Crazy Spatz's Alpha Centauri Mod

[Spatzimaus]

I had only begun building my spaceship, and I don't think anyone had built one yet. This was the first election held as well.

Okay, so no one had really gone far into the future content then. I was mainly wondering if he'd reached the Empath Guild yet, given what it does to city-state relations, but you can't get that without the spaceship.

Maybe its because I haven't played ciV in about 40 days, and I've regressed?

Possible, but for Siam to be THAT dominant on Prince, something strange must have been going on. If you'd started in the ancient era I'd have guessed that they'd had an early war and conquered a neighbor, but with an industrial start there wouldn't have been time to develop a conquered empire.

It just might be that the changes I made to city-states aren't hurting them nearly as badly as they do other civs. But there are other possibilities; for instance, I'm currently playing a game with raging barbarians. Every city-state has been giving out the "destroy a camp for me" mission, and the civs near the center of the map aren't getting nearly as many of those completed as those of us on the edges. Given how much the city-states love mission completions, it's possible that Siam just went on a streak of camp kills and got some free allies. (Or some other mission, like the requests for specific wonders or a road.)

Also, before I forget, the blurb for the Hospital appears to be broke in that it doesn't list the building's benefits.

Already fixed in v.17. I'd been using an Update when it should have been a Row (since the vanilla Hospital, like the vanilla Granary pre-patch, had no Help entry). For the record, its effect is "20% food storage, and all units heal at double the normal rate inside this city". I also cleaned up a lot of other tooltips at the same time (like adding building prerequisites, like "Requires an Aqueduct" on the Sewer System, that sort of thing) so once I can release the new version things should be a bit better.

And as always, I've been... tweaking things. I never liked how the Republic policy (+1 production per city) was so inferior to the Communism policy (+5 per city), despite the fact that the game prices all policies the same. So I changed it to +1 production per city and +10% to trade income; in the early game the production is larger, in the later game it's more about the money. So far it's worked well.

Oh, and I've temporarily patched the whole "city asks for Neutronium for WLTK" thing in my upcoming version. For now, if its random draw picks a resource that has a tech prerequisite (meaning just Neutronium), the game will immediately clear that city's demand and pretend it never happened. Eventually I'm going to change it to actually pick a new resource, but that'll take a little more testing.

Going to play another game tonight -same settings. I'll throw in Siam as well and see if the same thing happens regarding their getting a big tech lead/ UN votes.

I wouldn't be surprised if it is something I've done that naturally favors Siam. A lot of my balance changes have had unintended effects like that. Take India, for instance... the change to base city unhappiness absolutely cripples India if not played carefully. (8 unhappiness per city, SIXTEEN per conquered city!) In the long term India does just fine, once population gets large (the break-even point is size 7, barring policies or wonders), but there's a period in the middle ages where India will be solidly negative on happiness.

--------------
I'd love to say that I'll be playing another test game this weekend... but I just bought Dragon Age 2. So if I get sick of it later tonight I might play a little Civ5, but who knows.

 

[markusbeutel]

Okay, so no one had really gone far into the future content then. I was mainly wondering if he'd reached the Empath Guild yet, given what it does to city-state relations, but you can't get that without the spaceship.



Possible, but for Siam to be THAT dominant on Prince, something strange must have been going on. If you'd started in the ancient era I'd have guessed that they'd had an early war and conquered a neighbor, but with an industrial start there wouldn't have been time to develop a conquered empire.

It just might be that the changes I made to city-states aren't hurting them nearly as badly as they do other civs. But there are other possibilities; for instance, I'm currently playing a game with raging barbarians. Every city-state has been giving out the "destroy a camp for me" mission, and the civs near the center of the map aren't getting nearly as many of those completed as those of us on the edges. Given how much the city-states love mission completions, it's possible that Siam just went on a streak of camp kills and got some free allies. (Or some other mission, like the requests for specific wonders or a road.)



Already fixed in v.17. I'd been using an Update when it should have been a Row (since the vanilla Hospital, like the vanilla Granary pre-patch, had no Help entry). For the record, its effect is "20% food storage, and all units heal at double the normal rate inside this city". I also cleaned up a lot of other tooltips at the same time (like adding building prerequisites, like "Requires an Aqueduct" on the Sewer System, that sort of thing) so once I can release the new version things should be a bit better.

