9. Maybe I missed it, but what is the rationale for Breakout? Specifically from the perspective how are you trying to explain what is going on in-game? Why does it occur from a storyline perspective? Is there a tie-in with the overall direction your going with your mod?
Glad you asked, because I don't think I have ever laid this out explicitly. There are several completely separate reasons for this event.
WARNING: this will be long. I don't expect most people to read it all, but I want it laid out somewhere.
Before I get started, though, I do want to say, if I CAN, I intend to add an option in the Advanced Start menu to disable the Breakout. At least, to disable the spawning of spore towers, I'd still need the part where it awards the
Centauri Ecology tech to everyone. Even if it's not a separate toggle, the Breakout needs to depend on your Barbarians setting; someone who's selected No Barbarians shouldn't be seeing the spore towers, while Raging should be even higher.
Now if, after reading all of this, you still think it's all a bad idea, I'd appreciate an explanation of why.
1> SMAC
While I'm not making a total conversion, I do try to adhere to some of SMAC's design concepts where possible, to make a SMAC-like "feel" to these eras.
In SMAC, the wild psi units ARE the future-era "barbarian" faction; there's no barbarian Warrior-style units. And this meshes well with my mod's design; every future-era unit except the Laser Infantry and Geosynch Survey Pod has a resource requirement, so I'd have had to make Secondhand-style units for the Barbs as well regardless, but the Psi units were also intended to be most dangerous when alone (ideal for barbs), regenerating (ditto), adjusted their power to be a threat to high-tech units (ditto), and able to be confused with the Hidden Nationality versions the empires were creating
(Although this one doesn't work at present.)
In SMAC, worms spawn on Fungus in general, which can be cleaned up with Formers, but they're also created at a much higher rate by Fungal Towers, destroyable, immobile units that generate worms fairly quickly. I am NOT going to add Fungus all over the world, but I did like the idea of mimicking the Towers. But how do you explain the presence of these Towers in the wild? How do you show the transition from Civ-style camps to SMAC-style Towers?
2> STORYLINE
The Breakout basically occurs because the major empires got greedy. The first civ launched a ship to Alpha Centauri, and the colony sent back the genome information for the Psi organisms there. Eventually, several other civilizations got this information from their own colonists, but it was still mainly exclusive to the major empires.
Omnicytes are basically farmed versions of mindworm cells. The
Centauri Ecology tech is not actually revealing
existing deposits of Omnicytes, an Omnicyte "deposit" just designates a place in the world that has the right balance of temperature, humidity, and chemical content to act as a farm for these organisms.
(Note that this primarily means "wet"; Omnicytes are mainly in shallow water or Jungles.)
Mindworms are a colonial organism made of a large number of "spore" Omnicytes; get enough of these cells in one location and they can clump into a crude "worm". Generally, this was easily avoided, because these crude versions of Mindworms are no real threat. Also, the omnictye-generating genes were generally spliced into some harmless Earth creature for farming, because harvesting single cells takes more work than catching a Salmon that has the genes spliced in. (And hey, free Salmon!)
But, the world was in an unprecedented era of peace at the time, and military researchers noticed that worms, like any animal, could go into enemy territory without being traceable back to their original empires. Unlike animals, though, trained Psi units could be controlled psionically, which again is not traceable (unlike, say, radio), which'd make them the perfect military raiding unit.
Remember, Psi units are supposed to have the Hidden Nationality ability, which would allow them to enter other civs' territory even during peace, without broadcasting their owners.
So, they started trying to breed "weaponized" mindworms, ones closer to the original AC design, in captivity.
Note that civs cannot train military Mindworms until the Centauri Empathy tech. "Empathy" is the sort of psionic control I've described. I was originally going to tie the Breakout to THAT tech instead, but it makes more sense this way, that the research would be happening BEFORE they were ready for use.
Sooner or later, SOMEONE would take inadequate precautions, some empire that was behind technologically and was rushing to get something useful out of the project. And so they'd escape, and once in the wild, the worms would be nearly impossible to eradicate fully. (Again, colonial organism; if even a single cell survives it can grow back into a worm, all it needs is food.)
3> GAMEPLAY
Barbarians are a necessary part of the game, for several gameplay reasons, most of which come back to how a constant minor threat is necessary to keep the militaries honest; you can't throw your entire army at a single front, because sooner or later a rampaging barbarian would show up in some other part of your empire. So:
> Barbarians give a major disadvantage to spread-out empires (more ground to cover to reach a raiding unit, more places for barbarian ships to hit your fishing boats and such).
This is the big one. I want to force large empires to act like the AI always does, keeping a large fraction of its units spread out over its empires. This'll slow down expansionism.
