I've been visiting CivFanatics off and on since I purchased Civ 3 when it practically came out as a retail game. I'd been a big fan of Alpha Centuri and Civ 2 as well. I went on to play Civ 4, but didn't care for it that much despite it being "prettier".
Regardless, I'd like to give some back to the community since I've enjoyed playing scenarios and mods for all these years. Since I have a lot of time on my hands, and like to be creative, I'm interested in creating a mod.
WROL Plague Edition would be the first of several WROL post-apocalyptic mods in which the player would have to deal with some end of the world type scenarios in which there would be no way civilization could come back from it... not without a hundred years of humanity crawling back to their former position as apex predators.
Concept
What I'm especially interested in developing is a genuine homesteader type scenario in which multiple factions would be attempting to begin civilization again but with a caveat: they each would be largely on their own and relying upon whatever skills their group brought to the table.
Spoiler:
Rather than the typical fashion of 31 civilizations vying for control, basically there would be up to 29 homesteaders in rural locales on a single map, with two stranded military groups attempting to manage in a world without a command structure.
Instead of the routine post-nuclear dystopia, or highly unrealistic zombies (I love either by the way), to create something new and in the spirit of Civ 3, the players would have skills in the tech tree like flintknapping, water purification levels, mechanical ability, carpentry, agricultural and animal husbandry skills, hunting and trapping, as well as military experience and a host of others.
Each group would have skills in certain parts of the tech tree, but some would be handicapped by not knowing any medicine, or crop growing ability, or lack of military experience, etc.
Certain caches of resources would exist in various locales on the map, and coupled with the ability to learn new skills, and by trading them with neighbors, then progressive skills and units could be created. Because food and supply caches will run out, then it will be essential to learn new skills or perish.
Preparedness allows for continuity but limited resources and low levels of Humanity lead to regression
Spoiler:
While initially the homesteaders have some ranged firearms, they are unable to create new gunpowder weapons...for some time actually. They'd have to have the ability to machine metals, create or find their own gunpowder, create lead shot, etc.
As such they'd be using old technology like baseball bats, katanas found in caches, crossbows and compound bows found in sporting goods stores, etc. They'd have no way of blacksmithing armor at first of course, but would cobble together riot gear found in a police station, or use football shoulder pads and helmets, or find kevlar vests in a cache.
Instead of cities, a tightly packed preset number of houses exists, but due to the need to grow and raise their own food, most of these would have to be demolished. Otherwise there wouldn't be sufficient land mass to raise crops and animals.
The two military units being now seperated from their group have no starting settlements but will establish a base of operations. Since they have security due to their firepower but not much of a food cache and limited practical skills, one will likely establish martial law and develop a feudal society based upon serfdom. The other might think of themselves as trying to re-establish "rule of law" in order to defend the citizens and to support and defend the Constitution.
Much of civilization will stabilize with various ethos and societies not unlike America at its inception. One or two Native American groups or mestizo Latin Americans might try to take back the Land as well and return it back to their rightful place in history.
Eventually you'd see several of the units that sprung up in the Americas over that 1700s-1890 period, but likely you'd not see anything further due to severe world-wide collapse.
Tech tree to realistically create new buildings and units
Spoiler:
Say after learning hunting, leather making, soap making, atl-atl fabrication, along with gunpowder technology, access to metals, tools, and elbow grease, then the first crude firearms might appear. You might see "zip guns and improvised shotguns" as the first guns as some ammunition caches might be found for those weapons. Neither is particularly effective due to lack of range, but are "a gun to get a gun" as in history these items were air dropped or smuggled to help partisans. Certain groups might find abandoned dynamite.
In effect, while there is a postmodern start of 2015 AD, the players have some knowledge of the "ancient" era which are prepper skills. One is a Peace Corp volunteer who sets up sanitation in rural villages in Africa, and now will be trading some of those levels of technology in order to learn animal husbandry levels and hunting levels. Things like Sanitary Water Management-Wells-Biosand Filter-Latrines-Composting Toilets-Simple Sewers, etc would be the levels that he knows.
