Bluemofia
F=ma
As there are a dozen different space mods and scenarios, such as Space Opera, Star Trek, various Star Wars mods, Space Wars Evolution, Space Armada, etc. because space is awesome, the one problem was that none of them were compatible with random map modes like a true mod.
This mod aims to address this, as well as providing a more hard science than Star Wars or Star Trek, but with enough soft science and hand waving to mold it to game mechanics and for balance and fun factor.
This is a work in progress, as I don't have a full tech tree up and running, and additional ideas are welcome.
Map Generation
How most space mods usually work, is that they include a map that is 95% water, where space ships fly around in, and a scattering of land tiles representing planets, asteroids, etc. where land forces need to be deployed, and cities/planets built/colonized. After all, a blockade around a planet is just that, a blockade, and you still need boots on the ground to truly occupy it.
Space Wars Evolution and Space Armada did the opposite approach, where 100% of the map is land, and space ships fly around as land units and attack/conquer cities/planets, which can only be settled in limited locations (such as, the star itself or planets). Traditional land units like infantry battalions had no place in this map, as what planet can resist a star ship's orbital bombardment where megaton kinetic energy strikes are as common as bullets?
Because of these approaches to space, and space ships, these seem to preclude the use of a random map mode, because the Civ 3 engine can't generate 100% land maps, or 95% water maps with tiny archipelagos of planets. The main premise of this mod is that the space ships will fly around on land and water depending on the context. Land tiles will be considered "Galactic" tiles, while water is "Intergalactic" tiles. The type of ships involved are thus restricted to galactic and intergalactic. The in game justification is to invoke the existence of Hyperspace, but that Hyperspace only exists in a bubble of ~5 or so light years (or however large a tile ends up being) surrounding a star. If you want to go the slow way, you use regular chemical, nuclear, antimatter, etc. engines, have a ship that is 99% fuel to do so, and have fun. Functionally speaking, no ship intended for galactic travel will have anything to do with that, and the only way they would use this travel is for intergalactic travel, travel between galaxies.
Naturally, I will be taking the approach that infantry and tank battalions are useless, and space ships are king.
The terrain is based on a blend of Stellaris graphics, Leavan’s Space Terrain, sepamu92's Space Terrain, and some of my own creation. It is still a work in progress however. Here is a sample of what I have so far:
Small red stars are M Stars, replacing Desert, Flood Plains, and Tundra.
Orange stars are K Stars, replacing Plains
Yellow Stars are G Stars, replacing Grassland
Forests/Mountains/Hills/Jungles I am still working on, hence the mix of graphics.
Pay no attention to the Playground Mod stuff in the background; this is my testbed map where I do quick graphics tests, and there will no pokemon in space. I guarantee it.
Units
The units for this will primarily be land units, space ships that fly around on the land tiles, where intergalactic ships will be more like transport ships with minimal defense values, if even that. They also won't even be considered "ships", but more like ramscoop frames which gather the tiny amount of interstellar and intergalactic hydrogen to power the core ship’s fusion drives, in order to justify why a ship can maneuver around in the ocean tiles when it should have spent all of its fuel getting to top speed and in cruising mode.
For interstellar travel, I didn't want to immediately throw in hyperspace travel, because I want civs to work up to it, and have it be as revolutionary of a discovery as gunpowder ended up being in normal Civ. I also didn't want to give up on the water/land space ship distinction, and also need to consider the effect roads can have, because of Civ 3 mechanics. What I settled on, is for humanity to have initially discovered hyperspace by the EM Drive, which generated reactionless propulsion seemingly violating Newton's Laws by interacting with hyperspace. Early interstellar travel will be primarily this, where ships are still limited to normal space slower than light transport, but eliminating the need to be 99% fuel by mass. Later on, workers can start building hyperspace beacons (roads), allowing units to move through hyperspace, and travel faster than light. I may keep options on the table with All Terrain as Road units as units who can navigate hyperspace without existing hyperspace beacons, but I don't have the full details on those yet.
Even further down the line, will be Alcubierre Drive equipped units, true FTL units with more than 1 movement will become available after the discovery of negative energy required for them to work. Fixed wormholes (both “natural”, taking advantage of pre-existing black holes and artificially created black holes) can be built, allowing the base game's airports and air lifting, but rather than the traditional paired wormholes that most science fiction uses, they will be considered Hyperspace “Cracks” that allow ships to enter and exit from any wormhole to any other wormhole.
