New Horizons: A total conversion for BE

This is the base game version of New Horizons
For Rising Tide use Echoes of Earth
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New Horizons completely changes every Virtue, Military Unit, Colonist, Cargo, Spacecraft, Tile Improvement, Terrain and Resource yields and more! New Horizons is more than a mere "balance patch" that tries tweak a few things around the edges while keeping the body the same. With a holistic eye New Horizons makes changes that combine to be more than the sum of their parts. Old heuristics will need to be replaced, new strategies will need to be learned, get ready to experience a new Beyond Earth.

Features:

• Completely new pre-game choices (Colonists, Cargo, Spacecraft)
• Completely new Virtues
• Completely replaces every Military unit
• Completely changes every ring 1 and 2 technology and building
• Changes to tile Improvements
• Changes to Terrain yields
• Changes to expeditions
• Changes to the orbital layer and orbital units
• Changes to city strength and scaling
• Other smaller changes

Double enable this mod for correct behavior
This mod adds Promotions and Worker tile construction actions. Unless you enable all the mods you want to play with twice the unit panel in the lower left corner will not render correctly. To do this enable all the mods want to play with, but instead of setting up or loading a game instead click back to see your list of enabled mods again. Then click accept a second time and proceed to start your game as normal.

Download locations:

• Workshop page
• CivFanatics

Colonists, Cargo, Spacecraft


Ring 1 technologies and buildings

Early game buildings either provide one-time bonuses to get your economy humming or are highly dependent on the local terrain and resources. The land you have access to will influence what techs and buildings you want to prioritize.

Military Units
Overview
Alien units outclass human units during the early game. Military units don't scale in strength or cost as much -- making timing attacks weaker and it is easier to hold off foes that are slightly higher on the Affinity level. For basic units, their pre-Affinity level 4 upgrades do not increase their combat strength or production cost at all.

Marine
Cheap to build, Marines require no strategic resources and have the most efficient production to combat strength ratio. Some upgrades will let them heal faster, making them most effective at protecting vulnerable ranged units.

Rangers
Unable to damage cities but effective at killing other units. They also cost no strategic resources to build.

Armor (Requires Titanium)
Fast but unable to gain defensive bonuses Armor is best used on offense or flanking hostile ranged units.

Artillery (Requires Titanium)
Not as mobile or effective against units as Rangers but is able to damage cities. It also heals adjacent enemies.

Affinity Units
Each Affinity has a unique tactical style. Advanced affinity units come online sooner and fill unique battlefield roles. Each ultimate affinity unit has the ability to attack twice per turn, making them deceptively more effective than their combat strength alone implies.

Virtues
One major change to the Virtue trees is that no Virtue within the trees provides Health. Instead Health comes from the synergy Virtues. Every depth-based synergy Virtues provides Health as does the all the level 1 synergy Virtues. Players can combine various Virtues and experiment with different paths through the Virtue trees without gimping their Health.


Security: focus on military strength and orbital development. While this tree contains many Virtues that provide a military edge it includes just as many Virtues that support a strong economy. It includes bonuses for Arrays and Nodes.

Expansion: focuses on settling a large number of cities and exploiting large swaths of land. It includes bonuses for Biowells, Terrascapes and Domes.

Development: focuses on growth and leveraging high population cities. It rewards Wonder spammers, Culture generation and keeping lots of positive Health. It includes bonuses for Manufactories and Academies.

Commerce: focuses on trade routes, covert ops and specialists. It encourages fostering positive relations with stations and trading with other major colonies.

Tile Improvements:
Many improvements now have restrictions on them that make it harder to coat every hex with the same improvement. Farms can only be built next to rivers, manufactories and academies compete for limited flat ground. Arrays and Domes can only be built on hills. Biowells require forests, marshes or floodplains.