Another civ group is a collection of marines with various levels of "tech" they learned, which then can be traded but only things like tactics levels or recruitment of new soldiers.
Tied together, some of these interconnect to allow improvements to be made to allow communities to exist again, and for trade to start happening from found materials of "caches". Some have exsisting farming operations, or can hunt , or have apiaries (beekeeping) to trade honey.
So only primitive like weapons units happen from the start, and it will take into either the later period of the ancient period, but probably into the medieval period to get proper metal mining going again by hand, and thus produce edged metal weapons again, and those units too.
Most tech isn't tradable after the ancient era. I really doubt trading of technology in a post-apoc world would be done, but in the early period, with so many people with now useless skills (what good is an actuary, an office worker, a fast food worker, etc in such a world?) and so with only intense labor and research would advancements be made. 95% of the survivors would have useless knowledge, for what they knew couldn't be of practical benefit versus old ancestral skills. It's why the prepper/homesteaders in these rural locales survived.
The rate of new tech would be extremely limited due to lack of working labs and equipment to do research. As such there won't be a way to massively invest more than 30% of income into technology. Too much investment will be have to be made to manage food requirements for your population (and for animal husbandry needs) as well as high costs for maintaining infrastructure.
An example of a zip gun created to shoot .22 ammunition by converting a heavy stapler mechanism to set off the .22 ammo by a crude means into a metal pipe. It'll work but not very effectively.
Spoiler:
While I can use the existing units, and some have downloaded units of postmodern people (the sheriff, gangsters, riot police, etc), since I'm not a graphics person, I'd be looking for modders who can come up with a few units that would show postmodern people but with older style weaponry. Mauraders are a constant problem with metropolitan citizens fleeing to the rural areas, but most have died of the plague. They'll be also some of the units types listed above and probably set as "restless" barbarians.
If you're not interested in being on a mod team, would you be interested in playing it? I'm just as interested in the realistic difficulties of basic survival and bettering a homestead with Biosand filters, cobbled together solar power, improvised weapons, Hugelkulture, swales, deep and shallow wells, restablishing trade....as I am in some contrived scenario where it's easy to push out endless streams of highly unrealistic numbers of postmodern Marines.
Attrition due to fostering standing armies and population control
Spoiler:
In all likelihood, each unit trained will result in a reduction of the homesteaders population. Certain techs will end up in creating certain units to simulate the influx of strangers with certain skills sets. An ex-physician or nurse practitioner, chemist, machinist, etc will show up eventually due to hunger and their exodus.
Once the base is created, then alternative scenarios might be WROL New Madrid Earthquake, WROL EMP, WROL Peak Oil, etc.
EDIT
Here's an example of the kind of units that I'm looking for. These would be transitional units by citizens who had armed themselves when it no longer was possible for them to find ammunition for their handguns and rifles. Then later long term, as blacksmithing and reloading and machinists become more prevalent, then a return to those items by necessity would exist due to the difficulties of forging armour and swords.
These pics are from the Civ 4 Fury Road mod team.
Ordinary man with riot gear shield and machete
Spoiler:
Ordinary men with pipe wrenches, axes, and crowbars.
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Role of Nature as a civilization
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One of the civilizations will be designated as creating maruders to harass the other civilizations. Another will be Nature itself and able to send wild animals, escaped zoo animals (rare), thunderstorms, locust plagues, floods, wildfires, etc that will act to reduce the units and/or armies sent out. These might be combined into one civilization. In Civ3 in obscured areas in shadow, then two types of barbarians can be spawned as designated and this will be the main additional way of upsetting the plans of the other homesteaders. Because of colonies, and the homesteaders finding "caches" of things like fuel reserves, pain medicine, ammunition, etc, then those disruptions will be particularly bad as they'll be things that the homesteaders cannot easily recreate. In this way, Nature acts as a constant force to limit the expansion of humanity, to balance the subjugation of Nature by Humanity. When you take away the homes under Nature's control, then you limit the effects upon the locals.
