(Planetary Mod)The Ascent of Mankind

Welcome to the Ascent of Mankind: Call to Power development thread, the thread where I will post updates and alpha releases of this mod. The ATOM mod series has been under idea development for a while now and now that Civ 5 has been released along with a few mods that enhance the game's techs sufficiently, I thought I would finally begin work on it.

What is ATOM?
The Ascent of Mankind is a mod that will allow all civs the ability to expand their empires through space. Whether it be developing orbital colonies, settling on Mars or expanding your empire on Alpha Centauri, your empire will continue to grow and play a major roll in late-game expansion, economy and even a new victory type. Do you remember the Final Frontier mod for Civ 4 BTS where solar systems were clustered and seemingly uninhabited and the edge of the 'galaxy' somehow looped back like a planet topography? Well ATOM is nothing similar to that, instead it will allow you the leader to command your armies from the comfort of your palace. Yup, you will never actually see space or the colonies you are expanding, you will just be able to tell your command center to tell the ship and colonies what to do. Whether it's to claim that new precious space metal not native to Earth, or to fight for precious land on other planets to increase your resources in order to build and expand and destroy more. This is, after all, a planetary mod and not a space mod. Although the majority of this mod does take place in the cosmos, it is centered around planet discovery and colonization, so again, you will never see space.

What can I expect from ATOM: CTP?
The Ascent of Mankind: Call to Power is the first installment in this seemingly cosmic mod idea. This mod is where I set up the most basic of basic abilities: to create orbital colonies that will act like cities that can drop in units from the higher atmosphere. The reason why I named the first installment Call to Power is simple; I am using Decimatus' Call to Power mod as a tech base. He noted that orbital cities was an idea he wanted implemented and I had this mod idea cooked, on the backburner on warm just ready to be eaten. When this mod installment is done and out of Beta stages it will go out into the CFC modcomp download database for all modders who want to implement it to their mods.

To Do: _ = undone X = done
X-Make Button
X-Make Screen
X-Design 'Our Colonies' UI
X-Makeshift Star
X-Basic Planet Creation/Display
X-Basic Colony Handling/Display
X-Random Name Generator
_-Colony Creation Unit Mission
_-Release Alpha version
_-Colony Properties
_-Colony Build Queue
_-Colony Buildable Units/Buildings/Wonders
_-Implement SaveUtils.lua
_-Colony AI(_-Queue AI _-Specialist AI)
_-Colony Units/Map dropout relation
_-First Beta/Bug Extermination
_-ATOM:CTP v.1
_-Design 'Planetarium' UI
_-Planet Discovery
_-Advanced Planet Creation(_-Planet Resources _-Planet Environmental Levels)
_-Planet Renaming
_-Basic Spaceships/Creation
_-Spaceship Micromanaging(_-Spacial Distances _-Appointed Missions)
_-Basic Spaceship Property Management
_-Update SaveUtils.lua
_-Spaceship AI
_-Beta Release
_-Bug Squishing/Touch-ups
_-ATOM:CTP v.2

Latest Screenshot 5/31/11:

High hopes for this one.

Again, like I said this looks awesome. I was thinking, maybe you could also use this to make colonies on Earth, too.

Yanikin - Once on here to much; now to busy with life lurking. I am looking forward to this as well. Besides how great CtP is becoming.

Maybe I need to get my GF into Civ; would be great if we could play a multi mod of CtP, or ATOM: CtP. We need MOD multi player!!

Back to lurking.

Yanikin - Once on here to much; now to busy with life lurking. I am looking forward to this as well. Besides how great CtP is becoming.

Maybe I need to get my GF into Civ; would be great if we could play a multi mod of CtP, or ATOM: CtP. We need MOD multi player!!

Back to lurking.

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Be a lucky man if your girl likes Civ. My wife plays farmville, that is about it.

ikillu64 said:

Again, like I said this looks awesome. I was thinking, maybe you could also use this to make colonies on Earth, too.

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I could, but what would be the point in that if you can just move your settler there and make the city/colony the old fashioned way?

Immensly looking foward to this.

How will the relationship with Earth work for the mod, and different planets?

Pouakai said:

Immensly looking foward to this.

How will the relationship with Earth work for the mod, and different planets?

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Well as it is, Earth is the planet that you start off on (landmasses aside) and when you reach the appropriate tech you will be able to send shuttles into orbit or on the moon to start colonies there which in turn will be able to build space oriented things(with the resources from earth) that would otherwise seem impossible to build on Earth due to the high gravity. Your 'Astronomers' will look for planets, stars, star systems, etc. that you can expand to and you will be able to select where you want your probes/settler ship/mining ship/etc to go. For the Orbital cities stages of this particular installment I am going to be releasing multiple versions as I figure out and create more 'realistic' ways of portraying orbital colonies. For example at first the cities would simply add to your economy as you build buildings, next I would implement unit reactions where units would be able to descend from the colonies and appear on the map where the orbital city is. If all is well I might even implement a random factor where the orbital cities would be orbiting around the earth and the descending units would appear on a random location on the specific latitude.

It would be nice to have some resources that can only be manufactured in orbit as well. Though, last I heard Whys' buildable resources mod was broken with the december patch. If that gets fixed, or when the dll is released, it would be a great addition.