And as always, I've been... tweaking things. I never liked how the Republic policy (+1 production per city) was so inferior to the Communism policy (+5 per city), despite the fact that the game prices all policies the same. So I changed it to +1 production per city and +10% to trade income; in the early game the production is larger, in the later game it's more about the money. So far it's worked well.

Oh, and I've temporarily patched the whole "city asks for Neutronium for WLTK" thing in my upcoming version. For now, if its random draw picks a resource that has a tech prerequisite (meaning just Neutronium), the game will immediately clear that city's demand and pretend it never happened. Eventually I'm going to change it to actually pick a new resource, but that'll take a little more testing.



I wouldn't be surprised if it is something I've done that naturally favors Siam. A lot of my balance changes have had unintended effects like that. Take India, for instance... the change to base city unhappiness absolutely cripples India if not played carefully. (8 unhappiness per city, SIXTEEN per conquered city!) In the long term India does just fine, once population gets large (the break-even point is size 7, barring policies or wonders), but there's a period in the middle ages where India will be solidly negative on happiness.

--------------
I'd love to say that I'll be playing another test game this weekend... but I just bought Dragon Age 2. So if I get sick of it later tonight I might play a little Civ5, but who knows.

Dragon Age 2 is... different. Not in a bad way, just different. I don't think the story structure they used worked all that well. That being said combat is probably more enjoyable if you like Action RPG's. Combat would be perfect IF you could zoom out all the way like in Origins - mistake there to not include that. I'm about 5 hours in, it's okay so far. If anything, feels more like a console game, more like a Final Fantasy albeit it with much better writing.

 

[Spatzimaus]

That being said combat is probably more enjoyable if you like Action RPG's.

That's what I'd heard. While I liked the original game, I'm not one of those fans who insists that any sequel has to be exactly the same type of experience as the original, so based on the demo I'll be able to enjoy it as a hack-n-slash.

Bottom line, I probably won't play much Civ5 this weekend, although if I come up with some bright Civ5 idea along the way I might spend a few hours modding.

 

[Darsnan]

Ended up with a hard crash I couldn't get around (i.e. probably something an AI was doing) last night. Was in the process of building my spaceship, so it was a fair ways into the game.

Observations:

1. The case of the North Going Zax and the South Going Zax: right at the beginning of the game one of my riflemen encountered a Russian Settler being escorted by a riflemen. I plopped my riflemen down on a square and didn't budge, and neither did the Russian Settler/ Riflemen. They sat there like that for the first 50+ turns or so, which completely crippled Russia because they effectively lost one of their first Settlers this way. I have encountered this once before where the AI had its heart set on settling a specific spot occupied by my unit, but with my unit camped out on the tile the AI just didn't know what do do (i.e. I'm assuming the algorythm regarding Settler location doesn't take into account an enemy/ different civ unit camping out on the dsired tile).

2. I noticed Barb Archers in encampments weren't using their ranged attacks against my riflemen.

3. I can also still pull that trick where I declare war on a distant civ (like on the other side of the world), then after a few turns of not doing anything the enemy civ rolls out the tribute wagon with all sorts of goodies, asking what it will take to declare peace.

D

 

[Spatzimaus]

Ended up with a hard crash I couldn't get around (i.e. probably something an AI was doing) last night. Was in the process of building my spaceship, so it was a fair ways into the game.

This really sounds like it's related to the Plant Jungle/Plant Forest logic. Previously the crashes happened in the Industrial era, back when those were at Fertilizer; now that I've moved them to the Nuclear Era, the crashes seem to have moved with them. Obviously, Barbarians can't do either of these actions, being that they have no worker units. So I've been guessing that it was city-state related, as it seems to work fine for me when I try it.

But I did find one other thing that I'll try testing in the near future. Inside the terraform Lua script, for the Plant Jungle/Forest functions, it calls Plot:SetFeatureType. The syntax I was using was (ID, -1). But if you look in MapGenerator.lua, the calls to SetFeatureType only have a single argument, ID. If I remember right, that second argument is the redraw flag, telling the game whether to refresh the map with the new graphics. So it could be something like, city-states do their moves simultaneously, so if two or more CS workers are trying to plant jungles at the same time it can't handle the multiple requests for redraws and is bogging down and eventually crashing.

