Future Mod

[Tholish]

If you want a mod mostly focused in the era of the future, on planet Earth, with plenty of future content, I've made a BtS 3.17 mod that is focused on the future, though it includes Industrial and Modern eras that you can skip over with Custom and Advanced games and still have plenty of game left.

The setting of the standard game is Earth (or one of the Earthlike planets whose alternate histories all Civ games chronicle.)
Currently works with BTS 3.17, English Only. This mod works very well with Custom and advanced starts. This basic version is playable and complete, however I intend to expand on it quite a bit more...


Version 1.19 is available here,
http://www.atomicgamer.com/file.php?id=77422

and the thread seems to have moved to the main mods forum.






Deleted the version that was made of attachments. Also deleted screenshots. I'll need them when I put 1.0 in a new thread...or rather when I fix up the first post of the thread for version 1.2 or so whenever I get there.

 

[Tholish]

This post included screenshots of an old version and parts of that version as attachments that you had to put together. The latest is too big to do that way and I need attachment space, so all that is gone. The following posts concern an old version that wasn't ready for prime time.

 

[Tholish]

Basically I took the standard tech tree, gave every tech new names and buttons so that you start in the Industrial but it feels like the Ancient era start, with Musket replacing Warrior and so forth. Using everything I could find from standard mods and the downloads center (not other mods) I filled this tech tree out to include 3 future eras. So, I threw it all in, mutants, domed cities, workers in space suits, nanoswarms, giant war robots, solar panels, boreholes and tidal harnesses and domed farms, huge towering buildings, terraforming, space battleships, etc...

I made a lot of gameplay changes that are very interesting and subtle as well.


Deleted obsolete screenshots

 

[mamba]

When I try to load your mod, Civ crashes, using BtS 3.17 here.

 

[Tholish]

I removed it, then installed from above and it ran fine. However, I do not have 3.17, which I thought I had.

Nightmare. I've been developing a mod for an obsolete version. Specifically, 3.00. New computer. Could have sworn I got the patch. I'll have to find out what changed and fix it. Well, anybody that hasn't patched up, here's a mod for you. Probably explains why mods I've downloaded recently eventually crash.

 

[mamba]

Should not require a lot of changes then I assume. My advise would be to back up the current (i.e. 3.00) xml, both regular and from the mods you used. Update to 3.17 and do a diff (use winmerge) to see what changes you might need to add.

 

[Tholish]

The one I originally uploaded worked with 3.13 but not 3.17. I fixed it. While WinMerge did not do the job for me, it did help and will prove a great tool, as they say, going forward. Thank you, Mamba.

While I fixed a couple of changes where tags had been added, and isolated changed material at the end of each file instead of all strewn about, what appeared to be causing the load crash was the lack of CEOs 1 through 6. I use the CEO 7 art for all 11 of my corporations, but for some reason 3.17 needs the tags for all of them to be in the Art Defines.

Futurewise, I'll futurize the rest of the events, write Strategy texts, get quotes from great Sci Fi novels, use downloaded art for buildings and imps rather than repeating, and add enough wonders to use all the Test of Time artworks.

Eventually, there will also be a series of scenarios using vertical wrap, with Earth, a strip of space, another planet, and a strip of space. The idea being that Earth will dominate the solar system, and the most significant outside influence on each new planet colony will be its relationship with Earth, rather than with other space colonies.

 

[Mattin]

Great Mod Tholish

Do you need any help making any changes?
I have worked in alot of XML before.

P.S Is the time traveller ment to do all of that?

 

[Tholish]

Why yes. If you know how to do Events, they need to be changed to be about future stuff. You can see where I started doing a few of them. The Events themselves are in the Python, and there's no need to mess with them, they are fine. My idea is to just take and change exactly what they refer to and do and what triggers them and the text of the choices offered. Like instead of a hurricane sweeping away population, you have them emigrate to the moon.

The time traveller is intended to do all that. Almost the last tech in the tech tree allows you to build a backwards time travel RECIEVER. Since there were no recievers further in the past, no time travellers could appear, but now you can start recieving people from even further in the future, where they have built a backwards time travel TRANSMITTER. These people are all very far ahead of everybody else and can thus function as any kind of missionary or great person at all.

I've considered adding an AI Engineer GP Unit, which gives more hammers than the regular ones, more in line with the sharply increased costs of future builds.

Also, if you have played it all the way through, then you had an earlier version, ie one right after I put in Chamaedrys borehole instead of an enlarged Extractor for the core tap (ie yesterday). I've since downsized it (ie an hour ago).

 

[Mattin]

Any events in particular you want?

And also its extreamly easy to edit events its the CIV4GameText_Events_BTS file in the text area.

Here's one with the edited hurricane event...

 

[Tholish]

Actually, all of them. But actually there are three files. Civ4GameTextEvents, under the Text directory includes the various options. The first is just the text saying the event happened, and it is usually followed by other texts offering various choices the player can take. In the case of the hurricane I changed it to be a recession, so the first part says that. Then the alternatives offered are "Businesses Close Down"--ie, buildings are destroyed--and "Population migrates to the moon" --ie people are killed.

