C2C - Aliens

So I was thinking of what we should do with the Galactic Era beyond just building more buildings, making more units and researching more techs. At this point of the game you should be conquering most cities on the planet and sending off colonies to other planets. So I am think that we need some barbarian units for the end game. One that will give you a run for you money to prove you deserve to win the end of the game.

I personally hate humanoid aliens in most science fiction so I want to keep them a mystery on what the alien actually look like. All you will see are their ships and war machines. Stuff i would like them to do ...

- Make their units high superior to any units you can produce.
- Have them spawn anywhere, even inside your empire borders.
- Have them attempt to "terraform" the planet by changing tiles into "red fungi".
- Red Fungi will ruin the tiles making them unusable for improvements. it will also "grow" like trees do, but at a much faster rate.
- To stop the alien fungi you will have to send out haz-mat teams to clean it up (much like nuclear fallout).
- They will always raze cities since our cities are incompatible with their biology.
- They can place new "alien city" improvements that cannot be conquered and give off even worse effects than the red fungi. The more of these that are placed the more units will invade.
- Alien cities quickly depleted the resources in the area special mineral resources.
- Alien cities can only be built on red fungi tiles.
- Reg Fungi will destroy animal and plant resources it spreads to. Note it can be in the sea and the land. Trees and jungle also can be taken over.
- Teraforming ships will spawn the red fungi and if destroyed will help prevent new red fungi locations from being made.

I also want a way to defeat them too. So late game will have a national project to eliminate the alien threat.

Here are some graphics we can use ...

- Red Alien Fungi
- Alien City ?
- Alien Terraform Ship ?
- Alien Battleship ?

Don't forget the Andromeda Strain by tsentom1.

i like the idea of super aliens in the galactic area.
Did anyone played to the galactic area , when they started in the prehistoric area. Perhaps tested in test games ?

UPDATE Version 14 is out as of 3:15 am, a brand new way to play the game.

Why are we skipping right to homeworld invasion? Don't we have to encounter each other first? Perhaps encountering alien life should be a natural byproduct of galactic exploration in that every world you explore has an increasing chance of having an extraterrestrial empire colony on it. Though I would prefer it if we could all just get along, conflict is a core concept of what makes Civ 4 entertaining so diplomacy should be impossible (until you research and or complete a Xenolinguistics project). That said I really believe conflict should happen on an interplanetary scale with having to deal with extremely hard to get rid of invasions being a consequence of severely messing up. I need to know more about how you all plan to implement galactic exploration and colonization before I can really talk about it but if I were to guess you're using some sort of menu based system I would say that, with the prerequisite technologies you would be able to manufacture in your homeworld cities several tiers of military starships in the rock paper scissors vein of Cruiser, Battleship and Carrier (IE battleship I, II and III or more) to be added to a fleet pool and assigned to colonized star systems in discrete numbers via menu clicks...
You understand what I'm talking about?

@steampunk1880

That's more or less what I was saying by "end game". Expansion and exploration would obviously increase the chances of invasion. They have to find each other after all. Much of this stuff is just brainstorming anyways. We are far from even programing such things. But i agree with you that your colonies will probably get attacked before you homeworld.

That being said there should be a chance that you get attacked before your ready or even have have made off world colonies. Just like you can be caught off guard from other civs that are farther along than you in the game. In short it should probably have the random event be triggered by things like maybe discovering Radio or Nuclear Fission, you know something to get the attention of another civ from far way. In fact as you advance along and build things it should probably increase the odds you are found or you find them (such as with SETI).

I think techs like radio may be too early to use as a trigger. You don't want the aliens to be so superior to you current tech level that throwing units at them is futile. I don't want to be on the short end of the "Tank vs spear" scenario, especially if the National Wonder to remove the threat is far away tech wise. Make Radio/SETI as the start, but make odds real low. Maybe Astrobiology increases the odds a bit. As you start doing more space/related tech, Orbital Megastructures, etc, you increase the odds that aliens with better technology are more likely aware of your presence.

Another thing to think about is moving in the future is moving the spaceship parts to later, to IMHO a more realistic part of the the tech tree. Of course the base game put them in the end of the Modern Era because it was decided the game would end there, but the idea of building a colonization ship with anything close to current tech is rather nonsensical. Not to mention the issue of where do we sent it....I guess in Civ the idea has always been to send the ship to AC and hope you find a habitable planet when you get there, but I digress.