Now, in my next version, I've prevented city-states from planting forests and jungles by a simpler method: City-States can't build Combat Engineers any more. (What's the point of having that extra mobility when you only have one city?) Likewise, they can't build Colony Pods or Labor Mechs. Since the basic Workers can't do any of the terraforming actions, CSs no longer have the ability to plant forests or jungles. So, if you don't want to wait for the board software to start working again, it'd be easy enough for you to fix for yourselves; just go into Civilizations.xml, and ban the CE from the city-states like so, in the existing Civilization_UnitClassOverrides table:

		<Row>
			<CivilizationType>CIVILIZATION_MINOR</CivilizationType>
			<UnitClassType>UNITCLASS_COMBAT_ENGINEER</UnitClassType>
			<UnitType />
		</Row>

(This is the Content mod, not the Balance one.)
I'm not sure if this'd cause checksum issues or anything; if altering my files doesn't work, then I guess you'd have to wait for the next version.

But it might not just be city-states; it might be ANY civ other than the player (since the player, by his very nature, won't be trying to redraw multiple forests/jungles simultaneously, being that a player moves one unit at a time). In that case, the only possible fix is to change the redraw, and I'll see if that helps.

Also, I'm thinking of giving the Secondhand land units the Repair Improvement action. Too many city-states get their only worker captured and their improvements end up smoking for 20 or 30 turns. But that's not related to this issue, it's just something I want to try.

2. I noticed Barb Archers in encampments weren't using their ranged attacks against my riflemen.

This one's come up a few times. I think of it as the Keyser Soze argument. ("How do you shoot the devil in the back? What if you miss?") I just figure that the Barbarians don't want to make me angry. (They wouldn't like me when I'm angry.)
Actually, I usually only see this in the first few turns, where the Barbarian civ might not actually be at war with you yet. Or, the archer might be in the middle of a Move order and just can't move yet (like the settler example you gave).

3. I can also still pull that trick where I declare war on a distant civ (like on the other side of the world), then after a few turns of not doing anything the enemy civ rolls out the tribute wagon with all sorts of goodies, asking what it will take to declare peace.

Blame the devs on that one. I've tried to come up with ways to prevent that, but anything I've come up with is even more abuseable in other ways.

 

[dinobot386]

Okay, so no one had really gone far into the future content then. I was mainly wondering if he'd reached the Empath Guild yet, given what it does to city-state relations, but you can't get that without the spaceship.



Possible, but for Siam to be THAT dominant on Prince, something strange must have been going on. If you'd started in the ancient era I'd have guessed that they'd had an early war and conquered a neighbor, but with an industrial start there wouldn't have been time to develop a conquered empire.

It just might be that the changes I made to city-states aren't hurting them nearly as badly as they do other civs. But there are other possibilities; for instance, I'm currently playing a game with raging barbarians. Every city-state has been giving out the "destroy a camp for me" mission, and the civs near the center of the map aren't getting nearly as many of those completed as those of us on the edges. Given how much the city-states love mission completions, it's possible that Siam just went on a streak of camp kills and got some free allies. (Or some other mission, like the requests for specific wonders or a road.)



Already fixed in v.17. I'd been using an Update when it should have been a Row (since the vanilla Hospital, like the vanilla Granary pre-patch, had no Help entry). For the record, its effect is "20% food storage, and all units heal at double the normal rate inside this city". I also cleaned up a lot of other tooltips at the same time (like adding building prerequisites, like "Requires an Aqueduct" on the Sewer System, that sort of thing) so once I can release the new version things should be a bit better.

And as always, I've been... tweaking things. I never liked how the Republic policy (+1 production per city) was so inferior to the Communism policy (+5 per city), despite the fact that the game prices all policies the same. So I changed it to +1 production per city and +10% to trade income; in the early game the production is larger, in the later game it's more about the money. So far it's worked well.

Oh, and I've temporarily patched the whole "city asks for Neutronium for WLTK" thing in my upcoming version. For now, if its random draw picks a resource that has a tech prerequisite (meaning just Neutronium), the game will immediately clear that city's demand and pretend it never happened. Eventually I'm going to change it to actually pick a new resource, but that'll take a little more testing.



