"Power in My Hand" Development Thread

[ThichN]

Thank you @Buck2005 ! Good thoughts here. For the world map that you have played, was it the gigantic one used in the Imperialism scenario, or otherwise?

For the North Sea Passage map idea, I was thinking of trying to make a flat map that operates in that domain, but does not incorporate the whole world. What are your thoughts on that? The excessively large landmasses of North America and Siberia, in this case, become the new world according to the post-apocalypse, and Greenland becomes a more temperate biome. Something like below, but I could narrow it even further.

 

[Buck2005]

For the world map that you have played, was it the gigantic one used in the Imperialism scenario, or otherwise?

Yes, I meant the standard giga-world map that is used in most scenarios, including "Imperialism".

For the North Sea Passage map idea, I was thinking of trying to make a flat map that operates in that domain, but does not incorporate the whole world. What are your thoughts on that? The excessively large landmasses of North America and Siberia, in this case, become the new world according to the post-apocalypse, and Greenland becomes a more temperate biome. Something like below, but I could narrow it even further.

This projection (assuming the maximum map size is 32760) will give you huge areas of the oceans, the Arctic Ocean in particular, as well as huge areas of Siberia, Canada, Greenland. The area of the oceans will be 75-80 percent of the map. The area of Europe, the mainland of the United States, as well as Japan and northern China will be very small. I assume that the distance between the Baltic and Mediterranean seas will be about 8-10 squares. The distance between French Brest and Istanbul is about 10-15 squares. The distance between New Orleans and Chicago will be 8-10 squares Honshu is 7-8 squares from west to east, and 1-2 squares from north to south.
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If this scale of the map is acceptable for you, you can create a map. Personally, I would consider the scale unacceptably small. It all depends on your personal preferences. In general, if you do not care about accurate and reliable transmission of individual regions of the Earth, with a good scale, it is not very clear why you need to use the Earth. You can take any arbitrary piece of the Earth map of any scale (for example, even the scale of one country, or even the neighborhood of any city), and build you a mod on this map. Or use a random map (which, in my opinion, is the cornerstone of Civ2).

 

[ThichN]

@Buck2005 Good news! I was able to rescue my modified Earth map.

For anyone who might run into this issue: I had to use the "MapEdit" app to change the resource seed. Once I did that, the map loaded just fine!

 

[ThichN]

I have a working tech tree, improvements put into place, and factions named. Here are some improvement icons I made! And their corresponding image when selected in city view / the smaller version of their image in the Civliopedia. [Note: The Civliopedia versions are missing "Palace" - called "Headquarters" in this scenario - at the moment.]

 

[ThichN]

Chugging along over here. I curated a selection of units, editing some pieces of units. Many thanks @Fairline @Tanelorn @Broken_Erika ... and anyone else? Let me know.
These are base units, so they do not include faction-specific UU. Warning! Only look ahead if you want spoilers.

The eras are Regrouping, Reclamation, Adaptation, and Innovation. Regrouping signifies the coming together of likeminded tribes to create the factions, and a sort of neo-medieval society. Reclamation is the retooling and reuse of debris and other lost tech through oral histories and found items/salvage, with novel uses as well (for example, that 2nd unit in the row is an Augment). Adaptation is a continued willingness to fight against the environment and create new, codified systems of military and social presence. Innovation is going beyond where humanity previously ended in a lot of ways with a bunch of pulpy units.

I am admittedly unsure about the graphics. I'd love feedback or any suggestions if anyone has some better ideas. I know what I want the units to be, and I am pretty happy with these. The artists are amazing. On my end, it's mostly about curating the right feel. Naval units were tough. I am going for simple cobbled together wooden - metal parts ships at the beginning that later on veer into more established warship looks, but a little "dirty" or "off" -- with some weird accoutrements. Not here is a carrier, which I think I'll just edit one of the Ironclads floating around to be a platform where things can land. I call it in-game the Turtle.

Other than all this, really just moving along. I have a foundational tech tree, a map, and factions ideas cemented. Now comes the fun of incorporating UU. And finally, diving into Lua.

Spoiler Base Land Units :

Era 1: Regrouping

Era 2: Reclamation

Era 3: Adaptation

Era 4: Innovation

Spoiler Base Naval Units :

Naval units zoomed in a bit. This, by the way, is what the Amazon Rainforest looks like.

Zoomed out. You can see the Amazon and the Andes here.

 

[Patine]

@ThichN Actually, way back, around the turn of the 21st Century, back on Apolyton, I had conceived a somewhat grim and rough future vision set in 2048 (which was 50 years after the year of my first inception of it, 1998), which was to have a series of Civ2 scenarios, and some novel or novella material, that, while it wasn't a complete collpase of the civilization, the current world order had been upset greatly, and things were unpleasant, if higher tech (I don't know if I'd use the full-blown term, "dystopia," though). I had called it, "New Dawn," (a bit misleadingly, until the tail end of the stroy arc, at least), but given when I came up with it, it obviously pre-dates, at least in terms of the forum appearance, of the mod, "New Dawn," here, which has similar thematic ground, because the latter is, well, Civ4. I still have quite a few notes of my notes on it. So, in short, I have attempted, early on, a similar, but very distinct, project. @CurtSibling has taken several takes on the broad genre just here in the SL, but also shows different personal tastes for it's application.

 

[ThichN]

@Patine That’s great to hear and thank you for sharing! It’s an interesting subject to explore, for sure. Have you thought about resurrecting your project? I am intrigued as well by @CurtSibling work and the scenarios of others who have these interests. They’ve certainly provided a lot of thematic and graphic inspiration. And I hope my own take proves fun and distinct!

Also, very open to feedback on the work I’ve posted thus far. This is my first scenario, although I was a longtime lurker of the forums / avid player of them back in the day. Rediscovering Civ2 has been great.

My hopes are to convey the Earth as a totally ruined environment, with factions grouping together over ideology, and moving from a sort of neo feudalism to incorporating tech at the very end that is more advanced than what we have now.

But I also hope for each faction to tell its own story. I don’t know if this means 7 different sets of Lua files depending on the faction you choose, but I’m going to start small and go from there. I shifted the world map enough to where exploration will hopefully be meaningful and with surprises, or at the very least open up some differing strategic possibilities.

Terrain Notes
I thought I’d post some musings on terrain appearance in the scenario. The terrain you see above is under a lot of flux. I’ll post more about this down the line, but I want terrain files to become slightly lighter (in color) through play, as the murky, dark clouds dissipate. The ones you see above would be the “lightest” perhaps, with the first ones being considerably dark. And then, of course, the altering of land to “lush” as a sort of terraforming concept… but also preset ones on the map for factions to fight over.
Inspired by the Napoleon and Caesar and other scenarios that change terrain files seasonally. I made a few shades of these terrains by simply changing hue and saturation and brightness in photoshop, to great effect! The beginning of the scenario will look pretty muddy. This is my current thinking, anyway!