a mouseover popup feature for the cusom game setup screen or would that be too time consuming / impossible? As it is now it just says 'France' 3 times in the civ selection tab.

Keep up the innovative work!

I'll post 1.0 this coming weekend, now that I've solved the feature problem. Probably I can fix the custom game setup screen pretty easily by just changing some tags or something. I'll look at it. I hope I don't have to mess with Python. I can sort of read, alter and merge it, but I can't really write it. Thanks for playtesting Asthix and please please please let me know of anything else you find, especially in later eras.

One more thought on advanced start. Is it your intention that people can build roads during setup even though they have a resource requirement? EDIT: I see the difference now between roads vs. highways, disregard above.

also, did you leave off Archaeology and the religious techs from the tech screen so that you can't buy them during an AS? Or did you just not want to redo the tech tree. (I can see that)

Regarding primordial techs and highways: I did these as they are originally because I hadn't gotten around to fixing them yet, but I found I liked the way it was, so I left it on purpose. Sort of a serendipity and evolution thing. The ancient oriented techs are things of the past that are sort of uncovered, so they don't appear on the main tech advisor. Yeah, that means no colloseum or piles of alien temples on advanced starts. This is a measure to give civs that actually have a religion first crack at founding it.

On post industrial AS starts you can start with old highways even if you don't currently have oil, fuel, lithium, or electrolytes because that is part of the premise. A world war has just ended and everybody is recovering. Presumably the sources of fuel that allowed you to build highways have been destroyed, captured, or depleted.

I've got planet terrains and features now and have scripts to generate moderately realistic maps of each kind of planet (Space, Orbit, Venus, Titan, Mars, Spacerock ie Mercury Io or Luna, Icemoon ie Callisto, Ganymede, Europa or various others such as Triton and Pluto) as well as space Features (Cloud, Regolith, Carbonice, Scorch, and Asteroids). I am currently tweaking things to make these playable. For instance, playing on a Mars map I found that I could only make one city because all settlers that can move on Mars require a bonus, and if there isn't one in my cultural borders there is never any hope, so I gave regular settler (which looks like a hummer by then anyway) the ability to move on clear Mars, Spacerock Titan and Icemoon terrains with Composites. These maps are playable if you start in the near future or later. Took me a while to find all the different ways to make sure there were no lakes or rivers (except on Titan).

Regarding the religions, you might have noticed that there are now 15 religions (about 5 of them practical future religions gotten with techs that are in the tech advisor and the rest standard happytemple and shrinegold religions gotten either by having a chance to found the religion since your civ really has or had it, by researching dead religions with archeology or by building a missionary for them under free religion once you have liberalism) and 9 corporations. However, I am using a modcomp that obsoletes the minority religion (by number of cities it is in) if your civ has more than 5 religions. It would be pretty easy to change this value higher or lower, but I think 5 is about right. Would 3 or 4 be better?

Also, I think the National Museum allowing ancient wonders with Archeaology was a neat trick. Should there be more ancient wonders put back in or is the handful about right for the game?

I'll have a look at the next version, maybe there's something interesting for me in it (like the features or the religions).

For the restricted settlers: You can give the palace the bonus, which you need to build settlers, so it's not so hard.

Tholish said:

I've got planet terrains and features now and have scripts to generate moderately realistic maps of each kind of planet (Space, Orbit, Venus, Titan, Mars, Spacerock ie Mercury Io or Luna, Icemoon ie Callisto, Ganymede, Europa or various others such as Triton and Pluto) as well as space Features (Cloud, Regolith, Carbonice, Scorch, and Asteroids).

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Impressive.

Regarding the religions, I am using a modcomp that obsoletes the minority religion (by number of cities it is in) if your civ has more than 5 religions. It would be pretty easy to change this value higher or lower, but I think 5 is about right. Would 3 or 4 be better?

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5 seems fine but wouldn't it automatically obsolete the new (ie future) religions when they're founded by you if your civ has 5 already since the newly founded one has the lowest # of cities its in?

Also, I think the National Museum allowing ancient wonders with Archeaology was a neat trick. Should there be more ancient wonders put back in or is the handful about right for the game?