• Manufactories: +3 Prod, -3 Maint
• Academies: +3 Sci, -1 Maint, -1 Unhealth
• Domes (req Hill): +2 Energy
• Arrays (req Hill): +1 Orbital Coverage, -2 Maint
• Biowells (req Forest, Marsh, Flood Plain): +2 Food, +1 Health, -2 Maint

Resource yields
Many resources have had their yields tweaked slightly. The biggest changes have been to the affinity resources which now provide:

• Xenomass Well: +3 Food, +2 Health, -2 Maint
• Floatstone Quary: +3 Culture, -2 Maint
• Fraxite Mine: +3 Science, -2 Maint

Ramifications Overview
Food and Health vs Science
Various parts of New Horizon emphasis a trade off between growth and Health vs raw Science. Everyone requires Science in Beyond Earth, the question becomes how to get it? Growth and Health, to maximize the science each population automatically provides, or a smaller population working Academies, building Science buildings?

Production economy vs Energy economy
In Beyond Earth energy is much weaker than other yields and is often only good for paying maintenance or activating the beacon. New Horizon will try to make it possible to create an energy based economy that purchases the majority of its units and buildings. The current changes are not yet enough for this to be true, but they are laying the groundwork for later versions of the mod which will reward energy generation.

Expeditions:
It requires 2 expedition charges to salvage a location. You'll need to acquire a source of additional expeditions before you can start salvaging what your explorers uncover. Currently extra expeditions can be acquired from the Lab quest, Supremacy 1 and the opening Virtue in Security.

Future development
Making a Rising Tide version.

Changelogs

Fascinating (saw on the Workshop as well), will keep an eye on this (not least because I had ideas for a Virtue revamp, but running in a different design direction than yours).

Also I'm a sucker for great formatting and indentation in posts.

Continued playing my game with the covert options screen. The glitch would come and go and I can't quick figure out what would trigger it. If I just kept playing, it would eventually resolve itself. Then some time later in the game it would return.

Most of the mods I use are the ones you need the modular script mod to fix things like quests or buildings. I really dislike how Civ:BE keeps giving quests you cannot complete because the resource is not within your city boundaries.

I also tend to use either the Chiron SMAC mod or the newer Unity SMAC mod because I still play the original game or the Planetfall mod for Civ IV.

Health:
Health seems broken. In this it seems in most games, health is a big concern to the point where you really want that one original virtue which gives the +7 health. In my current game, I think the lowest my health dropped was -1, maybe -3 and I was easily able to correct for it.

In fact, I ended up not building things like pharmalabs because I didn't need the health and didn't want to pay more building maintenance.

Spamming
Most of the other factions were on the other side of the pangea continent from me but I noticed the Peacekeepers like to build manufacturies. How they paid for them, I'm not sure. Worse is later in the game they converted them to terrascapes! When I took the Peacekeeper capital, it had something like 8_ hexes of them! How that AI civ was paying that tile maintenance cost is beyond me.

Beyond that, your mod is the first one to make me see why you would build launch facilities and the tile improvement which goes along with it. In fact, just the other day, I had decided to look into it because in normal games, I've never had an issue getting coverage. In your game, a lot of my cities only had the one hex which made me quickly start having to build tile improvements and launch facilities.

The new virtues are good. I think the base game virtues are unbalance in that some trees are better than others. Still think you should be able to build farms on grasslands and plains but without fresh water you'd have to pay a maintenance cost for them.

BTW, how hard is it to add terrain in Civ:BE? It would be nice to have jungles again if only to recreate the SMAC Chiron.

Still think this game really needs a mod which simulates the Planetmind of SMAC where the aliens get more aggressive as your affinity to Planet goes up or down. Right now there really isn't any reason NOT to kill aliens. Especially if you get the virtue where you get science for killing aliens and nest.

I apologize if I've already said this on your Civ V mods.

I think a good addition (if possible; I'm not a coder) would be one which would allow explorers to act as artillery spotters for ranges units. This could be fan-wanked to be that when an explorer is adjacent to the ranged unit, it represents the communications section while the real unit is behind enemy lines. This would give a +1 range bonus to the unit and make explorers more useful.

For a space game, Civ:BE blows when it comes to tech you'd expect. I mean there are no space elevators! You should be able to build a few. You should be able to build projects which would send a probe to an asteroid, which would deploy robots to starting working on it and moving it into orbit. Sure this would take lots of turns but later in the game you could get a *lot* of production bonuses and possibly things like titanium.

