Rallying call for all interested: Colonisation of the Moon mod!

So, I had company over the weekend, and am going to have to do my taxes soon, so I've been rather out of action for a while, and will probably be busy for another several days, but Warsong and I are still working on the new design doc. I think Matt has thrown his hands up in the air about this crash bug, so I'll try and solve that too, but if we can't get it working, we may just wind up moving to the new design early.

Let's see... So I had a chance to go through Holistic's ideology suggestions last week. I thought the era 1 suggestions were basically redundent with the faction trait & charters, and therein didn't do much. I don't see any reason to have an ideology that is not really expected to spread in some fashion. I'm sort of eh on the Tellism and Symbiotism strains, although Symbiotism gets very close to Lunacy 8). I liked Fatalism and Exodus (Preservationism), and I'm thinking we probably want to add more "negative" ideologies like this. I've also been discussing with Warsong the idea of linking civics with ideologies in that switching to certain civics triggers unhappiness and revolts in proportion to the support it and opposing ideologies have in your colony. Also, Warsong wanted to do a line of civics called "Government Theory" to distinguish between the ideals behind your governmental system and the actual way your govenment appears/interfaces with your populace. I've convinced him, though to move that over to a set of ideologies, with your "state" ideology being the governmental ideal which you your government theoretically represents (note these are all era 3+ concerns).

I've been too busy to really do much with this, but I've been working on a merge of Matt's debugged XML files and my debugged XML files. I've also got a major restructing of the Python files in progress. I'm hoping that between these two our crash bug will at least make itself scarse. If not, we'll have to either rollback our XML to the old version or start in on the new design (roll all new XML files). We'll have to see how that all goes. For the moment, though, I'm pinned by taxes probably for the majority of the week. I'm still checking the forums and trying to keep up on my Warsong mail, so feel free to throw out ideas or what have you here. We have a prelim feature/design list for the new design which I will transliterate when I get a chance.
 
BTW, Matt, if you have time a couple of things you could look into for me. 1st, creating a "feature" (like jungle) for the Lunar charged dust. 2nd, a bulwark "improvement" buildable outside of one's cultural zone. Something like a low embankment wall or sandbag wall concept, preferrably that can be sided (blocking a particular side of the hex) -- that part I can jury rig with a dialog, etc. if you can figure out how to let workers build one outside of a cultural zone. I don't really care how you jury rig it, if you can get it to work. Worse comes to worse, I'll make an action button for it, and we'll just fake something for the AI. The AI is going to have a certain amount of "cheat" code anyway to compensate for things it can't understand.
 
Also for Matt, as your time is available, Warsong has dug up the following information on the moon resources vis a vis our mapping script:

In the hills, Magnesium
On the flat, Titantium
In the hills, Aluminum
On the flat, Iron
On the flat, Calcium, Chromium, Manganese, Sodium, Potassium
Everywhere: Silicon...

I'm not entirely sure at this point if we're going to use all of these resources in the tech tree, but if you make a generic distribution pattern based on lists of "hill resources" and "flatland resources", that should work out well.
 
Also for events, We have "X-Class" solar storms every 11 years, with a super storm in 11*11 years. Further, we have solar flare/storms of much more mild types every year. I'll probably add this in as events. The anual (per turn) solar storm will just be a passive form of attrition, basically, and with tech will be shieldable against.

Apparently Solar Wind is a lot more real then I thought, and contains a lot of Hydrogen, so we're going to move forward with some solar wind related techs like Hydrogen collection, etc. Warsong has some white papers on things like "Cold-Sink Traps" which net hydrogen via a chemical catalyst which is not lost in the process, as well as some late age techs like the Plasma-Energy Web and the like. Also apparently hydrogen content in the soil is by latitude, so there is a lot more hydrogen in the soil (about 15x as much) near the poles as near the equator. This means that polar regions are likely to be high hydrogen production areas, as opposed to ice, and will have something like a food bonus. Also, He3 is apparently a renewable resource on the moon, which is all good, since civ doesn't have a great dispersal model.

There's also questions about underground water on the moon, I don't have that discussion here in front of me atm, so I don't recall where we left it.

We have a Nasa white paper on Dust Transport on the moon from rovers, walker, mining and construction as well as natural sources like impacts, solar winds, etc.

Anyway, just a little snapshot, more later 8).
 
Sounds good Belizan. We figured Solar Wind was valuable, but I wasn't aware that it contained Hydrogen. Very cool possibilities.
 
Belizan said:
.. This means that polar regions are likely to be high hydrogen production areas, as opposed to ice, and will have something like a food bonus.
Click to expand...

How does this follow? Hydrogen = food? :confused:

Btw, in case you weren't aware, C.Roland has created a "Solar Plant" facility/improvement.
 
Do you (or your friend) have any idea how processing-intensive these procedé's are compared with just mining waterice?
Granted that hydrogen and oxygen give water, but instead of letting that resource give food, simply allow OR waterice resource, OR oxygen+hydrogen resource to let glasshouses have a larger food output. Or both of course, but the lack of waterice within a faction's border will at least give it water if it has oxygen and hydrogen. ;)
 
Having access to hydrogen should make your people happy, but I'm not sold it equals food so directly. Maybe have it needed to build buildings that generate food? I also like the National Wonder type mission idea to get comets or whatever to gain +x number of waterice resources.
 