Having a very early trigger like Radio might not be that bad if you allow for the "XCOM-effect": namely that fighting -even if you lose most battles- would yield some captured equipment. Equipment that can then be used to reverse engineer alien-tech.

So fighting aliens might yield beakers towards technologies that'll help you fight the invasion. Basically bypassing a lot of technologies, or depending on the setup, opening up a special part of the tech-tree.

@Dancing Hoskuld, strategyonly and Koshling

So here is my idea for the alien invasion side of the Galactic era. And i think its doable, but I need all 3 of your guys help.

Units
I will need strategyonly to get the Spore Launcher from the Planetfall mod. And we will have to give it some stats too. I would also like to give it and any other alien units a new unit class. The Spore launchers would be immobile. We would need a land version to spread xenofungus and a sea version to spread sea fungus.

The Cloudbase would also be a good candidate for an invasion UFO. This would be strictly a military unit that would have uber stats that would be hard to defeat. These would attack units and destroy cities. Somehow we need to make it so they can never take over a city.

Spawning
Koshling you said that you can make barbarian units spawn at different times. You will be needed to make the units that strategyonly puts in spawn in late game. The specific date we can discuss.

Terraforming
Dancing Hoskuld this is where i need your help. I would like the units to terraform the terrain with the Xenofungus and Sea Fungus from the Planetfall mod. This would make the terrain very unhealthy, slow movement greatly and ruin improvements. It should also have a fast growth rate on its own.

Clean Up
Workers (and boats) would need to be able to kill off this new terrain feature. It should not be easy to do and possibly need terraforming tech to do.

Please help make this work you guys. I think this could be an awesome end game feature.

Isn't it impossible for some units (Police Squads and Police Dogs, IIRC) to capture cities already?

Praetyre said:

Isn't it impossible for some units (Police Squads and Police Dogs, IIRC) to capture cities already?

Click to expand...

True, but what would that do? Just leave an empty city? That would be interesting having all these UFOs attacking cities and then leaving them empty with no units.

Hydromancerx said:

@Dancing Hoskuld, strategyonly and Koshling

So here is my idea for the alien invasion side of the Galactic era. And i think its doable, but I need all 3 of your guys help.

Units
I will need strategyonly to get the Spore Launcher from the Planetfall mod. And we will have to give it some stats too. I would also like to give it and any other alien units a new unit class. The Spore launchers would be immobile. We would need a land version to spread xenofungus and a sea version to spread sea fungus.

The Cloudbase would also be a good candidate for an invasion UFO. This would be strictly a military unit that would have uber stats that would be hard to defeat. These would attack units and destroy cities. Somehow we need to make it so they can never take over a city.

Spawning
Koshling you said that you can make barbarian units spawn at different times. You will be needed to make the units that strategyonly puts in spawn in late game. The specific date we can discuss.

Terraforming
Dancing Hoskuld this is where i need your help. I would like the units to terraform the terrain with the Xenofungus and Sea Fungus from the Planetfall mod. This would make the terrain very unhealthy, slow movement greatly and ruin improvements. It should also have a fast growth rate on its own.

Clean Up
Workers (and boats) would need to be able to kill off this new terrain feature. It should not be easy to do and possibly need terraforming tech to do.

Please help make this work you guys. I think this could be an awesome end game feature.

Click to expand...

Ok. The spawn part is super-easy. Also the always-raze on cities should be easy (acceptable Python usage)

There has been some alien stuff done in mods already.
I recommend looking at the planetfall mod - basically an awesome port of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=252829
Love to incorporate some of the factions for the future eras- new civs? also some neat spacecraft

and the new fork called - Conflict on Chiron
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=426026
which adds the alien factions from sid meier's alpha centauri crossfire expansion.
This one is extremely promising!!

also there are some existing Mod with aliens factions. I would import a few choice ones.

Star Trek Mod - http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=233074
vulcans , klingons, borg, might be interesting and not too campy . Many people would love to play the part of the Federation . could lead to some interesting techs also.

Star Wars mod - http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=157016
I'm sure someone would like to play the rebel alliance or the empire. done right it could be fresh and interesting. Probably some techs here that could be incorporated / interesting as well.

Final Frontier Plus? - http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=351012
improvement of the Final Frontier official civ iv scenario. Maybe has aliens?

