[MOD] Colonization: 2071

[Tssha]

Oops, forgot a couple points. Sorry about that.

1. Upgraded buildings sometimes don't include the production bonuses of earlier buildings. Upgrades replace older buildings, so if you get +1 to Plasteel and Earth Goods production from the spacedock, you won't get them from the Drydock or the Shipyard. I don't know if this is intentional or not, so I thought I'd point it out and either be corrected or have pointed out an oversight. Of course, I like the +2 food from Drydocks just fine, thanks for adding that.

2. You can't build Plasteel mills on hill forests. Sometimes the best sources of Plasteel are on a hill and not being able to build a mill there seems a bit...weird. Especially since a lot of forestry takes place on hills even today. Was this intentional or an oversight?

3. Lagrange points are also spawning spacial anomalies. Whether it's a space-time anomaly or an asteroid belt, sometimes you get a Lagrange point with a feature. That might not be so bad, but the features are usually pretty poor and they interfere with food growing a lot of the time (and you can't clear them). Of course, the space station, the derelict satellites and the communications array are notable exceptions, being all useful and stuff.


Lastly, I'd like to continue to be complementary by commenting on the music choices for the mod. They are excellent, truly atmospheric, managing at times to combine the futuristic and the naturalistic. Heck, I copied the songs to my iPod and even added a few to a custom writing playlist. I need music to write, so it's often best to have non-distracting (instrumental with no lyrics), sometimes moody (emotionally evocative) music on hand to facilitate the writing process. These tracks are truly excellent selections that have really set the mood of the game, adding to immersion and atmosphere, setting the tone early and keeping it up without subverting it at any point. A truly excellent selection.

 

[mrlimpet]

Hi there,

I came across the 2071 colonization mod last week and found it to be a very enjoyable build - great work! Playing a number of games, I encountered a few issues of which I would be glad if they could be resolved.

1. I couldn't build expeditions in any game I played - neither archaeologists nor explorers were able to build an expedition on the unique alien structures (plinth circle, pyramid, abandoned redouts, ruined tempel, ...) making it impossible to use these features of the game.

2. Progenitor structures lacked their base production values, e.g. the industrial complex gave a production bonus of +0 and was only usable after gaining the +4 bonus from nanofabrication. The same held true for the progenitor keep/citadels (0+2 weapon production with military-industrial complex instead of 2+2/4+2 as indicated) and the ancient database (0+1 research with cognitive science instead of 4+1). The progenitor metropolis never gave any bonus what so ever.

3. Excavations were a little letdown - I only managed to build one in an empty progenitor metropolis (volcanic terrain), gaining a +2 bonus on progenitor artefacts, which is pretty useless, especially as it meant the sacrifice of a valuable hardy laborer.

4. There was one little issue with moon colonization. Barren moons could not be colonized for some reason, other moons (aquatic, artic, volcanic, primordial) worked just fine (haven't tried artefact/verdant moons yet).

5. Science vessels were not able to clear dark matter, space-time anomaly or nebula features (gravitational anomaly, plasmafield and moon atmosphere clearing worked fine). Also, I could not use a space-time anomaly next to my colony for research purposes.

6. Explorers had the tendency to occasionally attack native creatures (spiders/killbots) thereby killing themselves when set on auto-exploration.

There also were the already reported occasional crash / absence of research labs issues but they were rather minor compared to the inability to use alien and progenitor structures. I am not sure if this is a problem with my installation or an issue with the build itself, but it would be great if this could be solved. The 2071 mod is definitely one of the great civ/col mods and I would love to play it with all its features!

 

[orlanth]

Thanks for the great feedback and bug reports; I'm working on an updated version for tentative release later this week that should fix most of the above problems and adds some new stuff, so please let me know soon if there's anything else you notice that needs to be fixed. This next version will hopefully enable Aliens to be fully playable with access to their unique buildings and units. Re stability, on second thought I don't recommend messing with the vanilla resource.thm files; I did a fresh reinstall of colonization and the mod and patch, and it seems to be fairly stable on autorun for >600 turns (at least the version I'm currently editing, which may be a bit different).

