It was a couple of tech loops. I planned the tech tree carefully, but I guess I left errors. Via intermediates involving confusing sentience and sapience, quantum computer was a prereq for plasteel which was a prereq for quantum computer. Another tech was a direct prerequisite for itself.
I tested it by just taking the whole tech tree and grafting it into a standard tech infos as a new "mod", where it should have had no effect since it is not connected to any consequences such as buildings or units. But it crashed it, indicating a tech loop.
Also there was a later crash involving victory conditions. After initially getting rid of all but score victory I had put back all the victory conditions without putting back any way to get to them since I was getting a spaceship victory in about 3000 BC even though there was no spaceship or spaceship victory included in the XML. So, to simplify things for now, I will just leave all the victory conditions in and
Now its working and I'm back to the design process. I went through the tech tree and wrote down a likely benefit of each tech. A building, promotion, specialist, unit or resource it makes possible. I originally planned the tech tree based on real projections of future technologies, rather than looking at what was doable or would make a good game. Now I have to figure out how to make it a game using what is doable.
I have learned that terrain impassables simply don't work. I wanted to avoid using the flying mod and make coast and ocean land terrains. Ocean (space) is impassable and spacecraft can move through impassable terrain. Coast (ocean) was supposed to work like regular sea terrain by me using terrain impassables. Make "sea" units (actually land domain) unable to pass any land terrain and regular land units (tanks etc) other than spacecraft unable to pass the coast terrain and I figured they would then function as land and sea units without affecting the movement of spacecraft. However in tests I have destroyers supposedly blocked from land terrains running around all over them and infantry walking on the sea. A problem to play around with, not a major barrier.
Anyway there are also issues of dealing with the religion thing. The idea is that as new technologies are discovered new forms of people become possible and these are represented by religions, forcing civs to decide what they want to focus on. For example, the presence of the robotism religion represents a population of robots, while the presence of the humanism religion represents a population of humans. That is problematic because the portion of each religion is not tracked, just the presence or absence. If there is only a tiny population of humans in a mostly android city, how can all these buildings that benefit humans be having such a huge impact? Shouldn't they affect only the human portion of the population? Making buildings require a religion or state religion helps a lot, but still seems clunky.
Also, I have to decide what to use as my base units. I mean there are armor types (metal, plasteel, duralloy etc) power plants (batteries, superloop, fusion, singularity power etc) propulsion (antimatter rocket, chemical rocket, warp drive etc..) and guns (electrolaser, antimatter projectiles, coherent particle beams, etc. Most of these variants can be represented by upgrades, but which forms the base? I think it will be armor type because think about it you can take an engine out or mount a different gun, but bolt on armor is always ad hoc.
Also there is the matter of local resources. It would be great if I could have resources do good only if local, like you could in civ3 conquests. Then I could basically restrict things to particular planets. Besides, having access to a resource through a spaceport is not the same as having access to it by road. It should take extra effort to ship between planets. I am going to have to make mass driver improvements the method of making resources accessible generally and pair this with making spaceports rather high maintenance and expensive to build.
I am using star wars spacecraft for spacecraft, but have so far just resized them pretty big. However, I 'm going to try different sizes and see if I can't get them in swarms.
Also rather than a new thread for a small question: how is a no upkeep civic done?
