[MOD] POST APOCALYPTIC Conversion (For Warlords 2.08)

Hey all,

For those of you who don't regularly read in the "second revolution" sub forum a few of us have been contemplating creating a Post Apocalyptic style Mod for Civ 4. Well work on the prototype/pre-alpha has begun and I figured i'd post about it here.

Join us in discussing, and contribute to the mod. We need more coders, we need modelers, we even just need ideas- anything you can help out with would be greatly appreciated.

I'm going to summarize what we have so far in this and the next few posts... Hope to hear from you guys soon

-S
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Current Test Version: Prototype 0.02p - 0.03p is currently under development!

0.02p Changes:



Planned Changes in 0.03p-0.05p


Current Version Screenshots:

Screenshot 1: The Shelter Test Civ has Emerged! Behold Shelter 44 with Shelter Warriors (Thanks to White Rabbit for the Model being used (This obviously is a temp graphic but still...credit is due, where credit is due )



Screenshot 2: The beginings of a Tech Tree! How can society exist without god!



Screenshot 3: Added Garrets "Wine from Water" mod to the game. I'm hoping to make some modifications to it to make the water a dark orange/brown color or maybe green - basicly I want to make it look even more polluted than it does now! -- Perhaps find a way to turn it off for some water (make small lakes of clean water etc.)




Screenshot 4: The first two government civics are in!



Screenshot 5: Civilpedia description for Shelter Govt!



Screenshot 6: Your ancient shelter is your seat of government (Takes the place of the palace):




CREDITS:

Here is the work we currently need done:

MODELLERS - We could use some themed models for the game.... What I know we need for sure: <--- These will be updated often!

"Shelter Warriors" - These guys are the initial warriors you start the game with. High Tech compared to other early units, they allow you to consolidate your initial territory!
Slave workers - basicly cheap, but very ineffective workers. Because they dont have any protection against the radiation, they are very sickly looking. Perhaps the "Slave Master" (I was thinking making each unit 3 guys 1 slave master and 2 slaves) wearing a Hazmat suit)
Two-Headed Cows- A tribute to Fallout. These are going to be a food resource. Shouldnt be too hard to do.
Giant Scorpions - Another Fallout tribute. Animals suck.
Giant Shark - An animal in the water. Your mid-game boats certainlly won't be safe with these guys around!
Other Mutated animal life.
Vault City Graphic
Several flavors of "outsider" cities (ask for details)
Several flavors of Mutant cities

Terrain Guys:

We really could use someone to help us make special terrain for the mod (Wastelands, radioactive landscapes, craters, etc.)

2D Graphics Guys:

We could use Tech Graphics for the Technologies listed below.

Currently our "Work in Progress" Tech Tree is as follows:

Line 1 Techs:

Storytelling - Basically the study of old tales and other cultural remnants from the ancient past. (I figure if your gonna lock lots of people in a shelter for a few hundred years you'd put a lot of books down there with them to keep them occupied!) IMPLEMENTED

Concept of God -Already been over this one - IMPLEMENTED

Shelter Economics - Basic local currency developed in the shelters. IMPLEMENTED

Rationing- The art of keeping a large population fed, and clothed with limited resources. (considering making it allow for a building ~ = to the granary?) - IMPLEMENTED

Survey Regulations- A series of rules, and regulations about exploring the outside world. Allows the production of a basic defensive type troop. Leads mainly to techs focusing on the worker unit down the line.

Pre-War Agriculture- The study of agriculture prior to the war. Some techniques might come in handy. Allows worker type units to create "trails" - IMPLEMENTED

Self Defense- The study of ancient martial arts, boxing, and other Fighting skills. While primarily studied in the shelters as a form of mediation and exersise, the leaders of the shelters quickly realized the value of such skills in controlling outsider settlements. Allows for basic fighting unit (str 2) (shelter only) and even more basic fighting unit (str 1)(non-shelter). - IMPLEMENTED

Line 2 Techs:

Barter system
Requires: Shelter Economics
This is the common form of currency in the "outside lands" and needs to be studied and adapted to if you are going to have meaningful trade between your conquored cities.

Realization
Requires: Survey Regulations
Basicly an understanding that the world is nothing like it was supposed to be after the exodus. Only by grasping the truth about the state of things are your people able to put togeather plans for rebuilding. Allows the creation of ultra expensive but fast (compared to other early alternative) Hazmat Suit wearing workers.

