2nd attempt; space armarda

[Xen]

perhaps this is just me, but is there anyone else who thinks that actual land should eb retricted to use as planets? strars,moons, and asteroid belts would be represented by bonus resources... luxury resources could be special planets, or plantoids that have some rare resource on them....

though a star replaceing a montai is good as well...

 

[Celeborn]

I tought that the star replacing the volcano might be a good idea because that allows for "plasma expulsion" (or a better name) disaters... ie, the volcano erupting

With my map I have grasslands making up the outer system and plains making up the inner system, jungles are the astriod belt... The ways I see it with Smoking Mirror's idea for "sollar power" as food, the inner system can have higer food than the outer system... or something to that effect...

 

[Xen]

the thing I dont like about that is, is that ground units would be able to walk from planet to planet- which is why IMO, Planets should be one tile island that the player can settle, and then resources placed in space, or the sea in non-modded terms, would hepl boost production and such

awahile ago I even though to add some vareity, a type of land tile could be a dense asteroid cluster- that a human player cannot settle, but could atack- this would be useful for barb camps, and a similer approach could be used for species that while advanced, and have a civilization, and therefore are a possible opponent, they dont live in a human freindlly enviroment...

actually, now that I'm sort of on the subject, i am assuming that human ground troops will be in the game to actually capture planets...

 

[CrazyMrLeo]

Why have planets as land at all? Why not make the space in the solar system as your land tile, and ships your ground units? Planets can be represented by resources. You could have faster ships be boats, and deep space be sea tiles. Or has this already been suggested?

 

[Xen]

in my opinion, it would look kind of silly setting downthe seat of government for a system in the middle of a system on no planet...

 

[Celeborn]

some of SM's ideas in the last thread just scroll down abit

 

[Xen]

besides, IMO, groung foto troops will always be needed to take hold of reral life cities anyway- might as well represetn them as units in the game and give them a maine ability, as like or not, war will never be won by air alone

 

[Smoking mirror]

Trying to make a space mod is very difficult, the biggest problem being, how to decide what is the sea, what is the land and what is everything else.

Thank you Celeborn for trying to wrap you head around it, thats prety much as far as I got on my last attempt.

I think CrazyMrLeo was closest to what I've had in mind, admitedly a terretorial war fought for the posession of a single world couldn't be won with air power alone, You would need vast ground armies to occupy the enemy territory.

However, if your terretory is in space and all you want to do is use the planet as a resource, its a simple matter of blackmailing the inhabitants in to working for you. You don't actualy have to occupy the planet, just tell them that if your quotas aren't met then you'll nuke 'em.

I think the best option is for the cities to be Space based habitats, and although you can base a city on (or around) a planet, the real work goes on in space. In order to use any of the resources a planet holds you must first liberate them from the gravity well. It take a great amount of energy to lift a small amount of matterial resources from the surface of earth in to space, so with out a space elevator (mine), planets will produce very few shields. As space elevators take a while to build, and will require a special tech, advantages can be gained from placing your city on a planet tile.

As far as graphics go, I'm thinking of using hills to represent a generic planet. It will be a small ball of rock. You can then place a planet resource on top of this. If the resource runs out or is destroyed, then you are left with an almost useless hunk of rock (even gas giants have a small rocky core). The planet resources will fit neatly over the rocky planet graphic.

Sea type ships will be transport/lighthugger/battleship types, designed for interstellar flight, while in system ships will be shuttles, freighters, fighters,gunships, fixed gun batteries, troop carriers (can enslave enemy ships), construction and mining ships and the like.

I'm thinking of doing the Shuttles etc.. (ground units) as multiunit "wings" of two or three ships. I've got to work out all the scales before I start work on animating all the ships for the first two eras, heres what I have in mind for the shuttles;

 

[Xen]

I have to tell you, so far out of ALL the ship, the idea for little squadrons of ships like that is probabley one of my favorites, and those designs are perfect for the small shio role, I have to those are my favories, except perhaps for that one light hugger that I like alot (the advanced one)

 

[Xen]

also, of thoise, I like the first squadron the best

 

[Smoking mirror]

I've been tying to organise the ground units, but I'm not sure how to do it.

In civ III you need four basic types of ground units, attacking units, deffending units, fast units and arttilery units.

I'm thinking of making shuttles the fast units, they are lightly armed and armoured, and their main job is fast movement to and from a location. The deffending units could be monitors and gun platforms, not very manuverable or fast, but with lots of firepower. Artillery units could be missile launchers and rail guns, capable of launching attacks at targets out of normal range. I guess the attacking ships would be something like a assault ship with powerfull short ranged weapons, and a complement of assault EVA equiped military troops.