I wouldn't be surprised if it is something I've done that naturally favors Siam. A lot of my balance changes have had unintended effects like that. Take India, for instance... the change to base city unhappiness absolutely cripples India if not played carefully. (8 unhappiness per city, SIXTEEN per conquered city!) In the long term India does just fine, once population gets large (the break-even point is size 7, barring policies or wonders), but there's a period in the middle ages where India will be solidly negative on happiness.

--------------
I'd love to say that I'll be playing another test game this weekend... but I just bought Dragon Age 2. So if I get sick of it later tonight I might play a little Civ5, but who knows.

Ive been testing since Ancient era and right now India is a dominant force in game, so the AI must have figured a way to deal with it's happiness.

Also if possible, you should make a diplomatic victory impossible until much later, like just making the UN a regular wonder that helps with city states and making a UN for later game like "Galactic Council" or something like that

 

[Spatzimaus]

Happy Daylight Savings Time! That's one less hour of gaming this week.

Ive been testing since Ancient era and right now India is a dominant force in game, so the AI must have figured a way to deal with it's happiness.

Well, like I said the break-even is right around size 7. Everyone else gets 4 + 1.2/pop, India is 8 + 0.6/pop, so a size 7 city will be 12.4/12.2, basically the same for both. So India goes through a really rough period during the first major expansion phase, when everyone's plopping down size 1 cities to claim resources. But once you get past the point where cities are done placing and size 7+ is the norm, like in the Renaissance, India's much better off than anyone else, at least in terms of total happiness. (In the normal game, the break-even is size 4. Obviously a very different timing.)

The problem I was referring to, though, is that the AI doesn't handle this well along the way. And that's because its behavior is set by the default rules, it's not truly adaptive. An AI will build a Settler if it thinks it has enough spare happiness to stay above 0 at the new location, but a size 1 city for India adds 8.6 unhappiness instead of the vanilla's 4.5. For non-India civs, it's 5.2 vs. 3.0.
So where a vanilla AI will be okay following a simple rule like "plant a new colony next to any new luxury", even for India, in this mod it'll still lose happiness on the deal. Likewise, try being India and go on a military offensive; the unhappiness India gains from even one conquered city is huge; 16+0.8/pop unhappiness, versus 10+0.66/pop in vanilla.

So basically, the AI will decide to found a city or start a war based on how much spare Happiness it has, and it just won't have enough any more because of my changes. For the other AIs it's not so bad, because of the numbers involved, but India just gets hit harder.

Also if possible, you should make a diplomatic victory impossible until much later, like just making the UN a regular wonder that helps with city states and making a UN for later game like "Galactic Council" or something like that

That's exactly what the Empath Guild was going to be, as it was originally the UN-equivalent in SMAC. In my original design the UN would let you do resolutions, and building it would still give +1 vote, but the Empath Guild would be the one that wins the game. Unfortunately, this is one of the times where the developers hard-coded it; whichever building has the <DiplomaticVoting> option turned on gives both +1 vote and starts the diplomacy countdown. And, of course, there aren't any resolutions.

Now, I could switch them, give the UN the city-state faction boosting and give the Empath Guild the voting. But that has two major problems.
1> The Empath Guild is only buildable if you build a spaceship. Whoever builds the ship first would, obvously, have a major edge in getting to the Empath Guild first. I don't want that; it effectively makes the spaceship race a key part of a diplomatic win, and I want those two to be truly separate.
2> I want to make it hard to win any victory early on, but I don't want to make it IMPOSSIBLE to win in any one way, which is what swapping the effects would do.

So, my changes have revolved around making things more difficult for diplo wins, without banning them outright. And I'd thought I'd done enough for that.

First, bribes give about 30% less influence per gold than they used to, and gold is harder to come by than it is in the vanilla game. You actually see this a lot in practice, where a civ will donate to a city-state, get them as an ally for one turn, then drop to Friendship because the gold doesn't give as much as they were expecting.
Second, the number of votes needed is MUCH higher in my mod. In the vanilla game the threshold is ~50% for a small map and 35% for a huge one (the actual formula is 67 - 1.1*N, counting both regulars and city-states for N, but it caps at 35%), with the percentages increasing as civs get eliminated. In my Content mod it's more like 66.7% and 50%, respectively (80 - 0.75*N, capping at 50%); on a smaller map, this means you have to get absolutely every city-state to vote for you (since competing empires have 1/3rd of the votes).