 

[Tssha]

Oooh, one last one!

The price of Expert Oilmen doesn't iterate like the others. It just stays at 800 per person. Hasn't gone up once.

I can confirm the science vessel doesn't harvest anything from spacial anomalies, like the time-space one and the dark matter one. Dunno about atmosphere conversions, I haven't had a moon to try it on. My only disappointment with the planet I chose.

 

[orlanth]

Colonization: 2071 v1.3 update

http://www.weplayciv.com/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=216​

v1.3 changelog​

Alien Empires
The main change for v1.3 was reworking the Aliens to be playable with the tech modcomp. It took a lot of doing but by changing all unique alien buildings to their own buildingclasses, it looks like the Alien races are finally becoming fully playable and should be able to conduct research and use their unique units/buildings, also beginning with a free Saucer at a random location to navigate to the wormhole to Earth.

It would take some SDK modding to fully make them more active & expansionist like the colonial civs, but I was pleasantly surprised that in some of my test autoruns a few of the alien civs did seem to abduct some UFO Cultists from Earth and occasionally even nab a Director. Earthlings watch the skies, your colonies can be threatened by..

Alien UFOs

Spoiler :

Even while presenting a facade of benign altruism to the Earthling interlopers, hidden saucers under the control of less sympathetic Alien Elders rained devastation upon unwary human colonists who were rash enough to venture into the New Worlds unprotected. To protect themselves the quick human Corvettes rapidly grew adept in Evasive Maneuvers, hiding in Low Orbit and strategic Asteroid Belts where they could often outmaneuver more powerful craft, and building colonial networks of Spaceports and Drydocks for damaged vessels to find refuge and repair.

Alien Saucers, UFOs and Smugglers use a mysterious propulsion mechanism entirely different from the massive Resonance Drives used by Earthling vessels, which enable humans to traverse the wormhole more rapidly but restrict them to Deep Space and Low Orbit tiles. By right-clicking over a planet's interior, an Alien Saucer can fly through the entirety of its atmosphere, reaching sites and colonies not directly accessible to Earthling ships. This leaves unwary Earthlings vulnerable to abduction by their alien neighbors. After discovering Xenolinguistics, units accompanied by an Alien Guide may receive forewarning of UFO attacks.

Stability Improvements
I've found and fixed several bugs which I think should improve stability; though there are still a few occasional crashes I couldn't trace. As a general idea when I ran 10 games on autorun for 400 turns, 9 ran without any errors observed and there was one crash on turn 43. So hopefully any crashes should be fairly rare, don't know if they're reproducible so may be avoided with autosave.

I did include an update to the Resource.thm files which I think might possibly improve stability but it's hard to be sure. If you want to try it, inside the mod's Assets folder you'll find a file Resource.zip . In your root Sid Meier's Colonization folder, make a backup of your original Resource folder, then extract Resource zip in your Sid Meier's Colonization folder, overwriting old files.

Other fixes and updates

* Misc issues from civfanatics forum (improvement builds, specialist costs, etc) mostly addressed. Wanted to make special Space Station improvements over Lagrange Points but need to find how to check for Lake squares in python.

* No more messing around with automatic Research Labs on starting settlements - if you want to research in a colony youre welcome to build one for a whopping 10 hammers. So, that bug's solved

* Expeditions should now be buildable on all the archaeological sites. They each have a unique yield boost depending on the site they're built over (which the pedia unfortunately doesnt show.) I think the Expeditions, Progenitor Improvements and unique sites should be providing yields if you've cleared any Ancient Mound have the right profession technology to harvest them (eg Progenitor Symbology, etc) but havent been able to playtest these out thoroughly. If they're still not working, maybe I should add their yields directly via the techtree.

