Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

Spatzimaus said:

The only remaining "fantasy" name, really, would be the Troll. I'm open to suggestions on changing that, but it has to still fit the unit's abilities: something that's VERY hard to kill, and is a great defender (and not just in cities), someone you can stick in a choke point and have then be practically impossible to move.

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"Hedgehog" defense: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog_defence

Also, "Wolverine" might infer having more teeth to it (haha).

Spatzimaus said:

A sci-fi possibility would be the Pak; after all, they WERE basically "upgraded" humans that were much harder to kill and were seen primarily as defenders (hence the "Protector" name). But that'd mean not using a "troll with a minigun" animation, if I can find one.

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Tarth (from the computer game Deadlock) do look like a troll, and they carried what amounted to a minigun (or mini-cannon), and they were (compared to the other races in Deadlock) darned hard to kill. Star Trek's Gorn also come to mind, but of course they were notoriously slow.

Spatzimaus said:

On to a different note, I have a question for anyone who's still reading at this point. Tech progression. I HATE that in the core game, once you get to the later eras you're getting a new tech every 3-4 turns; it's way too fast, and it makes some units become obsolete faster than you can build them. Some of this can be blamed on ICS, but some is just inherent to the multipliers involved stacking to ridiculous levels (notice the Research lab was +100%? That's why I dropped it to +50%.)
If you look at the Technologies post above, you'll notice that the tech costs ramp up pretty significantly, but I have very few buildings that add research (Fusion Lab, Quantum Lab). So in those later eras, this'd slow down naturally; my goal is that by the late Fusion Era you're taking ~10 turns per tech, even with a large empire. This might require making Great Scientists obsolete, for balance reasons...

So the question is, do I need to re-price all of the Industrial and Modern techs as well, making them more expensive? (This'd also make me reprice the Digital Era techs as well.) Or can anyone think of other ways to balance it, like reducing the benefits of research buildings or lowering the base research rate from population?

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A brute force approach might be to add more "dummy techs" in between the vital ones - that way someone would have to research several techs before getting to the good stuff. This would emulate SMAC's and GalCiv 2's approach in this area.


So now my question becomes "who is your target audience for this mod?". I think there is going to be an extremely small slice of the community who will want to (or need to) utilize this whole new set of eras your creating. However I could be wrong here, so thought I would ask and see what your perspective is on this. Personally speaking, I am extremely interested, as I play exclusively in the Modern and Future eras, so an expansion here is most definately something that I am willing to help out in.

D

Darsnan said:

A brute force approach might be to add more "dummy techs" in between the vital ones - that way someone would have to research several techs before getting to the good stuff. This would emulate SMAC's and GalCiv 2's approach in this area.

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I actually went away from this, deliberately. I don't WANT to have techs that only provide a single benefit, for two reasons:
1> It's boring.
2> You'll get techs that have no benefits that help with your particular playstyle. I want every tech to be at least a little desirable, no matter what strategy you take, and not just in terms of what techs they lead to.
This is why most techs give three benefits, and those three will be in different areas you'll see a tech that unlocks a wonder, a unit, and upgrades a terrain improvement. Even if you don't like that unit and even if the wonder's already been built by someone else, the terrain boost makes the tech still worth taking.

So now my question becomes "who is your target audience for this mod?". I think there is going to be an extremely small slice of the community who will want to (or need to) utilize this whole new set of eras your creating.

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I see this four ways.

First, there will be people who want to play the normal Civ, but are annoyed that the game just sort of peters out at the Modern era; no more Wonders, only a couple new units, and you'll end up researching Future Tech over and over while you finish up the U.N. or spaceship. These people don't need all of the new eras, and will almost definitely end the game in the Digital Era, but at least things will still be happening while they achieve their other victory condition.
Even if you don't really care about the new techs and such, the question becomes, why NOT use a future mod?

Second, there are people like me, who actually want to play some future eras in addition to the existing ones. For the current game, there's actually a fairly narrow window where you're building Modern Armors and such; if you don't go on an immediate rampage with these, you'll run out of time. But with a mod like this, you can take your time.
This also comes back to balance; in the core game, once you start conquering the balance between civs spirals out of control; you'll end up fifteen or twenty techs ahead of the AI and there'll be no real threat. In most games I've played, I could have won the game in the Industrial era, and the only reason the game made it to the Modern was because I chose to hold back long enough to get the last tiers of units for fun. That's why I started the Long Mod; it's designed to keep the game close as you get to the modern era. And if the game's still close, why not keep going?

Third, there will be people who want to play only the future eras as their own SMAC-type game, starting the game in the Modern Era. Right now, there's just no point starting a new game in the Industrial or Modern eras because you'll run out of researchable techs before your civ is even close to big enough to do anything interesting. While I've said that this wasn't the intent of the mod, it IS a good reason to have an extensive future era structure instead of just a handful of futuristic techs.

