FAQ / Suggestions on how to play

[BeatChurchill]

Hi All,

First time poster. Registered just to discuss this mod!

I've downloaded it and had a bit of a play round and the differences are very impressive! Congrats!

I'm looking forward to giving this a real play through soon, but in the meantime I wanted to hear some suggestions/tips on how to get started/things to do/avoid!

When I played the original FF, I seemed to colonise much better than the AI and expanded quickly. When I played on the same difficulty on FFP, I noticed the AI seemed to be expanding much quicker than I was! How can I keep up!?

On the original FF, I sent out my PDS to explore whilst I built a scout. I then built a Interplanetary Beacon and Mag Lev shortly after. I re-fortify my PDS to guard the Solar system, then I start churning out the odd colony ship when my population gets to 2 or 3. I mainly seem to have tried the Avowers.

I'm hoping to maybe add some additional Civ choices to the game to give a bit more variation. Is there anyone still actively playing/developing this?

 

[TC01]

Welcome to the forums!

It is still maintained, but not so much actively developed- if bugs crop up, they get fixed. I occasionally attempt more ambitious modifications when I'm feeling motivated and have the time- sadly these two rarely seem to coincide.

I haven't played it in a long time, unfortunately, but the AI definitely has been improved. People who play it more regularly can probably give you some advice.

Adding more civilizations is sort of on the to do list (but may never happen if I never get around to it). I think we have a set of other leaders for the existing civs in the files that God-Emperor made, but they are disabled (I am not positive about this, however, they may have been removed), because I never came up with names or found alternate leaderheads.

...that should probably be fixed someday.

As for adding additional civilizations- one of the things I wanted to do for a long time was add alien civilizations in some capacity. The idea would be that the aliens would need to be significantly different from the human civs for there to be much point of playing as them; otherwise we might as well just make them human civilizations. Sadly, I never really had the time to come up with interesting ideas for alien races that I could translate into game mechanics, so this never happened.

 

[BeatChurchill]

Thanks for replying!

I just want to say what an awesome job you guys have done!

I will take a look into adding some more Civ's down the line, The only complication is making them fit in with the current setting, as you said Alien's would make a more logical addition than more Human settlements, but that's not to say more humans couldn't be added!

If I take a look through and find the alternate leaders, perhaps I can try and suggest some names to help?

Not sure I could make the Leaderheads though!

The annoying thing is, I don't get much time to sink in to games so it might take me a while to actually get a decent play through! Are there many active players?

 

[God-Emperor]

I'm not sure how actively played this thing is. There is currently a PBEM game going on over here, with some discussion of the game mechanics in the thread since some of the players have played FF(P or not) very little (or possibly not at all) before. It has been months since I last played FFP - I've been thinking about playing a game of it again sometime soon.

As for the AI expanding faster than in regular FF, the main reason for that is because the original FF had a serious bug which prevented their starting star systems from having any food or production until the first time their borders popped, and the only commerce they got was the 8 from the capitol building. This was due to it not assigning its population to a planet until one of the few situations happened which made it do a reassignment and the first such thing was almost certainly going to be the first influence/culture level gain. So they had 0 production and 0 food and a reduced commerce output until then, which gave the human a huge lead. If New Earth was one of the AIs its free 2nd point of population starved away at the end of the first turn.

So the fix for that and a few other bugs was the start of this mod. The AI has had a few tweaks but still tends to be more passive, militarily speaking, than the original was once it actually got going (if the human hadn't completely destroyed their chances already). It isn't as bad in this area as it was for a while, but it still produces fewer ships that it really should until you attack it - it is not so bad at building a fleet in response to an actual threat, but that is often too late. From time to time one of them will do better in its fleet production at which point it will sometimes induce its neighbors to do so in response. Games where that happens tend to be more challenging militarily, but it probably happens less than half the time. Interestingly, one of the reasons for this is that it is better at improving its star systems with buildings than it used to be, but now it spends too much production (and turns) doing that instead of building fleets.

The AI could use some more tweaks for that. In fact, rather than the small adjustments that have been made it could probably stand to have some larger changes made. But in the changes I made I generally was just trying to get things to work (like actually loading missiles and squadrons onto ships that can carry them, and producing a few invasion ships when planning a war) and aiming for small improvements in the rest rather than the bigger changes it could have used. If I had realized the cumulative effects of some of the AI changes would be as small as they are, I would have made bigger adjustments in some areas.

The Avowers are a pretty god civ - I like them myself, mainly for their UU and UB rather than their trait. But I do almost always play with a random civ, so I have played them all multiple times.

I just checked: the extra leaders are not actually in the FFP files. They were just duplicates, 1 per civ, with names which were deliberately not very different from the originals (like "Hector Alvarez Junior", "Leo Pritchard", and "Deja Vu Tianqu") to remind me that they were actually identical in all their settings to the originals for their civs. The only point to them was to play the larger size maps with more civilizations without having duplicate leaders, making it possible to tell them apart most of the time.

 

[TC01]

On the subject of leaderheads; I seem to recall reading something, once upon a time, about how the holographic effect in the Final Frontier leaderheads was actually just an effect being applied to more ordinary leaderhead art. Which had always made me think we could just steal leaderheads from vanilla BTS (or take ones made by the community) and apply that holographic effect without too much difficulty.

Assuming we ever, you know, actually added leaders.

I just checked: the extra leaders are not actually in the FFP files. They were just duplicates, 1 per civ, with names which were deliberately not very different from the originals (like "Hector Alvarez Junior", "Leo Pritchard", and "Deja Vu Tianqu") to remind me that they were actually identical in all their settings to the originals for their civs. The only point to them was to play the larger size maps with more civilizations without having duplicate leaders, making it possible to tell them apart most of the time.

Ah, right. I probably never merged them from Finaler Frontier for that reason...

It would be nice to add a second set of leaders for the civilizations that actually play differently (and allow more civs per map as you say), but that would require us to actually come up with variations on the old leaders' settings and think about how they might play differently and what those settings should be.

And I suspect neither of us ever really felt like doing that...

 

[God-Emperor]

On the subject of leaderheads; I seem to recall reading something, once upon a time, about how the holographic effect in the Final Frontier leaderheads was actually just an effect being applied to more ordinary leaderhead art. Which had always made me think we could just steal leaderheads from vanilla BTS (or take ones made by the community) and apply that holographic effect without too much difficulty.

The effect is applied to the leaderheads automatically due to a setting called REPLACE_LEADER_FORGROUND in CIV4ArtDefines_Misc.xml. The NIF and KFM it points to do the trick, with the actual static in the NIF coming from in the file Art\Leaderheads\Space Leader\LeaderStatic.dds in the main BtS Art folder. The background is likewise replaced via REPLACE_LEADER_BACKGROUND.

 

[BeatChurchill]

Thanks for your replies!


I've dabbled with the Avowers and got on well with them, but once I got the basics down I restarted to play a full game through! Stupidly, I went for the biggest map size, 4 AI and Longest research time.

I've colonised a large number of solar systems, and have a decent amount of scouts/destroyers (still exploring), and from what I've established I've out colonised the AI. (Playing as the Syndicate).

Played lots of turns but it takes ages to achieve anything now as the AI are so far away and I always end up focusing on Production/Commerce/Influence/Research building rather than Military, so the games going to run forever!

Think I might restart on a smaller map with a normal game speed.

If it helps I could try and think up some alternate leaderheads?