* New promotions enabling specific advantages vs Feral (beast) and Progenitor units, and tactical promotions for Naval units taking advantage of the Deep Space features. The Seasoned Explorer is intrinsically more powerful against beasts.

* New bonus resources including a wide variety of native fauna, while making each individual species more rare to provide diversity. All species may not appear in every game, and several are endemic to a single planet.

* New special Professions discoverable with research:
the Journalist can generate Propaganda by field reporting on certain sites on the map
the Astronomer can research Anomalies in Low Orbit near a colony
after investing sufficient capital to found an Interstellar Bank, the Offworld Banker can generate Hard Currency profits directly

* Several graphical and pedia updates

* New Earthling civilization, the Syndicate Colonies representing organized crime

 

[Deon]

Oh, Syndicates? Awesome! Do they get red spacesuits?
Nanotrasen, beware!

 

[mrlimpet]

Hi there,

saw the new update today and gave it a short trial with the Europeans. Haven't managed to try out all the new features, but I came across a couple of bugs.

1. New UFOs are hunting you down (both on land / space!) from day one. They managed to kill my corvette 4 times in a row and went on to hunt my hardy laborer, even within the cultural borders. It's quite an interesting new feature, but they arrive to soon and strike to hard. The mismatch between the 5 UFO strength and the 2 corvette strength becomes painfully obvious. Things were a little better on a standart size map compared to a small one.

2. Back at Earth, feral units (abominations, hill thingis, AI and spiders) can be recruited for free, this was problably not intended.

3. The laborer unit has strength 1 and can use this gain in strength to attack.

4. The game still crashes occasionally - however, the good news is, that these crashes did not reproduce after loading an autosaved game. The issues with the missing laboratories was present in 2/3 games as well.

5. I still cannot build expeditions. Equally, the progenitor structures still do not give any bonuses. So this mod has unfortunately not changed anything about this issue. The exception is the excavation - which I couldn't build at all this time.

6. Other minor issues:

- the new mechanised worker is lacking its own graphics
- progenitor citadels give +125% def bonus, not 225% as indicated

Other than that, it seems that the new features (e.g. native fauna changes) have been well incorporated. I will try to test to other new features in the coming days.

 

[orlanth]

argh This patch should *finally* solve recurring problems missing tile yields from resources and Progenitor Improvements (turned off discovering map bonuses with research since it looks like there's a problem with the tech modcomp code for this). The professions Neuroscientist and Theoretician can allow direct map harvesting of Narcotics and Progenitor Tech respectively from appropriate map sites. If you want to use it for testing, there is a file Assets/XML/Civilizations/CIV4CivilizationInfos_test.xml that gives the Syndicate faction most of the techs if renamed to CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml .

The expeditions are in fact buildable by Explorers or Archaeologists, but you have to assign them to the Laborer profession in your colony since that's the only one with a buildrate.

Nerfed UFO strength to 4, and very significantly bumped up the Evasive Maneuvers defense bonuses in Low Orbit or space feature tiles for Corvettes/Merchantmen etc. It looks like the UFOs are now more reluctant to attack you in these tiles and if they do are likely to lose; but you'll still need to be worried about making long voyages in Deep Space unprotected (also need to think more about protecting captured Progenitor Treasures). Please feel free to tweak these values in the XML to find what plays best. (for xml docs see http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/XML/Documentation/Units/CIV4UnitInfos.xml)

When walking on the map, the civilian profession types now have moderate strength values but can't attack; so they should have a pretty good chance against UFOs in hills/forests/ruins/forts (especially with the Alien Guide promotion) but will be more vulnerable out in the open.

 

[mrlimpet]

Great to hear about the new patch - can't wait to finally try it out! Thanks for the laborer profession / expedition hint, will certainly give it a go.