Pillage Necessity
Requires: Population Control
The idea that pillaging outsider and mutant vilages/towns is needed in order to support your current ones. Allows the player to Raze enemy towns, for a production boost (if possible to code it to do so) in the nearest city and some gold.


Seeking Answers
Requires: Concept of God
The search for Answers about life and god.


Metal Recycling
Requires: Self Defense OR Survey Regulations
The art of melting down metals, and remaking them into new things such as swords and armor. Might not seem so useful compared to the Shelter Warriors you start with but in the early game gun units are rare and you need to defend your territory.


Line 3 Techs:

Monarchy
Requires: Fairy Tales AND Shelter Government
Do I really need to explain this?

Slavery
Requires: Pillage Necessity
Allows the creation of Slave Labor units. Basicly these guys are the equivilent of VERY slow, but quick building and relativly cheap labor. Actually your best choice at this stage of the game since outsiders and mutants will likely kill off 30-50&#37; of your workers One free slave labor unit could be created from razing or capturing a town (depending on balance)?

Ragnarok Doctrine
Requires: Seeking Answers
First to discover founds the Ragnarokian Religion. Allows for Ragnarokian Temples etc.

Rebirth Doctrine
Requires: Seeking Answers
First to discover founds the Rebirth Religion. Allows for Rebirth Temples etc.

Potential New Techs to be added:

Desert Farming - This should be much later in the tech tree. The ability to farm in that harsh climate should be difficult to say the least- the people are going to have to rely on hunting (see my idea on animals below), and other means of survival durring the early game.


Ecological Study - Good name. Perhaps requiring Rationing AND Survey regulations? Maybe this would allow for the creation of Domesticator units? (see "Other Concepts" below.)

Socialism - Not available to be researched. Line 1 tech. Not available via goodie hut. Only available initially to governments with the "socialist" trait. Can be acquired via trade...but by the time trade is available mostly obsolete. Basically these people either went into the shelter with populations from communist governments, or the idea emerged durring their stay. Gives some bonuses that Shelter Government doesn't, and is more viable into early-mid game (not quite as good as monarchy, but as an alternative to anarchy many might stay with it!)

Gathering - Line 2 tech. Requires Rationing. Reveals the Scrap (see "Other Concepts" below.) resource. Basicly the idea that things are going to need to be gathered in order to survive.

Disinfection - Line 5? tech. Allows the player to work water tiles and enables a basic medic type unit.

These are the current Civics and Religions we have in mind:

Governments:

Shelter Government: Similar to modern democracy. The people elect a leader and he rules for short terms.

Monarcy: Kingdoms. The idea comes from old stories. While a democracy worked great in the shelters, the people on the outside need something to believe in. A king is a great figurehead, and a much stronger leader than a president.

Religions:

Ragnarokia (name needs some work): These people belive that the Gods had a war, and the current world is how it is as a result. They belive they worship the surviving gods.

Rebirth Religion (Need a name): These people believe that God died, and has been reborn, and that all life does the same.

Here are our current ideas not yet implemented, but being discussed.

General Concepts:

"Outsiders" and "Mutants"

We are hoping to have two types of barbarians.

Outsiders

These are basicly people who survived the apocalypse and currently live in ragtag towns on the surface. Many of them raid each other, and search the land for prey (i.e. you) and resources.

Mutants These guys are people who unfortunately have been affected by generations of radioactivity. Highly violent, and some might say even mad they have several advantages and disadvantages over Outsiders. First off they primarily habitat radioactive areas (only able to settle on radioactive terrain?) although they come outside of it for food and other supplies. They are physically weaker for the most part than outsiders, but around their territory they are high in numbers. Some have been lucky enough to "mutate" into something stronger than even regular humans. Mutants will be a problem for the player much longer into the game than Outsiders since they originate on terrain the player wont be able to enter until later in the game.


Resources:

Food Resource thoughts:

Domestication of animals:

1.) Create Domestication Tech
2.) Make Two-Headed cows and stuff as animal units.
3.) make a Domesticater unit with +bonus vs animals
4.) Upon winning combat with cows (or later better animals) creates a "Domesticated cow" unit
5.) allow you to move the domesticated cow unit.
6.) domesticated cow unit would be able to create a pasture which destroys the unit, but creates a resource representing them
7.) if a unit razes the pasture a new domesticated cow unit is created under the control of the guy who razed the improvement

What this would do is allow resources to be "stolen" and moved to their own cities. Would add an interesting dynamic to the game.... don't know if its possible but would actually give meaning to razing improvements!