I have not yet decided on how air units will function, if at all.
General Gameplay
One of the points early on, is that there will be no hyperspace network at the start of the game, making connecting up an empire impossible, sort of like those games with road building as a later tech. Additional emphasis will also be made on location unique buildings, like Wormhole Nexus or Neutron Star Research Stations, which can only be built in cities which have a Black Hole, or Neutron Star in its radius, to make the map more dynamic, where some locations have higher importance in an economic or strategic sense.
Pollution will be kept to a minimum, as these are generally unfun keeping a bunch of workers on standby to rush off and clean pollution the moment it spawns. No buildings will produce pollution, and a size 3 city will be set to 99, making it functionally impossible to reach. Rather, if a building needs to have a negative effect, it will do things like, reduce culture, production, and/or generate unhappiness instead, although reduction of culture will only be a downside if the city is generating culture before it is made. However, because I can’t get rid of volcanoes, pollution will be renamed “devastation”, and the volcano will be represented by Luminous Blue Variable stars like Eta Carinae, where they can explode multiple times in their lifetimes. Naturally, cleaning up said devastation will be a greater undertaking than running around and scrubbing the landscape, and have its turn duration increased.
As pollution will be reduced, individual tile improvements will have their construction time, and their value, increased. My preliminary numbers have, for example, a G class star (grassland) produces 1/1/1 food/shields/gold unimproved, but produces an extra 3/2/1 with irrigation/mines/road. This will make destroying improvements more valuable in time of war, as it is more difficult to rebuild them, and cause more economic damage.
Next Goals
First, I need to finish implementing the rest of the terrain graphics, followed by other things, like irrigation, terrain buildings, etc.
On the game design aspect, I need to work out an appropriate tech tree. Right now, I just have a list of buildings I plan to implement, but without a tech tree, it becomes hard to plan out what goes where. Preliminary, it will be separated into 4 ages, Type 1 Civilization, Type 2 Civilization pre-FTL, Type 2 Civilization post-FTL, and Type 3 Civilization, after each of the 3 types of civilizations on the Kardashev Scale that this mod is named after.
This mod aims to address this, as well as providing a more hard science than Star Wars or Star Trek, but with enough soft science and hand waving to mold it to game mechanics and for balance and fun factor.
This is a work in progress, as I don't have a full tech tree up and running, and additional ideas are welcome.
Map Generation
How most space mods usually work, is that they include a map that is 95% water, where space ships fly around in, and a scattering of land tiles representing planets, asteroids, etc. where land forces need to be deployed, and cities/planets built/colonized. After all, a blockade around a planet is just that, a blockade, and you still need boots on the ground to truly occupy it.
Space Wars Evolution and Space Armada did the opposite approach, where 100% of the map is land, and space ships fly around as land units and attack/conquer cities/planets, which can only be settled in limited locations (such as, the star itself or planets). Traditional land units like infantry battalions had no place in this map, as what planet can resist a star ship's orbital bombardment where megaton kinetic energy strikes are as common as bullets?
Because of these approaches to space, and space ships, these seem to preclude the use of a random map mode, because the Civ 3 engine can't generate 100% land maps, or 95% water maps with tiny archipelagos of planets. The main premise of this mod is that the space ships will fly around on land and water depending on the context. Land tiles will be considered "Galactic" tiles, while water is "Intergalactic" tiles. The type of ships involved are thus restricted to galactic and intergalactic. The in game justification is to invoke the existence of Hyperspace, but that Hyperspace only exists in a bubble of ~5 or so light years (or however large a tile ends up being) surrounding a star. If you want to go the slow way, you use regular chemical, nuclear, antimatter, etc. engines, have a ship that is 99% fuel to do so, and have fun. Functionally speaking, no ship intended for galactic travel will have anything to do with that, and the only way they would use this travel is for intergalactic travel, travel between galaxies.
Naturally, I will be taking the approach that infantry and tank battalions are useless, and space ships are king.
The terrain is based on a blend of Stellaris graphics, Leavan’s Space Terrain, sepamu92's Space Terrain, and some of my own creation. It is still a work in progress however. Here is a sample of what I have so far:
Small red stars are M Stars, replacing Desert, Flood Plains, and Tundra.
