Middle-Earth: Lord of the Mods (octa)

[AlcTrv]

Well, do we want anything living in the far north anyways? all i remember in the books after the land north of the iron hills became all cold was mostly dragons

 

[mrtn]

Originally posted by PCHighway
From my understanding Forodwaith was largely sustained by the sea, and more or less was an land of ice.
I see no reason why a trade route there should not be important. ... On the other hand I can see I’m out voted, I’ll leave what makes sense to me, for my own edition...

That Forodwaith argument is actually an excellent argument for not allowing roads in tundra at all. Build a harbor.
I think tundra should have 1 food or 1 shield, and that you only can do the other thing, i e if it has one food you can only mine it, for one bonus shield.
And I prefer mined tundra before irrigated.

MightyPunkass: Actually PCH has been smoking too much of that pipeweed , Mithril is a luxury.

 

[AlcTrv]

Mithril should be strategic in my mind, but oh well

And is Longbottom Leaf a luxury resource? Old Toby? ANYTHING?

 

[mrtn]

Originally posted by AlcTrv
Mithril should be strategic in my mind, but oh well

And is Longbottom Leaf a luxury resource? Old Toby? ANYTHING?

Mithril as a strat can be a prereq for one or two units. Mithril as a lux can make your people happy, and be prereq for one or two units. We want it to be as important as possible.

Pipeweed is a lux.

Doesn't anyone read that first page summary?

 

[tjedge1]

Originally posted by mrtn
Doesn't anyone read that first page summary?

I do

I agree with Mithril as a luxury. How many armies did you really see all suited up in mithril. That would have been a really expensive army.

 

[PCHighway]

embryodead-
I still prefer swamps to ashlands on random map, but that's not so important to die for.

Really? Then I must say it's far more interesting being on my side of the spectrum.

embryodead-
But why do you want to boost squares that are worthless both in real and fictional world? Desert and Tundra suck, and I see no reason to "compensate" that by commerce.
And actually a road over inhospitable terrain usually means less than in one that goes through grassland, if it leads to nowhere... in deserts/tundras there are no dense villages and places to go, so building a road there that gives double commerce seems ridiculous to me. If such road actually leads to somewhere, the game reflects that in others ways (travel, trade route).

I see a great reason to compensate for it. It cannot be settled, in real life Tundra has less food than plains, hills and mountains. By making it give no food unless irrigated, we thus give a huge punishment to that terrain, although historically correct. In a random map I generated, there were 4 patches(3-6 squares consecutively) of tundra, and only 1 of these 4 patches had access to a lake or river. Giving tundra no food to start with, and have to be irrigated to do any good is quite realistic.

The Last Conformist-
But now, it's lumped together with Tundra, and tundra does yield sufficient food to sustain an sparse population, so I think it makes perfect sense it yields a bit of food.

Your saying polar desert mingled with tundra should give as much food as plains? As much food as a hill? As much food as a forest?!?!? The irrigation idea is perfect. It doesn’t mess up the stats much at all. And it proves that to get anything out of 0f, 0s, and 0c tundra, you will have to develop the land. Makes perfect sense to me.

The Last Conformist-
So, I still suggest 1f 0s 0c, with the option for +1s with a mine and +1c for road. That gives cities near tundra some hope, and gives some incentive to develop the place, but it remains really poor terrain.

Really poor terrain that gives as much food as a hill or forest.

AlcTrv-
Well, do we want anything living in the far north anyways? all I remember in the books after the land north of the iron hills became all cold was mostly dragons

There were the Forodwaith, but that’s not so much the point. I think a extremely cold terrain is necessary, and as this is for the random map, unavoidable. In most maps you will never get more than 10-20 squares of tundra.

mrtn-
That Forodwaith argument is actually an excellent argument for not allowing roads in tundra at all.

No it represents the polar ice caps.

mrtn-
Build a harbor.

A harbor won’t make a damn difference since no cities can be built on tundra, and any city with 3 squares of tundra probably will have the other 9 squares filled with grassland\bonus grassland, hills, plains and forest. Moreover, coast also give 2 commerce. Furs could represent both the food and commerce of the region, except for one undeniable fact. Tundra gets no resources except wolves, which damages the commerce and food output.