That's why I was so surprised to hear Darsnan's experience. For it to turn out that way, Siam must have allied itself with literally EVERY city-state in the world, (with no other civs buying any allies at all) and how could it possibly afford to do so for a game starting in the Industrial? It's very strange.

Now, there's one change that's been on my wishlist for a long time: I want to add some randomness to the voting, so that a city-state you've never paid off might still decide to vote for you, and a city-state that you've bought the allegiance of might still choose to abstain. This'd hurt anyone going for the diplo win, since with a dozen or more city-states the chances that at least one of them would turn on you is high, and that's all it'd take to prevent a victory. So if I can figure out how to do this, I might actually lower the victory threshold a bit to make it a bit less absolute.

 

[dinobot386]

Another thing ive noticed is that while playing on an earth map, no civs have even attempted to colonize austraila, Im not sure if it's a programming thing, or that none have seen it worth the effort to clear out the hordes of barbs that now make it their home

 

[Spatzimaus]

The Australia thing is because of how the AI is structured. It does the whole Settler thing in a pretty crude way.

First, it evaluates each hex within 20 hexes of the Settler unit as a possible location. This is obviously a problem on larger maps, because the new continent might be more than 20 hexes away from anything else. In my mod, I boosted this to 30; too much more and you start taking up too much time for evaluation.

Then, for each hex it's considering, the algorithm gives weights to the yields nearby (with adjacent hexes counting more than those further away), and extra points for strategic resources, rivers, and coastlines. It also skews it by distance from the rest of your empire. But, if a hex isn't visible, it isn't counted. So unless they actually land scouts in Australia, they'll only consider coastal locations because they won't see the interior.

So I'm not surprised no one's gone after the new lands. As far as I know, the presence of Barbarians doesn't factor into the discussion.

 

[dinobot386]

Question: Are you also planning on adding the Alpha Centari factions as civs?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Not to the core mods, no, because that was always intended to be played straight through from the ancient era. I've talked previously about the possibility of adding a third mod, a "scenario" mod taking place on Planet, that would adhere more closely to SMAC's rules and gameplay, including replacing the normal civs and leaders with SMAC factions. And technologically speaking, you can get a SMAC-like experience by starting a game in the Digital age; that's why I put Centauri Ecology in the Nuclear Era, so that a Digital start would get it for free (which would disable the spaceships). So it shouldn't be too hard to do, assuming you can make the leaderheads and custom traits needed.

I'd actually built part of the design towards this from the start. Originally, I'd thought of giving each civilization a third Unique, either a future-era UU or a UB. But I scrapped that for two reasons: first, because giving an endgame UU is much stronger that giving a UU that'll obsolete along the way, and second, because this'd screw up this sort of scenario.
But this is a very low priority for me; it's sort of like making a world map scenario with correct starting locations, and then asking for a World War 2 mod using it. It WILL be done at some point, but it's a lot of work and it's not really something I want that badly, as it's a bit too specific for my tastes. This is why I've structured this mod the way I did; it's all about how Earth would develop into a future where colonists from Alpha Centauri sent back the basic info about the Centauri biology but then had only limited contact afterwards. In that situation, of COURSE Earth would develop the new technologies faster than the colonists would, and all of the key Wonders would be built in existing Earth cities.

Besides, I wanted to tie it to all of the science fiction novels I knew of, and for that you need Earth. So I've got Civilopedia references to several of Heinlein's novels or short stories (Starship Troopers, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Revolt in 2100, and a few others), some novels from John Ringo and David Weber, Neuromancer, the Bolos books by Keith Laumer, some bits from the Shadowrun timeline, and a bunch of others. I've recently added an Ender's Game reference for the Cloudbase Academy (although I might move it to the Command Nexus), and I've GOT to put Moties into the story somehow but I'm not sure how. I'm explicitly avoiding Star Wars and Star Trek references, though.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

There's sooooo much Sci-Fi details in my own Alpha Centauri game copy that i'm currently boggled down as to what to use to represent your mod in LeoPaRd menus & gameplay_UI... any wish on a direct symbol or Icon such as, for example, the opening screen orbital view of planet on Reynold's design?
Still searching, but i sort of want your "permission" to respect your extensive work.

