Red Planet

FramedArchitect

Reluctant Modder
Joined
Mar 25, 2012
Messages
802
Location
Missouri
Colonize Mars!

Download latest version here.

Features
* Re-colored terrains
* 3 Mars Maps (Map name: Red Planet)
* 3 Map sizes: Small, Standard, Large
* Mars Scenarios for each map size.

Compatibility
* Vanilla, GnK, BNW
* Most mods, except those that significantly alter late game techs.

Supported Languages All (DE, ES, FR, IT, JA, KO, PL, RU) though text is in English.

Loading the Scenario
Tick the scenario check box after choosing the Red Planet map.

If the recolors are not visible on first loading:
1. Make sure the mod is loaded
2. Restart Civ, then reload the mod
3. Run Civ under DX10

Version History
v.7 More realistic terrains.
v.6 AI more competitive and expansionist; BNW caravansary much greater range; newly founded cities now begin with appropriate startup buildings; can no longer build pre-modern Wonders.
v.3 Adds two new maps of Mars: large and small; newly founded cities begin with additional buildings; updates CS for compatibility
v.2 Adds new resource (Subsurface Ice); Adds Strategic View recolors; No barbarians in the Scenario; No outposts on lichen;

Disclaimer: I am color-blind, so the terrain colors may not be up to par; feel free to edit them!
 

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Looks great ! :goodjob:
 
Really cool. Is there a source of food on the planet or is it all desert?

There is the range of terrain yields as on vanilla, though iirc the yields are lower and there are large stretches of "wasteland" with no yields at all. There is one new resource included, Subsurface Ice, that when mined provides a large food bonus, and there are pockets of Algae, a feature, near ice fields that provide a food bonus. Naturally there is nothing to farm and you cannot build farms. :/

Foolish question: I don't see a download link?

Oh yes, I see that now. In the rush to get all my old mods up here I forgot that "minor" detail. Thanks for the heads up!
 
No, I didn't include this feature as this is the first I have heard of it. It looks like an example of pareidolia, not a valid landmark type.

Yeah more or less, it was a phenomena that got a lot of attention in science fiction/paranormal pop culture circles in the 80s and 90s and was featured in massively popular tv shows like the X files. But yeah I guess natural wonders don't have to be based on completely on fact per se, some of Civ 5s wonders are mythological e.g. King Solomons Mines and Fountain of Youth.
 
Obviously this is a very early version; I presume that eventually this will be a total conversion, and for now you just have the terrains and map script set up.

The download says BNW compatible, but in the Mods screen in Civ5 (where you tick the box for which mods to install) it says compatible with Vanilla and G&K, BNW isn't mentioned.
Is BNW intended? Tourism might be a bit weird for Mars? Trade routes could work as supply crawlers though. This decision has implications for tile yields and economy; it's hard to have a mod that works for both G&K economy (where you still have lots of gold income from tiles) and BNW economy (where you also have per-civ gold income from trade routes). Are you planning to use religion mechanics, or turn that off?

The map seems interesting; the economy actually reminds me a little of the Civ4 Dune Wars mod I worked on, where income comes from a few tiles, and only those special tiles give food income at all. This tends to encourage very much a specialist economy.

Visually, it's interesting. I think it's too hard to tell the difference between planetia and wetlands.

One thing that we did with Dune Wars in Civ4 (and I have no idea if it is possible here) is mess around with the height maps, so that there was a height difference between mesa (basically hills), flat lands, and sinks. [And another for the deep desert, which functioned like ocean.] Planetfall did something similar. Is this possible in the Civ5 engine?
I assume there will eventually be terraforming mechanics? It would be really cool if you could have basins (presumably cities would have to be blocked from building in them) that could eventually fill up with water and become lakes or seas. Similarly, could acquifer resources be generated as part of map creation, and with appropriate terraforming tech, you build a bore, which starts a river-like stream flowing downhill?

I imagine that it might be easier to have invisible rivers created at map creation from specific aquifer resources, than to try and have procedurally generated rivers like the original SMAC had. Maybe melting lenses would have similar consequences.

[I've just been reading Red Mars, and the consequences of elevation seem quite significant in terms of where the water flowed and pooled.]

But depending on where you want to go with the mod, there are lots of interesting opportunities for making terrain quite different.
 
Niice! Great to see a SF total conversion in the works, especially one by the famed FramedArchitect! :scan::borg::goodjob:

I like what you've done with the terrain; if you're looking for more feel free to have a browse through the pack in my sig, there are oodles of potential Mars-scapes in there :D
 
But yeah I guess natural wonders don't have to be based on completely on fact per se, some of Civ 5s wonders are mythological e.g. King Solomons Mines and Fountain of Youth.
Yes this is true, and I will give some more thought to this idea. I am planning to include many of the unique "natural wonders" from Alpha Centauri, though these are more like zones so they will spawn something like the Great Reef.

Obviously this is a very early version; I presume that eventually this will be a total conversion, and for now you just have the terrains and map script set up.
...
Is BNW intended?
....
I imagine that it might be easier to have invisible rivers created at map creation from specific aquifer resources, than to try and have procedurally generated rivers like the original SMAC had. Maybe melting lenses would have similar consequences.
Thank you for interesting ideas, and the mod is compatible with BNW (I should update the mod browser info)! I am planning a full conversion mod, but after some long thought I've decided that the "colonize mars" idea was limiting players in terms of using all the game mechanics. So I decided I'd take a stab at interpreting the Alpha Centauri world. Terra forming is an exciting idea, but unfortunately the civ5 game engine doesn't update terrains on the fly. I do in fact have a working ingame method to allow "worker" units to spawn rivers and create lakes. But, those graphic changes do not show on map until a save/reload. It looks like this aspect of Alpha Centauri will be more limited in civ 5.

Great to see a SF total conversion in the works
...
if you're looking for more feel free to have a browse through the pack in my sig, there are oodles of potential Mars-scapes in there :D
Thank you for the terrain ideas! Unfortunately I haven't gotten that far into the Alpha Centauri mod yet. I've finished all the civs, the tech tree, most of the base units, and a few wonders, but that's it so far. I'm planning some altered game mechanics, including a major overhaul of the yields and a large expansion on the psi-war concept, so it may be some months yet before I can release the mod.
 

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So I decided I'd take a stab at interpreting the Alpha Centauri world.
aaah even better! :cool::woohoo: I'll be waiting with bated breath, and spore filters on my respirator :scan::D

Thank you for the terrain ideas!
Sure, I hope you can use some of the terrains - I don't know how easy they'd be to adapt to the hex format, but the textures currently "wrap" seamlessly from side to side and top to bottom, so it may work if one half of a hexagon borders each side. Anyway I clearly don't know much of the details of how Civ5 terrain is handled lol, so I'll stop talking now :p

My last impression of Civ5 general moddability was that it was still very hard or impossible to add anything like custom buildings or sounds, making things very tough for ambitious total conversion modders. But those terrain updates are more than I'd remembered being possible - have things gotten more moddable with the latest patch?
 
is it possible to play this without going through a scenario like making the textures appear in mods?
 
Hmm, after seeing this mod, I now want to make a Melange strategic resource.
 
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