Most ship designs fall some where in between, like a corvette, which is relativly fast and has good attacking and deffending capabilites. A corvette could be thought of as the mounted Knight of space combat, good in attack and deffence and able to withdraw fro the battle feild if out gunned.

So I'm thinking;
Delta winged shuttle; 2/2/1 somthing like the USAs planned next generation shuttle.
Rocket shuttle; 1/1/2 a shuttle designed around an integral nuclear booster rocket, not very maneuverable, but able to quicky move around the solar system.
Fighter shuttle 2/2/2 with minaturised fusion rockets combines early shuttle design with high speed.

Orbital defender 1/2/1 A small satelite fitted with heavy weapons systems.
Ironclad defender 1/3/1 a larger armoured satelite.
Monitor defender 2/3/1 a fully fledged armoured spaceship.

Assault ship 3/1/1 An armoured troop carrier.

Missile salvo (4)/0/1 like a small swarm of cruise missiles.
Rail gun (3)/0/1 a long ranged artillery piece.

Corvette 3/3/2 a fast war ship.

 

[A Viking Yeti]

I love the idea and the depth to which you are developing it. But I have a question. If you were able to drop the inertial resitence of a ship, then the light barrier doesn't exist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the light barrier is there because as you approach the speed of light, the mass (and inertial resistance) of the ship approach infinity. So, eventually you're just adding thrust to move the thrust that you're putting out, right? Until you become to massive and turn into a blackhole. So if you could drop the inertial resistance of a ship, then it wouldn't have to move the extra energy, and would therefor break the speed of light. Unless, of course, the energy used to reduce inertial resistance was exactly equal to the energy freed up by the inertia reducer. Also, near the speed of light, relativity would make the usefulness of on-board cryostasis useless. A trip that would seem to take millions of years here on earth, would only take 10 to the people on the ships. Though, that's not how we'd want to make a round trip cross the galaxy, since the earth and all of our species even could be gone be the time you get back.

Concerning energy problems, not sure for ships. But for sattelites or orbital istallments near stars, there always the idea of a nuetron/nuetrino drive. Or you could have the quark-plasma engine for ships, though potentially dangerous.

Another idea for a hull would be an anti-gravitational nose, made by energy vacuums most likely, as an early hull protection. Since the resistance caused by the repulsive anti-grav hull would be the same as the particles hitting the hull itself, it would move just as fast but without the damage to the hull.

Also, another government idea: Quantum-Fundementalism. A quantum religion based government, based on religious devotion and divine purpose. Since we'd probably change our religions a lot over time, quantum based religions would probably become very popular. To the point of fanatical. It would have low trade, high resistance to cultural absorbtion, low unit cost, low matinence, and high corruption.

BTW: I had an idea for a nuke-type weapon. An anti-matter bomb. Anti-matter converts all its mass directly to energy, where as nukes only do I think 1%. So and anit-matter bomb would be all the bang for your buck you can get out of a particular amount of matter, by direct engery conversion. Another artillery idea would be charged particle/radiation cannon. An orbital/sub-orbital, radiation emiting, cannon used to heat foriegn ionospheres at the poles to extreme temperatures. It would cost a lot to power, but so does a lot of the stuff we're talking about here. It would create a sever green-house effect, to the point of planetary inhabitability. Basically, a planetary seige weapon. Just some thoughts that have been brewing in my head for a while.

 

[A Viking Yeti]

I was reading more of your post about terrain and I was working on one, but the thread died. I made land planets/stars/etc, coast=orbital space, sea=system space, and ocean=interstellar space. This way you can restrict movement of certain ships to within the system, where as your interstellar ships would go through the oceans (interstellar or "deep" space). And your orbital ships, such as our shuttles now, would have to have somewhere to land every turn, or risk drifting into system space or deep space. I don't know how the AI handles single square land tiles, but the AI's kinda dumb with a lot of things.

 

[Smoking mirror]

Originally posted by A Viking Yeti
If you were able to drop the inertial resitence of a ship, then the light barrier doesn't exist.

My own understanding of light speed travel is not very well developed, but this is what I understand from reynolds writing;
The inertia reduction machinery works by reducing the inertial effects of the quantum vacum around the object you want to effect. In the "safe" mode, state two, inertia can be about halved, or with enough of a tech advance, reduced to very low levels. In state one, inertia is drasticly increased, much more difficult to work with, but allows the possibility of stasis fields.
In state three all inertia vanishes, all matter in a state three bubble becomes photonic, pure light. However, this would be a very difficult state to acheive, and would be fatal. Also, matter would have a tendancy to flip to the other side of state three, where it had an inertial equal to an imaginary number, (like infinity minus one) and could travel faster than light becoming tacyonic, rather than tardonic matter, a state four conversion. However, this is very difficult and very, very dangerous. A mistake at this level could erase you from history, making you never have existed, or causing you to die at some earlier more probable moment in your life (where it would cause the least temporal interference).