 

[dinobot386]

Heres another bug report, my combat engineers cant replace farms without the game crashing

 

[Spatzimaus]

Heres another bug report, my combat engineers cant replace farms without the game crashing

Okay, that's a new one; how many times did you do this, and what were you replacing them with? I've replaced farms in my own games without any issues, and it's not really something that's affected by XML changes. So it's possible that the conflict was caused by whatever you were replacing the farm with, but most likely only if it was one of my added Improvements (Monolith or the terraforming actions), since these trigger a Lua event that often involves a map redraw.

Also, what other mods were you using at the same time? It's remotely possible that there's some conflict with outside code. Obviously I try to keep this from happening as much as I can, but I only ever really use three mods: my Balance, my Content, and my variant of Tech Diffusion.
I've barely even downloaded any mods, really. Generally just the few that I cannibalized for parts; I mean, "used as inspiration".
---------
Really, though, it seems like the biggest crash problems all stem from the same thing: the Terraform Lua that triggers when an improvement is created, and/or the map changes happening within it. The script has six different triggers, but it looks like Plant Forest and Plant Jungle are the worst offenders. So I've been thinking up solutions. Unfortunately, the most complete solution would be to check every map tile on every turn, see if it has one of the offending improvement types, and if so then replace it with the appropriate new version.

This, of course, would add a HUGE amount of overhead compared to the existing logic. But it might stop the crashing, and it has some other potential upsides; for one thing, I could add a real "Tree Farm" Improvement instead of the current setup, where the forest or jungle pops up as soon as the action is completed. The current method is, to me, abuseable; there's really no reason not to plant a Jungle on any non-river Grassland, or a Forest on any Tundra, and then put a Trading Post or Lumbermill, respectively. (This is part of why I still give +production to non-river Trading Posts at Industrial Economics; TPs on Grassland jungles won't get the bonus because the +P will offset the jungle's -P, but at least it'll now be balanced with Plains jungles.)

So the alternate version would be to add a Tree Farm improvement, which has a flat yield of 1 food (replaces the tile's normal yield, like a forest does), builds much faster than now, and which has a random chance (say 10%) each turn of changing into a Forest. In fact, I could use this as a single improvement for both Forest and Jungle; if the terrain it's on is Grassland then plant a Jungle, otherwise a Forest. Or possibly randomize it a bit, depending on terrain type.
The result is that until it "pops" the forest/jungle, it'd be a lousy tile to work, which creates a real downside to just sequentially replacing every grassland you have with a Jungle.

If it really is a redraw issue, then the other terraform actions aren't a problem; Raise/Lower Hills and Terraform don't HAVE a redraw (you'll only see it if you reload a game), and Build Monolith's natural wonder also won't be drawn until a reload. Deep Mine's new resource might have the same problem, but I'll check.

any wish on a direct symbol or Icon such as, for example, the opening screen orbital view of planet on Reynold's design?

I don't really have an opinion on what icon you use within your own mod, even if it's about mine, but I'd avoid using an art asset directly from SMAC. I do so in my mod, sure, but there's an obvious thematic connection that makes Fair Use a bit more reasonable.
This IS part of the reason I've never uploaded this mod to the Mod Browser. That and that I'd need to pick a REAL name, like Planetfall, that doesn't directly imply a connection to SMAC. Quite a few people have told me that they initially skipped over my mod because they thought it was a total conversion instead of a future expansion, because of the name.

Besides, the fact that this mod doesn't actually take place on Planet would make a picture of a fungus-covered world a bit misleading. I'd save that for the inevitable scenario we were discussing above.