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Well, there's a lot to build already, I'd say set the bar high for more ancient wonders.

Wild brainstorm: Say, are you familiar with the unique terrain features in Ffh 2? Wouldn't those spice up the other planets? Olympus Mons for example, although it might be tough to think up a rationale for possible benefits ) to nearby cities from being inspiring?)
To really be a viable idea they would have to be specific to each planet with at least a few for each one as well.
Or you could take the mechanic and make the ancient wonders unique terrain features. That way they'd all (or just some depending on map size) be on the map at game start and provide a different method for controlling their ownership than simple city conquest.

Even more on Advanced Start: I found out you can delete the road in a city for the 50 points it nets you but if you do you can't put it back! You have to wait till the main game and rebuild it with workers.

One last question, did you change it so a settler can found a city only two squares from another? I don't think it let you be so close in reg. bts...

I did change it so a city can be founded only two squares from another. The ai uses this on advanced start, but not in game. This was so scenarios could use it, but it can't hurt. The religion obsoletion is random. I will look into Ffh 2 for additional features. In the meantime, I have posted 1.0 and started a thread in the completed mods forum.

FutureMod 1.0:

http://www.atomicgamer.com/file.php?id=76355

This will remain the development thread, that will be the finished product thread, with 1.0 a perfectly good mod that can stand on its own.

Between here and 2.0 there will be two lines of progress. One will be perfecting the existing mod. These changes include:

Just a better interface in detail ways, buttons and such. For example, separate the ArtInfo for the late version of missionaries and give them their logo for a button, not the space worker. Corporation logos need to improve and be distinct on all butons.

Improved scripts. I'm not getting enough Regolith on Mars and the default should be x wrap for all of them and since these are based on an originally regional map they have cold at one end and hot at the other instead of an equator. Ideally I want a script that generates the space and orbit terrain and multiple planet strips of different types

Gameplay tweaks. The ai doesn't build the rocket fuel factory. For that matter, why is iron so rare on mars and venus and luna? They're lousy with it. So I think I'll make rocket fuel factory more beneficial and buildable anywhere. You can make rocket fuel out of turpentine or moon dust, it just takes a lot of energy, so no bonus requirement. And there will be a special Ironmine imp that you can build on Venus or Regolith that has a chance to produce iron each turn. Or Titanium (coming) or any of several others.

AI. I can't really handle python, but I have to do something to make the AI cross space, might try to get into the dll. Took a course in C++ but this doesn't look easy.

Adding the past. This will be cool. I'll engineer a dark age by having a bunch of techs that give you a military advantage while obsoleting the ancient versions of all buildings. With Degeneracy, you can build Auxilliary or Horde, but now the Forum is obsolete and since your Legionary has now upgraded to Auxilliary you can't build paved roads any more. Halt research and your expensive legionaries will not be able to compete, will cost too much and just not have the numbers.

Hectic couple of days there, don't ask. Good to see its been released. don't forget to add some screenshots or a spoiler tag to your 1st post in order to draw new people in. A shot of one of the other planets with a bit of human presence, perhaps. Remember you can hide the interface completely with alt i and rotate the camera for more dynamic shots.

Strategyonly's mod Next War Advanced has a screenshot for each of the terrain changes he made as well as shots of the civics screen and tech tree. He also made a unit promotion tree that he added to the civlopedia and posted on his main page.

A Modder from the Fall Further team, Xienwolf, has great insight into civ code, I have found and is currently working on AI tweaking. You might consider trying to bounce ideas off of them once college season ends. (which is when those D+D nerds swing into high gear on this site.)

OK, Asthix, I'll definitely pursue all those recommendations. I was busy for a couple of weeks where I had to walk a couple of miles to get to an Internet Cafe, but was able to work on my mod, mainly doing better map scripts. The thread in completed mods is turning into the refinement thread. I am still refining this mod, but once I start adding pastward elements and AI improvements I will post those here rather than in that thread. I've replaced the first post here with a link to the latest version. One of my main problems now is getting a map script (my Alpha Centauri script for FutureMod 1.12, which includes no Earthlike planet and is thus not really viable unless you are in the Near Future at least) to start in a particular era.