Rallying call for all interested: Colonisation of the Moon mod!
- Thread starter JBG
- Start date
Belizan said:
That's how I think we should go now Belizan. Set Power (culture) per building. Eliminate most/all
/turn crap and keep colony influence expansion to a minimum. We don't need culture swapping either unless it happens. WAR is how we take colonies!And espionage isn't needed as I don't use it, but I like the idea of stealing tech! But keeping it fair with the AI is paramount.
Damn, you lurked away to bed!
After you finish up with your changes Belizan I'm still hoping to add more buildings, nerf culture (unless you can work in power), and add in Ideology. A lot depends on what the tech tree needs after you get done with it.
After you finish up with your changes Belizan I'm still hoping to add more buildings, nerf culture (unless you can work in power), and add in Ideology. A lot depends on what the tech tree needs after you get done with it.
OK guys, what unit should we use sharick's futuristic tank for? Find it here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=163139
The first laser tank and then up the size for the next one?
The first laser tank and then up the size for the next one?
Potential useful new building from Dual located here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=163154
I'm sure we can use it!
I'm sure we can use it!
That's a bit of an ugly building.. and it floats off the ground 
. That tank was bloody amazing though 8).
I love British curse words, they don't feel dirty to me at all. So liberating 8).
Anyway, stuff came up, I didn't get a chance to do much of anything today, although I had a very interesting conversation with my friend about moon colonization, which I guess I will relay in part now.
So, apparently, he's more into this then I thought, and has been reading white papers for years on the subject by various folks planning out the real-world colonization of the moon. Add to that he's also a bit of a civ nut (though not a modder), it was quite a nice conversation.
Let's see. Where to start. Well, first off, power, since I remember that part of the conversation the best. He felt that early power was almost certainly going to come from solar, not nuclear power. Now we all knew that nuclear power on the moon was problematic because you don't have spare water to cool the reactor with. He also pointed out you have no air. So your heat sinks look like burning off iron, which has all sorts of issues. He also pointed out (we talked alot about the dust issues), that with some with as many "complex moving parts" as a nuclear reactor, moon dust was going to become a big problem--particularly given the potential side effects of failure (although I think my understanding is that we have the tech for 100% clean nuclear plants now, with effectively no meltdown related issues, but...). Conversely, he said, solar power was widely accepted as the most feasible first order power solution on the moon, basically for all the reasons we postulated earlier. You have plenty of real estate to spread out on, no atmosphere to steal 90% of your energy, and maintenance is simpler. Silicon is plentiful on the moon, far more so, he claimed, then copper, making localized solar panel collection more effecient then a traditional wire power grid style system. We both agreed that beamed power, while lots of fun, would be a later era tech.
The main obstacle to solar power on the moon, he explained, was fabrication plants. Fabricating the electronics involved was "hard", and would require materials from earth until a proper fabrication plant could be setup (which also would require materials from earth). He had a lot of ideas about how to tier fabrication plant technology vis a vis building upgrades and technology, advancing them along two lines--effeciency (cheapness), and throughput. It was Fab plants, he felt, that should control your cultural radius for city's as they are most closely related to your real ability to draw power. He conceded, however, that building power relay improvements was a really nice game mechanic, so some sort of hybrid localized "hotspot" collection & relay power distribution system would most likely want to be our model. For later eras we can get into Nuclear power and beamed power. He did comment that one other reason nuclear power was typically overlooked for moon colonization was because it was assumed that the government would never give you a license for it.
We took a crack at moon dust modeling, but we didn't come up with much, other then various degrees of moon dust handling tech would be required as prereqs for certain other technologies. He also seemed to think that there were designs for magnetic field airlocks to strip off moon dust, and thought that simple moon dust issues could be solved with powerful magnets. This devolved into a physics argument which left him very unsure about what was and wasn't possible to do vis a vis this problem, and that's where we left it. I suspect he will read up on the subject tomorrow if he has time, so he can show me up 8). It's part of his personality (he is loving how much more he knows about this stuff then I do--very useful for sucking him into these conversation
). We argued about the merits of modeling dust management techs by creating a random chance that buildings would "fail" (be destroyed) each turn based on tech. Though in thinking about it, we could do a brown out effect. That's actually pretty good. Keep a tagged list on each city with the buildings that are currently "broken", each round you roll to fix them, broken buidlings are removed from the city, but put onto the brown out list rendering them unbuildable. That could work. *smiles evilly*.
