Idea: Inhabited Planets

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This idea came to me when I was thinking about stuff I might do for Final Frontier Plus. I might make it a gameoption there (since in FF there aren't aliens, at least at present), but it's definitely appropriate for Star Trek, so I thought I'd mention it here. Part of the reason I'm mentioning it is to see if people would like this, since I might make it a modmod if I have time (which I don't have at the moment).

In Star Trek, quite a lot of planets are inhabited. But this isn't reflected in game at present. So my idea is to give a percentage of all solar systems on the map "Alien Population". First, if a city was founded on a system with alien population that city would gain a population point.

Second, systems with alien population would have an invisible improvement on them that acts as a goody hut. So when moving onto systems with alien population, the goody hut gets popped- the equivalent of making First Contact with an alien race. You could get things like credits, techs, alien ships, and maybe even a new city- or maybe a barbarian city and barbarian ships (if first contact goes awry).

As for how I would code this (since I have considered making it a modmod for Star Trek):

-Add a tag to CIV4GoodyInfos.xml "RequiredImprovement", in other words the required improvement type for the goody to be popped. All existing ones would be set to require space wreckage- all new ones would require the invisible alien population improvement.
-Add a new boolean to system data which would represent the alien population.
-Whenever systems are created, roll to determine whether that system should have alien population, and if it does, place one of the invisible alien population improvements (Unless it's a city, of course).

EDIT: I've begun working on this as a Star Trek modmod.
 
This sounds cool. Could there be a way to control this for scenarios? That way when I port The Galaxy to 4.0 I might replace the independent systems with this concept (and save a bunch of turn time).

You mean control where the aliens get placed or what results you get from them?

If the alien population is added to WBS files as something saved per plot, the system creation function could be set up to not add alien population if the game is a scenario. So you could manually add alien population and the aliens improvement to plots in the WBS instead of letting things be randomly generated.

As for what results... maybe add a PyRequirement for goodies?
 
So in effect, these planets would replace goody hut, and give a possibility for new cities? This sounds like a good idea. The only things would be if it grants you a technology (which I disable in my games) as there are to few technologies to 'waste' on free ones imho. Perhaps the technolgy chance could be ramped up, so as free technologies a very rare, 1/20 ish.
 
So in effect, these planets would replace goody hut, and give a possibility for new cities? This sounds like a good idea. The only things would be if it grants you a technology (which I disable in my games) as there are to few technologies to 'waste' on free ones imho. Perhaps the technolgy chance could be ramped up, so as free technologies a very rare, 1/20 ish.

Yes, basically they act as goody huts (and also provide a population point when a city is built).


As for technologies, I've always thought the tech tree for the Civ 3 Star Trek Mod could be used as a source of ideas for techs.
 
Yes, basically they act as goody huts (and also provide a population point when a city is built).


As for technologies, I've always thought the tech tree for the Civ 3 Star Trek Mod could be used as a source of ideas for techs.

Ah, there was a Start Trek mod for III was there!. Without trying to sound critical of deanej (which I am certainly not, this is a really great mod) I did have the thought that if anything could have a massive, interesting and diverse tech tree, it would be star trek with its mountain of readily avalible cannon. I wonder if deanej has any thoughts on expanding the tech tree, and what sort of help he may need in organzing this? Anyway, I will go and have a squiz at the civ 3 III tech tree.

Cheers
 
Haven't seen the civ3 mod (civ3 won't even run on my laptop), but major changes to the tech tree are mostly out. Basically I don't want to have techs that do nothing (except for a couple special cases where they unlock multiple techs). See the Road to War mod to see what I mean - many techs just sit there and do nothing but unlock the next tech in the sequence.
 
With this concept would it be possible to incorporate the Barbarians, assuming they popped a 'city' as a hostile reaction, becoming civs in their own right ala the Civ Revolutions Mod pack?

It should be.

For Star Trek, perhaps we could pre-warp civs to the game that would be randomly spawned by this process.

I'll probably do something similar in FF+.
 
It turns out that if I add a new Goody improvement and require it to be placed on solar systems, it gets auto-placed on solar systems. Which means that I won't need to add another piece of system data to add them.

The downside of this, though, is that all solar systems (at least on a Standard StarTrek map) seem to get it. Maybe in Star Trek, with such an abundance of life in the universe, this wouldn't be a problem. But for Final Frontier Plus I definitely want to tone this down.

Unfortunately I have no idea how, or where, the amount of goodies per map are calculated.
 
So far Inhabited systems can:

-Provide credits
-Provide technology
-Provide maps (the maps are centered around the planet)

I intend to also make them capable of:

-Giving you a city
-Turning into an Independent system
-Spawning a new civ

Any other things an alien race should be capable of giving you? I decided not to let them give you ships since they are supposed to be pre-warp.

I also will need to get a list of pre-warp civs that should be able to "spawn" via this process. I intend to use Memory Alpha for this but I'd be happy to include suggestions.

It would also be cool to have "artifact planets" and "ancient mines" here and there, spawned randomly in various systems. Do you have an idea how to make it better? :)

So you mean you could find "Artifacts" in solar systems in addition to population?

Possibly.

The best way would be to make Artifacts not goodies, and provide a more permanent bonus. (Maybe make them a system/planet attribute?) Because if you made both goodies, you could only have Inhabited systems or systems containing Artifacts.

But I'm going to focus on alien population for the time being.
 
I meant as random buildings, although you could just make a check in CvSolarSystem where the free buildings are provided and randomly add "feature" buildings, like ruins and local shrines.
 
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