The Song of the Moon

If anyone wants to put together and underground "finish the SotM" movement, feel free. :D The next version won't be an update of this one.
 
That's right. I forgot about using the old version as a test version. Brilliant! ;)
 
jlwzap said:
Check your host i cant dl
:cry:

Check my first post on the first page. That should work. Or go to Planet Civilization. They are mirroring it.
 
is a shame to see the moon mod stuck, it was one of the first mods i got excited about on here :(

on a lighter note ... anyone fancy doing some temping/defecting till its back up? :p hehe


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I downloaded an earlier version, but the alpha disclaimer and confusing terrain features made me wait a long while before coming back to this mod

I ended up with a spaceship victory in year 429 of a quick game. since I had 80% of the world's population (dumb AI) and population is the only part of the score that has no upward limit (having long ago maxed out on the wonders and the tech tree), I was labeled in the Hall of Fame as "Augustus Caesar" (highest level). (BTW, the Hall of Fame is broken. neither of the two games I played allowed a save.)

I find it surprisingly playable for an alpha version.

this mod does have an entirely different dynamic than any of the other Civ 4 mods I have tried SINCE FOOD IS EVERYTHING IN THIS MOD.

this is surprising since the actual terrain of the moon is quite bleak.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS A SPOILER IF YOU HAVE NOT PLAYED THIS MOD YET.

the analysis is for a land-based public map for the game, ie not a Moon-map public map for the game.

in post number 868 I address bugs in the Moon-map version of the mod.



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Spoiler :


in other Civ 4 mods and the vanilla version you scramble to find the best new city spots based upon nearby resources, preferable at least three in the 21 tile grid of workable squares

the key to city improvement in this mod is getting the correct technologies in order to literally create food out of thin air.

once all the food techs have been discovered and you are fortunate enough to also get the "Fungus Amongus" Wonder giving you another two free food, you can start a new city on 21 grid of BARE ROCK (absolutely zero resources in any of the grids) and still get the total food up to 20 - meaning a city of size ten.

the Genetic Screening civic is available from the start and gives an unlimited engineer specialists, each of which contribute two hammers to the cause.

the net result of the above analysis is that the ONLY non-food tiles worth improving are hills since this gives two possibilities, either at least three hammers (one more than the eng specialist) from a mine or at least three coins from a customs outpost (in addition to the base number of hammers).

early on I built mines on the hill tiles but eventually realized customs outposts (more coins instead of hammers) are the way to go providing you have access to all the food techs to rapidly get your city up to size 9 (or 10 with the "Fungus Amongus" Wonder).

the only other tiles better than using the eng specialist for every single one of your workers is of course a tile which already produces some food.

1) a flood plain which provides three food
2) a water tile which provides one food
(after the "E-M shielding" tech and making an Ion Shield improvement)

NOTE:

the Civilopedia says the "Simple Electrolysis" tech enables water tiles to be worked. it turns outs that this tech reveals the hammer in the water tile but NOT the food. (and working the water for only one hammer does not make game sense with an eng spec who works two hammers is available instead if the Genetic Screening special option civic is selected.)

the much later "E-M shielding" tech and its Ion Shield improvement are necessary to reveal the one food that can be worked in a water tile. I found the island cities to max out at a staggering 17 to 19 pop even on a bare rock island with no resources.

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at the noble level the AI is clueless how to exploit the above analysis and always get its food production up to at least 18 to populate a city with at least a size of nine. not all the AI civs bothered to create ports, and of those that did, not one never moved colonists into the ocean to start cities on islands.

one particularly clueless AI civ after year 300 of a quick game still had only one size 2 or 3 city and was only then building mines!!! (others on this board have posted about the "frozen AI engineers" that create this problem and the problems with using an automated engineer in general.)

the only "problem" I had with my AI opponents was that the number 2 and 3 powers (after myself) attacked me simultaneously and unprovoked (except for the fact I was building near their territority).

I ended up having to give up some territory to buy time to get a strong enough army to beat them back. by year 446 of a quick game (17 years after the official end of the game due to a Spaceship victory on my part) I had wiped out one of these two civ's and had forced the other to offer one of its last three cities plus gold not to finish it off as well.

the civ I wiped out at the end was particularly inept in its military deployment. it sent a stack of almost all its units to a tile without a defense bonus. apparently it was heading off to attack my nearest city.

since this AI civ only had prism warriors and UAV platoons to my stealth warriors (at this late stage in the game!), this whole stack disappeared in only two turns. the whole conquest of the civ only took eight turns.

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in retrospect I should have gone out to sea and built island cities earlier rather than wasting time fighting meaningless land wars. the only land wars worth fighting are to maintain cities with resources on their tiles or with hill or flood plains tiles.

after the wars stopped and I was able to build new cities elsewhere undisturbed the AI fell further and further behind since its population maxed out and it was slow to build new techs.

I ended up with over 75% of the moon's population, and easily as much as that of the area in the two large land masses. however the game must count every single one of the islands since the victory screen on F8 does not reflect this actual huge lead in land :lol:

this is the only game of this mod I have played, but I found it quite strange the entire moon did not contain either titanium or plutonium resources. hence all the advanced units requiring these resources are never built by any civilization. (I later found out that these resources and some tile improvements such as Glasshouses only occur on Moon-map versions of the game.)

in the absence of strategic resources in a non Moon-map version play of SotM, the powerful units turn out to be successively the UAV platoon, the prism infantry, and the stealth warriors.

the most powerful mobile unit available without strategic resources (a non Moon-map version play of SotM) is the lowly lunar rover at a strength level of two.

is it a design flaw that these two strategic resources never appeared on a non Moon-map based version of SotM? or just luck?

