[MOD] Colonization: 2071

[orlanth]

Wow awesome! How did you do that, those oceanic planets look great!

 

[Androrc the Orc]

Wow awesome! How did you do that, those oceanic planets look great!

I created a new plot type, PLOT_SPACE, and a new terrain type, TERRAIN_SPACE (using the space graphics from your mod), which naturally is the default terrain for PLOT_SPACE. Then I tweaked the Planets.py mapscript, as well as the map generation process and some other things in relation to plots in the DLL to make it work correctly.

The space plots could be further tweaked to only allow units with the bSpace field set to 1 to traverse through them. And the starships could be made able to fly through land and water plots as well, if that is desired.

There is still one graphical issue though: coast terrain looks a bit strange when adjacent to space sometimes).

 

[thadian]

map with space and water, nice man... well, i am going to type a lot of feedback but its 1.3 feedback so SOME of the crashes might be incorrect but according to the changelog the rest of what i say should be on point, starting with...

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?

When a colonist meets natives you get gold, then with missionaries you can get units, and you get gold weather the alien has any gold or not. the alien doesn't lose gold. But with a missionary, units can defect to the colonists. i have never lost a specialized unit, only aliens and not hybrid or crossbreed. sometimes you will lose an alien - and the colonist will get a brilliant polymath, you DO lose the unit.

 

[thadian]

ok, i apologize in advance for the quality level of this feedback and weather or not it is helpful, mostly questions and comments.

On an XYZ Axix, Moons float a little bit high - moon atmospheres suck, only earthlike atmosphere is a non-punishment.

Too few native diplo options, should be able to trade gold, techs with natives at least?

Alien Starts - No guarentee of coastal start, can only build ziggurauts - should be able to build the 3 buildings that zig unlocks? Buying population is too cheap, improvements too expensive.

Aliens can build both colonist and alien version of docks, drydock, shipyard etc.
Alien research buildings crash - building progenitor autofabs in a lot of cities crash (MAYBE aliens using that colonist trigger you said they can't use but tried to)

Should kings occasionally demand/sieze settlements? Maybe conduct diplo? I have not seen a col2071 king tell me i am at war and to fight his enemy.

Resources: Nesting Grounds, Spider Lair, Prog Metropolis - what do they do? anything? they should be a little more up front defined. can anything be built on them? Native Unglates spawning on volcanic hills is annoying when i can only improve the hill with mines and i have a foodie on it.

improvements: Ancient Databank, Janus Device etc. - What do they do? Who builds, when? with what tech and where? i have seen these a million times... Same with Sacred Grove. Maybe aliens should get seperate specialist types for field journalist or abductor? can anybody build any of these improvements? maybe aliens should get unique tile improvements to build on their unique resources? this would show that aliens have different needs out of the same tile as humans.

Techs: Aliens are locked out of Alien Autopsy - i usually have to go to earth for specialists and by that time i have already researched almost the entire memitics line and i can research everything in 3-5 turns anyway. there are some areas humans can get easily that aliens can not get - how about an alien line in the tree? how about basing research on buildings instead of specialists?

Techs:

Aside from horrible teching balance, the natives should have their ruins count as forts for defense to make them easier to protect.
Some fathers are worthless to aliens like alien linguist and rights activist. could add pro alien bonus like 25% resistance to culture from colonists or strengthin relations with colonists.

no transcendence tech for science victory - should it be 2000 techs? by this point in the game, 5 saucers can carry 1500 techs so even 5000 techs is reasonable.

Should alien specialists really be built? I can flood the board with soldiers, polymaths and mutants very quickly while having no way to shuffle around my citizens. so, i kill off all my worthless "born" citizens to replace them by building soldiers? who am i, the progenitors? (ok, this works for the felids but the others.... show some kind of empathy.)