Scrap

If possible it would be awesome to require this resource to be worked constantly to provide resources... and make it depletable. Make it VERY common.

Reserved for listing new Civs and traits to the game!

Ok thats all the reserves guys -- Lots to read up there. Figured it would be easier to orginize the information we either have settled on, or how we currently have it. The Reserve threads above this will change often!

What do you guys think of the idea thus far?

Any ideas that might help us out? We are all ears!

Feel free to post Civ ideas too... my only hard rule AT THIS TIME is that all civs need to have come from a shelter. I might down the line come up with "outsider" civs, but for now shelter civs are what we are focusing on.

Discuss away

To the regulars from the old thread... welcome home

Current work on Barbarians is still in progress... Giving up on them for the day and working on placeholder Terrain. Currently I'm borrowing terrain from Roanoke, Dark Terrain, and of course Wine to Water. Water Texture with no line of sight currently correct. Working on fixing water texture for in line of sight. I also added Shelter Govt and Monarchy to the game (Changed Hereditary rule to Monarchy). - Added 2 new screenshots, and planned changes to new version to the top-post in the thread.

good work! its starting to come along!

Ok, socialism: I'm thinking +25&#37; workspeed and +1 health.

"While the majority of the governments rich enough to afford to build fallout shelters were capitalist nations, some shelters were built in communist and social democratic nations.
These shelters inherited socalist ideas from eons past, simple ideas such as pooling of resources and putting the survival of the shelter over the survival of the induvidual. The early shelter governments realised the benefit that such a government might bestow upon the awakening shelters and, ironicly, capitalised on it."

About scrap resource: If we make a cottage like resource that changes to a non-resource providing improvement after say 50 turns. However, only provide resource while worked, might require some more work. What I'm thinking is that we attach the previous benefits to the worked improvement. However, we have to find a way to store the time worked for each resource.

Also, some clarification about desert farming: It's meant to represent the basic "Can we eat that?, "Does that thing grow well?", "Is that poisinous?" metality. They are slowly learing what to eat and what not to eat.

Also, you might find thread interesting. Not quite what we want, but similar.
Edit: Nevermind, I just saw that you had posted there.

Need horses and cows with 2 heads.

ollj said:

Need horses and cows with 2 heads.

Click to expand...

Cows for sure! Maybe a 3 legged horse lol... something slightly diffrent from two heads for sure 2 headed cows are in our Requests up top.

Sarke said:

Cows for sure! Maybe a 3 legged horse lol... something slightly diffrent from two heads for sure 2 headed cows are in our Requests up top.

Click to expand...

How about 8 legged? Gives a happyness bonus if you have ragnarokism (you know, odins horse and all that).

How about posting what you have so far, that might give people a better understanding what is all that above posted??

strategyonly said:

How about posting what you have so far, that might give people a better understanding what is all that above posted??

Click to expand...

Thats why we are hard at work on a prototype - Once more gets implemented i'll release a version of it (0.05p prolly will be the first released prototype) - Expect something shortly after the new year if everything goes well.

Right this second i'm attempting to implement Chinese American's XML loader to save time and make it easier for you guys to contribute

Great news guys I finally got the compiler working 100&#37; and have integrated Chineese American and Impaler[WRG]'s Modular XML Loader 2.0 into the mod!

For those of you who aren't modders yourselves, or who don't know what that is let me explain it in laymans terms.

Basicly what this will allow us to do is create units, technologies, civs, etc. much quicker and easier.... and allow for people less experienced with modding to help out as well! Instead of making us hunt through thousands of lines of XML to change a unit, or add one in it allows us to orginize each unit etc. into its own folder with all the dependant files included inside! This should speed up progress by about 200%!

For those of you running your own mods I highly recommend it! It makes life easier for both you and your end user!

For those who want more information about this amazing innovation head over to: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=4910399

For the rest of you... more information regarding the actual mod will be coming up shortly.

