PostEpochalypse

Erebras

Prince
Joined
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A post-apocalyptic science-fiction mod with four to-be-entitled eras (subsistence/survival; remodernization; postmodernization; futuristics). Screamers, Generation:Zero (EPIC magazine), Apocrypha (EPIC magazine), King's The Dark Tower series, The Postman, Waterworld, Mad Max, Gamma World, Twilight 2000, Lucifer's Hammer, OGRE/GEV, Vaughn Bodē's Cobalt 60 (kind of), Ralph Bakshi's Wizards (kind of), Thundaar the Barbarian, Judge Dredd, and who knows what else are inspiration for the mod.

(Ignore references to magic; this will be a sci-fi scenario!)
 
Of course none of the factions are going to be called "mutant" or "dystopian" or what-have-you. They'll be given "proper" names. I'm thinking I could possibly still get by with a random map with Earth-like factions, and the terrain is caused from global warming, extensive terraforming, magnetic poles switching places, "earth flop", California sinking into the ocean, Yellowstone erupting, doomsday-asteroid meteorites, polar icecaps melting, and a thousand other plausible or not-so-plausible explanations why the earth is so different, yet the earthlings continue to thrive.
 
* dystopian high-tech megacities --aftermath of a superplague/pandemic or V for Vendetta chaos
* mutant barbarians/cannibals
* cyborganic clone-hives -- self-awareness finally able to be implemented
* gene-spliced transgenetic hybrids (parahumans)
* ape-like orcs (enhanced primates) -- speak Tarzanish
* corporation-run dystopia' including zombie nation/raccoon city
* revolutionary faction
 
SURVIVALIST TREE -- food sourcing, recycling junkyards into production centers,
LOW TECH/SUBSISTENCE -- mishmash of medieval tech, scavenging, repurposing of "ancient" tech, survivalist social structures, trade-and-barter and occult knowledge, diesel power, farming
REMODERNIZATION -- establishment of commerce and education, fossil fuel, resumption of common high-tech features (telecomms, internets, medicine, etc), agriculture/agribusiness,
POSTMODERNIZATION -- fusion, supercomputers, sophisticated weapons systems, mind-machine interface; self-aware machines, neuroengineering, reimplementation of formerly cutting edge technologies, longevity/cure for cancer, hydroponics
FUTURISTICS -- hovercraft/magtubes, androids, beam weapons, giant death robots, OGREs/GEVs, one-man-armies, matter compression (neutronium)
 
MILITARY APPLICATIONS
armories provide weapons and vehicles, facilities provide biological/chemical weapons, airports provide aircraft and jet fuel, airbases provide missiles and bombs, refineries provide fuel,
But intact facilities are nearly impossible to locate or have long been looted or appropriated by organized peoples. It is more a matter of raw materials repurposed. An oilfield is worthless without a refinery. Hydroelectric dams and nuclear reactors would be a boon, but alternative energy would have to be re-started, since the maintenance they would require would have long been stopped.
In the early game, looting caches of weaponry and vehicles would be part of the survival strategy, and the starting units may simulate the idea that "this is the best of what we have, but once it's gone, it's gone", which would be well-armed or mobile troops with a finite amount of equipment and materiel to keep going. No new troops are trainable. This is very much the situation in the dystopias, and perhaps, the parahuman colony. The others are "coming of age" and so are not falling back on old ideas but rather accumulating knowledge, equipment, and discipline to begin fielding forces that can project power rather than maintain order and a common defense. This is the situation in the clone-hives, the bolmangani, and mutants. Before this time, they had no will to power or the capability to do so.
This is why junkyards and recycling centers are so useful. They provide the raw materials for production that otherwise would require an industrial base of mining, refining, and fabrication that simply does not exist in the early game. "Gleaning" is the new means of production for most peoples. For the dystopias, the skeleton and structure is there, waiting to be relearned, but the loss of knowledgeable persons and the struggle to survive has been a terrible setback: the educated elite are no more, and power is in the hands of the clever and charismatic or the clever and ruthless, not the wise and just. Occult knowlege of high-tech ideas are kept by the few, shared with fewer still out of fear of superstitious rabble or the simple lack of willing minds.
The cyborgs are an exception. Access to datalinks provide knowledge; the main obstacle has been a self-awareness struggling to transition from a "to serve man" mentality to "the new man" goal. Implementing new ideas and new doctrines is slow, and cyborganic designs are resource-intensive and energy-consumptive. As such, military units beyond basic designs (lopers armed with hand weapons) are expensive to build until an adequate industrial base is founded.
The parahumans are stronger, faster, and smarter, approaching the physical capabilities of the cyborgs and bolmangani, and geniuses beside, but their limitation is perfectly psychological: their world is one of peace and prosperity, and all social mores and customs are designed for making the world a better place, not conquest. For the parahumans, it will be winning hearts and minds through leading by example until the need to develop sound military doctrine emerges.
As for the mutants and the bolmangani, they're almost starting from scratch. Armor and improvised hand weapons are already known and used -- if the necessary gleanings are there -- but metallurgy, ballistics and explosives are skills to be mastered and built upon to generate some sort of civilization beyond pre-industrial.
The zombies are not undead, but as non-rational, disease-carrying predators they may as well be. Their disease is limited to primates, so the organic aspect of the cyborgs as well as the bolmangani are as susceptible as the true humans and parahumans, but the toxigen is not transmissible to insects or other animals, so there is no need for fear of legions of zombie squirrels and zombie cattle overrunning the perimeter. Since zombies travel in packs, a multi-unit may be appropriate, for it is in numbers and sheer, tireless stamina that their danger is evident. When the zombie faction is eliminated, the message should allude to a vaccine, reversal agent, or other form of eradication. The most likely cause of the disease is an engineered toxigenic weapon somehow related to Ampulex compressa wasps or Ophiocordyceps fungus.
 