Units:

Alien -can not become students.
Alien Crossbreed - vanishes in colonies on buildings or tiles, can not select profession when attempt to eject from a colony, gives zero bonuses when on a tile - the source of many crashes, i presume.
Corvette - One way to fix the early game is with 20% to withdraw or increase power by +2.
Mining/Science Vessel - What do these do, i have played your mod for a long time and have built many of these and have never even figured this out, they dont seem to do anything.
UFO - one fix is to give it: power 3, move 3, cargo 2 (goods only) and remove hidden nationality.

Aliens: No field station, should be able to spread a progenitor religion and missionary humans?

Many techs require a specific student type not reflected in the aliens. they should have units that count as or techs should be researchable by colonist unit a or native unit b.

Diff. between progenitor king and hidden ufo's: accountability. i can hate the prog king all game, and take it less personal than when all my neighbors use hidden nationality to frag my workers and convoys.

 

[thadian]

and with their being so many unique native resources and improvements its a shame they are mostly pre-builds with no ability to build anew. maybe aliens should "remember" how to build some of these improvements as they gain in techs?

 

[Androrc the Orc]

map with space and water, nice man...

There is an issue: sometimes the interaction between coast (rather than ocean) terrain with space terrain doesn't look so good:

 

[KJ Jansson]

Hi Orlanth!

Sorry for delay, but I was absent last few days and only today open my account on civfanatics.

As I understand you are interesting to prevent Treasures to explore the territory.

I made all corrections in both source codes and XML files. Please, find them in the archive.

I used the source codes from your last version "Colonization: 2071" with 1.4a patch. All made corrections are summarized in correction.txt file.

Good luck in your modding.

 

[orlanth]

Great, thanks a lot KJ Jansson! Im now going to be traveling with no access to modding for a bit but will take a look when I get back.

Well, those aquatic planets still look cool Androrc . Those greenish bits at the bottom have an interesting look, kind of like an undersea trench. Maybe the border problem could be solved by just having only "inland" seas. But I wonder if Deep Space terrain needs to stay named in XML as TERRAIN_OCEAN and Low Orbit as TERRAIN_COAST to properly apply the tile yield rules for Astronauts, Orbital Traders etc. (People wouldn't want to build sea ships for each planet, so perhaps the water could probably just be left as DOMAIN_LAND type.)

Thanks for keeping up playtesting of the mod Thadian. BTW look in the Game Concepts for further info about game features; though there's more documentation I need to put in there. For example, the Progenitor improvements only start in their abandoned Metropolis tiles and can't be built, but after you capture one from the Killbots, your advanced professions (Theoretician, Nanotechnologist, Symbologist etc) working the tile can produce advanced goods directly without raw materials. On many of the unique map sites such as Iridescent Pyramids, Sacred Grove, Catacombs etc, an Intrepid Archaeologist can build an Expedition, this consumes the unit but greatly increases yields of these advanced goods. Mining Vessels can harvest raw materials from Asteroid Belts and Space Junk, and Science Vessels obtain scientific goods from Gravitational Anomalies etc in Deep Space, they also have the ability to terraform hostile Moon atmospheres to make the Lunar Colonies more productive.

However that Janus Device in the pedia is just some placeholder art that's not yet active. I was thinking of a late-stage tech Janus Project which enables building it; possibly developing the Device could be a unique victory condition like Spaceship Victory. Alternately, it could generate high Research yield for Astronomers; so if you neglect other tech development and focus hard on the Project, you will fall behind early but then pull ahead in research. Any other ideas for it?

I'm thinking a cool concept for Aliens could be enabling them to use the Education system, but instead of academic buildings they use genetic engineering in a Decomposition Vat building. Then their basic aliens (and captured Earthlings) could be "decomposed" and reformed into increasingly advanced hybrid specialists

After fixing the Colonist issue for aliens I haven't been observing any crashes in v1.4 so far, (but I haven't tested extensively and am traveling now); so after playing with v1.4 please let me know how its working.