I had a little test run with the caliphate today (6 games)

- of which 3 had to be aborted due to missing / unbuildable research lab
- one was aborted after being shoot down by an UFO before actually landing
- 2 were playable, however losing 9 and 4 corvettes (+content) to the
UFOs respectively

- there's one more issue with newly discovered resources (e.g. finding platinum under
a mine improvement) - they don't seem to have any effect on the yield
unfortunately

- one game crashes was reproducable (turn 165) while anothes could be
averted by loading an autosafe (turn 44)

- what's the purpose of the caliphates civilian urban combat bonus?

+ the problem with the barren moon colonization has been solved - no problems
anymore (until the UFO razes your colony )

With the reduced UFO strength, life should be easier (hopefully) - so far the UFO felt a bit like running the gauntlet, lol.

 

[orlanth]

Here's a minipatch you can try for a potential Lab workaround - all human civs start with the Earthling trait which gives free RLs in every colony. Also updated Fanatical trait to include Armed, and Lunar Outposts become unpillageable once they grow to a Lunar Settlement.

I guess Firaxis did not implement a yield update when uncovering bonuses - for the next update, I was going to make Excavations be buildable in special ruins tiles then have them randomly uncover one of the archaeological bonuses, but maybe better not unless I can do an Event based workaround.

 

[thadian]

beautiful!

size down those giant mechs and it will be all but about fixed.

i have some trouble with aliens but not in the way you might think - they are a challenge to play and i like it!

i would suggest one thing. I noticed that if i bring in a few warriors i can stand them next to a city on turn 19 and start wiping humans off my world on turn 20. These warriors aren't booted and disabled a turn (ala civ3) but instead they can attack right away when i delcare war. 2-3 soldiers can wipe 2 cities and a laborer before the enemy can respond to declaration.

EDIT - And there is no retribution. in fact, the AI "human" might never attempt another settlement again or if they do it will be near their old one, and if you alternate peace/war, you can usually let the same AI settle near the same area where you do the same thing and repeat.

also, the AI humans don't seem to care if an alien declares war. they build 1-2 warriors to protect settlement or two but then they get flooded out.

AI Aliens don't put any priority into protecting menhrirs or progenitor ruins of any type - they should park warriors by them or something.

in the earth screen, aliens can buy a certain units for free and ship them to home.

on the "Earth" map (rhye's or any), where you have more than one zone that takes you to europe, your ships might come back to any zone you know of, you can't set one "SPOT" to target returning ships.

Great work!

 

[thadian]

Ideas:

It should count how many menhrir type improvements each player "pops" and the aliens should give a penalty (your destroying our culture) based on how many you have popped.

Like in Fall from Heaven with Lairs, you might even make these improvements "explorable" so you don't accidentally kill the ruin with your explorer.

When using aliens, the colonists (humans) seem to forget they are at war with you. they might settle another place far away and just ignore you - even when your troops find them, they just don't prioritize you at all.

Neutral Encampments: I would have loved Col2 to have barb encampments to threaten everyone alike! Progenitors should occasionally wander around and kill units (without attacking/razing cities) and pillaging improvements.

 

[orlanth]

Thanks thadian. Those are quite good ideas and I would love to be able to make some changes to the AI behavior, unfortunately not being a programmer or knowing any c++ I haven't had any success at trying to edit the DLL myself. I've attempted it several times but keep running into many problems I dont understand. Due to my job demands I realistically won't be able to learn c++ from scratch this year, so I may be stuck at this point in advancing much further on this mod. Unless perhaps you might be willing to help out with some coding?

 

[thadian]

hehe, i know nothing of coding. The alien UFO's are a bit of a pain, maybe it's just me but they run around and shoot down all of my ships! It's like raging barbarians and i haven't observed them to attack the other colonists, only me. maybe their first UFO unit should not have hidden nationality?

I have noticed (maybe its just civ4col) that if i have a bunch of non-military units and i strip their specialties and make them soldiers, it does not add to rev force, it does not count "extra soldiers" even though they are now capable.