Fourth, this could be the basis for some scenario games. Imagine a WW3 map using the units and wonders of this mod. (I actually did this in Civ3 with a stripped-down version of this mod's predecessor, creating an Earth map with 12 major civ powers.)

(I would LOVE to see someone do a Succession Game using a mod like this. But that would come once it's balanced a lot better.)

Spatzimaus said:

I actually went away from this, deliberately. I don't WANT to have techs that only provide a single benefit, for two reasons:
1> It's boring.
2> You'll get techs that have no benefits that help with your particular playstyle. I want every tech to be at least a little desirable, no matter what strategy you take, and not just in terms of what techs they lead to.

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My thoughts were that, because research was coming so quickly in the situation you are describing, that its not really boring when your getting a tech every couple turns. By padding it with some extra techs, it then appeals to those individuals who would like to have to give some thought to the overall direction their research is headed (i.e. away from the instant gratification trend that is Civ5), which are probably the same people who are interested in playing out a longer (re: extended) game. Or to put it another way, it’s a deeper game appealing to a different audience.
However you have your target audience in mind, as well as the direction that you want to take this. If I think of another idea or solution that fits your criteria, I’ll let you know.

Spatzimaus said:

Third, there will be people who want to play only the future eras as their own SMAC-type game, starting the game in the Modern Era. Right now, there's just no point starting a new game in the Industrial or Modern eras because you'll run out of researchable techs before your civ is even close to big enough to do anything interesting. While I've said that this wasn't the intent of the mod, it IS a good reason to have an extensive future era structure instead of just a handful of futuristic techs.

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Bingo – that’s me!  I won’t debate with you whether this style is playable in its current form, however anything that fleshes this region of the game out (or takes the futuristic theme and overlays the original game from start to finish) I am interested in, and want to help out in.

Spatzimaus said:

Fourth, this could be the basis for some scenario games. Imagine a WW3 map using the units and wonders of this mod. (I actually did this in Civ3 with a stripped-down version of this mod's predecessor, creating an Earth map with 12 major civ powers.)

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Once your mod progresses I can probably contribute some scenarios. We can discuss theme and direction once the mod gets to that point.

And speaking of themes: do you have a theme which permeates your mod? Example: SMAC had a dark theme to it, from the GUI, to the music, to the text. Are you going to try and implement a theme of this nature? Let me know if you plan on addressing this in any manner, and if so I can help out with the associated text.

D

Wow, i'm really impressed with what has been done here so far. Just wanted to let you know that I will be playing this mod as soon as it is stable. There is soo much potential here. Can't wait to try it out

Darsnan said:

By padding it with some extra techs, it then appeals to those individuals who would like to have to give some thought to the overall direction their research is headed

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The problem with this is something I saw back in the original SMAC, and that you now see in Civ5 in certain eras: if a tech only gives one benefit, and it's not one you particularly want, you'll just avoid researching it. You'll go up the other side of the tree instead, until the costs get lopsided enough to make the bypassed tech more desirable. While the undesirable tech might lead to something better, most players just don't pay that much attention to the full tree; when they research a tech, they'll pick the next one from the list of available techs without going into the tree.

I just didn't want those sorts of bottlenecks. I wanted every tech to be at least a little desirable to every player on its own merits, not just in terms of what it leads to. So you'll see a tech that provides a World Wonder, a Building, and a Terrain Improvement ugprade, or maybe building/new resource/unit. Any two of those would probably be enough for people to want it, so I COULD add a few more techs in there if need be, but I didn't want to stretch this to four eras instead of three. (Also, a few of the tech names in SMAC, like Advanced Military Algorithms, I wanted to avoid using.)

There are a few techs that still worry me. For instance, Doctrine:Initiative gives two naval units and a Wonder that boosts naval units. So obviously, there will be some games where this isn't a high-value tech. This is why I put that particular tech in the middle of the tree, where it becomes nearly impossible to go around it. But I was thinking of moving Dilithium (aquatic resource) to that tech, moving the Leviathan (carrier battleship) up to Doctrine: Air Power, moving the Cloudbase Academy up one step to Advanced Spaceflight, and putting the Bioenhancement Center down at Mind/Machine Interface. I still might do this.

I also had another motive: in Civ5 there's no research overflow. If you have a large number of cheap techs, then the rounding becomes a HUGE deal; 2 turns vs 3 turns becomes a huge difference, whereas 9 turns vs 10 turns just isn't enough to care about. If overflow was implemented then I'd think a lot more about splitting the techs up further. And this mod was designed to implement the Tech Diffusion mod, which gives bonus beakers if your enemy has a tech, so that 2-vs-3 might be 2 turns for both, but you'd have no way of knowing.

chrome-rome said:

Just wanted to let you know that I will be playing this mod as soon as it is stable.