 

[thadian]

you fixed the alien crossbreed and the 1.4 UFO's are more balanced. i don't miss being hunted by 6 starting UFO's from progenitor king. I 1.4, many tile interactions have improved on terms of feature/resource/bonus/improvement continuity.

I have been getting crashes with space elevator - i think it crashes when it either sells too many goods or brings in too much income.

Improved Mecha Pilot father has no description.

Aliens can still build drydock/shipyard and alien drydock/shipyard. i haven't seen this cause crashes. Alien Crossbreed now can research and work tiles correctly.

I would like to see this oceanic maps uploaded - it would be great to play on it. Having "coastal cities" in the center of the planet would fix a lot of problems and the oceans would reduce the fact each planet is about 1/5 "worthless" anyway. This would allow a "dock" that you put on a coastal city to be different than a "Drydock" that you put on a tile next to space. This allows some different concepts - underwater ruins, water boats and jet fighters that can't enter space.

it allows for scenarios - imagine the progenitor invasion of earth. This means Alien colonists and Human natives with "Earth" and "Mars". Some "Planets" could generate different types. a gas planet, a water planet etc. that is, planets primarily of one terrain, enhanced to flavor. this way a planets script instead of 5 identical planets could give 3 different types of planet.

i suppose this all sounds pretty ambitious, but i love it! Your 1.4 map is ugly, the black ashy tiles replacing the neon orange... im not sure which is worse, living in orange nerf-world or living on an ashy heap - but the ashy heap gives character flavor, adds to the sorrow of the situation of the aliens and anything that changes this is better.


Also, as strategy goes, i find my early game commited to razing a city or 2 for citizens, research memitics and education line - this allows the rest of the tech tree to unlock itself ahead of your building pace.

i find that i am deleting almost all of my born units and ufo cultists to build soldiers. This means i can actually get a bigger "army" over time than humans ever could hope to. The pace of UFO cultists was too slow in 1.3, a little too fast in 1.4. I also think the student rate of UFO cultists should go back to 2 or 3. As for resources, i usually settle a bunch of 1-pop cities and transport everything to manufacture. i normally have 2 cities working resources out and 2 cities working heavy research. every other city has one citizen on bells and any other citizens go to food/bells/science.

Most of my early populace that i can't get from razing cities, i get from founding fathers - without those fatherly units, aliens wouldn't even be playable.

i will keep playing - i hope you enjoy your vacation, and i will be looking forward to a planets mapscript that generates something that actually looks like planets

 

[thadian]

i like your vat building idea and as for the map script imperfection, haven't you noticed rivers look horrible when they reach space? i already tolerate this (usually by using world builder and making it start the river on the edge and work inland to fix the ugly) and the little corner there doesn't hurt a thing.

 

[Androrc the Orc]

i like your vat building idea and as for the map script imperfection, haven't you noticed rivers look horrible when they reach space? i already tolerate this (usually by using world builder and making it start the river on the edge and work inland to fix the ugly) and the little corner there doesn't hurt a thing.

That river actually doesn't exist when having space and water tiles (since rivers end in water plots, rather than space ones).

 

[thadian]

well, it still gives a bonus to my city, so... i played quite a bit of 1.4 and here is some feedback.

First of all, i made a lot of personal tweaks to advanced start. I made it cost 100 gold to found a city (increasing by 50 per city) and i allowed Elder Council and Shamans Lodge to be built at a cost of 150. This means that Ziggurat, Council, Lodge and Warehouse all cost 150 gold.

Then i moved the cultivator to the "alien" tech that makes you alien, and i moved its building to Shamanic Lodge. So, on advanced start you can either put a city with Zig + Council + Warrior or Zig + Lodge + Worker. I also reduced the cost of the native wagon train to 180 (adv start) and this causes playing natives to finally feel good.

