Dune: Spice War

[Rayki]

DUNE​

Spice War​

This mod is aimed at bringing the Duniverse to Civilization: Beyond Earth. Currently it replaces all vanilla sponsors with factions from the Dune storyline as written by Frank Herbert. It includes leader graphics, and a basic custom unit for each house.

The background information for each house is sourced from Dune Canon wherever possible, however some creative license was used in order to make the factions work in the game environment.

Houses:
House Atreides:
Leader: Duke Leto Atreides
Trait: -20% Maintenance for land units and +20% Growth in cities when healthy.
House Harkonnen:
Leader: Baron Vladimir Harkonnen
Trait: +10% Combat Strength for Land units and +25% Culture gained from kills.
House Ecaz:
Leader: Archduke Armand Ecaz
Trait: +10% Worker speed and Units move through forests as if on roads.
House Fenring:
Leader: Countess Margot Fenring
Trait: -10% Covert Ops Duration, +10% intrigue and +5% to Wonder production.
House Moritani:
Leader: Viscountess Cilla Moritani
Trait: +1 Food from farms and +10% faster city razing.
House Richese:
Leader: Countess Edwina Richese
Trait: 1 Free Technology for every 10 Virtues gained and -50% culture cost for city expansion.
House Bene Tleilax:
Leader: Viscount Scytale
Trait: +5% Culture per new city and +2 food for Domes.
House Vernius:
Leader: Earl Rhombur Vernius
Trait: +10% Trade revenue and +1 Research from Terrascapes.

Armies:
Kindjals
Type: Melee
Trait: +1 unit moves and unit ignores Terrain cost.
Troopers
Type: Melee
Trait: +3 Combat Strength and -1 unit moves.
Militia
Type: Melee
Trait: Double Experience from defending and ignores terrain cost.
Corsairs
Type: Melee
Trait: +1 Combat Strength, +33% Combat Experience and 10% cost increase.
Warriors
Type: Melee
Trait: +2 Combat Strength, +33% experience from attacks and +10% unit cost.
The Guard
Type: Melee
Trait: -10% Unit Cost and +1 Science from kills.
Face Dancers
Type: Melee
Trait: +1 Combat Strength, +1 Movement and -33% experience from attacks.
Sec Patrols
Type: Melee
Trait:+1 Combat Strength, +1 Energy from kills and +10% unit cost.

Screenshots: View Screenshots on the Steam Workshop page.

Recommendations: It is recommended that you run this mod on it's own or without any other sponsor or unit mods at the least, to gain the best enjoyment.

Note: Due to problems with the Steam workshop this mod is best installed manually by following these steps:
1: Download the file attached to this post
2: Extract the downloaded file to your game folder; "My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Beyond Earth\MODS\
3: Load the game and it should install automatically...Enjoy.

 

[Rayki]

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[War Chicken]

Heythere!

I just wanted to let you know that this mods progress is anticipated. To say the least.
Are you planning to make this into a full conversion one day?
That would be absolutely great, but would also mean a Truckload of work almost not manageable by one person.

I'd love to offer support, but I'm kind of unable to do anything. I can't model and I can't script. The only thing I can offer is designing Icons, like Buid Icons or Icons for Techs or resources. If you'd like that, let me know - just write a PM with stuff you need in that direction and I'll do my best to deliver.

Thanks for this mod!
- War Chicken

 

[Meklorka]

I'm really interested in seeing this developed further, and would like to help with the art piece of it if at all possible. I'm just learning modding stuff and I don't have the right stuff to do it with. But it would be bomb to also have a map that is without oceans/rivers/lakes or grasslands - if someone else happens to make that or find something like that, it would be awesome to see a link to that posted here.

 

[Rayki]

Hey guys, I do have extensive plans laid out for this mod, my biggest problem at this point is graphic changes. I need to make the xenomass orange instead of green to resemble spice, I also need to find a way to change Miasma to a sandy couloured cloud, to resemble sandstorms. lastly I need a terrain set which is based on desert, eg: grassland to be something more like a sand flat, plains to be shallow dunes, tundra to be rock, this will make it so I can put together a true Dune map.

My biggest problem is that at the moment I don't have access to internet except at a mates place due to financial troubles, next is I don't have a program capable of reading certain .dds formats like DXT2 (Photoshop works, but I only have Gimp and Paint.net. In a couple of weeks I'll be back online but that still doesn't solve the problem of not being able to edit graphics, which essentially puts development on hold until I find a solution.

There are many plans from a coding perspective, in regards to changing every unit, building a research items to a Dune flavour, plus re-working the affinity system. I really would like to take this to a total conversion status one day.

 

[Argenteus]

Question: Why isn't House Corrino among the Great Houses, but the Tleilaxu are? Sardaukar make a much better army than Face Dancers, Face Dancers are more suited to covert ops. Not saying you should remove the Tleilaxu, but adding House Corrino would be a good idea.

Also, any plans for some of the well known entities that aren't exactly great houses, like the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen?

There's a buggy plugin for Gimp that adds .dds support, btw. I don't know if it works with the formats you need, but it's worth a shot if you haven't tried it. It's pretty damn buggy though, last time I used it.

Also, rather than editing the graphics to achieve such a thing, why not instead code a set of worldgen parameters that just only spawn desert terrain, nothing else, and let's any resource spawn in any terrain? Also: Doesn't making Spice a replacement for Xenomass rather make the Spice (Which is valuable to literally every group) a harmony specific thing?

I'd be happy to help out however I can, but that may not necessarily be much: I don't know jack about Civ:BE modding. I have some coding experience, but that's it.