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I guess I'm due for a timetable estimate/status update.

The Long Mod (the mod designed to ensure more civs make it to the future eras) is DONE, and I've played a couple games with it. There are a couple placeholder graphics in it, but in general it works just fine, and achieves its intended goal of keeping more civs in the game longer.

The AC (content) Mod currently runs, but not correctly. I'm still not sure what's going wrong, but I have some ideas.

TECHS: The tech tree displays correctly now. But now that I can see how the game will display it, I'm changing a few tech prerequisites and positions, because the arrows won't work right under certain conditions (apparently, if a tech leads to two techs with differing GridX values). All have quotes (with audio) and most civilopedia entries. For copyright reasons I don't think I'll be providing the audio, but anyone who has SMAC should be able to add them in easily. I have the tech icons, and I WILL provide them in an icon atlas, but I haven't got that to work yet.
BUILDINGS: nearly all have been programmed to their intended functions, although I'm tweaking these heavily as I figure out how to add better functions. None have graphics, but they don't really need them. For an unknown reason, though, these don't work, and none of the buildings get loaded; I'm going to have to go through one by one to find out which one is crashing it.
UNITS: all of them have the appropriate abilities (no missing functionality as far as I can tell). None have graphics. I still have to add in the AI table, but that's trivial as it's a copy of the AI entry in the unit definition. These SHOULD work just fine, as all of the unit abilities and promotions use existing XML schema. But as with the Buildings, none of the units actually load, and I THINK I know the problem (it's the Delete on the Mech unit; I'm going to have to replace the Combat Mech's new Row definition with a massive Update to the Mech to keep the IDs consecutive.)
I've confirmed that the promotions all load correctly, although the Civilopedia seems to arrange them in a strange way.
WONDERS: About 2/3rds have effects, the rest are either placeholders or have no current effect. None have splash screens or world art. I have wonder movies, but Civ5 has no ability to play them. (Yet.) Since these are part of the Buildings.xml, they don't work yet either.
SOCIAL POLICIES: 9 out of the 10 have the effect I want, one doesn't work yet (Fundamentalism, which adds culture to specialists). No icon graphics yet, but since there's one per tree they don't need unique icons. These seem to load just fine, although I haven't tried actually purchasing them yet.
EVENTS: Not coded in at all. Currently I have set no way to gain Centauri Ecology, a key tech (I want it to be granted when you launch a spaceship), the Transcendence victory has no timer yet, and none of my other "events" work at all. So as a temporary solution for debugging, I might unlock Centauri Ecology for free and have the spaceship do nothing.
I also have none of the "terraforming" code in place, as I'm still waiting to see how some of the terrain-alteration problems other mods have found get resolved.
SPECIALISTS: This is the big one. The Transcend specialist works fine, but the Empath doesn't. I NEED the ability to tie happiness (and culture, if possible) to a tile yield. There's a mod in the Mod Components forum that adds a "Judge" specialist to the Courthouse that adds +1 happiness, and that'd be a great start, but I also want the ability to create a +happiness tile improvement (the Monolith) when sacrificing a Great Empath. As a placeholder I've changed the Empath to "+2 food" while I test the rest of the mod, but this is one case where I'm not willing to compromise the design. (Also, +food is unbalanced, once you take the SP that makes specialists only cost 1 food instead of two.)

In other words, the mod is almost functional right now, and once the buildings and units load, that's enough to start Alpha gameplay testing. I want to go through it all once myself (building each unit and seeing if it does what I intended it to, etc.), but once that's done I'll release a public version on these boards.
I may have to create a Worldbuilder map for testing purposes, where I start off with a bunch of size 20 cities at the start of the Digital Era.
But again, this is using placeholders for EVERYTHING, especially units. I'm going to keep referring to this as an alpha build (and not uploading the mod to the official servers) until I get at least all of the unit graphics added, and that'll depend on others. I may have to just go grab a ton of things from the Civ4 forums and do the conversion myself, but anyone who really wants to help out could do that for a couple units for me...

Spatzimaus said:

On to a different note, I have a question for anyone who's still reading at this point. Tech progression. I HATE that in the core game, once you get to the later eras you're getting a new tech every 3-4 turns; it's way too fast, and it makes some units become obsolete faster than you can build them..... my goal is that by the late Fusion Era you're taking ~10 turns per tech, even with a large empire. This might require making Great Scientists obsolete, for balance reasons...

... can anyone think of other ways to balance it, like reducing the benefits of research buildings or lowering the base research rate from population?

