Realistic Mars

[Tholish]

"You are a prominent scientist among a group just landed on Mars to conduct research. Shortly after landing, to your horror, you hear that a huge war has erupted on Earth. Weapons of devastating effect wipe out entire populations. Humanity there has been bombed back into the stone age. You cannot count on resupply ships or support from back home. The other members of your expedition go crazy, dividing up into competing factions. Fortunately, you head the largest faction, and might be able to get something accomplished.

You weigh the situation. On the one hand, Mars is a desolate landscape, whose deserts, hills, mountains and icecaps are far more barren than those of Earth. You can't even produce food or venture outside the pressurized station tent without a space suit.

You do have the CATAlytic PUrification Light Transport (Catapult) with which to refine some of the local materials. And you have a couple of spacesuits. One is an old Explorer type, little more than a thin plastic pressure suit. The other is a modern Pikeman suit, the heavily contructed kind with built in tools, formerly used by road contruction crews on the Moon.

Your landing site was the middle of a huge crater, a nice plain with plenty of regolith. This could be a good site to garden, if there were some way to bring water from the icecap, or some way to shield the fragile plants against the harsh Martian environment. Hopefully you won't have to rely on that: there was supposed to be an extensive cache of prepositoned supplies around here somewhere. The exact location, and the access codes, would be in the station computer, but you can't seem to log onto it any more...

Plus, yours isn't the only colony on Mars. You see the huge colony ships of other nations coming down through the atmosphere occasionally, at night--sometimes quite close. Perhaps they would be willing to render assistance!"

Instead of a realistic map of actual Mars elevations ruined by a bunch of totally incorrect Earthlike terrain, I went the other way. This scenario gives the flavor of what the real Mars is actually like and the actual challenges that it might pose to the path of a growing civilization. Until the end, where it gets hghly speculative.

Created with just the plain vanilla editor, uses no new units, though the old ones are...different, as documented in the readme. Requires no special back up or loading procedures. Just click on the link

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/newmars.zip

and you get the zip. Unzip it or it will run slow, but other than that the scenario is all just one file, not a bunch of folders of units and stuff you have to paste in.

I'll do a better readme file later, showing the tech tree and also explaining the improvements and resources.

[Tholish]

My strategy:
If you are on the equator, use the Explorer and Pikeman to cut you out of the crater so you can head for the tundra. Settle in the middle of a nice big crater near the edge of the tundra. Next, a road out of the poleward corner of the crater, then start building road blindly around in the tundra until you find water and dry ice. Always keep the explorer and the pikeman together so the explorer doesn't get zapped by a jaguar warrior. Research Hack Computer first, then Theocracy, switch governments to Theocracy, and then get CO2 plastic and water and Mass Catalysis. While you are a theocracy it doesn't hurt to build the cathedral--its a good deal. Also the lan and bank is a good combination, and the dome is free happy faces like the mall. Now you will probably have to sacrifice your explorer to make a colony (once he helps build a road to it) for either catalyst or dry ice. Don't sacrifice him for water unless you've got no kind of food to raise your population above one. If you don't have cached goods, try for nutrients (via automated medical and synthetic food). By now you should have space suit and green house and perhaps industrial ion dep, and perhaps you can go to Corporatism, which really raises your worker speed. You can start farming if necessary, and making more pikemen and perhaps catapults. Put cities wherever there are resources but not on top of them: those squares with resources are the only ones that make shields at all when irrigated. Try to get mulitple resources in one city placement. Then start climbing the industrial tree straight up until you have the matter converter. Along the way you might trade for some electrotechs or even work your way up to the Mars Orchard. Once you have the Matter Converter start cranking out wonders. If you have to take down other civs.

[one_man_assault]

u got any screens

[sprnv8]

I really like your opening story, I wish I had thought of something like that when I made my Scenario.....But your Scenario is not realistic it is Fantasy (no offence), It is not a real map of Mars.
This map came from your head(which I'm no saying that it is a bad think, it takes a lot of thought to make a good map.
But like I said GREAT STORY!!!!!!!!!

[Tholish]

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads2/newmars.zip

Thanks for showing my map. I long time ago I copied a map of the real Mars into the editor and did a prehistoric version of this scenario, but it was full of glitches so I just started over. In testing, I just needed a map with the same general parameters, not an actual map if Mars. So I dashed off the one you see. In the end, I realized it didn't really matter. I get the spirit of Mars.

I was thinking about taking your map and redoing it in my four terrain format, but yours is Huge. Mars is Small, and my scenario only really works strategically on a small, due to the importance of getting water and dry ice from the icecaps.

Yes, the case could be made that my scenario is fantasy. Martians. Direct matter to energy conversion. Antigravity battleships. It winds up with Magic being the ultimate technology. But for most of the way I really feel it is science fiction. Most of its ideas were certainly stolen from science fiction.
Duralloy. Phasers. Teleportation.

My hope is that by starting out almost realistic and having you work up to the fantasy elements there will be a suspension of disbelief. Yes, its quite dull going, in parts, but its like learning to live in a desert, you know? After a while the sparse vegetation becomes what you are used to seeing, and what seems unusual is the lush greenery of normal terrain.

[sprnv8]

Hey man its your Scenario have it stand out like you want.

I like fantasy because it requires an imagination to come up with one with a good storyline behind it. Like I said GREAT STORY.....GREAT JOB!!!!!!!!

[Lynx]

impressive...

[Tholish]

As I recall, "impressive" is teacher language for "yawn," but thanks anyway, I'm glad you liked it. Now that I have PTW I see how mediocre this thing was. I was inspired by an old post in the user created maps forum, to which I added some suggestions, but nobody acted on them, so I did. To really be impressive I would have had to make a real attempt to copy a real map of Mars and I would have done it in PTW so I could really give new unit names and stuff. Now I can even import the map from the early version of this where the rules changes were so buggy it didn't work at all, but the map was good. What would be really great would be if I could have pollution turn grassland into coast. And with Teturkan standard with PTW I can use all the stuff in that as a starting point without breaking my puristic belief in not using any mod creator programs other than the standard editor.
So that's what I'll do.

I just wish there were (standard issue) leaderheads and urban terrain for the future era.

In the meantime I've been working on this.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads3/tweaks.zip

[Canuk]

All in all great story line but map wasnt great ..i give you credit for the story line but other then that it was kinda bad no offence..