Seas Of Fire

Something I've been working on for the past few weeks is turning all the oceans on the planet into molten lava. (saying that makes me feel vaguely like a Bond villain )

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I want this to be functionally different from a water ocean as well as cosmetically, colonising a planet half covered by molten rock should be a different gameplay experience and require different strategies than colonising a planet with an earth-like ocean. So I've renamed and changed the yields of some terrain features:

• Coast = Lava (1 energy)
• Ocean = Magma (2 energy)
• Ice = Pumice (allows land units to walk on lava)

To make sailing in lava is impossible I've removed embarkation and naval units from the techweb (put them into an unresearchable tech). The only way to cross the lava sea is with hover or coastal walk units, phasal transporters, or using Pumice. The tricky part of this mod is going to be striking a balance between making lava more difficult to cross than water, but not making it so difficult that your enemy wins before you can get to their continent.

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• River = Lava Flow (1 energy)
• Flood Plains = Glass Flats (1 culture)
• Fresh Water = Sulfur (allows mines to be built on flat ground)
• Lake = Caldera (2 energy, 2 production)
• Algae = Basalt
• Coral = Silica (duplicates of the resources found on land)

And finally, since I don't want aliens swimming in molten rock:

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• Sea Dragon = Salamander (equivelent to a Wolf Beetle, but can walk on the surface of lava/magma as well as on land)
• Kraken = Steam Drake (a gargantuan version of a Drone, which can only fly over lava/magma)

 

I imagine coastal walking units to receive a damage per turn, like walking in miasma, or maybe greater... ~20 perhaps.

Although I think the AI will fail to recognize and just end up getting most of its unit killed by the lava damage.

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Also, the canyons now in theory will be the same as a geothermal source too right?

 

The damage per turn is a good idea, if I can figure a way to do it such that hovering units and naval aliens don't take it, but coastal walkers do.

I was planning to leave canyons as they are and have calderas (lakes) be a "like a canyon but also roduces energy" feature. Haven't decided what to do about the geothermal resource yet, it doesn't really make sense to be drilling deep underground to find hot rocks when half the planet is covered by molten lava, but I still need some sort of strategic resource to fill it's role as a wonder requirement.

 

Why not make the geothermal resource as a groundwater resource? Since you're making water into lava/magma, then make the lava/magma into water.

Just paint the orange geothermal tile blue, then rename the geothermal well into a groundwater well or just water well.

 

Groundwater should be important on a volcanic world, but I feel like it's too ubiquitous a neccesity to be the "wonders" strategic resource. I think I'm going to go with Diamond as the replacement for Geothermal, and use a modified version of the Water Refinery building to represent drilling for groundwater (since that's what the pedia description of the building says it does to begin with).

This week, I've been working on lua functions to deal damage per turn for land units on lava, and to make floating pumice appear and dissapear (a terrain improvement that allows units to walk on lava). It can be encouraged to spawn by launching a special "pumice spreader" orbital, but to make lava feel unpredictable this is not a guarunteed spawn like a miasma-spreader, just a percentage chance to appear on all tiles within the area of effect. After the orbital's gone the floating pumice has a 50% chance to dissapear each turn.

Attached is a WIP build, if anyone wants to do some playtesting and give me some feedback

 

I was also thinking about Obsidian, but Diamond is much better.

Any interest of changing the color of the aliens? Also, I don't think Seafairing fits, since there are no seas.

 

The point of the Seafaring tech is to be inappropriate, it's an impossible-to-research container to lock away all the units that don't fit in this setting, so they can never be built. (deleting units causes no end of errors because of other bits of code which refer to them, so it's better to lock them away like this)

I've turned the title red now, to make it a little clearer it's suposed to be unresearchable.

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Reskinning the aliens is problematic for me, since many of those textures are saved in DDX4 format and I don't own photoshop. I'm not sure I'd want to anyway on this particular biome, the green aliens look quite nice against the red orange lava.

 

This is excellent! You're making some amazing mods, keep it up!

 

Now finished and released!

In this thread and on Steam