Orange stars are K Stars, replacing Plains
Yellow Stars are G Stars, replacing Grassland
Forests/Mountains/Hills/Jungles I am still working on, hence the mix of graphics.
Pay no attention to the Playground Mod stuff in the background; this is my testbed map where I do quick graphics tests, and there will no pokemon in space. I guarantee it.
Units
The units for this will primarily be land units, space ships that fly around on the land tiles, where intergalactic ships will be more like transport ships with minimal defense values, if even that. They also won't even be considered "ships", but more like ramscoop frames which gather the tiny amount of interstellar and intergalactic hydrogen to power the core ship’s fusion drives, in order to justify why a ship can maneuver around in the ocean tiles when it should have spent all of its fuel getting to top speed and in cruising mode.
For interstellar travel, I didn't want to immediately throw in hyperspace travel, because I want civs to work up to it, and have it be as revolutionary of a discovery as gunpowder ended up being in normal Civ. I also didn't want to give up on the water/land space ship distinction, and also need to consider the effect roads can have, because of Civ 3 mechanics. What I settled on, is for humanity to have initially discovered hyperspace by the EM Drive, which generated reactionless propulsion seemingly violating Newton's Laws by interacting with hyperspace. Early interstellar travel will be primarily this, where ships are still limited to normal space slower than light transport, but eliminating the need to be 99% fuel by mass. Later on, workers can start building hyperspace beacons (roads), allowing units to move through hyperspace, and travel faster than light. I may keep options on the table with All Terrain as Road units as units who can navigate hyperspace without existing hyperspace beacons, but I don't have the full details on those yet.
Even further down the line, will be Alcubierre Drive equipped units, true FTL units with more than 1 movement will become available after the discovery of negative energy required for them to work. Fixed wormholes (both “natural”, taking advantage of pre-existing black holes and artificially created black holes) can be built, allowing the base game's airports and air lifting, but rather than the traditional paired wormholes that most science fiction uses, they will be considered Hyperspace “Cracks” that allow ships to enter and exit from any wormhole to any other wormhole.
I have not yet decided on how air units will function, if at all.
General Gameplay
One of the points early on, is that there will be no hyperspace network at the start of the game, making connecting up an empire impossible, sort of like those games with road building as a later tech. Additional emphasis will also be made on location unique buildings, like Wormhole Nexus or Neutron Star Research Stations, which can only be built in cities which have a Black Hole, or Neutron Star in its radius, to make the map more dynamic, where some locations have higher importance in an economic or strategic sense.
Pollution will be kept to a minimum, as these are generally unfun keeping a bunch of workers on standby to rush off and clean pollution the moment it spawns. No buildings will produce pollution, and a size 3 city will be set to 99, making it functionally impossible to reach. Rather, if a building needs to have a negative effect, it will do things like, reduce culture, production, and/or generate unhappiness instead, although reduction of culture will only be a downside if the city is generating culture before it is made. However, because I can’t get rid of volcanoes, pollution will be renamed “devastation”, and the volcano will be represented by Luminous Blue Variable stars like Eta Carinae, where they can explode multiple times in their lifetimes. Naturally, cleaning up said devastation will be a greater undertaking than running around and scrubbing the landscape, and have its turn duration increased.
As pollution will be reduced, individual tile improvements will have their construction time, and their value, increased. My preliminary numbers have, for example, a G class star (grassland) produces 1/1/1 food/shields/gold unimproved, but produces an extra 3/2/1 with irrigation/mines/road. This will make destroying improvements more valuable in time of war, as it is more difficult to rebuild them, and cause more economic damage.
Next Goals
First, I need to finish implementing the rest of the terrain graphics, followed by other things, like irrigation, terrain buildings, etc.
On the game design aspect, I need to work out an appropriate tech tree. Right now, I just have a list of buildings I plan to implement, but without a tech tree, it becomes hard to plan out what goes where. Preliminary, it will be separated into 4 ages, Type 1 Civilization, Type 2 Civilization pre-FTL, Type 2 Civilization post-FTL, and Type 3 Civilization, after each of the 3 types of civilizations on the Kardashev Scale that this mod is named after.
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I took inspiration from the Honor Harrington series with the Eridani Edict, and I'm sure there's plenty of other examples elsewhere.
) and fill the map with tons of different resources - but that´s a different approach than you do it.
