Sea Monsters, Dragons and Other Mythological Beasts. (And aliens too.)

[NukingGandhi]

So I know people have been talking about a Mythology expansion with pegasi, griffons and other mythical beasts. Space and XCOM themed expansion ideas have been floating around too, so without further ado, my crazy idea: Bringing in Titanic Beasts that will leave you alone if you leave them alone. Aliens will be observing Earth and will either try to invade a la XCOM or will try a more subtle approach a la X-Files.

Titanic Beasts
In short, I think that as the player expands, he or she should discover Titanic Beasts like Sea Monsters that wreck your trade routes and Dragons that raze your farmland. This will definitely need balancing so please leave some feedback below if you would. As time goes on and you will discover more about the world around you, but some things should be left alone (Think Jurassic Park and The Meg by Steve Alten). Scientific advances like Genetic Engineering and the Discovery of Hadopelagic life, might bring beasts back from the past like Dinos and Megalodons. The player can either deal with these beasts by force, driving them to extinction forever, or you can conserve them in special parks or reserves.

Close Encounters
As the player advances with Technology like radios they will start to give Earth a bigger transmission footprint in the galaxy that might attract some unwanted attention. When they arrive you will have to choose between sharing the discovery with your friends and neighbors OR keep it all for yourself by getting the tech for yourself with Covert Crash Retrieval teams that will respond rapidly by securing the site for extraction by scientists and engineers. You can use your new alien technology to advance your military effectiveness and optimize your civilian economy.


This is a VERY rough draft so as always, some feedback would be nice to refine this idea.

 

[Krajzen]

Personally I'd love to see one thing in particular: Alien/Robot Invasion scenario. Crude map of Earth, size large (because let's be realistic firaxis wouldn't make bigger scenario map), I don't know how many players, and alien units spawning - either under barbarian or some regular banner.

By alien/robot units I mean, in the laziest option possible, reskinned giant death robots with special mechanics. If anybody actually wanted to work on this more, I'd readily greet one or two or four actual powerful alien units with models and animations and special abilities and stuff. Aliens spawn across the map starting from landing zones and try to capture every city on the map. Upon capture they don't immediately kill all pops, but pop number decreases as they are "processed" until it reaches 0 and city is razed - so you have some time to reconquer cities and save some survivors.
You'd have to defeat invaders using inferior modern era military and human ingenuity (also possibly nukes). Scenario would disable culture, religion etc and focus entirely on military - with one exception: you could earn science in this scenario, to invest it into modified future techs, unlocking more efficient ways of fighting inhuman invasion.

However now I also have entirely different idea.
Zombie apocalypse

Needs just one model, for zombies, and some special mechanics. Crude large Earth map, idk how many players, and "barbarian" zombie units spawning en masse in infection starting points. Zombies have bad combat ability but they have numbers. They agressively seek to kill units and take cities, but on top of that they obsessively pillage terrain improvements - and every time zombie unit pillages improvement, it has 50/75% (?) chance to spawn another zombie unit. Also, when zombies capture city, it is immediately razed and converted to several zombie units. You have to contain the apocalypse using small numbers of modern troops. Everything other than military is disabled, with the exception of modified future era tech tree - with varios anti zombie techs.

 

[Takfloyd]

So I know people have been talking about a Mythology expansion with pegasi, griffons and other mythical beasts. Space and XCOM themed expansion ideas have been floating around too, so without further ado, my crazy idea: Bringing in Titanic Beasts that will leave you alone if you leave them alone. Aliens will be observing Earth and will either try to invade a la XCOM or will try a more subtle approach a la X-Files.

Titanic Beasts
In short, I think that as the player expands, he or she should discover Titanic Beasts like Sea Monsters that wreck your trade routes and Dragons that raze your farmland. This will definitely need balancing so please leave some feedback below if you would. As time goes on and you will discover more about the world around you, but some things should be left alone (Think Jurassic Park and The Meg by Steve Alten). Scientific advances like Genetic Engineering and the Discovery of Hadopelagic life, might bring beasts back from the past like Dinos and Megalodons. The player can either deal with these beasts by force, driving them to extinction forever, or you can conserve them in special parks or reserves.

Close Encounters
As the player advances with Technology like radios they will start to give Earth a bigger transmission footprint in the galaxy that might attract some unwanted attention. When they arrive you will have to choose between sharing the discovery with your friends and neighbors OR keep it all for yourself by getting the tech for yourself with Covert Crash Retrieval teams that will respond rapidly by securing the site for extraction by scientists and engineers. You can use your new alien technology to advance your military effectiveness and optimize your civilian economy.


This is a VERY rough draft so as always, some feedback would be nice to refine this idea.

This isn't a rough draft, this is a suggestion that Firaxis plagiarize Stellaris.

 

[NukingGandhi]

This isn't a rough draft, this is a suggestion that Firaxis plagiarize Stellaris.

Sure while it has some similarities, it's not plagiarism of Stellaris as it still maintains the Civ formula but with some added units and mechanics, basically, it just keys off of pop culture ideas. I understand that the words "Titanic Beasts" are from Stellaris but that was not intended, they would basically be Uber Barbarians. Now studying alien technology to boost your military and economy isn't something that is from Stellaris alone, I will admit, I took a lot of inspiration from the X-Files for the alien bit, but I'm not saying that we plagiarise anything, I'm just saying that we take some inspiration from certain pop culture phenomena.

P.S Firaxis owns XCOM, so there will be no issues there.

 

[PhoenicianGold]

I personally would be disappointed with any sort of mythological or fantasy expansion because it would in all likelihood be 90% centered on European and Mediterranean mythology, with only some token nods to other cultures. It would basically set the series back another ten years by adding another layer which all but admits that the devs can only research so much, and the players largely don't really care about world culture, because the only thing anyone is into is God of War and that cool egyptology book they got when they were seven.

Do I think it could be done in a limited way? Possibly. There are a small number of near-universal creatures that show up in various forms around the world. Dragons or something resembling them. Vampire-things. Fairies or nature spirits. But I think the idea is limited to a very short and general list, and specificity would not go over well because as we have seen time and again the things which are resonant enough to sell the idea are going to be predominately buying into the same myopic western dominance that VI is trying to break free from. I would rather the devs go very narrow but tall with the idea instead of trying to include a lot and then discovering that 80% of what works is just Greco blah (deja vu, I know).

I could support an aliens expansion I guess. I have no interest in zombies. Zombies are perhaps the laziest fantasy/sci-fi trope to plague the past decade. No real thought or cleverness or commentary; generally just riding on the coattails of vague cultural fears of irrelevance and poverty (and immigration?) in an overpopulated, stagnant leisure class.

There are enough different global accounts of civilizations lost beneath the sea, so that could be a nice way to use up what is otherwise empty space on the map. HOWEVER, I would be against calling it "Atlantis" because, again, that's just more Greco-blah.

And I guess Lovecraft is always fair game, so I would never rule that out. Hell it seems every major franchise resorts to Lovecraft at some point or another.