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The idea I had this morning involves the Ascent to Transcendence. The background on this goes something like this: just as an ape trying to create a super-ape could never dream of a human as a creation, so too mankind cannot realize the next step in our evolution. (this is a paraphrasing from Gordon Dickson's "Dorsai").

The thought here is that instead of utilizing science to take the next step in our evolution, that we actually turn away from the corporal world, and turn our minds eye inward to delve into the inner workings of our minds. As such special buildings would need to be constructed to house these individuals exploring the furthest reaches of our minds, and to simulate this turning away from the corporal world, these buildings would have a negative effect on science, economy, and food. In order to build the Ascent to Transcendence you would need to build X number of these facilities, each of which have a negative modifier against the above listed items, thus achieving your goal of slowing down tech research, as these buildings cumulative effect would be to continually attenuate a players abilities to research technologies. Once the prerequisite number of these buildings are constructed, then the player can build the Ascent to Transcendence. But until that point the research of other techs would become slower as more of these buildings are constructed. So in effect these buildings by themselves do nothing other than to attenuate the abilities to advance research, but you need X number of them to build the AtT.

Anyways, my wild-arsed thoguht for the day. HTH.


D

Darsnan said:

Anyways, my wild-arsed thought for the day. HTH.

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It's not a bad thought. My main worry about that would simply be that there's no way the AI would be capable of doing a good job with it. But the basic idea is actually somewhat related to what I'd planned with that 20-turn timer; sacrificing Great People knocks turns off of the timer, because what's ACTUALLY happening is that when some "celebrity" decides to ascend, a whole bunch of people in that field will suddenly decide to go with. (Sacrificing Great People is something the AI can do. Stockpiling great people to USE as sacrifices, that's not really the AI's forte.)

One thought I had for Transcendence was much simpler than what you'd suggested:
Every turn the timer is counting down, every city loses 1 population. Any city that is reduced to 0 population is demolished.

This reflects the fact that as more and more people ascend to the whole energy being thing (and stop caring about contributing to your corporeal empire), every city becomes less effective. Science decreases, you have fewer available workers to farm the land or work as specialists, and so on. A few Transcends will still work as specialists in your top-tier buildings, but most will go all solopsist on you instead.
One upshot of this would be that you shouldn't even TRY to transcend until you've got some size 20+ cities (which, by that era, you will). Now, if it's just a flat "-1 pop per turn" without shutting off food production, then you'll often grow back after losing the population, so a size 15+ city might still survive (since with 90% food storage and Maritimes and Sky Hydroponics Labs and such, once you get down to size 3-4 you should grow almost every turn). All that really matters is that your capital survives the timer, anyway.
Also, if you sacrifice a GP to reduce the counter, then obviously your cities will lose less. So the game might still be winnable with size ~10 cities if you plan ahead.

----
Anyway, I'm still trying to figure out why my units and buildings don't load. Hopefully I'll get that straightened out tonight, and if I can, then tomorrow or Monday I'll upload the Alpha version of the mod to this board for some playtesting.
Also, I'm continually tweaking things like the tech prerequisites, etc. I'll try to keep the first few posts in this thread updated with the latest information, but it's possible I'll miss something. For instance, last night I decided to change the Quantum Converter, Paradise Garden, and Stasis Generator to be National Wonders (1 per civ), so that I could give them more impressive bonuses. I've actually got a fairly large restructuring in mind tonight that I want to test out once I've got it working.

(My ongoing issue: the resource formerly known as Deuterium. Which is a better name, Dilithium or Tiberium? Either works in terms of lore.)

Spatzimaus said:

It's not a bad thought. My main worry about that would simply be that there's no way the AI would be capable of doing a good job with it.

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Have you thought of just making it a free facility associated with the discovered tech? This then completely frees the AI from any necessary programming in this sense. And if you form the tech tree correctly, then via the pre-existing biases in the AI you should be able to shape the direction the AI's take in research by placing facilities and units into the tech tree which entice the AIs down directed paths. Its still sort of exploitable (i.e. a human could purposely avoid the prerequisite techs if they were driving towards a different goal), but heah, I hope you appreciate that you have posed a very difficult problem, and that I am trying to come up with viable solutions.

I do really like your approach of every turn the timer is counting down, a city loses a population point. Question: once the prerequisite tech is researched, is the effect global for all factions (i.e. like the UN Vote)? If so I really like it, as a human then has no control over this effect, and it is a huge variable a human player then has to contend with! :b:

D

Darsnan said:

I hope you appreciate that you have posed a very difficult problem, and that I am trying to come up with viable solutions.

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No doubt. This is one of the things that SMAC really oversimplified; even with the SMAC-X subspace ending, it was still a fairly simple "build X of these and you win" thing, and I want something much, much more complex. So clearly there's going to be negatives to every suggestion, since we're in uncharted territory here.