 

[dinobot386]

I was trying to replace it with a urainium mine, I tried about 3 times, but it ended up working right after I posted the bug report :/
My guess is that it has issues dealing with any sort of terrain change, seeing as how It crashed again after I dropped my first A bomb

As for the plant forest/jungle, they dont seem to have the intended effect, it just made an improvment that said "plant jungle" that looked like a manufactuary and didn't count as "jungle" (there goes my mass jungle/university reasearch I had planned out .) I assume it's intended effect is to actually create a jungle (or forest) tile, not another improvment

 

[Zyxpsilon]

I don't really have an opinion on what icon you use within your own mod, even if it's about mine, but I'd avoid using an art asset directly from SMAC. I do so in my mod, sure, but there's an obvious thematic connection that makes Fair Use a bit more reasonable.

Don't worry, i'll figure something out which is completely Legal & within FairUse restrictions. If Firaxis wants to sue me for using anything that i've created to overlay their 80x80 buttons completely from scratch or by tricky pixelizations of anything - i invite them to any courts for a case on Copyright issues along with the best lawyers they can mustard. I'd win in a snap without even showing up. Port-Folios & reputation included.
Even my Z-Advisors (and specifically its DiploCorner layer, btw) are now to be considered an integrated part of the official CiV by presumption. But i still own each of these individual images except for the photographic variations, be they blurred or recolored extensively. That's the commonly acceptable & enforced pseudo_Law (more like rational principles of professional artists in the context of duty) in the GDI sector. An employee hands over the art for a salary while i give it away, important distinction right there.

Although SMAC isn't public domain or freeware... any of the graphics found in their product can be tied directly with HUGE numbers of Art resources that nobody really owns, even them. They can sell the results but they DO NOT have exclusive property rights on creativity or talent.

Music is a whole different issue though.

 

[Spatzimaus]

As for the plant forest/jungle, they dont seem to have the intended effect, it just made an improvment that said "plant jungle" that looked like a manufactuary and didn't count as "jungle"

If you're seeing that, then the Lua never loaded correctly in the first place. FireTuner should have given you a message when you started the game (or if you were to start a new one now). That improvement you're seeing is what your builder actually makes (hence its name), and the Lua script checks the ImprovementCreated event and sees if the type of the newly-created improvement is of type IMPROVEMENT_PLANT_JUNGLE. If it is, it removes the improvement and places a Jungle. Ditto for the forests, Raise/Lower Hills, Terraform, and Deep Mine, each of which uses a temporary Improvement that's deleted when completed. (The Build Monolith action also triggers this way, and places a new Feature, but it doesn't remove the improvement in the process.)

The only way you should ever see one of these on the map is if it's not triggering the Lua, and the only way that should happen would be if it thought there was an error in the Lua script from the start. And if that's happening, then I could see the whole thing being a bit unstable.
So start up FireTuner and start a new game; it should give an error message during initialization if it thinks there's a problem with that script.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Although SMAC isn't public domain or freeware... any of the graphics found in their product can be tied directly with HUGE numbers of Art resources that nobody really owns, even them.

Most of the assets created for SMAC were unique to SMAC, created by in-house staff and never intended for use outside of the game itself. (The fact that the files in question were stored as unencrypted .pcx and .mp3 files in the game's directories is unheard of these days, but at the time...) So I can't see comparing them to art in the public domain; they're protected under copyright the same as the contents of any book. Even if the book in question is freely available from your public library, you can't just quote an entire chapter of it in your own work as long as the copyright holds, and they almost HAVE to defend the copyright or risk losing it.

That then brings up the "scope" issue, where precedent says that while you might get away with quoting a few sentences here and there or a single picture (such as for a review), taking a sizeable fraction of the assets is illegal. Obviously, if you're talking about a single image for your project then that one isn't likely to come up, but for my mod it's a bit different in that I quote a lot of the Datalinks text and use various icons. (Of course I don't even go as far as the Planetfall mod did, so I think I'm fairly safe on that one.) This is part of why I'm not including SMAC's sound files or wonder movies (not that they'd work at the moment anyway), although I'd like to include stubs for them eventually, like Planetfall did.
You can't even argue that they're publicly available from being used for advertising or something; these were internal game assets, and the only way to get them (legally) would be to have bought the game, which changes the whole equation.