Originally posted by A Viking Yeti
Also, near the speed of light, relativity would make the usefulness of on-board cryostasis useless.

Yes, depending on your actual journey time subjective ship time could be reduced to a five or six years between starsystems. If you could reduce your inertia enough, it would take a matter of weeks.

Originally posted by A Viking Yeti
Concerning energy problems, not sure for ships. But for sattelites or orbital istallments near stars, there always the idea of a nuetron/nuetrino drive. Or you could have the quark-plasma engine for ships, though potentially dangerous.

I'm still trying to decide how to handle the division of resources, food, shields and trade. I did think of solar power, ore and gas, which would be good for an eraly era, but in later eras, energy would be come so abundant that you wouldn't need solar energy, or even gas. Have to keep thinking of that one.
Most drive systems are dangerous at some point during thier development, its just a question of how bad a risk. What would happen for instance is a ship with a quark-plasma drive blew up?

Originally posted by A Viking Yeti
Also, another government idea: Quantum-Fundementalism. A quantum religion based government, based on religious devotion and divine purpose.

Yes, I like this one, though I think a general fundamentalist government would be more servicable. Think of the multitude of possible religions in the future, such as hero worship religions based on the exploits of the early colonists, or famous scientists. Religions whose goal is to make man kind imortal through technology, others who refuse to use technology to augment thier bodies. In terms of the religious buildings of civ III I'm thinking of replacing the temple with a recreational station/casino (representing the very current religion of hedonism and matierial gain), and the cathedral with a consiousness scanning clinic, where you can become imortal by having your memories and personality recorded on to a computer. The stadium can become a multi-faith church.

Originally posted by A Viking Yeti
BTW: I had an idea for a nuke-type weapon. An anti-matter bomb.

Anti matter bombs are very good weapons for direct hits, or attacks on a planet, but the vacum of space makes all area of effect blast weapons somewhat limited. If you missed your target or the delivery device (likely a missile) was shot down before it reached its target your very expensive antimatter warhead would be practicly wasted. This doesn't mean that its not a good weapon, only that its not very economical. Perhaps it could be an expensive cruise missile type unit.

Originally posted by A Viking Yeti
Another artillery idea would be charged particle/radiation cannon. An orbital/sub-orbital, radiation emiting, cannon used to heat foriegn ionospheres at the poles to extreme temperatures.

There are lots of ways to kill a planet, one of the reasons I've suggested space habitats as the main city unit. They aren't so reliant on the clement nature of thier surroundings. I'm not sure however, what the new conquest rules are concerning the destruction of resources using bombard attacks. Perhaps a specila planet killing artillery unit could be built, with a low rate of fire, but a high bombard value. Does anyone know what it takes to destroy a resource?

 

[Xen]

I just had a thought... what if you turned the colloseum into a sort of "stellar resort", which increases happyness at a maitenince cost...

 

[Smoking mirror]

Yes, I supose the Colluseum would make a better Recreation station/ space tourism resort, while the temple can be made in to a multi faith church. The techs would be better placed to, as I want to copy the normal civ III tech tree as much as possible for ease of play.

It would also give the possibility of a great wonder, I should imagie any civ would be proud to own the first cathedral in space.

I'm still working on the ground units, some will be weeded away as I progress, I think for the first age, traditional units like space shuttles and sattelites are realistic, while the second age gives you purpose built war ships.

One other thing I've been thinking of is diplomacy. with out faster than light communication (not available till the third era) Messages will take a long time to pass between systems. There are more than a hundred stars withing 20 light years of earth but most are red dwarf stars, without much likelyhood of a planet rich system. I think the map could be about 24 light lears across, and be slightly realistic. So if two planets on eaither side of the map want to comunicate it could take 56 years for thier response to come back. That is about on a par with earth in the bronze or Iron age.

In reynolds books two parties often conduct negotiations by sending each other programed copies of them selves, avatars if you will. The copy has much of the memories and personality of the original leader, but is usualy edited to stop secret information being hacked out of it. The two parties make their negotiations and then return the avatar with its new information. The leader can then either talk to his own copy or have it scanned directly back in to his own brain (there is a risk however of hidden viruses etc..)

For the first two eras therefore, I was thinking it might be good to have a holographic leaderhead, something like this;

 

[Smoking mirror]

It would be great to have all the factions like this, the figures could look like almost anything, from traditional humans in military uniform (the guy above) to people in space suits or battle armour, even aliens would look good.
The background room could change too, It could be a portable projector in some ones hand, or a giant projector in a staduim full of people.