I do really like your approach of every turn the timer is counting down, a city loses a population point. Question: once the prerequisite tech is researched, is the effect global for all factions (i.e. like the UN Vote)?

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To clarify, I meant that each turn, EVERY city of yours loses a population point, which is obviously a substantial penalty. I'd have to remove the previously mentioned "add two turns to the timer if you lose a city" thing, because you WILL lose your peripheral cities in this process.

And this would only trigger for YOUR cities, which means that a civ attempting to ascend is suddenly at a substantial disadvantage relative to its competitors, which is exactly what I wanted. Basically, if person A starts to ascend, person B basically has ten or so turns to throw everything they can at A in an attempt to knock out his capital before the timer expires. Since it's practically guaranteed that A has a tech advantage, I wanted to level the playing field a bit to give B a fighting chance.

Also, to be clear, the timer (and population decrease) would only start once a specific Project was completed, the Ascent to Transcendence. Not just when you research the tech. So you'd be well into the repeatable Transcendent Thought techs at that point. (One thing I want to do: every time you research Transcendent Thought, you gain a permanent +1 happiness. Not just bump up your score.)

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Status update:
As of tonight, the buildings, wonders, and units are now semi-working in the mod. They have placeholder graphics, obviously, and I haven't verified yet that they do all of what I want them to, but they all at least show up in the tech tree and civilopedia and the units have the correct promotions. (I HAVE confirmed that the Great Empath specialist does NOT build his custom improvement, which means the Improvements.xml file isn't being read. Still debugging that.) Before I upload it, I'll also want to add a few necessary Civilopedia texts. Like, say, the part that tells people what each building/wonder actually DOES, which I think is kind of essential when anyone other than me tries to play it.

There are still quite a few parts that aren't done. I'll update the earlier parts of the thread with a more detailed status.

Spatzimaus said:

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Status update:
As of tonight, the buildings, wonders, and units are now semi-working in the mod. They have placeholder graphics, obviously, and I haven't verified yet that they do all of what I want them to, but they all at least show up in the tech tree and civilopedia and the units have the correct promotions. (I HAVE confirmed that the Great Empath specialist does NOT build his custom improvement, which means the Improvements.xml file isn't being read. Still debugging that.) Before I upload it, I'll also want to add a few necessary Civilopedia texts. Like, say, the part that tells people what each building/wonder actually DOES, which I think is kind of essential when anyone other than me tries to play it.

There are still quite a few parts that aren't done. I'll update the earlier parts of the thread with a more detailed status.

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OK, so once you post your mod you will be looking for feedback: do you have a format you would like followed for the feedback? Gamesaves, screenies, etc.? It would probably be good for you to be proactive in this regard, as feedback in a format you feel comfortable with is probably more beneficial and expedicious to getting this mod bullet-proofed.

Also, if I encounter a problem and think I can fix it (via xml, and possibly LUA) do you want me to give it a shot, or do you just want me to point to where I think the problem is? Each approach here has its benefits and drawbacks, so again just let me know what you feel comfortable with and I'll go with the flow.

Looking forward to your mod - right now ciV is kinda getting boring playing in the Modern/ Future only eras.

D

Darsnan said:

OK, so once you post your mod you will be looking for feedback: do you have a format you would like followed for the feedback?

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Not really, even a stream-of-consciousness feedback would help. The biggest problem with this sort of one-man construction is that it's really easy to create a blind spot. You've got all of these variables being changed at once, and the result gets very messy. It's easy to mistype something and not find it, but it's also easy to just screw up the effects of something, especially if you're trying to do something new to Civ5 and misjudge its impact.

For instance, last night I started a game in the Digital Era for testing purposes. I was given a nice chunk of culture to start the game, and I figured I'd see if my new SPs worked. And that's where I ran into the first problem: while you can set a tech prerequisite for an SP, and it DOES check against that, there's nothing in the SP display to indicate WHY the SP is not available. This would obviously be confusing, so I'm now considering dumping the tech prerequisite altogether. This'd make it possible to select "Cybernetic" in the Medieval Era, so I'd prefer not to do this, but not having the display explain why the SP is unavailable would really confuse any (non-me) players.

Some things will clearly be bugs (one of my buildings' costs was still set to 9999, which is the placeholder value in my template, and I'd accidentally left the cost of the Great Empath at "1" instead of "-1" for testing, so it was a 1-turn build in the ancient era...), others will just look like bugs (Ever notice that a single jet fighter unit is more expensive than the carrier it bases on? That trend continued with their Fusion-era replacements, and they now both come at the same tech so it's more obvious.) Even if it's not truly a bug, feedback would still be valuable, like "Hey, the Leviathan should REALLY cost more than a Needlejet. Can we bump its stats up a bit more to justify a higher cost, without screwing up the balance too badly?"