Let's see.. what else. Oh, he's going to take a pass at doing some small incremental changes to the tech tree tomorrow, which, if feasible, I will incorporate into the version I give back to you, probably tomorrow night, unless I hold out to finish some of my python projects (I have like 5 irons in the fire python-wise right now).
So, he muttered some stuff about not using religion. Not sure where he got onto that from, because we don't have any religions--probably just misinterpreted something, I'll follow up on that with him tomorrow. He recommended (and I had been thinking similar thoughts) that we add/change our early happiness buildings to things like "Entertainment Library" followed by "Internet Downlink". I might be inclined to add things like a "Lottery" for commercial civs, or "LBE MMORPGs" for Independents 8). "Zero-G Paintball". heheh.. anyway. He also suggested the idea of adding a chemical plant which would allow you to get "Recreational Drugs" as a happiness tech, with the civ comment of "It's legal here". We could tie that into a civic, but I'm not sure whether we want to go there. Although... *shrugs* Anyway...
We didn't discuss my ideas for adaptation techs or contract/research techs, salvage, sats, etc. (from Lunacy), although we have discussed those in the past (he thinks my Old World immigration plan is pure genius, of course *ducks*)--basically we were trying to cover new ground. He suggested that we allow Scientific Agencys to purchase (build) a unit (Form 982-A) which allowed it to culture bomb an area representing their government claiming that land. To counter balance this, he suggested we add a wonder called the Freedom of Information Act, which would allow any civ to build a unit which could be used to get a free tech from any scientific faction. I convinced him that maybe we'd make it so that the unit would give you 80% of the tech. Anyway, Cute, but... Well, I like the second part a bit... But not so much the first part.
He mentioned that Duricrete is not a Lunar tech, because it involves making cement out of martian soil, and won't work on the Moon. He also suggested that we rename the City Wall something like a "Security Perimeter", and tie the turret techs into them to chain them off, so you get "Defensive Turrets" followed by "Bunker Hardening", etc. I believe we've suggested all these things before, but still...
He also said that he felt we lacked a sense of industrial bootstrapping, and in that I totally agree. He recommened that we add something like a machine shop for adding +1 hammer to all machinest or engineer type great people we have in the city. That's not so easy to do, directly, but... Moving on... He then said there should be some sort of forge and it should be expensive. A much higher tech forge should be the microwave forge. The uwave forge would give the same benefits as a forge, but be much, much less expensive. He also muttered about solar forges, possibly as a pioneer adaption tech (I've been poisoning him with my ideas a bit, I'm afraid). From there he got into electronics fabrication plants.
Elsewhere I had thought to model the purchase of building support structures from earth once we have the Old World immigration screen (as I call it), by allowing you to basically buy units whose only power was to be able to create a building in a city which could then be upgraded into the building in question. So, for instance, a Fabrication Plant Architect, might be able to build a Fabrication Plant Foundation, which could be upgraded into a Fabrication Plant.
. That tank was bloody amazing though 8).I love British curse words, they don't feel dirty to me at all. So liberating 8).
Anyway, stuff came up, I didn't get a chance to do much of anything today, although I had a very interesting conversation with my friend about moon colonization, which I guess I will relay in part now.
So, apparently, he's more into this then I thought, and has been reading white papers for years on the subject by various folks planning out the real-world colonization of the moon. Add to that he's also a bit of a civ nut (though not a modder), it was quite a nice conversation.