 

[Rayki]

House Corrino are not a playable house because of canon restrictions and balance issues. Sardaukar will be available in a different way, possibly only to House Fenring but I haven't decided the fine points. Any Emperor of the Padishah Empire is not allowed by CHOAM convention to have a controlling interest in planet Arrakis or the Spice Melange, also no other body without Landsraad recognition and voting rights is unable to hold a Siridar Fief. Also House Corrino has massive funds and a seriously over-powered army. However Corrino will make an appearance, see below...

The Bene Gesserit, Fremen and The Emperor will be guiding forces in re-working the affinity system. in this way I can also answer the other question of whether xenomass is harmony specific, and that answer is no, I will be re-working building requirments as well so when Spice is implemented it will be more critical to ALL affinities, and a different resource will be used for a main dependency of each affinity, such as Superiority/Firaxite Purity/Titanium Harmony/floatstone, I haven't worked out the full details of this but I do have a fair write up of the things I want to change.

I've used every .dds plugin available for Gimp and nothing fixes my problem, It took two weeks of constant trying to reach the conclusion that my troubles can only be fixed with Photoshop or someone who can just change the hue of the graphics for me and send me the .dds files so I can simply add them to the mod.

I want a new desert tileset mainly for terrain diversity, I believe it would seriously take from the gameplay if I was to just desert the whole map with no strategic differences between terrains, that was an option I considered but the flaws with doing it would kill the mod.

Thanks for the offer but the coding bit seems to be easy IMO, I can smash that out in minutes without a problem, creative content is the next hardest bit but I have a pretty god imagination and a number of information resources and Dune which mean that's also relatively easy, just time consuming. It's only graphics I'm having any real problem with, considering I've modified graphics in many games before it was something I thought would be one of the easiest parts, turns out short-sighted programming has made it much harder.

 

[Argenteus]

OK, it does make sense to not include House Corrino if you're going for absolute accuracy then. Any plans for dealing with the prohibition on Computers after the butlerian jihad? That closes off a good deal of the existing tech tree, but some of it could probably be explained by mentats. I've given a few tries to opening the files myself, but no luck; everything I try gives some error or another. I even tried converting the files using a few online converters.

If you can make suitable textures yourself, they should work fine if you export them as dds. But it's hard to know the exact requirements of the texture if you can't see the original.

Are you planning to modify the victories to ones based on the books, like a Muad'dib like Jihad victory or a Leto II like Golden Path victory?

 

[Omega124]

Alright, I'll admit the only exposure to Dune I have is Dune 2000, but since they managed to get into that game, where is House Ordos? Is there some canon reason why they aren't in?

 

[Argenteus]

Alright, I'll admit the only exposure to Dune I have is Dune 2000, but since they managed to get into that game, where is House Ordos? Is there some canon reason why they aren't in?

I did a quick google of House Ordos, and it seems they are non-canon and have never appeared in any of the books.

 

[Patrick Pelikan]

I did a quick google of House Ordos, and it seems they are non-canon and have never appeared in any of the books.

I've read all the Dune books, the awesome ones by Frank Herbert as well as the not so awesome but still great ones by his son. The Dune Saga is one of my favourite book series up today. But the only time I encounterd House Ordos was in the "Emperor: Battle for Dune" RTS, never in the books... So it makes sense to not include them into the mod.

Rayki: Installed the mod and I'm very interested how it will develop! Would love to see it become a total conversion one day! Unfortunately, I'm not really capable to offer any help to you, sorry Have not played really far until now, so I can't give you any feedback on balance or anything else yet. Will do it when I find some time!

One thing I noticed in my short test game: The colors of House Harkonnen are cool, but make it really hard to read the city names and to recognize Units (maybe it's just me though). Maybe a bit brighter blue would help...

Anyway, keep up the good work! Looking forward to further updates!

P.S. I noticed, that you implemented a custom city name for the capitals, but not for the other citys... If I find time, I'll look for some more appropriate names if you'd like?

 

[Rayki]

Argenteus: The tech tree is going to be one of my biggest creative challenges, how to keep things in the game without keeping them the same is going to be a balancing act, A lot of it can be modified to expanded mechanical function, perpetual motion drives, clockwork operation, and a variety of other things, the strictures of the Jihad state "no machines that resemble human minds and functions" which would mean no micro-processors, however hard-coded machinery is completely possible, literal robots are even possible as long as they don't function like androids and are incapable of doing anything but a hard-wired task. However the Mentats, will also become a big part of developing tech tree's. Also yes the victories will definitely change to more appropriate titles.

Omega124: Unfortunately yes the House Ordos is not official canon, however they were originally picked by Westwood from the Dune Encyclopedia which has a small connection to Frank Herbert in the form of; he wrote the foreword. so based on that there may be a chance I'll find a way to put in something based around them, haven't made any plans to that effect though so it's sheer speculation.

Patrick Pelikan: I have also noticed the problem with House Harkonnen, but it's one of those things that kept slipping my mind when I updated, I'm sure I'll remember next time, I hope. lol As for the city names, I thought I had changed them, I wrote them all down on paper but I must have not saved the file when I inserted them or forgot...


On another note: I have been unable to do any work on this mod for the last couple of months because of a lack of housing, I am finally in a new place for a couple of months but after that I'm not so sure what I'll be doing if I can't find another house between now and then. So now I can actually do some work on it I'll do what I can.

If anyone out there is willing to extract the xenomass assets from the game, change the green to orange and send me the files to use I will happily give credit and be eternally grateful, without those assets the Spice can't flow.