Nature units have the "hidden nationality" attribute, so they can attack cities and units in the field with impunity. Of course you'll know where they're coming from as the human player. In this way, Nature is immune from attack due to the start postition. She won't have much to trade save some natural resources (if she trades them at all for they would be of very high value to the struggling humans and would only enable her eventual demise). She begins with far more gold to create her units, and has her own untradeable tech to create various levels of weapons. A tornado is a true weapon of mass destruction, and the capcity of making a bomber will be outside the scope of the other civilizations (or perhaps a crude improvised one might happen).
Interconnectedness of society
Spoiler:
One could exploit a cache of coal to heat a home, but it would be enormously difficult to chance upon it due to a corporate practice of inventory control called Just-in-Time (first created by an American adviser in Japan). This then spread to affect all of American business practices in manufacturing in order to save money. As a result, while the player might understand mining technology, with their small group there are limited ways of actually mining without large numbers of citizens to do so.
Just in Time inventory control results in things like your local water utility having just the right amount of chlorine on hand for water purification as that reduces their inventory, but it vastly creates issues with potential collapse situations under a disaster like the plague. One need only look at Congressional Reports on pandemics to see the very real concern about this impacting American society, and it's why there are National Strategic Reserves for certain material in order to prevent societal collapse in case of sustained disruptions to transportation due to disasters.
Everything is so intrinsically interconnected in postmodern society, which allows it to operate effeciently, but the result is a very precarious position if there are long term interuptions due to humans getting sick with a virulent influenza or plague. If the citizens who work in refineries, who transport the chlorine, who work to oversee production, who sell it are severely ill, then technology alone won't result in it getting to the consumer. This is also another educational aspect of the mod.
What happens in 3rd world countries, and in American history, might be things like the burning of cow manure and/or the mixing of dried agricultural waste into it, to form brickets that are extremely dense in heat energy release, have only an earthy smell that is not unpleasant, and VASTLY saves on chopping down trees that otherwise are producing valuable lumber for tools, building shelters, flatboats, etc.
Because chemical fertilizers will be very difficult to find and impossible to replicate, then the standard practice is to recycle liquid human waste into ideal fertilizer that otherwise is a waste product. Solid human waste has been converted in low tech biodigestors to produce valuable methane gas that can be utilized as a cooking fuel.
The latest method for heating homes consists of a special (inexpensive) mass rocket stove that has an extremely high energy output, produces low ash, and very little smoke (mostly steam). This will be one of the technologies learned and within the realm of possibility in a WROL situation. It also produces very valuable Biochar (a form of charcoal), and this is a soil amenity, a medicinal, as well as essential for blacksmithing and improving the taste of water (it's the kind of material used in commerical water purification).
So the mod will have both fun elements of improvised weapons, a genuine look at how postmodern humans might adapt by using low tech, as well as being scientifically and historically accurate. Many old mechanical practices that homesteaders used in history will be discussed in order to use leverage and pulleys in order to do things like haul water out of a well. In turn other low tech items like treadle pumps will vastly ease removing water against gravity and then stored (as well as rainwater cachement) into cisterns for dry periods. In this way, a steady amount of water will result in improved health and irrigation.
Due to that, there won't be much desert in the mod as it's highly unlikely for larger civilizations to be created in any population density due to lack of rainfall, lack of humus in the soil, and nitrogen fixing bacteria. That niche results in low density of flora and fauna to support other species as well as humanity. In this, the mod is largely a teaching device about agricultural practices and practical science as well as understanding Ecology and self-sustainable systems.
Ever wonder how salt was produced in history? It wasn't always mined, but extracted from salt "licks" across America, extracted by dehydration for those who are blessed enough to live close to salt water, as well as residue in certain arid environments. Salt is essential for food preservation. A lot of seemly mundane things like this or canning are the backbone of civilization in order to support standing armies. Due to the inability to easily acquire salt, then trade becomes not only essential to sustain life, but might be the cause of human conflict in order to acquire those resources.