Also, I think the anti-satellite combat needs reworking. It's too easy to shoot them down. I mean really? Ground based artillery shooting down things in orbit? Did anyone in Firaxis realize how hard that would be? I mean the range implied is a LOT more than the hexes on the planet.

Any chance of porting over the Civ V mod of having cities on ocean tiles? I think they should have a population cap but still, floating cities are a common sci-fi component in a lot of books, especially those by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Obviously this is a game and a game needs certain metrics. However, what gets me is how health and happiness are combined. I think the Civ V way is better. But what also gets me is how energy and money are equated as the same thing.

Energy powers things. While I can see it being currency, usually money comes from infrastructure. Your farms create food, your factories produce goods, your people produce services. While energy is needed to do this, for the most part these have been created by buildings.

Having almost all your energy (and thus money) coming from wind farms and trade routes seems simplistic. I'm not sure how the game calculates how much you get for trade routes, but to me it would seem a factor of population and available resources coupled with buildings. Thus the more you put into your city in way of certain buildings is off-set by your increased trade. It does, however, cost the time to build and the energy cost needed to power it.

Thus you need energy to fuel infrastructure which generates wealth which creates happiness and pays for your military.

So to me it seems you'd start with a basic power plant which would feed your station needs at first. As your population and amount of buildings grow, so to does your energy needs. Again this is where not having the SMAC concept of Planet Affinity makes for a lesser game. Using a coal fired plant would be worse on the Planet than solar panels or wind farms.

Health can also be a relative metric of pollution. The higher the negative health factor (regardless of whether or not it is outweighed by positive health) would result in a higher negative factor to the aliens.

So right there you get what you see in SMAC and games like Anno 2070, were you might start with some bad energy creation buildings but later could research more benign options...if you care. The whole point of Morgan Industries was to say to hell with the aliens and counter with force.

Again we see different strategies playing out. A faction like Lady Diedre (using a SMAC example) has a lesser footprint and thus generates less money. However the trade off is while she can't afford a larger army, she also doesn't have to fend off hordes of pissed off aliens. Likewise, Morgan has plenty of money but has to contend with almost constant alien incursions.

Right now beyond the endings, and some of the unit upgrades, there really isn't that much difference in the 3 affinities. Harmony factions can kill aliens or cut down forests with impunity. Right now the 3 affinities might as well be Xenomass, Floatstone & Firaxicite.

Your project looks very promising!

I sadly only had the time to play for 2-3 hours until now, so it is to early for real gameplay feedback. But as long I really like your ideas/changes. The parts of the game you overhauled definitely seem more balanced than before. Good work so far!


In my opinion the main weakness of the game is how trade routes are calculated. I think they are still too strong in comparison to other game elements (like buildings) and especially the way how internal TR push the bigger cities feels wrong for me. What are your plans for TRs? (Can the way TRs generally work even be changed after the patch?). I think this will be one of the basic decisions for a new economic foundation of the game.


If your are interested in suggestions regarding (more general) gameplay changes let me know, I have some!

And one bug report:

Copper and silicium are improved with quarries(?) which are invisible on the map.

I've released a small update. It includes a fix for the visual issue with Copper, Silica and Gold and makes most non-resource improvements buildable in hexes with Miasma (so Harmony players can make effective use of Miasma without crippling their economy).

Future development
I'm working on redoing much of the tactical and military game. A few features that have shown promise:

• Artillery and Tanks requiring Titanium
• Artillery has a medic-like ability that makes them support units
• Jets require Oil
• Rangers have a -100% city attack penalty
• Artillery and Jets get a bonus verse aliens, making them useful for assaulting nests or holding off incursions

Sounds nice to me! I especially like the ressource requirements for non-infanterists.

But I fear this could severly weaken the AI:

Rangers have a -100% city attack penalty.

Click to expand...

It is really bad at using artillery and so will lose most of its ranged attacking capacity against cities.