One more idea - many of the late game techs have requirements in what type of specialist has to research in order to gain bulbs. This can cause unpleasant times trying to conjure up a specialist or research in a linear order. Then again, i get it - you don't want me to get memetics and higher education as my third and fourth technologies unopposed without consequence in research order.

 

[orlanth]

Good news, I think the patch 1.3d I just uploaded (to weplayciv thread top post) may have solved a lot of the instability. It can't be used with old savegames but give it a try & let me know how it goes.

 

[thadian]

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=447895

i posted a reply in the thread requesting "native mods", and some of the content is feedback for you, but i didnt want to cut-paste everything.

I FINALLY FINISHED A GAME. I used the syndicate and won a revolution.

Most of the natives have a hard time getting specialists to research techs. The alien civ's, when their specialists are stripped can not become a student - i have not stripped UFO Cultist and tried with him, only with the hybrid/crossbreed and alien proletarians.

The starting saucer for an alien starts off in illogical places. You might start nowhere near a europe zone near you - in the middle of a planet all the way across the galaxy. how did my people find a ship so far away?

Aliens on advance start might be able to see 300 tiles on the map, including their whole planet and 1 or 2 other worlds. But only able to settle their small zone, why can they see all of this?

The royal expedition force is totally pushover. Maybe this is exploitive play but when i send my students to school to become elite soldiers the king doesn't seem to know that my citizens are now army. This means it is easy to stay very far ahead of the royal troop count.

Then again its better than in mare nostrum where you have 20 troops and the king gets 400. (yes, it happened to me.)

The progenitors just sit around and don't do anything. They are true barbarians and should act like it, i want their spiders to go out pillaging and looking for fights. can you make a progenitor king who is at default war with everybody - who has no colony, only king troops that spawn in progenitor metropolises and rampage?

The UFO's that aliens start with is ridiculous. Sometimes i don't even make it back to europe from dropping off troops before i get shot down, and they shoot down other alien ufo's as well. they also kill workers. it is hard to deal with losing your first ship and laborer to a UFO. Maybe losing hidden nationality - OR giving it -2 power so it doesn't resemble a civ4 barb camp spawning axemen next to your capital on turn 4.

Another thing is when aliens need to be able to trade correctly. That is, they need to be able to trade techs, gold and settlements with other natives the way colonists can. Maybe they should only have these "civil" relations with other natives.

I can still buy giant progenitor spiders for zero gold. i just get my saucer and ufo to earth and every several turns i get 4 spiders. usually they get fragged by native warriors (colonists dont seem to have the balls to fight a spider). But no ammount of SOD troops will attack a pile of 10 spiders even if they can win it!

I think a mean progenitor faction who acts like barbarians and hates everybody would be good. He could even diplo you to demand gold or he will direct units to attack you until either you pay or kill x units.


I will download the newest fix for this, my favorite Col mod

thanks for continuing this work so many years after the game could rationally be expected to be dead.

 

[orlanth]

Thanks for the comments. I didn't realise the weplayciv site made you log in to get patches, I'll add the current patch to the top of the 2071 thread as well. Let me know if you get any crashes, this patch seems to be more stable, I think some of the crashes were caused by aliens trying to use PROFESSION_COLONIST when they didnt have access to it.

I am currently working on a new update integrating Androrc's cool new Domestic Market mod; this should be especially great for the Aliens to help them gradually build up their own economies independent from Earth.

I would love to try making a simple change to AI behavior by inactivating any special native behaviors programmed by Firaxis, and letting everyone use the normal behavior of colonial civs. If native civs used the colonial civ behavior, and colonial civs behaved more like the natives were normal colonial civs, it would solve the problems you mentioned and make the game lots better. (I'd think the only special behavior script that would need to remain is having only colonial civs send missionaries) Androrc or anyone else who knows the SDK well, would you know of a way to achieve this?

They get a free saucer (boat) but it starts all the way across the world

That's actually cause I could only figure out how to make it start on a random place And you need to get it before turn 1 or else the Progenitor Exarch will give you a Saucer on Earth.