Religion (and lack thereof) simulated with luxury resources.
Spoiler:
Religion was an addition with Civ 4, but not generally within the milieu of Civ 3 (without modification). Instead, whenever two or more humans got together in ANY civilization in history, religious adherents through mysticism as well as fierce deniers resulted in conflict and artistic expression.
As luxury resources can be made with the ability to:
1. Create happiness
2. Disappear based upon a percentage chance
3. Allow for the creation of buildings or units
then religions (Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Pagan, Christianity, etc might result from a local luxury resource of adherents and deniers living within the proximity to the main community.
As such, missionaries as well as atheist raionalists might spring up from there by the presence of certain levels of buildings. Then in turn that acts as a "hub" to send out proponents of that method of belief systems in order spread it to other regions. Certain parts of the map might thus be exploited to propagate ideas to other regions. You can bet under collapse conditions, Humanity will seek for ways to understand, meditate upon, and alter their future in this way.They'll either see spirituality as the cause of societal problems, or see spirituality as the only way for Humanity to live together in peace. Love thy neighbor unless he's a heretic.
Nature units that might show up based upon acquiring permission (if needed).
Spoiler:
Snake Wildfire Locust Swarm
Barbarian units to represent fleeing urban dwellers
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Thug Riot Police Chainsaw maniac Gangsta
Borders look like razorwire
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Cities look much as they did during pioneer days
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Simulated navigatable rivers
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If within the realm of possibility, then I've considered making many of the starting settlements in appearance as islands surround by a narrow band of freshwater channel, then this surrounded by land masses. As such, it might be possible to create water craft like flatboats and keelboats to transport units via this method. That might be far faster (or even just safer) than directly walking to new claimed territories.
The rogue military units who are setting up feudalism (perhaps Chinese infiltrators) would be on a small land mass at sea, but stranded until they establish a base of operations and assert domination over the barbarians there. Likewise a set of American military units would be on a seperate land mass at sea on the opposite side of the map. Either has to go through the main "island" to dominate or diplomatically control those civilizations prior to attacking each other. They may choose instead to deal with each other while both are weaker, and thus eliminate their main contender prior to asserting dominance over the others. Though far better armed, they lack supplies that will severely limit their expansion. Thus either might rationalize seizing control of certain towns to ensure their own survival. It's rather like the way medieval invaders preyed upon surrounding villagers to acquire food and supplies while beseiging larger urban areas.
As salt will be largely acquired by dehydration (not boiling it down) as any coastal civilzation did in history, then both military forces have an essential trade resource to act as a medium of currency to parlay with the other nations close to them. That is if they research it.
Royalty free music
Spoiler:
Because there is a large body of it on the Internet, and since you can only play so many files within a mod, I'm wondering how many people shuffle mp3 files in WinAmp instead? No matter how diverse the music is based upon the culture and time period, it STILL gets stale after a short while. As such, I wonder if people would like me to include an alternative download that would be a collection of royalty free mp3s that I think go well. In that way, I could post 20 or more mp3s instead to add diversity.
Since it's a post-apocalyptic mod, I'm going for a score that's made for horror films to add TENSION. However the overwhelming aspect of it is a return to agrarian life typical of the Colonial Period through the Wild West Period (Manifest Destiny), and so I could also try to locate authentic royalty free music from those periods as well.
What do you think?
Mapping
The concept is to add many significant caches of postmodern day materials (there won't be electricity until you research it or have it as a basic skill early on through small scale hydroelectric and solar powder), and these will likely be impossible to replicate. Thus wiring and light bulbs might be resources.
Spoiler:
It can get far more complicated. Some resources only affect the civilization within their borders or colonies. Others are trade items. Others are luxury items. As such, instead of a pig icon, having a pig farm would be a normal part of an operation, but Feral Pigs might be an additional hunting resource. If you had a smokehouse and feral pigs, then you could produce country hams as either a food item for yourselves or as a trade item. I'm thinking about clever ways to do much more with the engine rather than just the typical trade. Usually that's reserved for military units.