In the Events directory there are also EventTriggerInfos and EventInfos. In EventInfos you can often change outcomes of the alternatives, like how many people are lost or what buildiung burns down, there are tags for that but sometimes the results are done by the python code which is referred to here, as is the case with the Hurricane. In EventTriggerInfos, you have the conditions for the overall event to happen. In this case, I changed it so you have to have TECH_SPACEPORT.

 

[phungus420]

To get events to work properly, you will also often need to edit python as well.

 

[Tholish]

I just put up a repaired version. The older one crashed whenever anybody built the Nanobot Plant. I got rid of the special building status and the Nanotech Core Tools project. Also lots of other little tweaks, fixed the Tidemill description thing, made some buildings cost more, fewer early spaceship parts required and cheaper, nuclear plants now require uranium. More to come, but that fatal one was urgent. Fortunately about 3/4 of the way through.

 

[Mattin]

Actually, all of them. But actually there are three files. Civ4GameTextEvents, under the Text directory includes the various options. The first is just the text saying the event happened, and it is usually followed by other texts offering various choices the player can take. In the case of the hurricane I changed it to be a recession, so the first part says that. Then the alternatives offered are "Businesses Close Down"--ie, buildings are destroyed--and "Population migrates to the moon" --ie people are killed.

In the Events directory there are also EventTriggerInfos and EventInfos. In EventInfos you can often change outcomes of the alternatives, like how many people are lost or what buildiung burns down, there are tags for that but sometimes the results are done by the python code which is referred to here, as is the case with the Hurricane. In EventTriggerInfos, you have the conditions for the overall event to happen. In this case, I changed it so you have to have TECH_SPACEPORT.

I knew about those but i just did as asked which was change the hurricane event to emigration to the moon...

If you could send me a list of events needed i can make them...

 

[Tholish]

OK, I'll get that together. Meanwhile I uploaded a new version into the first post with a bunch of building art fixes, mostly Hrochland stuff in place of dittos of the NextWar buildings. Other changes also. For example, the infantry line no longer builds with food, because then the AI will stack infantry up to the sky in sea cities.

PS. Dual's Huge crystal works, as is, as a building but not as an improvement.

Edit: this is when I put in the borehole crash.

 

[Mister Giggles]

Few things...

- In WorldBuilder, when you select Borehole (Er...the first one), the game crashes.

- Treefarm in 10 turns = Tree Nursery which in ten turns = Treefarm, repeat?

- War Bots are by far the cutest things ever.

 

[Tholish]

A couple of politenesses:
1. Thank you for testing my mod, giving me feedback, and also for mentioning the good the bad and the ugly.
2. Sorry about the borehole crash. I copied when I should have cut.


Now to address specific points, in order of the brevity of the answer.

Yeah, I like the Warbots too. They are the Next War Assault Mech, reduced in size and made into a formation.

The Treefarm thing: Intended! Basically it represents a cycle of tree farming on a tract. During the first part most of the trees are saplings, and during the later part most of the trees are harvest ready. Thus, the changing yield, which approximates cutting and regrowing. Actually it was a stopgap since I haven't put in authentic Terraforming yet, to Plant Forest, so I just made an improvement that uses a thick forest nif and another that uses the modern plantation and set them to grow into each other like towns and it works like a charm. I played around with a terraforming mod component but it didn't work. I'm thinking of using tsentom's, but the treefarm kind of works game balance wise and the AI knows how to use it, so it may stay though the look of the nursery may change.
EDIT: check it out now!

Re the borehole crash. Oops. I fixed it. Now using the intended art, since that wasn't the problem. Many more changes in the works. As of the borehole fix (Christmas) there are no crashes and the game is playable. However, it is still morphing. Please let me know (here, so as to bump all these fancy "real" mods) if you think the design should go a different way or anything is buggy. Anything buggy is going to be just stuff I recently added sloppily rather than something fundamental.

 

[Tholish]

I've PMed a moderator and requested that this thread be moved to the main creation and customization forum, since the mod was obviously still in development when I started it.


This thing is getting pretty near completion for like 1.0. All I really need to do is finish the text (civilopedias and stuff) and a few tweaks and cleaning up. Then I'll

(1) Ask a moderator to move this thread to the main creation and customization thread, where it should have been.
(2) I'll upload it all together so you don't have to assemble it, and can play from a single icon click
(3) I'll start a new thread here, with a good presentation and a finished product, FutureMod 1.0.
(4) I'll start working on fancier versions, possibly includng

(a) increased research cost over time. I used standard research costs for the tech tree I reskinned, but there are lots of things to accelerate research and wealth. this replicates a Technological singularity, but can be less fun to play, maybe.
(b) use gods of old prophet powers and mesoamerica sacrificial altar functions
(c) put in space terrains and features and make space maps with bands of Earth, space, another planet, space, wrapping in x (equators) and y (sort of around an orbit).
(d) write a piece about what I learned making this mod, as in how to organize things from the get go so you don't have to go back.

 

[Padma]

Moderator Action: Moved, as requested.

 

[Asthix]

Edit: Absolutely loving v. 0.96!