seZereth said:
Thanks Sez. This isn't a SMAC remake so don't worry about matching styles. This is what would happen if colonists landed elsewhere. There is nothing set in stone so any models you created would by right, not wrong.
[MOD] Planet Roanoke, a/k/a all SMAC'ed up
- Thread starter Padmewan
- Start date
Thanks Sez. This isn't a SMAC remake so don't worry about matching styles. This is what would happen if colonists landed elsewhere. There is nothing set in stone so any models you created would by right, not wrong.
loki1232
Loki
Padmewan said:
He-3? I think that we should leave He-3 for more advanced fusion. Simple He and Crystals sounds good to me. Although later I think crystals should be replaced with silicon and optics.
Yeah, a big problem is I'd like the choice of a state religion (Preferred Lifeform) to have the same consequences as a Civic. So there's an argument to be made that Lifeform should be captured by a Civic rather than (or perhaps in addition to???) repurpose the Religion engine.
I had this vision that the game board would look different from civ to civ... that the Borg territories would be big stretches of scarred lands that they'd exploited for every last mineral... Perhaps one way to do that is to give Borg +Food on Boreholes/Mines, -Food on farms -- easily modeled with Civics, not so easy with Religion.
Because Boreholes eventually collapse, you have to keep building them to get that quick fix. (They should work like crack.) The only way to survive them is to BUILD citizens rather than GROW them -- but if you're right about the AI not handling this well, that's a problem.
Maybe I will take vanilla Civ4, create a borehole improvement, and see what the AI does with it in the Ancient era...
In the game as it stands, the default Anthrocentrism is low maintenance, +1 unhappy for other Lifeforms. So switching to Tolerance (no traits whatsoever) is a step up from bad because it eliminates unhappiness; however, it is high maintenance. I like your ideas because I think starting from 0 and going to 2 is better than starting from -1 and going to 1, if you know what I mean (?)
btw, there is a weird bug if you mouse over the existing "Chauvinism" civic. It shows the +1 unhappiness as +[very large number] happiness. It still works, tho.
These all mesh well with the civics we've got on the table; we needed one more for governance and society. The Gov civic closest to Collective Mind is either "Consentience" or "Hive."
Yeah, that was my concern too. The AI likes food! I've seen the AI do things like make cities unhealthy or unhappy, but never purposefully go into negative growth. A momentum human player can do the math and realize that building boreholes would allow the quick construction of buildings that replace citizens and thereby enable a "rush" strategy. Can the AI?Krikkitone said:
I had this vision that the game board would look different from civ to civ... that the Borg territories would be big stretches of scarred lands that they'd exploited for every last mineral... Perhaps one way to do that is to give Borg +Food on Boreholes/Mines, -Food on farms -- easily modeled with Civics, not so easy with Religion.
Because Boreholes eventually collapse, you have to keep building them to get that quick fix. (They should work like crack.) The only way to survive them is to BUILD citizens rather than GROW them -- but if you're right about the AI not handling this well, that's a problem.
Maybe I will take vanilla Civ4, create a borehole improvement, and see what the AI does with it in the Ancient era...
Yup! In the proto-mod posted, that's already modeled to some degree. Not balanced or tested, tho, b/c by the time you get there there are no more techs to research so the game is basically "over." But it's there...Krikkitone said:
Well, the root problem is that in this mod, "No religion" = "pure human." So "Pure Breeding" could be a more virulent form of Anthrocentrism. OR it could be a "new" lifeform in the sense that the original human settlers have evolved so much by the time this tech is discovered, "pure" homo sapiens are actually a different race.Krikkitone said:
This meshes with what I'm currently describing as "Chauvinism," the name of which I'm not attached to.
Great, very similar to "Tolerance."
In the game as it stands, the default Anthrocentrism is low maintenance, +1 unhappy for other Lifeforms. So switching to Tolerance (no traits whatsoever) is a step up from bad because it eliminates unhappiness; however, it is high maintenance. I like your ideas because I think starting from 0 and going to 2 is better than starting from -1 and going to 1, if you know what I mean (?)
btw, there is a weird bug if you mouse over the existing "Chauvinism" civic. It shows the +1 unhappiness as +[very large number] happiness. It still works, tho.
Yeah, the current specialists are a bit more, um, punitive than this. The "Vitaologist" is +3 food, -1 hammer, -2 psi (turning minerals into food is very demoralizing). The Borg are also -1 psi. I was doing this because I was thinking that Psi could work like a "bank" and that Psi borders should grow and shrink, rather than only grow. Culture then becomes a resource like everything else. Any thoughts on that?
I was actually thinking of the Borg as potentially being upgradeable to a fighting super-unit of the current era.
[/quote]
These all mesh well with the civics we've got on the table; we needed one more for governance and society. The Gov civic closest to Collective Mind is either "Consentience" or "Hive."
loki1232
Loki
Padmewan said:
That's it?