Some resources might allow for all kinds of things like cold running water, but hot showers were a technological achievement that happened because of cisterns to hold the rainfall that came down seasonally, rather than allowing it to be washed away. Soap production happened only because of the discovery of lye and fat producing it. That lead to cleanliness and better sanitary practices, all of which meant an improvement in health, pleasure, and grooming habits.
For our homesteaders, some might be able to create hot water through methane biodigestors, roof mounted passive solar heating, and conversion of their hotwater heaters to act as reserviors. That would be a major technological advancement that lead to things like the better cure rate of soldiers in hospitals by cutting down on pathogens. Those who have apples might make not only make "scrumpy" (a hard apple cider beverage), but also apple cider vinegar. Every Roman soldier has a vinegar flask for their health as it's so valuable as an astringent or cleaning agent.
The most common things will not exist within the milieu of the post-apoc mod. It might be more than 50-100 years before salt or oranges might be common again. Most of the things you take for granted at the hardware or grocery store simply won't exist anymore unless you can produce it within your civilization. Instead of daily orange juice for Vitamin C to prevent scurvy, instead the homesteaders would be consuming pine needle tea, which would be available to most everyone, but think how oranges would once again be an impossible luxury. Fresh fruit out of season would be nearly impossible due to shipping issues (prior to learned technologies), but canning and dehydrated fruits would be common in every household and surely trade items for those with orchards.
It means a real re-evaluation of the trade system.
Bootlegging ethanol would happen by necessity as a dual purpose cleaning agent for wounds, but also as a luxury item. But it means a pottery operation in order to create containers until the rediscovery of glass. Both require materials. Bootlegging means distillation, which is notorious in history, for methanol "comes over" at a similar temperature. Consumption of it means blindness as methanol concentrated in the optic nerve. Bootlegging can't happen without thermometers and copper tubing.
The Horde i.e. Barbarian units versus Medieval Serfdom
Spoiler:
Barbarian units when they win...enslave other units and create new clones of themselves. As such, if you don't manage to form a defensive force to repel them, then you'll have a really tough time dealing with even more of them.
Medieval serfdom will occur with some civilizations as they capture and create new serfs from the captives. Other civilzations will have some form of citizenship apply through upgrading (slave-serf-worker-citizen-laborer-engineer). Other civilizations will merely kill off hostiles as it's one more mouth to feed (take no prisoners), and in those civilzations, they'll convert excess population to created workers. Upgrading workers is expensive because that's what the schools will do. As technology increases, better agriculture and engineer results in better worker bees to accomplish it.
It's possible and likely that some martial law type heavily authoritarian civilizations could develop concentration labor camps as their factories and in these they might capture and "disband" workers. The way the AI diplomacy resolves attitude to other civilzations is that such disbanding results in antipathy and if you do it, while the return of shields will benefit you, it will create a terrible diplomatic attitude towards your civilization.
Economic/Trade system
Spoiler:
A lot of resources are rare and owning them triggers the only way to create infrastructure and/or units. As such, highly expect wars to break out over them. This echoes history as believe it or not, the high demand for coffee of the Sumatra type, a wonderful flavorful coffee, resulted in the postmodern era to wars in East Timor over those coffee fields. Coffee only grows in Hawaii in America, and the close importation is from Mexico and some Central American nations. It's the most common drug in America.
Because gold mining would be extremely limited with only the panning of gold in some areas (which was very hit or miss in American history with most of the money made by selling equipment to prospectors), I'm thinking of making tobacco the universal unit of currency. While distilled booze as moonshine will no doubt be a popular item, this means an abundance of grain crops are converted into ethanol instead of merely consumed. Later the research and adoption of currency will be a major technology and economic breakthrough supplanting barter networks. Perhaps in fact we shouldn't be using petrodollars after all as they're really worthless electronic currency created out of thin air (paper dollars make up less than 1% of all financial transactions).