You'd be right that they'd have a hard time in court regardless, since clearly the intent of our mods are not to hurt their company, with one exception as far as I can tell: if they're considering making a SMAC-themed expansion to Civ5, like they did with Colonization for Civ4. If they were doing that, then they could easily argue that an unlicensed work that takes art assets directly from their previous game would impact the potential marketbase for the new one, which is one of the key exceptions to Fair Use (and probably the most likely to succeed). It's sort of like how the superhero MMOs had to, initially, crack down on the thousands of Superman and Wolverine clones; since DC and Marvel were intending to make their own MMOs, it wasn't much of a stretch to claim that any copyright infringement would impact them financially once their own games were released.

Now, I'd be first in line to buy that SMAC expansion if they DID do it, even though it'd basically kill a lot of my mod's appeal. But I haven't heard anything about ANY expansions for Civ5, so I think I'm safe for now.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Anyway, back to the mod. So I've mentioned this before, but there are two units I've long been considering adding. The first is a sea worker unit, although I might just skip that one in favor of giving some worker actions to various naval units. The second, though, is the Doppelganger. Originally intended to be the final spy unit, this was something I've wanted to put into the game as a combat unit, but until recently I didn't have a way to do so. So here's the concept. What I need right now is a quick, back-of-the-envelope sort of evaluation for whether this is underpowered, overpowered, or too situational to classify.

The Doppelganger would be at the Homo Superior tech (late Fusion age, same tech as the Troll and Ranger, meaning basically endgame). I'd consider moving it down a tier to Ethical Calculus and moving the Ascetic Virtues up, but no more than that.
Infantry unit, type Energy. I'd only start it with the Regeneration I and Commando promotions (can use enemy roads), and it wouldn't get the extra +30XP that the Ranger and Troll get. Its custom Synthesis promotion would also have a -50% XP penalty; it'd gain XP very slowly. (See below for why.) And most importantly, its base strength would be WEAK, like in the 50ish range. (Remember, that tier is where the Bolo unlocks, and one tier AFTER the strength-90 gravtanks.)

Instead, the Doppelganger would have a unique Synthesis ability: when fighting against a non-city, non-Doppelganger unit, the D would automatically, before the fight starts, copy a single promotion from its opponent, for free.
So it'd go through every promotion its opponent has. As long as that promotion doesn't have the LostWithUpgrade tag (which almost always means a negative promotion) and as long as the promotion doesn't have a prerequisite promotion that the D doesn't have, it becomes a possible steal (so no stealing Shock II before you have Shock I, but obviously you can steal Shock I in that case). Once it has a list of possible choices, it'll randomly pick one.
(Possible balance point: I could have the list only contain eligible ones that the D doesn't already have, OR I could include the ones it already has and if it picks one of those you get nothing. If I do the latter then I'd bump up its base strength a bit.)

A Doppelganger that fights a French Mechanized Infantry that was upgraded from a Legion might get its custom "+20% in enemy territory" promotion, one that fights a Plasma Artillery or Skimmer might get its SAM ability, one that fights a heavily-upgraded tank might get Blitz, fighting a Laser Infantry might get the Teamwork promotion, fighting a Ranger might get its custom Critical Strike or Special Forces promotions, fighting a Troll might get its custom Thick Hide, Regeneration II, or Spontaneous Healing promotions. Taking on a Vertol might give the All-Terrain ability to move across water (once that works). And fighting practically any future unit will give the "1 MP per hex" ability. This'd also let you steal Wonder-bestowed promotions; fight a naval unit and you might steal the Great Lighthouse's +1MP promotion.

So surviving for a few fights would make for a VERY dangerous unit, which is why I was giving it a low strength to begin with. While I don't have a lot of confidence in the AI to handle that well, the inherent uncertainty favors an AI; you don't know which promotion it'll steal until the fight happens. It might be something really useful, or it might be something utterly useless. If your pure-melee unit steals a ranged combat promotion from that Plasma Artillery or an interception promotion from a Jet Fighter, it'll be worthless and you'll be at a significant disadvantage in that fight; on the other hand, stealing a Shock-type promotion could make a huge difference in that fight as well as all of the later ones.

 

[dinobot386]

What are it's defences and movements? Because I could see this as ether a very useful unit, or too fragile to do anything, especially since it has -50% hp

I'll throw a quick game to test it's effectiveness whenever you release the new version