The aliens also start with some big advantages such as starting with populated cities already in place, greatly superior harvest of raw materials, good potential for internal population growth, etc. So that needs to be balanced against having a lot harder time than colonials in areas like manufactured goods, tech discovery, and trade with Earth. That's why I forced them to slowly build Ziggurats in their cities to give the Humans a 50-turn head start.

The natives don't have a "europe" to trade with

Weren't you able to transport goods and colonists to Earth using your Saucer? I'm interested to hear more about how the alien gameplay went; were you forced to abduct human specialists from Earth to enable advanced techs and manufacturing? I think maybe getting Crosses/Abduction should be made easier for them, but would kind of like if that's much more challenging than for the human civs. Currently their specialists like the Venerable Elder and Brilliant Polymath are "built" using advanced goods rather than educated; and to truly unlock advanced Earthling knowledge they need to kidnap human scientists from Earth. Since they can get so many basic aliens it might be too easy if they could all get educated to advanced specialists.

However they DO get your units. It is awful when you finally get 2 citizens born and both become british.

What do you mean by this?

The progenitors just sit around and don't do anything. They are true barbarians and should act like it, i want their spiders to go out pillaging and looking for fights. can you make a progenitor king who is at default war with everybody - who has no colony, only king troops that spawn in progenitor metropolises and rampage?
The UFO's that aliens start with is ridiculous. Sometimes i don't even make it back to europe from dropping off troops before i get shot down, and they shoot down other alien ufo's as well. they also kill workers. it is hard to deal with losing your first ship and laborer to a UFO. Maybe losing hidden nationality - OR giving it -2 power so it doesn't resemble a civ4 barb camp spawning axemen next to your capital on turn 4.

Maybe I should inactivate starting UFOs for now, since hopefully they can eventually be build by the aliens themselves (you can inactivate them by deleting the ALIENSTART1 line in Events/Civ4EventTriggerInfos.xml) If there were to be marauding Progenitors though wouldn't that be a very similar issue as marauding UFOs currently?

 

[orlanth]

I've now uploaded a new Version 1.4, some of the principal updates are below:

* The mod now includes the Domestic Economy Modcomp by AndrorctheOrc. Each colonist type and colonial building generates demand for a certain type of goods which can be seen in the Civilopedia. If you generate enough supply and demand, goods can be consumed in your colonies by your citizens and buildings, creating cash from your internal economy that can eventually decrease your dependence on trade with Earth.
* Some graphical updates; let me know what you think of the new look
* Enabling the full set of diplomacy options for Alien players
* Removed starting UFOs to make the early game less difficult, while leaving open the possibility for Aliens to develop and build UFOs in the later game
* A number of changes to the default AI behavior for natives (aliens), mostly by removing most of the native-specific behaviors from vanilla Colonization to hopefully enable Alien Empires to behave more like regular colonial civs, while also having more of a focus on internal population growth from Food.

Colonization: 2071 v1.4 update​

http://www.weplayciv.com/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=216"​

 

[orlanth]

Uploaded patch 1.4a added to the top post on this thread. (As usual, unzip the patch in your Mods/Colonization 2071 folder and overwrite old files.)


* Updated Domestic Economy by Androrc; when you successfully create supply and demand to consume goods in a colony, additionally creates a small amount of Liberty and Propaganda to represent the satisfaction of your colonists and their growing self-sufficiency. Also adjusted some of the goods demands (eg to avoid consuming Tools which are needed for construction.)

* Behaving more like colonial civs, it seems the Alien Empires can be more opportunistic/aggressive if they find you vulnerable. To compensate for early vulnerability, Earthling civs will Colonial Garrison unit dispatched by their government and can recruit more on Earth; although their gradually escalating cost weak offensive capability will eventually necessitate development of a colonial militia. Alien players are also able to buy a few defensive Progenitor Killbots during their setup phase.

 

[Androrc the Orc]

I was doing some experimenting, and:

A map with both space and water!