Let's see. Where to start. Well, first off, power, since I remember that part of the conversation the best. He felt that early power was almost certainly going to come from solar, not nuclear power. Now we all knew that nuclear power on the moon was problematic because you don't have spare water to cool the reactor with. He also pointed out you have no air. So your heat sinks look like burning off iron, which has all sorts of issues. He also pointed out (we talked alot about the dust issues), that with some with as many "complex moving parts" as a nuclear reactor, moon dust was going to become a big problem--particularly given the potential side effects of failure (although I think my understanding is that we have the tech for 100% clean nuclear plants now, with effectively no meltdown related issues, but...). Conversely, he said, solar power was widely accepted as the most feasible first order power solution on the moon, basically for all the reasons we postulated earlier. You have plenty of real estate to spread out on, no atmosphere to steal 90% of your energy, and maintenance is simpler. Silicon is plentiful on the moon, far more so, he claimed, then copper, making localized solar panel collection more effecient then a traditional wire power grid style system. We both agreed that beamed power, while lots of fun, would be a later era tech.
The main obstacle to solar power on the moon, he explained, was fabrication plants. Fabricating the electronics involved was "hard", and would require materials from earth until a proper fabrication plant could be setup (which also would require materials from earth). He had a lot of ideas about how to tier fabrication plant technology vis a vis building upgrades and technology, advancing them along two lines--effeciency (cheapness), and throughput. It was Fab plants, he felt, that should control your cultural radius for city's as they are most closely related to your real ability to draw power. He conceded, however, that building power relay improvements was a really nice game mechanic, so some sort of hybrid localized "hotspot" collection & relay power distribution system would most likely want to be our model. For later eras we can get into Nuclear power and beamed power. He did comment that one other reason nuclear power was typically overlooked for moon colonization was because it was assumed that the government would never give you a license for it.
We took a crack at moon dust modeling, but we didn't come up with much, other then various degrees of moon dust handling tech would be required as prereqs for certain other technologies. He also seemed to think that there were designs for magnetic field airlocks to strip off moon dust, and thought that simple moon dust issues could be solved with powerful magnets. This devolved into a physics argument which left him very unsure about what was and wasn't possible to do vis a vis this problem, and that's where we left it. I suspect he will read up on the subject tomorrow if he has time, so he can show me up 8). It's part of his personality (he is loving how much more he knows about this stuff then I do--very useful for sucking him into these conversation
). We argued about the merits of modeling dust management techs by creating a random chance that buildings would "fail" (be destroyed) each turn based on tech. Though in thinking about it, we could do a brown out effect. That's actually pretty good. Keep a tagged list on each city with the buildings that are currently "broken", each round you roll to fix them, broken buidlings are removed from the city, but put onto the brown out list rendering them unbuildable. That could work. *smiles evilly*.Let's see.. what else. Oh, he's going to take a pass at doing some small incremental changes to the tech tree tomorrow, which, if feasible, I will incorporate into the version I give back to you, probably tomorrow night, unless I hold out to finish some of my python projects (I have like 5 irons in the fire python-wise right now).
So, he muttered some stuff about not using religion. Not sure where he got onto that from, because we don't have any religions--probably just misinterpreted something, I'll follow up on that with him tomorrow. He recommended (and I had been thinking similar thoughts) that we add/change our early happiness buildings to things like "Entertainment Library" followed by "Internet Downlink". I might be inclined to add things like a "Lottery" for commercial civs, or "LBE MMORPGs" for Independents 8). "Zero-G Paintball". heheh.. anyway. He also suggested the idea of adding a chemical plant which would allow you to get "Recreational Drugs" as a happiness tech, with the civ comment of "It's legal here". We could tie that into a civic, but I'm not sure whether we want to go there. Although... *shrugs* Anyway...
We didn't discuss my ideas for adaptation techs or contract/research techs, salvage, sats, etc. (from Lunacy), although we have discussed those in the past (he thinks my Old World immigration plan is pure genius, of course
*ducks*)--basically we were trying to cover new ground. He suggested that we allow Scientific Agencys to purchase (build) a unit (Form 982-A) which allowed it to culture bomb an area representing their government claiming that land. To counter balance this, he suggested we add a wonder called the Freedom of Information Act, which would allow any civ to build a unit which could be used to get a free tech from any scientific faction. I convinced him that maybe we'd make it so that the unit would give you 80% of the tech. Anyway, Cute, but... Well, I like the second part a bit... But not so much the first part. He mentioned that Duricrete is not a Lunar tech, because it involves making cement out of martian soil, and won't work on the Moon. He also suggested that we rename the City Wall something like a "Security Perimeter", and tie the turret techs into them to chain them off, so you get "Defensive Turrets" followed by "Bunker Hardening", etc. I believe we've suggested all these things before, but still...