I say add orbital units. These would be immobile but able to spy and bombard the map.
What about some lattice specific units?
loki1232
Loki
Padmewan said:
I can see two easy ways to do this.
1. Have civics be linked to religion. There should be one category of civics where each is linked to one religion except for a default one that doesn't allow state religion.
2. Whenever the religion spreads to a city you can add a trigger that automatically adds a building to that city which gives all of the advantages and disadvantages of the religion.
Either way works, but I personally prefer the first.
loki1232 said:
I think each "religion" or Lifeform will get it's own unitcombat class. They almost have to to get promotions and tactical warfare going.
I hadn't thought of orbital classes....Would these give bonuses to the civs ala SMAC with the later units that I can't remember their name!
onedreamer
Dragon
nice idea. If I don't remember bad though (it's been years) the naturalist's name is Deirdre (surname Sky ?).
loki1232
Loki
woodelf1. think each "religion" or Lifeform will get it's own unitcombat class. They almost have to to get promotions and tactical warfare going. 2. I hadn't thought of orbital classes....Would these give bonuses to the civs ala SMAC with the later units that I can't remember their name
(In my Luke-talking-to-Yoda voice) -- Can this be done??? That may resolve this discussion.loki1232 said:
"Dierdre" has two "r"s???
btw I looked up some Gaelic (or was it Celtic?) words and used one for the name of the Neo-Gaian faction. I couldn't get all the accents right so I took them out.
Finally, SMAC abstracted the idea of orbital satellites because, well, the Civ engine is based on 2-D landscape. Satellites did nothing but provide resources for ALL of your cities. Pretty uber. You could later build attack satellites to take out rival civ's satellites. But all of this was very abstract, and in some ways a parallel engine.
loki1232
Loki
Padmewan said:
Well its been done in the FfH mod, so I don't see what's stopping us from doing it here.
KrikkitTwo
Immortal
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2004
- Messages
- 12,418
The thing to remember with specialists is they Could be doing something better. so they really shouldn't be to punitive. (I can see 'Vitaologist' though making something necessary). I do think the idea of negative psi is good. (for some specialists, buildings, possibly a few religions, etc.)... although how the AI will deal with that I'm not certain... probably just keep it limited.
One note on Boreholes, you need to make them un-pillageable, especially if they eventually 'runout' to prevent people from 'Almost' running them out and then eliminating them.
And for the Terraforming... It would be interesting if you couldn't terraform with workers from Tundra to Terran Dryland, but that had to be done by "Global Warming" especially now that the SDK is out, if some type of 'terraforming event' would trigger it instead of nuclear events...perhaps you build Terraforming Device Buildings, and they 'meltdown' with no damage to the population...
probably a number of ways to do it but having Terraforming be a Global event rather than a local one would be an interesting improvement.
(Boreholes could lower the chance, perhaps even perform reverse terraforming)
One note on Boreholes, you need to make them un-pillageable, especially if they eventually 'runout' to prevent people from 'Almost' running them out and then eliminating them.
And for the Terraforming... It would be interesting if you couldn't terraform with workers from Tundra to Terran Dryland, but that had to be done by "Global Warming" especially now that the SDK is out, if some type of 'terraforming event' would trigger it instead of nuclear events...perhaps you build Terraforming Device Buildings, and they 'meltdown' with no damage to the population...
probably a number of ways to do it but having Terraforming be a Global event rather than a local one would be an interesting improvement.
(Boreholes could lower the chance, perhaps even perform reverse terraforming)
Krikkitone said:
I found the AI handles the Vitologist quite interestingly... AI-controlled civs rarely end up with 1-tile cities, but mine does if I leave the governor on. OTOH, the Talent specialist gives +1 psi (rather than +1 prod) so after the city shrinks to 1 tile, the AI seems to switch to the Talent. The border yo-yos until you get to 2 pop, then the AI seems to de-prioritize the Vitologist. There must be some kind of variable prioritization, because according to the XML, the AI weighs hammers 120 and food only 100.
(With the creative trait this is not an issue!).
Good observation about pillaging, because I just realized the pillage order has to be reversed (when you pillage a new borehole, it turns into borehole II rather than into nothing, otherwise you could pillage borehole IV back to borehole III).
Anyway, the solution to this is to turn the tile permanently into a useless, non-terraformable type upon completion of the 'hole. You can really cripple a borehole-dependent civ by pillaging it is what you are pointing out. But then, a boreholey civ is probably one on the rampage elsewhere or about to collapse upon itself, anyway.
To make sure that both players and AI understand the REAL consequences of building a borehold (terraforming the land to "useless") a little sleight-of-hand in Python will be necessary. If the final borehold produces 10 hammers, and Packed SiO2 naturally produces 2, there needs to be a borehole specially made for Packed SiO2 that shows +8 hammers. Then when the Python code terraforms the land from Packed SiO2 to Stripped, it also converts the improvement into the "real" Borehole.