Any of this would help.

Also, if I encounter a problem and think I can fix it (via xml, and possibly LUA) do you want me to give it a shot,

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Well, if it's truly a bug, then fixing it in your own version is obviously a good idea, since it'd let you keep playing/testing. (Example: last night I noticed that the Monolith improvement for the Great Empath couldn't be built, and I'm still debugging that. If you spotted that sort of thing and could fix it on the spot, that'd be great, because there'd be no difference in how you fixed it vs. how I fixed it.)

If it's just a personal opinion on balance, then that's a little different, but obviously the best way to test the balance would be to make the change and see what happens. If you think the 40 combat strength for the Scout Powersuit is just a bit too low to contribute in the Fusion Era, then bump it up to 45 or 50 and we'll tweak the cost later to match. If you think Mind Worms shouldn't be able to take the Blitz promotion, or SHOULD be able to take the March promotion to boost their already-impressive regeneration (they currently can't), then tweak it and see what happens.

If it's something more involved, like "I think the Robotic Assembly Plant should be a few techs earlier, let's say at Subatomic Alloys", then changing that would have a HUGE impact on a lot of other areas, so that sort of thing I'd prefer to discuss before implementation. And if it's adding an entirely new element (for instance, I didn't use the Network Node, Recycling Tanks, Hab Complex, or Recreation Commons from SMAC, and I skipped many SMAC techs altogether) then I'd definitely insist on being involved.

LOL! No, nothing concerning personal opinions or anything like that. Just if I do encounter a true bug (i.e. somethings obviously broken) then I was just offering to investigate to see if I could fix it for you. This is your mod, and I have absolutely no problem subordinating myself in this situation and helping you out by playtesting it. I will offer opinions, but once I comment on something, then thats it on the subject (i.e. I won't keep harping on the same things because I have a different opinion than you in a certain area).

D

Okay, I'm not QUITE ready to upload the mod itself. I did a test game last night, starting in the Transcend Era just to see if everything was in place. After building most of the Wonders (a few of which still do nothing), and coding in the Civilopedia entries for all the buildings and Wonders (not the History part, just the part that explains the game effects), I tried going on a military rampage, and unfortunately this revealed a couple crash bugs. I should have those straightened out today; I think most were caused by units trying to do an animation that their placeholder unit didn't have graphics for. (Satellites trying to rebase when I'd had a Scout as their placeholder, that sort of thing.) I'll play the test case again tonight to see if this worked.

There are a couple other minor tweaks I found in the process of this test game, but I'll be able to do those when I get home from work tonight. One of which I'd like feedback on:

In my design, Neutronium is both a strategic resource and a luxury, in that it's a strategic that also has a Happiness rating. Unfortunately, it looks like adding Happiness to any resource removes it from the strategic resource counter display at the top of the screen, the one that tells you how many units you have remaining. So the question is, how important is that display to people? Do I need to figure out how to force it to display the additional strategic resource, or should I remove the Happiness boost?

But I DID upload four images this morning, under their appropriate posts at the start of the thread; three show the layout of techs in the tech tree (although the icons won't tell you much), and one shows the new policies. (Hint: the 10 new ones all use Oligarchy's "shield" icon, and each is in the bottom row of its branch.)

Spatzimaus said:

Neutronium is both a strategic resource and a luxury, in that it's a strategic that also has a Happiness rating. Unfortunately, it looks like adding Happiness to any resource removes it from the strategic resource counter display at the top of the screen, the one that tells you how many units you have remaining. So the question is, how important is that display to people? Do I need to figure out how to force it to display the additional strategic resource, or should I remove the Happiness boost?

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Generally speaking I like the idea of a resource which is also a luxury (or, even more generically speaking, items that contribute more than one thing), so I'd say leave it in and make fixing this a low priority: it isn't important to the computer, as it "knows" the resource count, and people can take the discrepancy into account for now.

D

Darsnan said:

it isn't important to the computer, as it "knows" the resource count, and people can take the discrepancy into account for now.

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There's a lot of that going around. The placeholder units are the biggest offenders, obviously, but look at my resources:

Omnicytes: I'm using the Oil graphic, with the Iron terrain icon and the "Flower" icon at the top of the screen. Since this is both a land and sea resource, it can get a bit confusing.
Ultimately, I'd like this one to look more like the Fungus. I suppose I could do that by coloring Oil red (or possibly using Wheat, Cotton, or Dyes colored red? Possibly Cotton for the big deposits and Pearls for the small ones.)