I already said that I am saving this feature for my personal adaption of this MOD. And seeing as how most of you guys are going to vote for the original adaption of tundra (1f, 0s, 0c). But you better come to a vote quickly, we need to talk about the other terrains. Were there any other things with the current settings terrain that we didn’t discuss?

mrtn-
MightyPunkass: Actually PCH has been smoking too much of that pipeweed , Mithril is a luxury.

First Bonusss ressourceres aren’t as good as luxurrries, and now you single out pipeweeeed! Bigot! All resources are the sameee, maaaan!

 

[Mithadan]

Originally posted by PCHighway
I think it would add lots of information to the game, especially for those who have not read the books. However I agree, it’s far too large of a job for one man alone. And should be put on the bottom of our list. Even after city aerial views (and since they are disabled in c3c, that’s saying something). We could do like TAM, and put “If you would like to write a civilopedia entry for this building\event\unit, please send it to (insert e-mail here)”.
I do think we need to plan it out first. Maybe sometime we can start discussing which ‘events’ are worthy of entries. Then I can add a nearly blank log to the civilopedia.txt.

Sounds good.

Ideas for basic "background info" entries:

1. The "Ages" of Middle-Earth in relation to the "Eras" in our mod. If I recall correctly, there isn't going to be a "First Age of the Sun = Era One" correspondence in the mod. Plus, people might ask what the heck was going on before there was a sun. Maybe...

2. The two great struggles, the Wars of the Jewels and the War of the Ring...I guess?

3. From there, I guess we could go into smaller events, like the Dagor Bragollath or the Great Winter when wolves invaded the Shire, or whatever.

4. I think the rest of the info (like "what's the difference between Angband and Angmar?") would come out in standard civilopedia entries, e.g. PRTO_Angmar or something.

Originally posted by PCHighway
I like the idea of grasslands as floodplains, and your overall “greener Middle-earth” scheme. But I’m not so sure we should change it so drastically. If we do so, it would be beyond the reach of someone to add their own terrain pack. Not to mention it would be a massive undertaking for a talented artist, as the entire 'transition' from, say grassland to desert, would have to be reversed ? And then the question becomes, "to what end"? Why do we want grassland to look like desert? Unfortunately we cannot adjust it so regular grassland is unsettle-able, and bonus is. afaik. Well, if we make it so desert is unsettle-able, just like mountains, these would be very important. Aside from that, we can’t get rid of them. No terrain is able to be deleted, so we have to do something with it.
Maybe we should add a good resource, only available to floodplains?.

Hmmm. I thought we could just rename the "desert.pcx" to "grassland.pcx," the "grassland.pcx" to "plains.pcx," and the "plains.pcx" to "desert.pcx" and then everything would be tickety boo. I didn't realise that the borders would get all buggered up as a result. That's no good.

Plus, I always play with deserts unsettlable anyway, so that issue hadn't popped into mind. (Hadn't thought about players wanting to switch to their own terrain sets, either.) We want to allow deserts to be settlable in order for people like the Haradrim to survive, yes? Maybe then we could just strategically plant plains squares in the middle of deserts for them to settle on? But that wouldn't work for the random map, would it?

Plains should certainly not be green. Grasslands are green, and semi-arid plains DO exist in Middle-Earth (and they would be tan/brown dominant with grey/green undertones like most semi-arid plains). We'd just have to make sure Rohan was green, not tan like it was in the movie. Standard Civ (or regular Sn00py?) plains are just fine, I think.

Originally posted by PCHighway
It’s not so much to represent a forest, as to represent an desolate, untamed land. Think Mirkwood, then think Greenwood. The only place that was ‘tamed’ in the darker Greenwood, was where the Elves were. This would thus be adequately represented by ‘clearing wilderland’. The idea behind wilderland isn’t to be a dark forest, indeed my idea originally was to have a steppe like country, with a few thickets ([steppe-thicket]oxymoron, I know). But then embryodead had to bring up Snoopy’s great alterative forest, which is too good to pass up.

