Settling Australia: 1788

This is the first in a series of 3 Mods.

Mod 1 - The First Fleet: 1788. Settle the new hostile and rugged country.
Mod 2 - The Gold Rush/Exploration era: 1860. Australia is starting to stand on her own 2 feet, exploration is opening up new parts of the country, the gold rush is in full swing. The indigeneous population are more opposed to loosing their lands to Europeans, and a new menace is terrorising the young colonies.
Mod 3 - TBA

This mod is set in 1788. The first Fleet has just landed at Port Jackson with the first of many thousand's of convicts.
The land stands open before you, all you have to do is take it!
But the Aborigines aren't going to let it go without a fight.
You are vastly outnumbered, but you have the advantage of having gunpowder, albeight a limited amount.
Can you forge a new home in this hostile enviroment?
Or will you be beaten back by the overwhalming tide of opposition?

Play as either the English settling the new world, or play as the Aborigines fighting for what is yours.

Here is the file
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/FirstFleet2.zip


Features of this Mod
- Over 81 Aboriginal tribes in their historical places.
- First Fleet ships named after actual ships in the first fleet.
- East coast been slimed down to more realistic size.
- Resource Placement accurate(ish), but needs more fine tuning.
- Challenging scenario.

Changes to come
- Lots of civilopeadia entries.
- Resource placement needs adjusting in a few places.
- Scientific and Military Leaders need to be entered. (ATM I have just put some names tin to fill the gap). If anyone has any good ideas for scientific and military leader then please post.

Please feel free to analyse and post your comments.

Sounds very interresting...
But in scen. 3 what does TBA means?
And can we have some screenshots?

TBA stands for:
To Be Announced

you might want to add some english units of the time period, you can get them from the coosaks conversion collection and some cavalry from the american conquests collection.

Can't wait to play as the Aborigines.

Ok dont download the file just yet. I just spotted some major game issues that need fixing that I overlooked this morning.

I'll post an updated version in a few hours which will be more balanced

Dang, I already d/l and played it some. It is pretty fun, different at least. But what is the goal? Is it to rack up those points and beat the natives that way? Also, we have some gunpowder units, and ships, so why do we have to start over at the beginning of the tech tree? Why not give us all the ancient age techs and some techs in the middle ages?

@Dogboy
Thats one of the things I am fixing at the moment.
I'm trying to give the english all techs up until the industrial era, and the Aborigines only what techs they would of had.

The win criteria will be conquest, Diplomatic, cultural win or space race.

One of the things I want this scenario to reflect is how hard it was for the first fleet. I'm trying to make it as close to what conditions would have been like in 1788.

The land was already populated by nearly 300,000 Aborigines back then, so the only way that the English could advance was through displacing the native population.Hence the overwhelming amount of native tribes in comparrison to the English.

I wanted to re-create the sense of isolation and vulnerability that they would have felt.
They only had what they brought with them and they needed to establish commerce and trade

After looking at the Scenario a bit more closer, I shouldn't have posted it so prematurely (see what happens at 3am).
I suggest that everyone else waits for a bit until I post the updated version.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Sir Eric,

Great scenario, great map, thanks a lot.
I was thinking about the trade issue, if we are at war with the aborigines, then we have no one to trade with. Were all the aborigines of one tribe? If not, then maybe another civ as another tribe?

Can't wait for the update

@Grey Sky
Thanks and welcome to CFC

The Aborigines were basically hundreds of different tribes, most of them had their own language, but they were all lumped together as Aboriginal.
Some of the tribes traded, eg: Tribes in Western NSW and SA traded, some of them were bitter enemies that were constantly at war with each other but I think that most got on OK.

One idea I was throwing around was to do an Eastern seaboard scenario, just have a map of Tasmania, Victoria, NSW and Queensland and have the major tribes as different civilisations, so that you had to negotiate with each one seperately. I like the idea of doing this some time in the future as I think it will allow a greater degree of flexibility.
Plus you can have some tribes more aggresive than others etc, which seems a bit more realistic.
I didn't do that with this one cause this is my first mod and I reckon that would take a bit of work to achieve it.


As far as trade is concerned, the English start off a lot more powerful with a lot more tech, whereas the Aboriginies have Lux and resources(if they have the required tech). The potential for trade is there, the only problem is that the Aborigines need to hook up their resources and establish trade routes, which may take a bit of time.

The update should be out fairly soon.

Sir Eric,
Have you finished this yet? Can I download it and play it because I'm really looking forward to playing this scenario.

It is playable as it is but it is not a finished scenario.
I will try and get somemore done in the next few days, if not then definetly by the weekend.
I've made a lot of the changes that i needed to make but there are still a few that need to be made to give it that authentic feel.

neat!

I am looking forward to playing this!

Sir Eric,
Any more progress made on finishing this? I have played it some and it looks really good, but wanted to wait to play more of it once it's done.

hey Sir Eric,
don't you think that the scenario is a bit too easy for the Aborigines? they have so many cities and the english only start with a few. even if the english have way better techs, you can still make peace with them and surround them with your culture or just buy all their techs and build a massive army.

Citizen, I'm pretty sure the intent of this scenario is to play as the English, hence the title "Settling Australia". Sort of like the Rise of Rome scenario that came with the C3C disk. The intent is to play as Rome, but if you want a much easier game, play with one of the other civs, Carthage I think.

edit: I went back and read the opening post about playing as the natives trying to keep what is yours, so my bad there. But I think the challenge is playing as the English.

any plans on adding new units?

@DogBoy
It's coming along. My homework and work schedule has been quite hectic the last 2 weeks but it should be done soon.

@Citizen001
The Aborigines have about 81 cities (The names of each city reflects the more dominant tribe of that area . In a lot of cases there were a lot of different tribes in a small area, ie Near Darwin the tribes of Larrakai, Woolna, Limjlngan, Mburkala, Wadyiginy, Kungarakany, Warray and Malak Malak are all with in a few houndred Kilometers of each other).

What I am aiming to do is to make the scenario as challenging and as realistic as it would of been for the Aboringies and the First Fleet.
Unfortunately the game allows for certain changes to happen that would not of happened in real life.
Yes you are correct in saying that if you played as the Aborigines it would be too easy to overpower the settlers in Port Jackson and effect an easy victory, but that is exactly what could of happened had the tribes been more unified.

The English only start with 1 city, Port Jackson. But they have greater Tech and Red Coats(musketmen) to defend themselves.
If you can think of a way to balance things a bit better then feel free to post your ideas.

As Dogboy pointed out, The idea is to play as the English put you have the option to play as the Aborigines if you wish to do so.

@Johann Mcleod.
I'm not sure of any UU that I can put in that would go with this scenario. If you have any ideas for UU's then let me know.

well the English Fusiliers from the cossacks conversion collection would fit. this is set in 1788, they werent using matchlocks or arquebeses anymore. theres one in the American Coquests collection too, so you could have two different ones.

Urgh, how did I end up here?


Nevertheless, it is indeed sounding interesting.