He also said that he felt we lacked a sense of industrial bootstrapping, and in that I totally agree. He recommened that we add something like a machine shop for adding +1 hammer to all machinest or engineer type great people we have in the city. That's not so easy to do, directly, but... Moving on... He then said there should be some sort of forge and it should be expensive. A much higher tech forge should be the microwave forge. The uwave forge would give the same benefits as a forge, but be much, much less expensive. He also muttered about solar forges, possibly as a pioneer adaption tech (I've been poisoning him with my ideas a bit, I'm afraid). From there he got into electronics fabrication plants.
Elsewhere I had thought to model the purchase of building support structures from earth once we have the Old World immigration screen (as I call it), by allowing you to basically buy units whose only power was to be able to create a building in a city which could then be upgraded into the building in question. So, for instance, a Fabrication Plant Architect, might be able to build a Fabrication Plant Foundation, which could be upgraded into a Fabrication Plant.
Okay, big question time.... We have new terrain, resources, some new units, and a ton of ideas. Should we gut what we have now or simply start over? Sometimes gutting causes more headaches than simply building something from the ground up.
We also have tons of python, the map script, and some XML files that hopefully we can re-use.
Any thoughts on this?
We also have tons of python, the map script, and some XML files that hopefully we can re-use.
Any thoughts on this?
I'd take a breather and play GalCiv2...
My buddy's got time dispersal issues. Right now he is doing a lot of long builds at work, so he has time to craft emails during those builds. But his time for that sort of thing at work is feast and famine, so he would totally be in the position to disappear for weeks at a time. He has other issues going on in his personal life that render his out of work time too precious to spend on things of this nature, at least in any significant quantity.
BTW, did you see this?
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=162847
We should grab that. And by we, I mean you 8). Since I don't really play with graphics stuff. I got your patch, btw, it integrated without much trouble to what I've got. I have modd'd the ArtDefines_Interface file, so if youw anted to update the other ArtDefines, that would be safe--I'm not going to touch them. Similarly for buttons, btw, as I've seen a lot of cool buttons come out. That's something you could do in parallel to what I'm doing right now if you wanted to make progress.
Anyway, as to the Architect thing, Warsong and I (that's his online nickname) could probably together pretend to be the new Architect for the project, assuming I can get enough cycles out of him for us to work up a complete design. Otherwise, he's just a higher bandwidth version of Luna Argent, I suspect 8). When are we expecting Matt and D^2 back? I don't like making these decisions in a vacuum or "cutting people out". :/.
My buddy's got time dispersal issues. Right now he is doing a lot of long builds at work, so he has time to craft emails during those builds. But his time for that sort of thing at work is feast and famine, so he would totally be in the position to disappear for weeks at a time. He has other issues going on in his personal life that render his out of work time too precious to spend on things of this nature, at least in any significant quantity.
BTW, did you see this?
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=162847
We should grab that. And by we, I mean you 8). Since I don't really play with graphics stuff. I got your patch, btw, it integrated without much trouble to what I've got. I have modd'd the ArtDefines_Interface file, so if youw anted to update the other ArtDefines, that would be safe--I'm not going to touch them. Similarly for buttons, btw, as I've seen a lot of cool buttons come out. That's something you could do in parallel to what I'm doing right now if you wanted to make progress.
Anyway, as to the Architect thing, Warsong and I (that's his online nickname) could probably together pretend to be the new Architect for the project, assuming I can get enough cycles out of him for us to work up a complete design. Otherwise, he's just a higher bandwidth version of Luna Argent, I suspect 8). When are we expecting Matt and D^2 back? I don't like making these decisions in a vacuum or "cutting people out". :/.
What are we using fusion bombs for on the Moon? 
I haven't seen d^2 in a long time and Matt still has tests of some variety.
Button work is fine, but I do need a general idea of what techs, buildings, and civics we're going to keep.