> They give military units something to do during long stretches of peace. They WILL occasionally kill a unit, too, which necessitates replacement, which in turn diverts production from infrastructure. But, this gives those units much-needed experience, at least until they get to 30 XP.
> They encourage players to keep their military units upgraded, instead of stockpiling cash and weak units and then upgrading once a war starts; you never know when you're going to need them and you don't want to waste a turn. Extra cash means Research Agreements and bribed city-states, both of which I've been trying to tone down.
> They force you to protect workers, and keep units in cities or in fortified choke points or defensively-oriented terrain, instead of just letting them wander wherever they feel like.
> Barbarians are an easy way to make friends with city-state AIs. Given that I've tried to de-emphasize bribing them as a path to victory, adding this barbarian cleanup (both in the innate diplo boost you get for killing any barbs, and the chance they'll offer an anti-Barb quest if the local infestation is too heavy) helps civs that haven't focused on bribery in the hunt for alliances.
But, the existing Barbarians were practically nonexistent in the later eras because there would be no open map hexes remaining to place camps on, nothing that wasn't being viewed by at least one empire at any given time, except possibly a few small remote arctic islands. Enabling camps in later eras wouldn't help, because there'd be almost nowhere for them to go. (In fact, I've done this as well.) So they no longer served this purpose adequately; there was just no effective barbarian presence once you reached the future eras.
As a result, I needed a new mechanism to spawn Barbarian units, something that could place new units within controlled territory, and generate new barbarian naval units. The Spore Towers were an ideal solution; they're a "camp" without looking like a wooden palisade in an era of tanks and planes, and it's easy to justify them occurring within "civilized" land. (The other option for this is basically Terrorists, and I didn't want to go there.)
Psi units, as noted before, are the perfect match to the Barbarian playstyle of single units rampaging around and being hard to kill. By contrast, most future-era units are in the "combined arms" school, where an attacking force should have tanks, infantry, planes, etc., which makes most of these units unsuitable for barbarians anyway.
4> FUN
The spawning of Spore Towers is supposed to make things more "active" for the player. You can't just hit "End Turn" five turns in a row, because the chances are that you'll need to clean up an infestation, either in your empire or in that of a friendly city-state. It gives you something to do, so that you don't declare wars out of sheer boredom.
It removes "safe zones". In the core game, barbarians are only a real threat on your frontiers. But with the towers spawning everywhere (even if they prefer coasts), you can no longer write off an area as totally secure. That means shuffling units around your empire as needed, and that requires input from the player
(Although I'm keeping an eye on this one; I don't want to bog the game down in micromanagement too much). This is also a balance reason as well: the AI moves his units like this, making them easy targets for air units and such. By encouraging the player to do the same, it keeps things more even.
As to why the Psi units need an explicit Breakout event, I wanted something more than just a small info popup to tell you when this next phase of the game had started. Something you couldn't possibly ignore or miss by accident, something that'd let you know that for the next few turns, you should stop with the invasions and infrastructure and worry about something else for a bit.
Frankly, I wish the core game would have "events" like this, things where for five or ten turns you're doing something other than just the normal gameplay cycle. The closest the core game comes to that is the space race, and that's intended to be an endgame experience. The obvious early-era choice for this would be the discovery and colonization of the new world (I mean, they could even make a separate game out of this and call it "Colonization"... oh wait), but the closest you can get to that in Civ5 is the Terra-style maps.
5> STYLE
If you read through the Civilopedia entries I've added, you'll notice that most of the Breakout-related events are taken from
World War Z, with the mindworms taking the place of the zombies. (I also cribbed from
Starship Troopers, the Alldenata books, and I've even got one Motie reference in there, I think at the Brood Pit. I'm an equal-opportunity plagiarist.)
Basically, most books and movies dealing with zombies and such boil down to the same dynamic: what was once a nice, peaceful, SAFE world is now a lot more... "interesting". Humanity generally suffers greatly for this, but the protagonists will be among those few who've adjusted to the new reality. I didn't want things to be nearly so bleak as WWZ, so I've tried to make it manageable; I've tried to do the same with most other references, altering them into narrowly averted catastrophes. (The "Rain of Fire" WW3 nuclear exchange being mostly ineffective because of anti-nuke defenses, the VITAS plague getting stopped before it had a chance to wipe out 25% of the human race, and so on.) But the general trend is the same; I wanted a story-based excuse for why the Human Race would stay concentrated in the large cities for protection, instead of spreading out through suburbia even further.
SMAC was similar to this, although there you could at least clean up the fungus to make an area safe. But if you had a low Planet rating, more fungus could spawn, and I don't intend to implement the same kind of Social Engineering system here. So I needed some other reason to justify fortified, isolated cities.