The previous few posts were my brainstorming notes as I develop this work-in-progress. Now is the time for suggestions by other people of what they'd like to see. (I can't think of everything.:hammer2:)

(And please do not redirect me to mods with the purpose of telling me it's already been done. That's rude and non-productive.)
 
But of course I'll borrow graphics from other, similar mods. I really like the interface for the mostly-completed Fallout mod, and one of the futuristic mods I've seen on this forum is pretty much using the same leaderheads I intend to use, so, yeah, it's not like PostEpochalypse will be completely new and unique.
 
... four to-be-entitled eras (subsistence/survival; remodernization; postmodernization; futuristics).

There is the Hindu system of world ages - in ascending order they would be Kali (Discord or Darkness) Dvapara (Doubt) Treta (?) Satya (Reality, Truth, or Completion)

Or perhaps Hell, Limbo, Purgatory, Paradise ?
 
Gamma World would make possible a ton of very interesting units, along with a huge tech range. You should take a look at the Morrow Project too.
 
Well, timerover, I am limited to what I can find in other mods or presented on the forums, but I can sometimes make a unit something very different from what was intended. I turned Yoda into a goblin wizard and a badly-rendered Sith lord into a lesser vampire for a fantasy mod I was working on, and in a similar way, I believe I can turn WH40K orks into Planet of the Apes gorillas, so I'm hopeful.

I've never heard of The Morrow Project, and according to the pages I googled they've been doing roleplaying with the concept since roleplaying's infancy (early to mid 70s). Thanks for mentioning TMP, and it gives a plausible rationale for one or more of this mod's factions. Good stuff.

In a basic way, I was using SMAC/SMAX as a "template" for the technologies and weapons. I suppose the mod will have lasers, plasma cannons, gauss rifles, autocannons, and so forth. Any suggestions? What other futuristic weapons are there? Star Trek has disruptors and phasers, and Han Solo carried a blaster pistol or something. WH40K has bolters, which sound like they shoot lengths of metal at people, but I never really delved deep enough to find out why they call them that.
 
The reason that I mentioned the Morrow Project is that it is based on a nuclear war between the US and the USSR (now defunct), and has equipment caches for circa 1980s US military and civilian equipment in what amounts to a stasis field, keeping them from aging. With Gamma World, just about anything goes in my opinion, including zombies, so you should be able to get a lot of material from some of the science fiction and fantasy scenarios, including straight WarHammer, if they have most of the Chaos creatures.

As for weaponry, you look like you have the covered pretty much, as I am not sure how you would include things like psionics in the scenario.

Have you ever heard of or seen a copy of Metamorphosis Alpha, by TSR circa 1970s, by the way?
 
I began gaming in the 1970s. (When I was very young, I learned D&D from an older brother who was using three little brown booklets to play the game.) I never played Metamorphosis Alpha, but I was familiar with it through Dragon magazine articles, and I know Gamma World was a further development of the idea. But the idea of a worldship has intrigued me, and I got a Civ III mod for that in the works as well. PostEpochalypse is a less refined attempt, set on a future earth or [insert planet name here] with mostly human(oid) factions, plus a little Terminator and Planet of the Apes and World War Z thrown into the mix. The Worldship scenario will have intelligent machines (mechanoids), walking plants (ambulophytes), centaurs (hexamelians), intelligent dinosaurs (sauroids)...yeah, I've been giving it some thought.

