Final Frontier - the next space 4X?

PsiCorps said:

Hi All, I'm currently looking at all the B5 stuff i have to work out a tech tree, benefits of the techs and some resources. Don't know if we'll need to start a new thread to start a B5 developement for FF

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We should probably keep future communications off of this thread. Send me a PM with your ideas, and I'll set up the thread.

Jon Shafer said:

As far as an official "Final Frontier" product, I can tell you that no such thing is planned right now. It was just a mod I thought would be interesting to work on and the higher-ups have their sights set elsewhere. You never know though, things can change. If it's something you'd really like to see, then you can go to the Firaxis Game Feedback Page and pass it along.

Thanks again everyone, and happy holidays.

Jon

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So, Jon I followed your advice and sent this letter as feedback to Firaxis.

I would pay for an expansion that was primarily an extension of the standard civ game. A cleaned up Next War as the first step continuing on to Final Frontiers.

Or have options at the beginning of the game allowing you to check your endpoint so those who don't care for scifi civ can keep their game style and those who love the scifi continuation can do so.

FF is very skeletal but shows a lot of potential once some meat is put on the bones. Having various options allowing for different styles of FF would be fantastic. Civilization/Leader specific techs would be a nice touch to differentiate each civ. Such as the Avowers have the ability to make jump gates allowing instantaneous transport or even a hyperspace/alt dimension/universe ala Master of Magic which would be a good alternate to "Astral Gates."

Gravity wells should slow movement based on the gravitation influence of the sources and as a consequence unit movement should be increased to partially compensate so units far from gravity wells go several times faster. This would encourage fleets to spend their time in space ports and critical points outside the system. This opens up a lot of strategic styles and options and discourages the build up of large defense fleets within systems and means that an invader is truly committing himself to taking a system as extricating from a system would take many turns. Influence should not slow movement. Planets should be vulnerable to assault rather than just the star of the system making attempting to take and defend systems much more strategic in scope. Imagine pillaging the Mines in the asteroid belt or the research lab on Titan.

Planetary defense ships should not have ftl drives as they are very powerful and this would make defending peripheral systems more difficult if you have to wait until the system makes its own defense units.

Tech trees should have branches involving key research areas: Social Psychology, Energy, Weapons, FTL, Materials, Terra Forming and Communications. The derivatives of each should be fairly obvious such as new civics provided by SP; Energy as the backbone for other techs ala coal/hydro/nuclear and as a requirement for FTL drives and weapons; Terraforming increased food and habitation; Communications would be culture and also military since a superior communications technology would allow Generals to coordinate more effectively; FTL would allow for more customized units especially in tandem with a limited energy source in that a faster engine might mean a sacrifice in defense or weapons for example; and Materials would be manufacturing, ship defense, and starbase manufacturing and resource harvesting.

Starbases should be more customizable and be effectively small systems with the potential to match star systems in wealth, military, and culture as technology advances.

Wonders such as Ring World (Materials), Dyson Sphere (Materials), Galactic Trade Center (SP/Comm), Galactic Trade Tongue (SP/Comm), Astral Gate Program (Energy/FTL), Artificial Intelligence Singularity (?), Virtual Reality Universe (espaniage), and Reality Hacking University.

Thank you for your consideration of my ideas. I sincerely hope that they are implemented. Thank you for continuing the franchise that I fell for back in 1991.

Personally I find the relatively bare-bones style of FF refreshing as I tend to overcomplicate when thinking of mod ideas.

I feel Jon would be better utilized in debugging and improving the AI of the bare-bone vanilla mod, without a proper AI a SP game has very limited playability.
While private-modders have the energy to imagine strange new ideas and also have the freedom to use IP without major risk of lawsuits against Firaxis.


Things I'd like to change:

-change all references to city to system or star.

-change floodplains/space description of grav-field space to stellar/space or grav-well/space.
(simply copy/paste the correct xml-txt entry from the blackhole-gravfield)

-make stars visible on the map, from the start.
Just for reality's sake, light from stars should be visible from all across the galaxy. Exploration would still be required to discover the planets and find resources.
IIRC there are tags in the terrain-descriptions for visibility range (at least for mountains).
(only for terrain, not for features, which is what a solarsystem is. Setting ocean/coast iVisibleFrom to 20 does nothing)

-more events and some "hidden fun stuff".

-pirate systems. I don't recall ever finding one.

Someone mentioned antimatter as a produced and expendable resource in another thread. That is an intriguing idea.

Another intriguing idea is having some resources located on planets...which might be possible with random events....as soon as a planet-plot is accessable a event might be triggered modified by multiple factors.

-harvesting of asteroid fields/deployment of minefields? Dubious about these ideas.
-moving features? Nice for event-candidate, but maybe unrealistic at civ-timescale.
-destroyed ships sometimes creating wreckage-fields same as asteroids. maybe by event, python cumulative chance of event happening if multiple ships are destroyed in same tile during one turn.


see. already I'm complexifying the hell out of it.

I think what is needed for this mod is a strong graphicical makeup on icons and such, a redesign of rules based on gameplay, and a new and longer tech-tree. Include more aspects that works well in CIV4.

Personally, what I miss, is a brand new Alpha Centauri mod for CIV4 (which they could have included). Of course that is far away from space-civ, like FF, but still a sci-fi genre.

The optimal (but not possible) is to have a 3D map. It feels wrong to only have 2 dimensions to move in space! But making CIV4 3D takes more than just some strings of Python

We should all work towards a Final Frontier 2. I'm not yet a modder, but I hope it will be enough people to achieve this.

You should look up the "planetfall" mod, they have a folder on this forum.

I don't think 3D is such a big deal actually, in most 4X games it is not used and in the ones that do it is at most for show.
At best it is irrelevant at worst it makes the interface impossible.
(ps 3D is not really in the scope of a game that is in essence chess)