You have a few options other than rely on getting fathers for extra citizens, and it is reasonable - the AI aliens already seem to advance start with buildings and troops, so why not players? i played a humans game and it made the natives pretty dangerous but it is balanced because the natives still don't know how to execute a strategy with this advantage.

Ok, the aliens can build ALL human versions of ALL special buildings from human docks, universities and sattelite uplinks - i think i have seen crashes to this because what else could be in conflict? Humans can not build alien buildings, however.

About using water in the maps - i think work boats (for water resources) and sky-ships, airplanes or fighters will add extra dimensionality. these units can explore planets but not space.

Natives have a cheeser strategy you might want to know about - but i suppose this works on all versions of col. All you have to do is advance your start with 2 cities, each with a zig and 2-3 wagons. if your planet is empty, reroll.

then, choose your free warrior - he will frag every human who lands near you, in fact you will spend almost all game at war with every human but dont worry they wont pursue you. Use native wagons and trade cheat! maybe its a bug but...

When you use wagons to trade with natives, ask for all their food and resource. ask what they want, and they want you to give - oh, what a nice guy. you want me to take 100 or so credits in addition to a free wagon of goodies.

These goody wagons will float your economy - the AI native chiefs never seem to figure out they are giving you everything for free, just sell it in the third world for tools, weapons and earth goods - the big 3.

What i am saying about a bug is that EVERY ALIEN COLONY will give you their 150 food and 150 whatever else they have and about 100 gold every visit - this means 3 wagons + 6 aliens on your planet = riches!

Ok, so even without cheating the trade system or my racist hateful behavior against a race of thin-skinned consumers who drained their own world dry - the natives still have some setbacks. First of all, if you miss the fathers who give you free people you are toast. you also need at least one father to give good native relations, pref. the one who also gives 3 crosses.

Goods:

Every turn, every good in any ammount above zero (accept food) sells itself down. even things i don't want it to sell. for example, i set a city on a forest, and it starts selling the lumber. I set the governer and trade routes to emport/export all, keep 150 and no matter what i do, every copy of every good is always sold. this means i have to store earth goods, weapons, tools, and things inside of transports in fear they will sell down before i can spend them on research or buildings. It would be nice if there were a way to declare a minimum ammount to keep in your city for your auto-goods sell thing. despite that i never have goods right after producing them, i love this addition.


As i said, alien people now work normally but the only way i know of for aliens to get an early hybrid to research alien autopsy is a founding father.

Most of the aliens have a very easy time with the line of memetics and higher education, and they have almost no ability to get earth goods - only to use a saucer. I always bring up this tech line because i do zero research until i can - alien homies will research techs and give them to me on my wagons. By the way, when i ask for goodies like food or uranium to be added to the tech, the AI asks for less money - maybe the AI THINKS that i am offering the thing i am asking for so it offers what it normally would, and i win.

Once my aliens have helped me get some of the starting human techs, and i get earth goods, i can research the education line. once i have memetics, i am usually able to research and build anything i want to - period. this makes a big difference. if i run out of gold to buy buildings, send a wagon to visit kilaric.

Besides the bug of auto-sell all goods, native trade wierdness this is almost fixed. Now, if you will be patient with me and answer some questions, i am not totally incompetent and incapable. I have been editing files to make small changes for years, just nothing huge. you broke colonizations rules - you made it outer space, and you made natives REALLY playable.

I would like to start slowly working on an attempt to break another piece of ice - i want to make kings as playable as natives and i have many ideas on how to rework everything, i will tell you all about it in a PM or something. i just need a little bit of instruction.

 

[thadian]

Sky, Space and Water.

Water: Work Boat and Destroyer. Destroyer can explore water, and shoot hostile boats and bombard any land, sky or space unit. Work boats or work divers would work underwater ruins and resources. Water tiles would break up the worlds on planets mapscript that either destroyer doubles as a transport of 2 units OR land units need to embark on water - OR the creation of a new land unit who can walk on water, but i like this the least. i like destroyer transporting as it gives them another use. Progenitor water units could occasionally spawn to create a threat.

