Missed out on this thread over the weekend, but I'm back.
Very cool. I always thought there could be something other than "Future Tech" at the end of the Civ tech tree. The fact you are pulling assets from SMAC just makes this mod double cool.
I'm gona keep an eye out for your mod thread.
Yeah, it's coming along nicely, but I wasn't going to create a dedicated thread until I had a file to present, even if it's all just placeholders. The technologies are all in (although the Flavors need tweaking), the wonders and resource modifiers are nearly all in, and I'm still working on units and improvements.
The thing is, I agree with
Optimizer: complexity, for its own sake, is bad; having hundreds of techs just makes things drag out, and kills the utility of the various "free tech" wonders and such. So anyone expecting a straight port of SMAC will be disappointed. Most of the new structures and such are about blurring lines (buildings that add to both production and research, for instance, or happiness and culture at the same time), just like in SMAC, but the units are very specialized and a lot of the techs have been trimmed out as unnecessary.
Basically, I'm following some simple design principles:
1> This will still be set on Earth, with the techs being purely extensions of the previous ones. So there's just no need for SMAC's "remedial" techs and structures, like the Network Node (basic +research building), unless I want to change these to do something completely different. That's why it's only 47 techs, I've tossed out about half of SMAC's tree (and didn't include any of the SMACX techs); there was just no need for more.
Likewise, a few things had to get rearranged for practical reasons; Graviton techs are now much sooner, so that I could have hover units earlier instead of needing even more tracked ones. Conversely, nanotech and quantum ones come much later. And the dependencies of the techs were greatly changed, just so that lines wouldn't cross over each other in the tech tree. (SMAC's tech tree was horribly messy on paper.)
2> The units generally aren't about scaling up in raw power, unlike in SMAC where it was all about using the newest high-power weapon or defense. Most of the advanced units in these eras are comparable in power to modern-era units (or even lower in a few cases), but are loaded with special abilities instead.
For instance, I add the Laser Infantry; think of them as the soldiers from the
Starship Troopers movie. They're actually weaker than MechInfantry (40 vs 50) and only move 2, but cost about half as much and among other things have a "Flanking" promotion that gives them +25% when adjacent to a friendly unit, plus a bonus when attacking or defending a city or when fighting Psi units. So they become pretty desirable to have around if a war bogs down, and since they're so cheap to build, you can rush them easily or build them in a city under siege.
Or the Mindworms, a Psi unit (new unit type) that also has low power but heals automatically, upgrades through a variety of buildings, gains double XP but can't spawn Great Generals, and so on.
Or the Gravtank, which is a 100-power Armor unit (Modern Armor is 80, for reference) that can travel on Coast tiles and treats all terrains as 1MP, plus a few other tweaks (like a bonus against bombardment and better visibility, and no penalties when attacking cities or anything). Not substantially STRONGER than a Modern Armor, but definitely more useful overall.
In other cases, I'm just combining existing units. The Needlejet is just a fighter/bomber hybrid, capable of all fighter actions but with a good ground attack rating, good evasion, and a big range. Likewise, I've got one naval vessel that combines the submarine with the destroyer (an invisible sub that can bombard!) and one that combines the carrier with the battleship (a carrier that can bombard!).
3> The existing game will be heavily tweaked to make it more likely that you'd ever reach these eras. For instance, cities will now take more food to grow, and I want to make it easier for an out-teched civ to catch up (better discount for late researchs).
Also, I'm giving a Himeji Castle-style bonus to ALL units by way of the Palace: +10% when fighting in friendly territory, plus another 10% if ATTACKING within friendly territory. This should drastically slow down Domination victories, and keep things a lot more balanced.
I've removed the Spaceship Victory entirely; building the ship first instead gives you a free SP, a very long Golden Age, and unlocks certain Centauri techs (Centauri Ecology, Centauri Empathy, Centauri Meditation, etc.) for everyone. I also want it to start a "World Peace" event (no wars, everyone in a Golden Age) for ten turns, but I can't code that part yet.
Each SP tree gained a sixth box, with some powerful effects, but this drastically slows down the culture victory since you'd now need 30 instead of 25.
4> I'm adding three distinct Eras, each designed with its own "flavor".
The
Digital Era (GridX = 15 to 17) has a lot of Wonders (contrast with the Modern Era, which I've renamed the "Nuclear Era": very few wonders) but is light on units and city improvements, and a lot of techs provide bonuses to various tile improvements (+1 production for a farm, +1 gold for a mine, and so on), which shifts back away from the specialist-centric economy of the Nuclear Era.
Most of the units in this era are about simplifying life, like the two naval vessels mentioned above. This is sort of a "consolidation" era; much harder to have massive wars, but your city growth will take off. Especially if I can get that "World Peace" event in to kick off this era. This'll also be an era where you start getting enough surplus happiness to start filling in all those empty spots in the world with smaller cities.
The
Fusion Era (GridX = 18 to 20) has a lot of city improvements, but the most important part is that this era includes nearly all of the "endgame" units, a la the Modern Armor in the core game. Most of these are highly specialized units; you'd use one type of infantry for defense and a different type for attacks, for instance. This era also introduces some basic terraforming actions, if you want to change Grassland to Plains and so on, plus the Magtubes improvement (costs 3 per tile, but has infinite movement).
This era's either about massive city improvement or huge wars. Or both. I'd expect most games to end in this era, like how the core game often ends at the end of the Industrial era.
The
Nanotech Era (GridX = 21 to 23) is all about growing insanely big cities, improving specialists, and spawning Great People, in preparation for the Transcendence victory condition. The few units in this era are all in the "Giant Death Robot" power category, with tons of raw firepower, and most of the buildings are so expensive to build that you simply CAN'T have more than one or two new ones in each city before time runs out (but are VERY powerful).
(To win Transcendence, you need to build a Wonder, and then a 20-turn countdown would start. Sacrificing a great person would knock 2 turns off the timer. I haven't got this coded yet, though.)
If you make it to this era, then it's all about the race to the endgame, or utterly crushing everyone with an unstoppable military of giant robots, hovering battlecruisers, and orbital death rays.
There are only a few things I really need to get this off the ground:
A> I'm developing an Empath specialist type. Instead of adding food, hammers, research, gold, etc., an Empath simply adds +1 happiness. This would give some basic tunability to the existing happiness model.
Unfortunately, to do this, I need to create a new Yield type for happiness, and that isn't in there. I can add a new entry in the yields file, but I can't find how to tie this to the effect I want. (Also not in there? Culture as a tile yield, which explains why the Great Artist can't build anything. All the things that generate happiness and culture do so through explicit table entries.)
B> The ability to use Wonder movies. Any format would do; I've got the SMAC movies translated to common movie formats on my computer, but Civ5 just seems to use a picture and a quote audio file. (For copyright reasons, I don't think I could distribute those even under Fair Use, but for my own copy of the mod...)
I can take screenshots of the movies to make some placeholder pictures, but I REALLY want those movies. And this could also expand to adding the Civ4 wonder movies to many of the older wonders...
C> The two Events I mentioned, the triggered World Peace for building the spaceship and the Transcendence victory countdown. What I'd REALLY like is a "Breakout" event in the Digital Era where wild mindworms start spawning around the world, but that might be a bit much.
I'm hoping to have a semi-working version this weekend. More as events warrant.
I will send you a PM.
We're going to expand the tech tree to ~300 techs