Alternative medicine in a post-apoc world
Spoiler:
Early rural dwellers often got pellagra and other nutritional diseases from a poor diversity of diet. They didn't understand the tribal lore of nixtamalization which allowed the proper vitamins to be absorbed from consuming corn, and that will show up as a tech that must be learned. A diet whether based upon plant or animal or both sources requires amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) of diverse kinds. Otherwise proteins cannot properly form in the body. I'd like that to be part of the technology learned through nutrition. Likewise inadequate calcium (which can be found in leafy green plants as well as mostly through milk consumption) led to rickets (a crippling bowing of the legs in American immigrant children during the Industrial Revolution). Scurvy plagued early pioneers until they understood its effects, and in history this was a basic issue for sailors (research the use of dried limes as a storable preventative). I'm trying to think of ways to utilize this through technology and infrastructure having higher death rates on the populace in civs without that knowledge. It's likely this will mean levels of a nutritional understanding, that in turn tie in with basic medicine and with medicinal herbs as forming the basis for a new kind of medicine through most of the eras. Pharmacalogical agents weren't invented for a very long time, so you'd have few natural ingested antibacterials (grapefruit seed and olive leaf and neither grow in most of America), and hence this ties back into the WROL Plague Edition mod.
Finding a cache of antibiotics will be of extreme strategic importance.
In Civ3, if one isn't careful, too many buildings can improve the growth rate, and so end up killing off the population due to caps for sanitation or medicine. There's a real balance, for only so much food can be grown without severe labor. Because it begins as homesteads, leading to communities, and then cities, and since the creation of units results in population subtraction, then this is a double-edged sword where creating too many citizen soldiers can stunt the growth of those homesteads.
There's a lot of intricately made units on the forum and in the database that are just waiting to be implemented into a mod or scenario. One of my main goals is to find a mechanism through these diverse WROL scenarios in order to utilize a rare unit that otherwise wouldn't get used.
Spoiler:
The AI isn't concerned about aesthetics but number crunching. It is passionless and doesn't care about the beauty of the unit, only it's stats. This means if two units are precisely the same, then they fill precisely the same niche in the AI's arsenal, and so you might not see that other colorful version that was used in history. It fails to appear unless carefully modded. So I want to create ways to make that happen automatically by a variety of means to showcase them. They'll appear if rarely and then when the player loses them, then they'll grieve the loss but look forward to next rare unit.
Playing with Civ 3 units is much like playing soldiers in the dirt once more as we did as children. We imagined in delight what it would be like to be a general.
Spoiler:
Sometimes it can take a long time to finally create units as that is a long process of managing trade, income, infrastructure management, learning tech, etc. Sometimes you just wanna break something or engage enemy units, and so I want to foster a mechanism in which this will happen on occasion in order to remove some of the tedium and just play.
Gamers in history have created endless ways to play those soldiers through GI Joe action figures, Napoleonic metal figures that are meticulously painted, model planes and car kits, etc. In this Civ 3 fulfilled an important aspect of the admiration of that military unit's role in history.
Spoiler:
We think of WROL as a postmodern event but often in very vanilla scenarios. Who hasn't seen a film and thought, "Wow couldn't they have been more creative and not churned out another retread?" My goal is to create a similar engine but to alter the situation enough to make for a use for seemingly mundane resources turn out to enable some terrific units.
WROL events don't always have to be tied to America. This is an international community and so why not make the scenario happen as if you were living in some far off place and understand their history and economic and social issues. The quandry is understanding those things enough to get it right, and that limitation means needing Beta testers from those areas to help fine tune whatever storytelling devices (mostly the Civipedia) exist for that purpose.
WROL events happened throughout history. We just didn't call it that in history class. Say you're there when Krakatoa erupts! But how often do you think you'd see a scenario about Indonesia in 1883?
