Dune, Arrakis Mod for Civilization:Beyond Earth

[Deliverator]

So it seems like Beyond Earth is going to make a much better modding platform for a successor to Dune Wars than Civ 5 for a number of reasons.

1. It will already have an Arid biome built-in which can hopefully form the basis of creating a Dune environment that is as varied and interesting as we aimed to create in Dune Wars. "Then there’s an arid biome … very little water, sand everywhere." - David McDonough

2. In Dune Wars we had an Arrakis Future Civic category which had two options Spice or Paradise. Spice represented maximising production of the spice, while Paradise represented the Fremen dream of seeing Arrakis terraformed into a verdant paradise. It seems like these could map well to Affinities in Civ:BE.

3. Beyond Earth already has giant worms called Siege Worms.

"You can do many, many more things with spies when you get them in cities and things like smuggling from them and stealing their research and technology to things like planting the Dune thumper device in their city and having worms pop out. Only the Harmony player can do that." - Will Miller

"When you kill the siege worm, you see its skull, and when you pick the skull up you may find a new quest thread that you can pick up and follow, and each time you complete an objective in that thread, you get a little bit of the fiction." - Will Miller

Quotes and info from here.

I almost wonder if Dune Wars might have had a hand in inspiring these seige worms... . Although it sounds like the devs read a lot of sci-fi classics including Frank Herbert

The hope is that since Civ:BE is using the same Granny graphics engine used for Civ 5 - we will be able to re-use all the same tools that I and others have developed to mod the 3D graphics.

Anyone interested to hear what people think about a Dune mod and any ideas people might have?

 

[Lord Tirian]

Anyone interested to hear what people think about a Dune mod and any ideas people might have?

I'd be excited to see something like that and hope that I'll have time to help - I always regretted that I got too busy with my degree and a bit too burnt out with modding when Dune Wars became a thing a few years ago.

And, obviously, I'd like to see a SMAC/X mod that steals the best bits of actual SMAC/X and Planetfall and integrates it with Beyond Earth's rather cool and interesting ideas... (though, undoubtedly, there will be many SMAC/X mods...)

 

[Antilogic]

The devs have definitely drawn from a number of scifi sources, and Herbert's work ranks among them.

I would love to play mods that are more focused to one scifi mythology (both Dune and the other one that's not a focus of this thread but ya know wink wink nudge nudge say no more).

 

[Maniac]

Would you join a BE->Planetfall/SMAC modding effort, Lord Tirian?

BE affinitiies could be used for the three ecological strategies Planetfall had: Hybrid, Terraformed and Biodomed.

 

[Lord Tirian]

Would you join a BE->Planetfall/SMAC modding effort, Lord Tirian?

BE affinitiies could be used for the three ecological strategies Planetfall had: Hybrid, Terraformed and Biodomed.

Hah, certainly interested, I'm looking forward to see how Civ:BE plays out in general. Of course, it depends a bit on how useful I can be, i.e. whether Civ:BE allows sensible modification of the graphics - but Deliverator has done a lot of awesome work for Civ5, so I'm optimistic.