I haven't seen d^2 in a long time and Matt still has tests of some variety.
Button work is fine, but I do need a general idea of what techs, buildings, and civics we're going to keep.
GeoModder
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woodelf said:
How about convincing the helmet modellor to put that engineer helmet+lifepack on the scout, retexture his outfit, get rid of his stone-age axe and perhaps some extra fluff of his outfit, and use it as a prospector unit instead of a lunar scout?
This would get rid of the double use and the lunar rover can be a manned lunar rover then. (and on top of that we have another animated early unit
)Perhaps its possible to retexture that skirt part of the scout as a sort of toolkit hanger.
GeoModder said:How about convincing the helmet modellor to put that engineer helmet+lifepack on the scout, retexture his outfit, get rid of his stone-age axe and perhaps some extra fluff of his outfit, and use it as a prospector unit instead of a lunar scout?
This would get rid of the double use and the lunar rover can be a manned lunar rover then. (and on top of that we have another animated early unit
Perhaps its possible to retexture that skirt part of the scout as a sort of toolkit hanger.
Hmmm, I wonder if Rabbit could put a helmet on that unit. Good idea Geo.
Well, so the stuff I was talking about throwing away before were building and tech defines from vanilla civ4 we have logically disconnected from the mod, but still ahve in the xml files, making them bloated and unnecessarily more confusing.
As for gutting vs. starting over, I'd be inclined to keep most of our current files. The Python stuff is mostly modularized to be able to handle any changes, and I have plans to abstract out the rest. Not to mention I've made some recent discoveries that require I rework some things anyway, so...
But I digress. If I were going to scrap anything it would be our tech tree (sorry to say
). We have a lot of good tech ideas in it, but also some bad ones, and they are in a sort of random order. We basically have two options in this respect. We can either incrementally change what we have and feel our way towards a mod we're happier with, or we can "sit down" and plan out a new tech tree from scratch, fully populated with untis and buildings, etc. and then build it out. I can't see doing the second without some sort of input from matt and D^2. Beyond that, I have misgivings, in that, while we are incrementally modding the existing files, we're still, in theory, following JBG's plan. Once we toss out the tech tree, and rework all the buildings and units (and civics), we'll have basically abandoned JBG's mod design in favor of a new one. I'm not saying we don't need to do it, at some point, I'm just saying it feels a bit like a hijacking, and makes me feel uneasy :/.
As for gutting vs. starting over, I'd be inclined to keep most of our current files. The Python stuff is mostly modularized to be able to handle any changes, and I have plans to abstract out the rest. Not to mention I've made some recent discoveries that require I rework some things anyway, so...
But I digress. If I were going to scrap anything it would be our tech tree (sorry to say
). We have a lot of good tech ideas in it, but also some bad ones, and they are in a sort of random order. We basically have two options in this respect. We can either incrementally change what we have and feel our way towards a mod we're happier with, or we can "sit down" and plan out a new tech tree from scratch, fully populated with untis and buildings, etc. and then build it out. I can't see doing the second without some sort of input from matt and D^2. Beyond that, I have misgivings, in that, while we are incrementally modding the existing files, we're still, in theory, following JBG's plan. Once we toss out the tech tree, and rework all the buildings and units (and civics), we'll have basically abandoned JBG's mod design in favor of a new one. I'm not saying we don't need to do it, at some point, I'm just saying it feels a bit like a hijacking, and makes me feel uneasy :/.woodelf said:What are we using fusion bombs for on the Moon?
I haven't seen d^2 in a long time and Matt still has tests of some variety.
Button work is fine, but I do need a general idea of what techs, buildings, and civics we're going to keep.
I don't need the bomb per se, although I don't know why we don't have nuclear weapons on our tech tree.
I want the rocket. Because for criminey's sakes, you know we have to rocket technology. How we getting stuff too and from the moon?!?!
BTW, I have changed the engineers to speed 1 (and done a few other things). I want to change/add a lunar rover unit which is speed ?3? that can carry 1 or maybe 2 special_unit_people units. What do you think? Not sure why I'm asking you about this and not some of my other mods, but.. Oh, right, because it involves models and the silly oversized manned rover model 8).
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