Another goal is to not be overly concerned with making a mod set far in the future to make it look delicious and perfectly thematic...and then never have it gel due to setting the bar too high. It's better to play something sooner than later.
What would life truly be like under collapse scenarios?
Well life would be truly difficult but based upon five main factors.
1) The amount of supplies one could draw down from.
2) The security for one's loved one based upon population density
3) The amount of skills one possesses that are practical generalist ones versus what the world makes you do as a specialist
4) Calm demeanor
5) Land to draw natural resources from and to reacquire intentionally cultivated ones
You see, under collapse conditions, those who panic and live in a large urban area, are not going to have the space for supplies without competition for those resources. Due to the population density, there would be little ways to escape that wouldn't become clogged. Why? It only takes a single stalled car to clog up everyone else who is fleeing.
Many urban areas evolved out of the proximity to water, but only modern piping and sanitation resulted in an improvement in public health. Shut down the water for three days, and the very people who lack skills and supplies will die during their flight.
Since one urban area arises but a small distance from another one, then fleeing people might get stranded in the next metropolitan area over. Fleeing people buying up supplies as they enter a new city, then remove resources that the inhabitants cannot draw from.
If the collapse occurs simultaneously, the a huge portion of the most congested regions would no longer have transportation networks and utilities, and so massive deaths follow. Massive deaths result in a massive sanitation issue.
While conflict is a major aspect of post-apoc films and tv shows, the reality is if you're in those zones, you'll see that, but if you're in a remote place, then the survivors are the ones who already know how to live off the Land. It's chancey at best to flee for resources. Rather than bugging out, they bug in.
While post-apoc media forms show an awful lot of hunting, what we know from American history was the opposite. Trapping was far more important as hunting is an energy intensive activity. Native Americans instead chose to trap as it was more practical. Those who did hunt, hunted without restriction, and such practices killed off too many of the younger members of the species, disturbed their habitat in adverse ways, and so reduced the game population in a short amount of time.
There is almost no living off the land. It's not practical for species bloom and fruit in their specifed time based upon rainfall, sunlight, and temperature. Yes, something can be taken from March through November in many parts of America, but in small amounts. Save for the abundance of nut trees like the common acorn, or the abundance of maple syrup, or the common cattail, or wild grass seed, then most of the time, the amount of nutrition produced is LESS than the amount of energy required to harvest it.
Something as simple as grinding wheat with a homemade quern requires a good knowledge of masonry, mechanics, farming, and STILL uses up a ton of energy by turning it into flour. Only an abundance of careful agriculture would lead to sufficient food stores to feed a family AND save up for Winter.
Even if that happened, then mishaps with extended Winter seasons, a rush of floodwaters, a blight upon the autumn crops, the death of animals, etc could bring about ruin and death.
Those are the practical elements of the mod. Initially you're trying to live and learn new practical skills, not shoot the intruder, for you can't afford the energy loss, nor replace weaponry easily to oppose them.
Since the early medieval period, leadership needed professional soldiers and artisan/craftsmen in order to maintain the main capitol. This meant robbing these professionals from their home areas and relocating them to the capitol, and in turn relocating agriculture to those areas outside of the capitol.
The rise of nobles in the medieval period meant a local need for professional soldiers and artisan/craftsmen, and hence a local mechanism to develop these specialists.
In history, those who lived on the Frontier needed to be generalists like their ancestors. Being isolated, they needed to be jacks-of-all-trades. Sure, it was great for certain specialists like a priest/pastor and physician to be within their community, but mostly the community began as loose collection of generalists. The very first specialist was often the blacksmith.
Any post-apoc scenario is realistically going to follow some similar type of feudalism, have generalists, and a few specialists. The transmission of general agricultural knowledge must come first to maintain survival, must have an educational process to teach those primary generalist skills, then follow with specialization.
And yet, all of us today are specialists. We don't know these generalist skills. We would be ill prepared to do them. They are truly becoming lost knowledge even though they were commonplace even as early as 100 years ago.