Sky: Planes would move 2 spaces, can not cross over peaks - can cross over water. Helicopters move one space, can cross over peaks, can cross over water. Helicopters would double as transport. Likewise these movement spaces could become 3 for planes and 2 for helicopters. I fear making stronger/weaker versions with more/less range would add too much.

Space ships: Can not fly over land or water. Possible "Shuttle" that can fly over land, water or space, like an alien UFO, a shuttle would have power 1. Space transports should be able to carry helicopters and destroyers (as long as the helicopter/destroyer does not have cargo itself).

A few space and sea monsters, distance between planets in the center of the map, slightly bigger planets would allow room for a few space monsters or progenitor ships to give barbarian presence.

Well, thats about it for now - i will keep on it.

 

[orlanth]

Those are some cool ideas. Upload the XML files with balance changes you made to the Alien advanced start and I'll try to incorporate them.

To try to make natives/aliens play similarly to colonial civs for this mod, I've been looking through the DLL for isNative checks and commenting out some of the codeblocks for default natives-only behavior from Civ4Col; but I may still be missing something to change about their trade behavior. I don't think I updated the new sourcecode in the last uploads so I'll try to do that soon if people want to look at it. However rather than continuing with the current DLL, I'm hoping to eventually rebuild the 2071 mod using a more advanced DLL as a base, like that of the RoR mod, or possibly TAC if that's impossible to achieve. There are really a lot of good AI improvements and features developed in there that I couldn't achieve working all by myself.

I like the idea of aquatic planets; the graphics problems are caused when a Coast tile is next to Space, so I'm guessing this could be solved in a mapscript by changing any Coast tiles on the edge of planets to a basic land terrain. Having water terrain on planets would enable interesting gameplay for aliens with the Aquatic trait. Their units could move on water terrain and buld cities and Aquaculture improvements there, while the Earthlings couldn't without a special tech. I wouldn't want to get too complicated with multiple Domain types and carrier units though for fear the AI could not handle it. Perhaps replacing default Wagons with a Planetary Shuttle that could access all planetary terrains would enable the AI to still do wagon transport.

 

[thadian]

i have a lot to do today but will try to upload them tonite, the big problem playing a native still faces is no matter what form of cargo-carrier they walk into ANY colonist or native city with, they can ask for resources and... well, i won't keep bringing it up we all know about it and i am wondering if there is a simple fix.

I think this was intentional programming by the dev's, the native AI sucks so by letting it commit diplo highway robbery you can try to make 1-2 of them successful in the long game after the rest fall and evacuate their cultural lands. in a format with no intention for natives to be ever playable, this is not harmful.

the only problem then, is when they ARE intended to be playable - they become exploitable quickly. i think the "easy fix" is to "redirect" the definition of "native trade rules" to colonist trade rules. this would allow natives to trade fairly and not freely and as long as this didn't make a big conflict, it would be better for aliens to function as normally as possible.

So, a few civ ideas and i will be working on upcoming college projects as my new semester starts so i doubt i will have too much time to make them myself - so i propose them to the master. this is purely for testing and for fun and would allow you to push the rules deeper.

You have tech tree definitions of human/alien in addition to the game features of colonist/native. this model allows a second axis to be crossed, so...

Progenitors - Colonist (yeah, human.) Tech types - Alien. (With a few edits to how the game handles the difference in this factor, you could go a lot of places with this.) This means they have a progenitor world europe zone, they have starting ships and units like normal colonists. Being natives however, they follow the cultural rules, improvement/worker/specialist rules as natives.

Kulkata - Alien (Natives here.) Tech types - Human.
This is a race of survivors in the chaotic world. they were once subjects of forbidden experiments, humans who were abducted and taken to their world. the descendants of these humans have survived and evolved and continue to gain power.