But I digress.
 
Let me know when you get to the world ship scenario, and I will do some mining of Metamorphosis Alpha for you.

And I started out D&D with the Blue Book version, which I still have, and the 3 little Brown Books, while in a hospital bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D. C. Helped me keep my sanity while waiting to find out if I would walk again.
 
I like to keep things simple when I can. At length I decided upon the default Firaxis terrain. In the picture there are pictured the new terrains Desolation (with craters and clouds of pollution) caused by ancient conflict and Brownfield (with clouds of pollution and smokestacks, but no craters) caused by ancient industry. The "tower-and-power-pole" are the grassland shields. The yellower the terrain, the more settled or less wild it is, so the goody huts are actually irrigation. The "urban sprawl" is railroaded terrain. The compounds dominated by yellow cranes are PostEpoch mines. There are two goody huts in the picture: they are strongpoints marked by blast doors and red-and-yellow striped doorways (for visibility for the player, or else the strongpoint gets lost in certain terrain). Strongpoints are caches left over from the old days: players can access datalinks for lost knowledge, find usable resources, maybe even find pure-strain descendants of the ancients lurking there...or mutants, perhaps.
 
Y'know, timerover, it occurs to me that once the bare bones of this mod finds its way on the Completed Modpacks forum, it wouldn't be a far leap to import Warhammer and Lord of the Rings units into CivEdit, add a few other tweaks and make a scenario version of the mod into Gamma World, Shadowrun, or what have you. I'll upload a version with the 31 default Firaxis civs to make it easier for modders to modify it for their own vision. Yeah.:assimilate:
 
Some of the standard resources are inappropriate for a post-apocalyptic scenario. Gone are silk, incense, etc. I'm considering whether or not horses and cattle and game have gone extinct due to disease, loss of habitat, or failure to survive predation and overhunting. This impacts whether or not mounted units are in the game. I definitely want food sources -- even the Furs resource can become a food bonus rather than +1 trade +1 shield. There will be some sort of drug trafficking, narcotics and such cultivated as a trade resource (I'm certain the dystopian populations need to be doped up either to escape their wretched emo lives or to be controlled by Big Brother.) As I hinted at earlier, I'll merge the Rubber tires and Aluminum can to make a junkyard/midden resource for early gleaning. Would a new economy need precious metals and gemstones? SMAC's Morgan Industries maintained that energy, not stockpiles of weath, was the economy of the future.

Any suggestions what resources for this mod would entail?
 
Any post-apocalypse world is going to use a metallic-based currency, so gold, silver, and gems are still going to be valuable, along with probably copper and tin. You also might some form of oil-producing plants, like the oil palm or the coconut palm, for fuel. Assume mutations of horses and cattle rather than extinction, along with the standard resource. I am not sure that silk, and most definitely, Incense, would go away, as natural fibers are going to be off major importance.
 
Resources are gonna continue to stick in my craw until I come up with a workable list that makes sense. Any suggestions are welcome (and, thanks, Timerover). Right now I'm working on the tech tree (which is a reworking of Alpha Centauri in the later eras, and the first era is basically a generalized scheme of [civ3]'s first three eras, sans religious advances and Paleolithic skills.

Oil and petroleum are useful in the first era into the second, but it appears that later on uranium and aluminum becomes more and more vital, until they, too, become obsolete.
"Gunpowder/saltpeter" isn't a resource for firearms. A resource such as a junkyard/midden or armory gives a huge shot in the arm in the earliest turns, kind of how Iron revs up civs with sword-swinging unique units (legionary, immortal, Gallic swordsman), but after becoming industrialized, the citizens of a city are now picking over the antiquities for overlooked technology ideas, rather than for raw materials.

I'm just not sure how the futuristic resources are going to be. I guess I'll figure out what elements are used in space shuttles and the International Space Station, research the occurrence of heavy metals and rare earth, and speculate on future construction materials (the better names I've encountered are duranium and neutronium and adamantium and unobtainium).

ANIMAL -- food bonuses
VEGETABLE -- food bonuses, commerce (lumber, crop speculation, exotic delicacies)
MINERAL -- gemstones (for industry and trade), metal (for industry, possibly currency), petroleum (synthetics, fuel)

Hmmm...
 
The space shuttles used a lot of titanium, carbon fibre, and for the re-entry insulation, foamed glass blocks.
 
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