Hmm, I would go for this if I could send my worker into a "Wilderland" tile and tell him to "clear forest" and when he's finished, a nice new tile of "Forest" would appear. But I don't think we can pull that off, unless we even go into more insane depths with our terain.pcx swapping.

I've no problem with "steppe-thickets" (there are plenty of thickets in the steppes of my habitat -- that's where all the deer hide); "scrub" comes to mind. A wilderland with scattered cut-n-pasted Sn00py trees would be to my liking.

Would we be interested in distinguishing "sand desert" from "broken rock/scrubby/desert"? Sort of like the difference between the Sahara and the Mojave, mabye (or the Sahel?)? (Can a LM terrain be settlable, while it's corresponding vanilla terrain be unsettlable? Thataway, the scrub desert could be settlable, but not the sand desert.)

Re: Tundra

There aren't many roads in tundra. I think there's about 10km of roads in all of the territory of Nunavut, for example. Tundra's beatiful land, and it is rich and bountiful, if you know how to receive what it can give. Being civilized is typically being utterly ignorant of what an ecosystem can or cannot give; civ tries to force an ecosystem to "produce" more than it naturally gives. Hence the phenomenon of "marginal environments," such as tundra. Tundra is recalcitrant to civilization. I think one problem with roads is the permafrost (it's a major problem for building houses; you've got to drill through the permafrost to get a secure foundation, and then insulate the pilings so the permafrost doesn't melt...I think), and the same with roads I do believe. The "ice road" is a major phenomena in Northern Canadian trade; there is no wheeled transport available during the summers, because the ground is too soft for trucks. I think that's because the ground that thaws above the permafrost is pretty soft, though not quite as bad as muskeg, which you get in the taiga. (We are having a "Marsh" terrain, aren't we?)

So unless we have strategic or luxury resources in tundra, I don't think we'll need roads up there. Bonus resources we could just soup-up a little bit, then. Appologies if I haven't met all of PCH's points, but I'm not completely read-up on the tundra debate going on here.

Edit: looks like PCH was typing at the same time as me, just a lot faster than me. Hmm, now what do I say about this tundra thing?

 

[The Last Conformist]

Couple of points on tundra:

i) Normal tundra does indeed produce as much food as plains and forest, which is not entirely realistic. But unless one ups the amount of food a citizen eats per turn, it's simply not possible to have terribly much variation in food yields, and what's true of all those terrains is that they, in their natural form, produce too little food to sustain sizeable urban populations. The difference is that plains can be irrigated (which I take to represent any sort of intensive agricultural development) and forests chopped down; tundra is and remains what it is.

ii) You don't get polar desert mixed with tundra - polar desert is found where it's too cold and dry to have a tundra. But since there, outside of Antarctica, which is represented by a polar ice cap in the game, there's alot more tundra than polar desert, wherefore it seems most reasonable to base a terrain-type representing both on the former.

iii) Tundra being "marginal" has little to do with civilization not understanding its ecosystem. The biological production simply is quite low, and that's not going to change this side of substantial global warming.

iv) This is mainly aesthetical, but irrigated tundra just looks wrong! You shouldn't be able to do any agriculture there.

 

[Mithadan]

Agreed on pretty much everything, Last Conformist (except the "marginal-civilization" connection, but that's an irrelevancy that I introduced and needn't be pursued further in this context ).

 

[MightyPunkass]

Originally posted by Mithadan
Sounds good.

Ideas for basic "background info" entries:

1. The "Ages" of Middle-Earth in relation to the "Eras" in our mod. If I recall correctly, there isn't going to be a "First Age of the Sun = Era One" correspondence in the mod. Plus, people might ask what the heck was going on before there was a sun. Maybe...

You could briefly mention the creation of the world, the big music thing, where Melkor rebels against the big god...Uru I think his name is, know what I'm on about?

Anyway, I'll be starting work on the map for Beleriand tomorrow for my Silmarillion scenario...if you think it's good enough, I'm willing to share.