They are considered by the tech tree to be humans, granting them all benefits associated with being human. However, they are actually natives to this world now. this classification allows them advanced starts with access to the alien technology they have always observed and the secret ways of earth are lost to them.


by making alterations to what benefits you grant "humans" and "aliens" by your tech tree classifications, these 2 examples could be made into very fun civ's that break the rules of colonist and native. that said, im going to test some more games and prepare my files for upload so that you can change, rebalance and do as you feel need be done. that said, i hope for some oceanic planets soon...

 

[thadian]

also, in a mod i am preparing to make i need the oceanic map to produce one large world with space tiles renamed "deep ocean". coast, ocean, deep ocean. then i can create a real planet earth with travel zones for ships but still have a few advanced ships who can navigate deep oceans without using space tiles.

this will allow me to begin to consider how i will implement europe, kings and chiefs.

 

[Androrc the Orc]

I like the idea of aquatic planets; the graphics problems are caused when a Coast tile is next to Space, so I'm guessing this could be solved in a mapscript by changing any Coast tiles on the edge of planets to a basic land terrain.

You are correct, it could be fixed that way (or alternatively, by making them ocean squares and pushing land two tiles deep into the planet). The one thing I haven't developed yet is the DOMAIN_SPACE (units that move in space); when I do that, I will send you the codes for the Space plots.

 

[orlanth]

You are correct, it could be fixed that way (or alternatively, by making them ocean squares and pushing land two tiles deep into the planet). The one thing I haven't developed yet is the DOMAIN_SPACE (units that move in space); when I do that, I will send you the codes for the Space plots.

Wow thank you Andre, thats a great help. Do you know what's the role of the following in globaldefines.xml - does this relate only to the water-specific professions yield, or mapscript creation, river direction, ship AI, or possibly all of these? I wonder if a space terrain should be assigned to these or not.

<Define>
<DefineName>DEEP_WATER_TERRAIN</DefineName>
<DefineTextVal>TERRAIN_OCEAN</DefineTextVal>
</Define>
<Define>
<DefineName>SHALLOW_WATER_TERRAIN</DefineName>
<DefineTextVal>TERRAIN_COAST</DefineTextVal>
</Define>

BTW I tried to import your nif file in blender, but still couldn't get blender to import nifs on my computer Have you had any success with it? I've come across almost a dozen Civ4 unit nif files which seem to crash in Civ4Col for some reason.

problem playing a native still faces is no matter what form of cargo-carrier they walk into ANY colonist or native city with, they can ask for resources

Im getting that problem too. There must be some DLL function for native trade behavior that I haven't found, or maybe changed inappropriately I'll keep looking for it

the aliens can build ALL human versions of ALL special buildings from human docks, universities and sattelite uplinks

That's a remaining problem as well. I set those to require the human-specific City Center building, but the game seems to ignore it. I think that for SpecialBuildings it must use different logic. When changing to a new DLL, hopefully I can get the tech system to allow civs to have different buildingtypes for the same buildingclasses, that should help a lot with building problems (maybe even the Inventors House?)

I made all corrections in both source codes and XML files. Please, find them in the archive.
I used the source codes from your last version "Colonization: 2071" with 1.4a patch. All made corrections are summarized in correction.txt file.
Good luck in your modding.

Thanks for the modcomp KJ. I also needed to use the function willRevealByMove, but I found it in your mod, and its working nicely.

 

[thadian]

this post is an attempt to upload my .rar archive. i hate to bomb you with the whole folder but i don't remember all the edits i made.

wannabe modder lesson number one has been learned, i will from now on keep a .txt file where i list what changes were made where. this way i can only upload what is relevant. again, i apologize and lesson learned.

this is my XML folder and i don't believe i changed anything outside of it.

 

[thadian]

as for the native trade operation my answer is to not exploit it, but i don't know how to track if the AI uses this as a way for natives to trade submissively to each other, which could be responsible for why one native always has 8000 gold and the others have nothing but a bunch of food.