Dilithium: I'm using the Uranium graphics with the Coal terrain icon and the "Star" icon at the top. Since this is a sea-only resource, it's really easy to spot (green crystals floating in the ocean). The only thing I'd like to change is to color the crystals something other than green. (Purple, blue, even pink? Blue would be best since I want to make a Tiberium reference.)

Neutronium: I'm using the Aluminum graphics with the Horse terrain icon and the "Omega" icon at the top (which unfortunately has a small red box around it, but it's growing on me). Since this is a land-only resource, it gets VERY tough to distinguish these deposits from other resources. I'd like to color the deposit dark purple (possibly dark blue), to distinguish from Aluminum, but that makes it a little harder to distinguish from Coal and/or Iron.

Unfortunately, since strategic resources can have "normal" and "heavy" deposits, you can't use a luxury as a graphical placeholder as easily. Either the two sizes have to look alike, or you use two different ones. So when I was modifying the AssignStartingPlots.lua (the resource allocation routine) to include these three new resources, it was a bit painful to test... "Hmm, where's the Neutronium... okay, look for a Horse icon that has chunks of metal below it." I'm still checking to see if any non-resource items could be used as icon placeholders, like using the Nanotechnology tech's icon (gears on a blue field) for Neutronium; not every icon atlas exists at every size, so it might not have any icon at the sizes I need.

On a side note, I'm fairly happy with the resource allocation as it stands now, but obviously this could use some feedback once you start playing. (Hint: if you start a game in the Nanotech or Transcendence Eras you'll see the entire map and all resources right away. Fusion era gets you everything but Neutronium, which unlocks at one of the first available techs.) I'm worried there are too few Neutronium and too many Dilithium (but that too many of these are far from shore, as it's a water-only resource), and the Omnicytes are just STRANGE.
I also tried to add these without screwing up the balance of existing resources too much; if I made Neutronium take up 15% of the hilltops, then I increased the general rate of strategic resources on hills by 15-20% to compensate. This might have made the map a bit too resource-packed, though.
I'm also still looking into adding Dilithium to Lake and possibly Oasis tiles, to help with the yield on Pangaea maps, although I'm not sure how you'd get Work Boats to the former and I'd need to link another resource structure to the latter (probably Quarry).

Okay, I'm still at work so I'm not quite ready to upload the mod, but here's another concept to give feedback on:

Buildings making resources.
In Civ4 you had a bunch of modern Wonders that made luxury resources (Broadway, Rock & Roll, etc.), and I'd wanted to do more of that. Even after I found out that wasn't in Civ5, I wanted it in my design, so the Planetary Datalinks (National Wonder) will make Information (a new tradeable luxury, 3 happiness) and the Longevity Vaccine produces Ambrosia (which was originally a combination health/luxury resource in the Civ4 design), although I'm thinking of moving that up a tier to Clinical Immortality for both balance and thematic reasons. (Balance: Longevity Vaccine is at a tech that can be reached through purely terrestrial research, while CI is at a tech that requires one of the Centauri techs, so you can't make it until you unlock the whole Mindworm/Omnicyte thing through building a spaceship. So I'm looking at just swapping the two Wonders' effects.)
Now, someone in one of the other threads figured out how to mod this in, and I plan on integrating it.

But I'd also wanted to add this functionality to a bunch of other buildings for strategic resources, so that your empire isn't crippled by a complete lack of a specific strategic. So the Fusion Lab would create a small supply of Uranium and Aluminum at the cost of 1 Dilithium; not enough to equip an entire army, but enough that you weren't completely hosed if your territory didn't include a supply. (This is a recurring theme of my balance: make it so that all-out expansion isn't the only way to succeed.)
Others, in my latest design (and these are in addition to the other benefits of each):
Quantum Lab: produces Dilithium and Neutronium
Brood Pit: produces Omnicytes (originally I had this at Nanohospital, but that's just too late in the game.)
Quantum Converter (National Wonder): produces 1 unit of all the "inorganic" luxuries: Gold, Silver, Gems, Dyes (and if you don't think Dyes can be inorganic, go look at what a lot of the industrial-era clothing dyes were made from, let alone the modern stuff.)
Paradise Garden: produces 1 unit of all the "organic" luxuries: Furs, Ivory, Spices, Cotton, Pearls, Whales
Energy Bank: produces Oil, Coal

So this last one got me thinking; at the end of the Digital Era/start of the Fusion era, Doctrine: Air Power only depends on Neural Grafting. In SMAC, D:AP had as a prerequisite a tech named "Synthetic Fossil Fuels", whose only benefit was that it gave you the 6-power weapon, the Missile Launcher.
So one possibility I thought of was to add that tech back in at T17, move the Leviathan back down there, and add a building (the Recycling Tanks would work, since I'm not using that name/icon at the moment) that has, among its effects, that it produces Oil and Coal instead of tacking that onto the Energy Bank. (Third effect: I forgot to add a terrain bonus to the Well improvement, and this'd be a good place for it.)
This'd also free up a unit slot at D:AP, which'd allow me to move the Geosynchronous Survey Pod down two tiers (from 20 to 18). It seemed kind of pointless to have the cheap "recon" satellite come so late in the game, AFTER several of the city-boosting satellites.