Some suggestions for unit changes:

The non-affinity units should progress less in raw Combat Strength. ~+4 CS should be enough per upgrade. Gaining affinity points should be a military advantage, but not nearly as strong as it is now. And you still get free promotions in addition to the CS-bonus.


The affinity-units should be remarkably stronger then the ressource free units and should progress in CS with every affinity point the player receives (if this is codeable, some affinity-buildings work this way).

Example: Marine (tier 3) should be at least 4 CS weaker than affinity 4 affinity-unit.
And the affinity units gets +2(?) CS per affinity point over 4.

So even the early afffinity units would always be better than basic units and you always want to build them if you have enough ressources.

Another possibility would be to remove the abilily requirement alltogether and make them even more affinity-dependant. Like Battlesuits have a base-CS like tier2-marine +2-4 CS per affinity point in purity. This way even the late game units could be build earlier, if you have the right tech. But they would be weaker as long as your affinity level is relatively low. Would add a lot of tactical choices.

And ships non-ranged CS should be higher or perhaps even equal to their rangedCS.
Could also use a speed boost. (And I suggest to remove the speed-bonus from the observatory quest.)

Speed boost for embarked units on midgame techs. And embarked units need a much higher defense capacity. They are one-shooted even from rangers in vanilla.

I had the time to play a game (around 250 turns) with your mod over the weekend. I just have to say amazing! Really great work so far!


Your overhauled virtues are a stroke of genius, especially how you made health independent from the single virtues. I spent some time for chosing new virtues. They all seemed interesting. Not one tree seems OP or too bad, just situational.

Started another game with the vanilla trees (to test another mod) and just missed your overhauled virtues. Really great!


The improvement changes are really great, too! Way better than vanilla. I like the competition for flat-lands between academies, generators and factories.

Academies with unhealth is definitely the way to go.

Factories without unhealth could eventually be a problem (too early to say after just one game). They are extremly powerful (especially with the development policy for +2 prod) and lead to production inflation in midgame. Perhaps their upkeep could even be higher than 3 energy, making them a bit more rare.

Farms only on riverbanks (and lakes?) may be a bit too restrictive. Perhaps add a non-river farm with energy upkeep. Or allow them on non-river grassland.


I like your idea of moving the expeditions a bit away from the very early game, but the AI seems to have problems with new 2 expeditions requirement. Often saw their explorers sitting for dozens of rounds on the same expedition site without doing anything.


Eagerly awaiting your next update!

I agree with Berd-das-Brot in that Affinity should have less to do w/military power than it is now. I've noticed that modded factions for some reason lag terribly in Affinity. In games I play on the Historical speed, I can usually go for a Dominion victory mid-game because I've got level 8-10 units and others are still at 1!

Also, not a bug but shouldn't farms be able to be created next to any fresh water source? In my latest game I found I couldn't build them next to lakes.

About the only other thing I've notice (and this could just be a mod interaction) is that health isn't as much of an issue. While not a bad thing, towards the late game I was getting something insane like 200+ health. Again, could have been a mod interaction thing but it is noticeable.

Great mod! Signed up just to say so. I can no longer go back to playing without it! Love the changes; as stated before, health is really easy to stockpile, so the efficiency bonuses are nearly always active. I am really looking forward to future updates.

My favorite change was "Deficiency Spending," which gives you less energy per turn depending how much energy you have stockpiled. Without even filling every tile, I was able to build up cities fairly quickly with this virtue. It has also helped me in the war department as well. That is to say, I'd spend all my energy as soon as I could to maximize the energy refund rather than stockpile it for emergency troops during war.

Second to that is Teraspheres. For those cities I don't have the luxury of time to fabricate better tiles, this enabled me to stack both product and food, so I could not only build up fast, but also maintain a bigger army. I only enable Domination victory and take my time, so military is a major issue in all my games.

A small update has been released. This update adds some text to Titanium mines to help differentiate them from normal mines. Game-play-wise the Health synergies for Development have been changed (because the old health-per-pop was not stacking correctly).