I'm confused. Will you be able to see the colonies, or just chose a place, found it, and control via Astropedia?

The initial idea was to just have it unseen and controlled via Astropedia. If this mod is hugely successful then graphics could come in but as it is now graphics are the least of my worries while I'm making the code that goes behind it all. Besides there's no real way to implement the necessary graphics in a neat and organized fashion. Once Nexus and the graphics side of modding is fixed I'd have to figure out what I'm gunna do with graphics and how to implement them.

Can't wait for the mod release. It's a great idea. I like the idea Decimatus put forth about having resources that are found exclusively in orbit. I think it would provide extra incentive to make the colonies if you know you will be able to build things that your earth-bound opponents can't.

Aah.

Would it be possible to have a random chance of the colony settling near a deposit of the resources mentioned earlier? E.g. "Your colony, ___________, has discovered a source of Helium-3" And then by building a miner (I presume you can build stuff) you aquire the resource. But, you can't use the resource in your cities until your colony has a spaceport.

Also, would you mind if I just did a post in here with lots of ideas for buildings / technologies etc. or have you got that covered?

Pouakai said:

Aah.

Would it be possible to have a random chance of the colony settling near a deposit of the resources mentioned earlier? E.g. "Your colony, ___________, has discovered a source of Helium-3" And then by building a miner (I presume you can build stuff) you aquire the resource. But, you can't use the resource in your cities until your colony has a spaceport.

Also, would you mind if I just did a post in here with lots of ideas for buildings / technologies etc. or have you got that covered?

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Erm, deposit of helium? It doesn't quite work that way, lol. Decimatus was talking about man-made resources from buildings which will be in the mod sooner or later.

All the technologies have been sorted out for the series and with those come the buildings and units, and if you want to post your ideas about the long-running mod please do so in the idea development thread in my sig. If you wanted to post your ideas about techs for CTP then go to decimatus' thread since his mod will be the tech base for the first installment.

Civ Fuehrer said:

Erm, deposit of helium? It doesn't quite work that way, lol. Decimatus was talking about man-made resources from buildings which will be in the mod sooner or later.

All the technologies have been sorted out for the series and with those come the buildings and units, and if you want to post your ideas about the long-running mod please do so in the idea development thread in my sig. If you wanted to post your ideas about techs for CTP then go to decimatus' thread since his mod will be the tech base for the first installment.

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I think he was referring to the Moon, which is believed to have relatively high density deposits of HE3.

HE3 is probably the best mine-able resource that would be available in those future eras; what would be the Diamond Era for my mod. With Carbon and fusion techs, it is about the only conceivable commodity that would be worth fighting for in that future.

I figured once sea and space cities became a reality, I could plant them on the bottom of the ocean. The moon could work too, if it is implemented right.

Alright well this is a progress report post; I have recently been debugging/optimizing the planet selection list on the left side of the screen trying to figure out how the dynamic lists worked. I looked through the vanilla screens and came really close but hit a wall, after posting my problem in the Lua/SDK subforum I realized that Kael's example screen in his guide contained a working dynamic list so I'll be taking the code structure from that and implementing it. Funny how the guide for the most basic of modding -the last place any advanced modder would look- is the place with the perfect example of what you're trying to do. Anyway, expect a progress update screenie probably tomorrow.

@Decimatus
Well ya but the previous discussions were about orbital cities and in that case it didn't make much sense. Anyway if you want the moon in the CTP version as well instead of just orbital cities then that's fine too. More incentive to get more of the base mod done. Implementing resources on the moon via lua that could be imported to use in the main game would require more work, but who said I didn't like this?

How will the Space Victory work with this mod?

Pouakai said:

How will the Space Victory work with this mod?

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Ah yes, the space victory. It will be replaced from a mission to Alpha Centauri into a mission to the center of the Galaxy (In later installments). For now for this installment it would be up to the author of the mod with the techs to rearrange which techs the civs get the ship parts in.

Civ Fuehrer said:

@Decimatus
Well ya but the previous discussions were about orbital cities and in that case it didn't make much sense. Anyway if you want the moon in the CTP version as well instead of just orbital cities then that's fine too. More incentive to get more of the base mod done. Implementing resources on the moon via lua that could be imported to use in the main game would require more work, but who said I didn't like this?

Click to expand...

How far CtP goes with your mod depends on how it works out. Not sure I would want to go to the Moon unless you had an actual map that you moved and fought on.


I think there could be many space victories, conditioned upon which mod it might exist in. It would also be cool if you could set the end era and get different science victories based upon that choice. Apollo for modern end, centauri/etc for diamond end, etc.

Decimatus said:

How far CtP goes with your mod depends on how it works out. Not sure I would want to go to the Moon unless you had an actual map that you moved and fought on.

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Not only is there no way to support a map in a map or a map on a popup, but the engine was only designed to handle so many tiles in which even the most advanced computers get taxed heavily on the bigger maps. I've thought through this whole thing once before and the only plausible and possible way of getting more than one planet in -which is the main 'earth' planet the game starts on- is to have your cities and units automatically find their own paths upon request of the mission triggered by the player without actual visuals of the units and cities on the extra planets. This however does not mean I can't put in fake graphics to give the impression those things are there without actually seeing the map.