GeoModder said:
Do you (or your friend) have any idea how processing-intensive these procedé's are compared with just mining waterice?
Granted that hydrogen and oxygen give water, but instead of letting that resource give food, simply allow OR waterice resource, OR oxygen+hydrogen resource to let glasshouses have a larger food output. Or both of course, but the lack of waterice within a faction's border will at least give it water if it has oxygen and hydrogen. ;)
Click to expand...

Well, "mining waterice" is sort of up for debate at the moment. According to Warsong there is very little evidence of any actual water being present in the form of ice in any quantity anywhere on the moon, where as it is basically known that water exists in rock form awaiting chemical extraction. Particularly near the poles. As for the food vs. hydroponics enablement, that's more on the detail side (which is to say it's not clearly specified atm). It's more to say that this means that food can be produced, however, we represent it in game 8).

woodelf said:
Having access to hydrogen should make your people happy, but I'm not sold it equals food so directly. Maybe have it needed to build buildings that generate food? I also like the National Wonder type mission idea to get comets or whatever to gain +x number of waterice resources.
Click to expand...

Well, understand that Oxygen exists in large quantities in solid form in the Lunar Soil. It's a fairly simple chemical process to extract it (that we are capable of right now). Warsong (and I) had a number of ideas for how to represent water that we went over early last week, but I'm not sure where they sit in light of this particular realization. Those sorts of details are going to have to wait for our first merge design doc, which we're working up now. We have something like.. hrmm.. 40+ pages of idea correspondence back and forth between us to filter down to a design doc. I expect the initial design doc will focus largely on the early eras.
 
BTW, Matt, if you have time a couple of things you could look into for me. 1st, creating a "feature" (like jungle) for the Lunar charged dust. 2nd, a bulwark "improvement" buildable outside of one's cultural zone. Something like a low embankment wall or sandbag wall concept, preferrably that can be sided (blocking a particular side of the hex) -- that part I can jury rig with a dialog, etc. if you can figure out how to let workers build one outside of a cultural zone. I don't really care how you jury rig it, if you can get it to work. Worse comes to worse, I'll make an action button for it, and we'll just fake something for the AI. The AI is going to have a certain amount of "cheat" code anyway to compensate for things it can't understand.
Click to expand...
Sorry, but I won't be able to help out for a while. I have a huge project that I have to do for school that is due in a couple of weeks.
 
Belizan said:
Well, "mining waterice" is sort of up for debate at the moment. According to Warsong there is very little evidence of any actual water being present in the form of ice in any quantity anywhere on the moon, where as it is basically known that water exists in rock form awaiting chemical extraction. Particularly near the poles. As for the food vs. hydroponics enablement, that's more on the detail side (which is to say it's not clearly specified atm). It's more to say that this means that food can be produced, however, we represent it in game 8).
Click to expand...

I agree wholeheartedly with Warsong here on whether waterice is present in quantities or not. Perhaps simply removing the waterice resource from the map altogether and going for the oxygen+hydrogen=water setup. That way, you can use the "water(ice) resource" as a trade/space commodity. In the early years, it could come from earth, later on from ice planetoids or comets as to emphasize the growing demands of water that oxygen+hydrogen processing is unable to provide anymore.

As on how food is represented ingame, my emphasis of using the glasshouses and related improvements/facilities for that is that you can't just put some seed in the ground and expect it to grow. Food growing needs a significant technological backup on the moon, hence the improvement/facility requirement.
 
Regarding the water situation, couldn't it be done somewhat similarly to the Ironworks in vanilla, i.e. certain Buildings work better (produce more food) when both hydrogen and oxygen-resources are available? Perhaps even give small percentual increases for each connected hydrogen or oxygen-resource, or limit it so that one resource can only be used by one city?

This might've been brought up earlier in this thread, if so, apologies (is it out of line to ask for a new thread for the new design doc once it's released?). The moon is currently a non-military zone and may not be occupied by any signatories of the Outer Space Treaty. Now, this is just a piece of paper and even more so than most international treaties, since it's quite dated, not written with the immediate prospect of actually colonising any celestial bodies and omitting the possibility of private enterprises on the Moon. Regardless, it would cause some amount of international tension to have military installations on the Moon. Perhaps building strictly military units could be a factor in bringing about Isolation?

Belizan said:
Let's see... So I had a chance to go through Holistic's ideology suggestions last week. I thought the era 1 suggestions were basically redundent with the faction trait & charters, and therein didn't do much. I don't see any reason to have an ideology that is not really expected to spread in some fashion.
Click to expand...
Yuh, probably better to do the early ideologies by charters instead. Also saves the bother with spreading of the ideology, should've probably read the thread a little closer beforehand, but eh.

Belizan said:
I'm sort of eh on the Tellism and Symbiotism strains, although Symbiotism gets very close to Lunacy 8). I liked Fatalism and Exodus (Preservationism), and I'm thinking we probably want to add more "negative" ideologies like this.
Click to expand...
Well, I'm sort of eh on them as well (the names not the least). The main reason why they I suggested them at all was to somewhat ease the shock of the negative ideologies. Ideologies for isolation from, coexistence with, and future "supremacy" of Earth respectively seemed like the most "logical" to stem from an Isolation-like event, though. Glad you liked the Fatalists and Exodus-ideologies, though (since they were the only fairly "original" concept).
 
Duke van Frost redid all of the tech tree buttons for me. :)

They look incredible. Whether or not we use them all for the new mod at least we have some that are more "finished" looking. I'll upload them sometime to put into a patch for version 0.21
 
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