Now, to the question: should I do what I said above and create a new tech and building, or just add the Coal/Oil production to the Energy Bank and be done with it? I think I've got too many effects in the Digital Era for the number of techs, so adding another would help, but that gets a bit crowded.

My opinion is that you are starting to get into the nit-picking stage, meaning you are sort of starting to second-guess yourself. I'd say shoot off this initial version of the mod and let people start playing it, then see what the feedback is in this regard.

D

Okay, here goes. I'd wanted to wait until I played a full game before posting these, but that probably isn't going to happen.

Two .zip files are now included in the first post:

Crazy Spatz.zip is my low-level "Balance" mod, also known as the Long Mod, which makes it harder to win by conquest and slows down city growth a bit.
Spatz Alpha Centauri.zip is the content mod.

It's obviously not done. I'm still writing Civilopedia text as fast as I can, and I'm still trying to playtest some things. (For instance, I think some of my all-empire future Wonders just give too much of a benefit.) But it should be at least somewhat playable.

Things that don't work:
> The Transcendence victory doesn't show up on the city build list, and I don't know why not.
> The Centauri Ecology tech, for testing reasons, is a 1-cost tech just off Ecology. In the final version this will be a Disabled tech that's manually awarded after you build a spaceship.
> Any wonder whose Civilopedia help text includes "***" is not functional.
> Neutronium, as mentioned before, isn't being listed among your strategic resources at the top of the screen. This is because it adds Happiness as well, and that particular UI .lua classifies it as a Luxury as a result no matter how I've classed it. Working on this.
This is particularly annoying because if you use your last bit of Neutronium, then you no longer have the luxury and lose the 5 happiness, so a lot of micromanagement is necessary.
> The railroad movement boost from Monopole Magnets doesn't work, and I don't know why. The XML modification is in there, in CIV5Routes.xml, but it doesn't DO anything.
> The ability of antigrav land units to move over water doesn't work right yet, because I didn't actually REMOVE the Embarkation promotion. I'm trying to get around this by setting Embarkation back to false in this particular promotion, but I'm not sure which takes precedence. I may have to create a new Grav unit type and simply not give it the Embarkation promotion, but that screws up all kinds of other things.
> When I killed a Labor Mech with a Combat Mech's bombardment, the game crashed. Since the Combat Mech had been doing just fine up to that point, my working assumption is that the Labor Mech just doesn't have the right death animation (which is strange since it's using the Roman Legions as PH).
> I haven't tested all of the units yet, especially the orbital weapons.
> There's no icon in the tech tree when a new Social Policy unlocks, but I'm VERY close to adding that functionality in.
> The bonuses for starting in a future era are way too large; basically, an Engineer can build ANYTHING in one turn, your SP gain rate will be insane, and you'll have more Great People than you know what to do with.
Good for functionality testing, bad for balance. I'd recommend not starting any later than the Industrial Era for now.

On the bright side, I got some changes in at the last minute. For instance, the new strategic resources now have distinct map icons; basically I cannibalized the four unused Civ5 future technologies' icons. So the Particle Physics icon is now Omnicytes, the "sun" from Fusion Power is now Dilithium, and the blue "gears" from Nanotechnology is now Neutronium. I'm planning on using the "glowing people" Future Tech icon for either the Empath or Transcend specialist (probably the Transcend, since the Empath currently uses the green "Citizen" icon instead and I kind of like it.)

Spatzimaus said:

The bonuses for starting in a future era are way too large... I'd recommend not starting any later than the Industrial Era for now.

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I don't mind being a guinea pig in this sense and starting games in the Modern era, as I don't think I could get into a game starting pre-Industrial era (its all about the sci-fi for me). And I don't mind banging on the code - for me its also an interest to see whats in-game right now and how everything is interconnected.

Spatzimaus said:

On the bright side, I got some changes in at the last minute. For instance, the new strategic resources now have distinct map icons; basically I cannibalized the four unused Civ5 future technologies' icons. So the Particle Physics icon is now Omnicytes, the "sun" from Fusion Power is now Dilithium, and the blue "gears" from Nanotechnology is now Neutronium. I'm planning on using the "glowing people" Future Tech icon for either the Empath or Transcend specialist (probably the Transcend, since the Empath currently uses the green "Citizen" icon instead and I kind of like it.)

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Will be dl'ing shortly - looking forward to it.


D