The military update is still in progress. I am happy with where 90% of the units are, but finding unique roles that are also balanced for the remaining 10% has been tricky. I don't want to promise a date, but right now it looks like 2-4 weeks.

Fraxis featured New Horizons on its "Mod of the Week" but also has a nearly two hour lets play show casing Beyond Earth and New Horizons that you can check out here!

As for the long planned military update, it will likely be released this weekend! After developing and scrapping nearly five distinct efforts the update will dramatically change the military game. Units don't scale in strength as quickly, so rushing down enemies in the first 50 turns because you got 1 free affinity level is much harder. Aliens won't be brushed aside by your units until you have two upgrades. Affinity specific units have unique play styles, like Ageis having 1 range but 3 move (great for hit-and-runs) while XenoCavalry is a fast unit that retains defensive bonuses, allowing it to charge ahead and screen for your more vulnerable artillery. Ultimate affinity units all have the ability to attack twice, making them a huge threat on the battle field while not having such an outsized combat strength as to be uncounterable with swarms of weaker units.

Consider me green with envy cause that's awesome.

I'm pushing back the release of the update to Tuesday as that is the next time I'll be able to do more work on the mod. A couple of small non-military quality of life related changes went in at the last minute and I'll want to run testing on those before I send out the update.

Hello Commander -- in response to the recent alien incursions this counsel of governors has approved activation of the XCOM project. You have all the resources available to the colony at your disposal. Your objective is the preservation of this colony and humanity's future on this planet. Good luck commander!

Version 7, the XCOM update of New Horizons has been released! The military game has been radically changed. Wrapping your head around all the changes can be overwhelming so here is an incomplete list of some key elements:

1) Aliens will out class your units in the early game.
2) The pre-Affinity 4 upgrades for your basic units (marines, rangers, tanks, artillery) don't increase the combat strength or production cost of your units.
3) Non-Infantry units (aka not marines and ranges) cost resources, so you can't spam them as much.
4) Rangers can not damage cities. Bring Artillery if you want to capture cities.
5) Artillery will heal adjacent units. So will Suprmacy's CARVR.
6) Units don't scale in strength as much.
7) Cities generally have more hp but less strength. They will buy you time, not solo kill an army.
8) Affinity unique units come into play sooner and all have unique play styles.
9) Ultimate units can all attack twice per turn, making them deceptively more effective than their combat strength alone implies.
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All in all this is a radical change for the military game. I expect it will take some time for people to adapt, but I also expect there will be some scaling issues or places where the design breaks down. If you feel like you're in a situation where something seems wrong please let me know.

There is about a 50% chance I will scrap the whole military system and try something different (again). If there are parts you like or dislike please let me know. I want initial impressions and spreadsheet backed detailed analysis! If I do end up scrapping this I want to be able to keep what people liked and throw out what people hated.

So it's like in Alpha stages, or experimental?

Machiavelli24 said:

Version 7, the XCOM update of New Horizons has been released! The military game has been radically changed. Wrapping your head around all the changes can be overwhelming so here is an incomplete list of some key elements:

2) The pre-Affinity 4 upgrades for your basic units (marines, rangers, tanks, artillery) don't increase the combat strength or production cost of your units.

Click to expand...

:O

I love the brilliance of Deficiency Spending, encouraging you to spend more, in tension with the inherent strength of saving. Not like just literally increasing the power of buying and tenfold the intimidation from saving.

Horseshoe_Hermi said:

I love the brilliance of Deficiency Spending, encouraging you to spend more, in tension with the inherent strength of saving. Not like just literally increasing the power of buying and tenfold the intimidation from saving.

Click to expand...

I am irrationally fond of the design of Deficit Spending, for exactly the reasons you describe. It is an effect I would have trouble cutting from the mod.

As for if the mod is "alpha" or "experimental", it isn't "alpha" in the sense that it will crash a bunch. But the military stuff is so different from the normal game that it is hard to tell if it will hold up to hundreds of plays.

The non-military stuff (like the virtues) are more likely to stay the same, at least for the next couple versions (which will focus on the early game buildings and tech web).