Urbanization and specialization allowed trade to occur. If every group is a generalist, sure they can create all of their own needs locally contingent upon natural resources. But this means thinly dividing out responsibilities so great as to be less effective at certain ones.
Urbanization and specialization can only happen with good trustworthy neighbors. The biggest fear would be being assimilated as serfs under another group so that the stronger group can be professional soldiers.
That's why warfare must not be neglected as an essential skill. Warfare in all of its ways allows freedom within community and self-determination. It's particularly vital in a post-apoc scenario as it could be appealing to return to feudal societies maintaining soldiers on the borders of near by rivals.
I mean the poor guy was gonna build all that for who? There are so few of us left on civ 3. I had nothing to type besides a 'cool' since this goes beyond what i've ever modded in civ 3, so I never said anything on this post, but i think some of us were interested.
Sometimes silence =/= people are uninterested. At least for me I kept wondering how all this was gonna be achieved... in silence
I get the gist of the scenario, but not the mod-specifics. For example, here are questions which arise:
1. What timeframe is the mod covering? Decades? Centuries? What unit of time does each turn represent? The editor allows you to use days, weeks, and years as units, and each turn is x number of units. A typical 540 turn game can break down into a single decade of game time, or cover a thousand years. The default game is abstractly unrealistic about transportation capabilities of units with access to combustion engines (marines can only move one square per year) and some people have gone so far as to change the unit values to reflect some sort of logical consistency, which nonetheless throws game balance out the window. If your game-turns reflect a smaller unit of time, your game will certainly contain all the intricacies and details you are aiming for. And you can make the early game very detailed and then later on, with the rise of cities, you can return to a more CivIIIish abstraction.
2. It appears you want all the action to take place on a single continent. (No problem, I did the same thing for MagePunk). This makes terrain and improvements take on a different character. Cities can become individual suburbs. Mountains become landmarks in their own right. Rivers become streams, and, like you said, you can use water tiles to make your own waterways. Your custom maps can become extremely detailed, depending on the scale and scope of the mod. Will your map be a gigantic 256x256 map, or will you want less elbow room for the two-dozen factions? If you go the non-custom, random map route, be sure the map editor can draft a map that makes sense. You might want a water terrain to say "Lake" or "Fresh Water" but if those tiles are used to randomly make a large great lake, and it's large enough, the great lake becomes salty and unusable for game mechanics like irrigation, but it does open up the ability to make trade routes and build port or coastal facilities.
3. You've already established that the factions are basically followers amassed around a concerned citizen or charismatic figure or a skilled leader motivated enough to want to drive on and ultimately rebuild society. Does that imply that each individual unit is a single person or very small group of people? Instead of an Archer being a group of Stone Age hunters, represented by a single figure, you want, say, a Guerilla to be an actual survival-junkie toting a submachinegun? I think it's the latter, especially since you mentioned being able to upgrade a unit once resources and techs are obtained. If this is so, then at what point does the unit become representative of something larger and more abstract? For example, if late in the game you have three policemen garrisoned in your city, does that mean you'll have a trio of cops keeping order and no heavy military troops within easy mustering distance? These are points to consider, not a criticism in any way, shape, or form. I'm sharing with you what questions I answer for myself in the planning stages of a mod.
4. Do you plan on reconfiguring what worker jobs are or do? Will terrain improvements such as fortresses, irrigation, and radar towers remain as they are? Keep in mind forests are something of an improvement, except they cannot be pillaged.
5. The editor allows you to include natural disasters in your mod. They take the form of plague, volcanic eruptions, and global warming. Pollution is a form of manmade disaster, as are craters. Both require cleanup by workers. These manmade disasters need not be manmade if you adapt them as a form of effect or attack by the Nature faction you describe above. A meltdown is a building effect that can drastically reduce population and pollute the surrounding countryside. You need not limit it to fission reactors. (In MagePunk I turned meltdowns into plague outbreaks.)
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Locust Swarm 
Riot Police 
Chainsaw maniac 
Gangsta 