-S

Update: Phew! Finally finished editing out all the changes I made into the mod, and made them modular. So far so good Now for some real changes

Update 2: Added in the Ancient Shelter (actually just renamed the Palace for now) - This will be your seat of government. Depending on user input losing this will either lose the game for you, or will be irreplaceable (many of the best units in the game can only be built in a city with a shelter - Noting I said A shelter not YOUR shelter... if you wrestle one from an enemy (or perhaps find an abandoned one?) you can make use of it.... I also made the building modular and took it out of the main files to save space and make editing it easier. From now on any buildings modified, or added will be modular so i'm not going to mention it further

Update 3: Updated two posts above to reflect the current direction of the prototype. First off I changed the current version from 0.01.01p to 0.01.02p and made changes accordingly, second I updated the plan for what is going to change. Finally I added in 3 techs discussed in the old thread which I mysteriously forgot to include. (Seeking Answers, Ragnarok Doctrine, and Rebirth Doctrine).

Update 4: Recompiled the SDK adding in the Cultural Influences Mod. Credits throughout this post were getting overwhelming so made a CREDITS spoiler in the main thread! Props to all of you!

Update 5: Did some more work on the terrains. Coasts are totally done and look amazing. Water in line of sight is still grey for some reason...but i'll figure it out... meanwhile have a look at the coasts... This is prolly gonna be final version material!



Update 6: EUREKA! I Fixed the Water issue! After changing almost every water related texture there is to green I finally got the result I wanted! It looks so good that I am releasing it as a standalone graphics pack! http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=3840

W00T!

Been a long day -- Work is Coming along big time Hopefully will have a Release Candidate in a few days for the Prototype

Update 7: Couldn't sleep so I spent a few mins adding in 2 new techs, and updating the version number to 0.01.03p - Getting real close to 0.02p - If I don't figure out the barbarian stuff tomorrow I'm going to move it down to 0.04 reqs and update versions

Update 8: Been a LONG night lol.. still cant sleep. Added in most of the Line 1 Techs, and updated to version 2.0 - Modularizing has allowed me to create techs at LEAST 3 times faster!

Making it a short day today... If anyone knows python I could use some help...

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=4913305#post4913305

While it seems basic, once I get this down I think I can solve the barbarian issue!

I have a suggestion, why don't you guys make the 'Mutants' animals. They would be unable to go inside cultural borders-possibly being afraid of the 'normals' superior technology?

FranciscoHernan said:

I have a suggestion, why don't you guys make the 'Mutants' animals. They would be unable to go inside cultural borders-possibly being afraid of the 'normals' superior technology?

Click to expand...

I was thinking along the same lines, but if I can figure it out I might make a new class for them. Basicly I was going to restrict them to certain tiles for building cities, and make them unable to enter borders that are outside that tile type. Think of it as defending their territory. Later in the game you'd be able to capture their cities and make units specific to mutant cities (this part is somewhat easy... just make all mutant only units require a building and set it so that only cities built by mutants have it by default) I dunno it's a bit complex so I might not be able to make the change myself... Right now I'm focusing on outsiders first (and having a ***** of a time at it due to python issues....apparently there is no one around who knows python and able to help (see above post) - Pretty frustrating).

Your suggestion might work for the prototype though -- I'll heavily consider it.

Anyway work does continue meanwhile. Added a few new techs in.... Nothing heavy for today...need a break and its hard to focus with those python bugs hitting me in the head.

-S

Ok, what have you started on? I would like to do some XML work myself, but I don't know what you have started on.

Also, idea for unit classes:

Animal: Basic animal unit. Perhaps a bonus against mel&#233;e?

Mutant: Special abilities. Resistant to explosive and energy units.

Mel&#233;e units: Early unit. Vounerable to most other units. Best emplyed en masse. Later units can be quite strong and armoured in metal armour. Good against energy, but weak against firearm.

Firearms units: Equiped with rifles, pistols, smgs, etc. Armour vary. Light units are good against angainst mel&#233;e and mutant, while heavy are good against energy. All are vounerable against explosive. Should form the main part of your army

Energy unit: Equiped with flamethrowers, laser guns etc. Somewhat futuristic. Normally equiped with heavy armour that is resistant to explosive troops and can hold their own against most troops. Expensive though.
Note: Think Fallout Super-mutant and energy weapons.

Explosive units: Equiped with bazookas, granades and anything else that makes a loud bang. Low base strength, but have a HUGE number of first strikes, also causes collateral damage.

Ranger units: People who know the wastes and can act thereafter. Not too strong (due to low numbers), but are immune to first strikes and are fast. Ideal against explosive units. Good bonus against animals.

I've mainly been focusing on trying to get those stupid barbarians working. I think I've come up with a temporary solution. I'll let you know. Since i've made the mod modular, I'm gonna have to show you the new format for techs and units etc.

good ideas for the units... mostly mid-late game stuff....but still interesting