Lots of room for peole to show of thier skills. Even I could do one when I've finished with the ships and terrain and buildings...

 

[WinterRose]

Originally posted by Smoking mirror
The main design of a lighthugger is simple, an aerodynamic hull, made of resistant material (synthetic diamond), with one or two powerfull engines.

I've already started working on the animations, and next month hope to overhaul my terrain graphics (they were too confusing before).
even with simple shapes I can make quite good animations, heres a death animation for an armoured light hugger;

Explosions in space should be spherical.

 

[A Viking Yeti]

I don't think it would be possible to actually move matter past the speed of light. The reason being as you increase your speed, the kinetic energy would generate large amounts of gravitaional force; regardless of inertial resistance. If you used an anti-grav core, the power need to keep the ship stable would be imense and generate large amounts of gravity itself. An alternate idea to actually moving is to (somehow, though I have no idea how ) coordinate all the quantum randimocities of every particle that makes up the matter to move in sync. Then increase the quanta level of the matter, and the randomized position would be largly signifigant. If you could control the position of the ship's quantum mechanical state then you could, in theory, travel instantaneuosly anywhere. You could call it orginized quantum displacement or something like that. Of course you always risk adding to much quanta, and changing the ship to pure plasma (and everyone in it for that mater); boom, no more ship. Not to convelute the mater, just trying to make the mod more realistic, IMHO.

A nuetron/neutrino dirve works by making the massive amounts of almost undetecable particles, known as nuetrinos, that stars emit to collide with nuetrons. When this happens the nuetron emits a blue cone of light, and therefore energy. If we could condense the nuetrons, or in some other way improve the effeicentcy of the system, we could produce massive amounts of energy from virtually nothing. Just being near a star would be enough. Every second, billions of nuetrinos from our sun pass through the tip of your finger every second; so there's obviously abundant energy passing through us every second, it just doesn't interact with us. That's why I wanted to make sea system space, ships that rely on a nuetron/nuetrino drive, would have to stay near a star to generate their energy.

A quark-plasma drive smashes highly energized particles at high speeds, 99.999etc...% the speed of light, directly into each other via powerful, linear atom smashers. This breaks even the most fundamental particles down to highly energized quarks (theoretical sub-sub-atomic particles that make up everything, i.e. the basic building block of physics). Creating a mesh of pretty much just energy, which is then shot out the back as it expands and reforms into sub-atomic and atomic structures. An explosion caused be a mechanical error would basically be imense amounts of radiation coupled with just about any particle that can feasably exist. That is of course if you have enough quark-plasma. It would be very pretty though, .

A planetary seige weapon could be used to destroy the native working inhabitants, or you could point it at a space colony. It should, with the materials you're using, generate large amounts of heat, electicity, radiation, light, sub-atomic particles, etc... Just pretty much particle choas, and radioative "soup."

Concering comunication, they have already "moved" one of mozarts symphonies 5x the speed of light, via microwaves. "Moved" being used loosely, since we didn't do anything. They first split the microwave beam into 2, and sent one directly into an insulator with a microwave reciever on the other end. The sigle picked up on the other end, though slightly distorted some of the time (due to the quantum randimocities all photons contain), was still recognizable and got there 5x faster than the normal microwave beam. So communication might not be as slow as previously thought. Though I still like the idea of hollograms, just saying your map can be bigger than previously thought.

Nukes are expensive too, and can be shot down (which I always found to be a great lose).

Explosions in space would only be spherical if the hull had the same strength all the way over, and if no inertia/movement effecting feilds were present (though they almost certainly would be, due to the advance nature of the ships we are currently discussing). Movement effecting feild being anit-grav feild, microwave, gamma, etc...

How would you transport foot units if the land was space, the AI has no land transport handlers. Also, all ground based units (as in foot units, not ships moving on tile that were technically land, but consedered space) would have to be immobile, which means you couldn't make them attack or defense.

Sorry if I'm complicating things too much here. Are you basing this mod off a book, or what you actually think the future's going to be like?

 

[Bob McDob]

I sort of like the idea of keeping hills as planets, and using them as colony bases. Maybe make them islands, and the solar system sea tiles, and being able to expand the city onto the coast tiles, a la orbital bases. All units would be able to move on sea (except for ground units, which would be restricted to amphibious assaults). Surrounding the solar system would be coast tiles, impenetrable to all but FTL craft (or, if you have a warp-node based system, there's be strips of sea connecting star systems).

BTW, what are LN units?

EDIT: Three minutes later, I see someone else posted the exact same thing as me. Doh :\ Still like the idea, though <G>