 

[Mithadan]

Originally posted by MightyPunkass
You could briefly mention the creation of the world, the big music thing, where Melkor rebels against the big god...Uru I think his name is, know what I'm on about?

Good idea. That's actually my favorite part of the Silmarillion.

"...Behold, I love the Earth...!" (thus spake Eru, All-Father...)

 

[The Last Conformist]

You'd be thinking about The One; Eru.

 

[Mithadan]

Beatcha to it, TLC!

 

[The Last Conformist]

Damn! Now I have to wallow in abject sadness for several minutes!

 

[MightyPunkass]

Thanks for the corrections people

 

[RRnut]

Hello guys,


Hmm, i leave for several days and get over 40 posts. good work!

my takes on the:

Terrain. I reccommend as few as possible changes from the regular civ3. the only one that i would really feel good with is dissallosing mining on grasslands and making planting forests both easier and earlier. therefore the main thing that would happen is that forests would be the main source of shields for cities. this is of course rather debatable.

Re: tundra. recommendation, just leave it like it is. it can never suupport cities of corse. however, we should still be able to plant forest on it. Therefore it would only be as good as the forest on top of it. this is the same as vanilla civ3..

Re terrain mods: I would reccommend no changes. perhaps a name change for jungle, but thats all. desert looks good for the ashlands. check what I did on my map. jungle I used for thick, "evil" forests, like mirkwood, the Dark Forest, the inner Reaches of Fangorgn. therefore, perhaps with a new name, I think that we can use all the original terrain types. I don't think that we should use, or even reccommend any terrain modpack, as that will just be something else for somebody to download. just leave it at that. however, perhaps Snoopy's wild trees would be good for jungle. that's my vote.

something else re: terrain. I think that there should be some way to acess ereas completely sorrounded by mountains, common on 3 billion maps. my reccommendation for this is to make a 2nd age worker that is not wheeled and available to all civs. the dwarves, and perhaps the orcs could have workers that aren't wheeleed even from the beginning. I'm also not sure, perhaps jungles should be acessible to wheeled.

Re: civilopedia. This is a good idea. However, it is a lot of work, and i recommend significant outsourcing. however, I will work, but it is better if somebody assigns somehitng.

PCH, didn't you say that you had some sketches of resource entries? if you post them I'll work on them and make them more LOTR compatible.

RRnut

 

[embryodead]

Originally posted by RRnut
Re terrain mods: I would reccommend no changes. perhaps a name change for jungle, but thats all. desert looks good for the ashlands. check what I did on my map. jungle I used for thick, "evil" forests, like mirkwood, the Dark Forest, the inner Reaches of Fangorgn. therefore, perhaps with a new name, I think that we can use all the original terrain types. I don't think that we should use, or even reccommend any terrain modpack, as that will just be something else for somebody to download. just leave it at that. however, perhaps Snoopy's wild trees would be good for jungle. that's my vote.

That's one horrible idea Original graphics don't look at all fantasy, while other do. Another thing is that all the landmarks made ie. wild trees, do not fit the original graphics at all. Desert good for ashlands??? For most people, visual aspect of the game is importnant. We have access to graphics, we can do more, so why leave the game with it's boring look?

 

[tjedge1]

Originally posted by embryodead


That's one horrible idea Original graphics don't look at all fantasy, while other do. Another thing is that all the landmarks made ie. wild trees, do not fit the original graphics at all. Desert good for ashlands??? For most people, visual aspect of the game is importnant. We have access to graphics, we can do more, so why leave the game with it's boring look?

I second that motion.

Has anyone thought about maybe adding more terrain, like have both desert/ashland as one and change the landmark version to some kind of wasteland that produces more food for the interior of Mordor?

I've been trying to follow you guys on this topic, but I don't know if this has come up.

 

[RRnut]

Hmm. It seems as if I'm not most people. while I like good graphics that is not the reason that I play Civ. otherwise i'd play RON ore something like that. ok, forget that.

RRnut

 

[AlcTrv]

Pipeweed isn't precise enough for me