MOO2 Civ - http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=267295
Mod based on technologies and aliens from Master of Orion 2. It would be interesting to take aliens and technologies from there.

Babylon 5 Mod project- http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=261551
lot's of races here. also some extremely well developed graphics for space craft. Check out the whole thread!

Not to forget the
Dune Wars mod - http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=335213

and

Mars Now! - http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=312246
both have factions/aliens that could be incorporated as aliens or future era spinoffs

NecroCristi Mod- Apocalyptic - Post nuclear war - zombie plague - nanotechnology / virus could be done right . zombies spawning could be used as aliens?? also some ideas for postapocalyptic factions/graphics.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=237238
Optional age/era / future civs/ factions - just an idea to explore here.
Like to keep things plausible and interesting.

Parts of these ideas could be genericized or altered to keep things in line with possibilities for the mod!
What does everybody think?

Two 'events" I have been considering.

1. Martian Invasion - aka "The War of the Worlds" H.G.Wells

For my idea there is no need for any units except the red weed since the whole thing is over in a fraction of a game turn.

When: Sometime after Indust and before Electricity.

What happens: Martians invade every significent (size>?) capital city on the planet. The red weed spawns around said capital and spreads for some turns.

Red weed destroys all farm style improvements, is toxic to units except workers who can clear it. adds to cities.

All units in the region outside cities either die or loose 75% health. In cities only loose 50% health.

All wars stop.

Capital city looses 50% of its population. Most go to other cities but some dies.

2. Andromeadia Strain

I have to see what the code is that comes with that mod.

Now I am going off line for a few days because a book I have been waiting for has turned up.

@Dancing Hoskuld

I would like the Xenofungi to be a bit harder to kill off than that. This would be on the scale of say kudzu or other alien species, except in this case its a real alien species. Unlike in war of the worlds where our microbes took over them and killed them off these would do the opposite where our species would have no immunity.

Sort of a mix of the Andromeadia Strain and War of the World. Except this would be more of an Alpha Centauri invasion.

Hydromancerx said:

@Dancing Hoskuld

I would like the Xenofungi to be a bit harder to kill off than that. This would be on the scale of say kudzu or other alien species, except in this case its a real alien species. Unlike in war of the worlds where our microbes too over them and killed them off these would do the oposite where our species would have no immunity.

Sort of a mix of the Andromeadia Strain and War of the World. except this would be more of an Alpha Centauri invasion.

Click to expand...

Actually, I want all three. Two easy ones then the main one in the future.

Edit Attached are two land plants and one ocean plant. I do not have a proper button for land plant 1. They are just experimental and wont appear on the map. They are they are from your link and the Planet fall mod.

I got a problem with having the Aliens definetly coming in a violent way. Also with them beeing far superior.
For one I think diplomacy with aliens should be right around the corner from the universal Translator tech. If you got a programm code taht is able to instantly translate any given human language, adaptiong it to translate ANY language should be possible. Maybe a tech just a bit after universal translator in the tree.
For their power: Make it on par with human units of the galactic or late galactic era. That would still make them extremely powerfull. if they came just after you started sending the first radio signals into space, but on eye level if you stumble on them in the galaxy with your ships.

For that matter: they could simply be a civ somewhere on the galactic map, with all their stuff needing the culture "Alien", that is outmaticly completed in their capital once their nation is founded. And until either side gets xenolinguistics they are treated as a minor nation.
If it is possible, depending on how the galactic map is implemented in the end, their randomized start date could either lead them to be a galactic superpower when you first leave the solar system, or just start exploring their neighbouring system when you as a galactic power discover them.

@Il Principe

Note this topic was made before we learned of multi-maps. So things probably will chnage now that we have more options.

just a suggestion: maybe some of the aliens would be predetors and aliens from the movies!!!!!
now that would be cool!!

I'll just say that I'm in favor of having a wide variety of Alien species and of them being civs of varying development once you reach spacefaring yourself. There's likely to be reptilian, raptor-like species, a variety of insectoids, an Octopus-like species or two, some other 'near-humans', swarm-like hive minds, Avians, even draconians and gellyfish style races. Nearly all forms of life have the potential to develop high intelligence and the means of reaching spacefaring technologies must vary greatly from external (technological) means to internal (psychic) or biological (evolutionary) methods that allow for space travel and outer world colonization. Not all should just be barbarians and the politics should be complex beyond all earthly comprehension.