(BTW it would nice if the lunar rover unit was visually a tracked vehicle [already done for the radio cars and UAV platoons] instead being the nonsensical Spanish conquistador of the vanilla Civ 4 game.) :crazyeye:

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another "feature" of a non Moon-map version of SotM is that for a Terra map the moon is in effect a giant size golf ball with island dimples. this means the lowly non-oceaning going skiffs can traverse the entire moon. this raises balance issues since a string of nearby island cities can thus be started fairly early in the game.

some of the tech improvements playing a non Moon-map version of SotMare are currently vaporware such as glass houses, algae farms, and boreholes. (the first two however ARE implemented with a Moon-map based version of SotM.)

the first page of the SotM mod should list all the improvements and buildings that are not implemented yet itemized by lack of occurence for both Moon-map and non Moon-map play.

having played both versions, I know the list is different for both versions. :eek:

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I found it confusing at the start of the game that the bunker and biodome improvements are mutally exclusive. I spent several iterations of building one on top of the other before realizing this.

the civilopedia entries for these two techs need to highly emphasize that the two are mutually exclusive. other commentators on this board have also noted this. :ninja:

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regarding terrain features, the crater rims are such a dark black that roads through them are entirely indistinct with a non Moon-based map.

please make crater rims tiles lighter in color. it was due to the dark black crater rim tiles I initially did not try this mod when I first downloaded it.

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the lunar dust seas (dust oceans) are navigatable by naval units (listed as skimmers in the Civilopedia) for non Moon-map versions of SotM.

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one terrain feature that would be nice to implement is gorges. they could be as impassable as mountains or (preferably) require a movement cost of three (like a vanilla Civ 4 jungle). in the latter case there should be no equivalent defense bonus for being in a gorge. in fact it would be a bad idea to build a city in a gorge, so there should be a negative defense factor.

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a humorous additional improvement would be lunar golf course (to complement the already implemented jet park). the golf course should get a bonus of happiness based upon the number of units nearby the city it is in.

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one missing improvement from vanilla Civ 4 is the fortress tile improvement. (this improvement can be made by a military engineer in a Moon-Map based game of SotM.)

I found myself wanting to build a fort occasionally to defend my borders and was frustrated there is currently no way to make a defensive improvement in open (non-city) terrain.

see my post later day on suggested improvements of terrain tiles so that 90% are no longer have building a road as their only possible improvement. (tiles are much more improvable in a Moon-map version of SotM.)

 
Nice feedback joelwest. Thanks. If/when this mod takes off again I hope to put that Lunar golfcourse in as a nice luxury building. :)

You have some nice ideas here. I hope to use some of them.
 
the unlikely Ion Shield is the improvement that leads to food appearing in the water tiles. this improvement is key to growing island cities beyond size 9 or 10.

the Civilopedia needs to expand the entry for the "Simple Electrolysis" tech to indicate that it enables one hammer to be worked on water tiles, but it takes the much later "E-M Shielding" tech to create an Ion Shield improvement and hence also extract one food from a water tile.

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the bunker improvement is currently moot since air units cannot be contructed.

as far as I have been able to tell nuclear units also cannot be contructed.

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the Jet Park improvement promises a boatload of happiness points, one for every two culture points. in reality it delivers exactly one happiness point.

either change the writeup in the Civilopedia and the floating text or implement the behavior described in the text. in fact a better idea would be to change the behavior of the Jet Park improvement to just add three happiness points since at the point I was building it I would have accrued over twenty happiness points for this one inexpensive improvement.

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the recycling center tech is supposed to remove the yuck factor for every building in a city. I just built one in a city full of every conceivable improvement, and the yuck was reduced from 21 to 20 meaning as it is currently implemented recycling center tech is not worth the time to build.

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please clarify the factory power descriptions. it is unclear from the text if each factory powering on improvement adds an additional 50% hammer yield improvement, or if this only happens for the first such device. if the latter is true, who would ever build the gravitic turbine since it has the extremely undesirable side effect of two yuck points? a solar power plant costs the same. its only drawback is the latitude restrictions sometimes make it unavailable. a harmonic plant also costs the same but is only available later in the game (I think). the incinerator is worth building anyway due to the hammer yield

a future version could implement solar powered satellites for an additional 50% factory improvement. or a nuclear reactor with the accompanying core meltdown rate.

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given the golfball nature of the moon on a Terra based map (non Moon-map version of SotM), ie islands everywhere, the sloop is not that big an improvement over the skiff since both can go everywhere. this has one of three solutions -

1) no more golf ball moon. each island has a possibility of around 18 population as it stands now, and so should be a rare commodity. this would restrict the skiff and skimmer to the large land masses.

2) increase the sloop movement to three.

3) create a galleon or man-war that is a movement and strength improvement on the sloop. or create both units, each specializing in one strength.

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I was extremely disappointed to find out the Resident AI tech does not lead to an actual Resident AI improvement. actually it would funnier if it was renamed the Resident ALIEN tech since the mod has yet to address the issue of "the other." :lol:

strangely enough in the game I am playing the barbarians are not called aliens but "minor powers." they built a city on the south pole with a pop of one. I am not kidding. :ninja:
 
woodelf said:
About barbarians....Hopefully they will be removed soon and replaced by meteorites or impact debris. Or at least lessened. They do come in waves.

I am curious how you plan to implement meteorite damage or debris. on the real Luna this is big concern due to a total lack of atmosphere to disintegrate them. hence real Luna colonies would no doubt go underground as soon as possible.

maybe you have in mind road damage due to meteorites???

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BTW, in researching the geological history of the moon I found out that both the maria (flat "sea") areas and non-maria areas of the moon are ancient, ie over 3 billion years old.

since the maria areas are much less heavily cratered the obvious inference is that the really big meteorites all but vanished after the maria were no longer molten.

hence the smaller size of meteorites currently hitting the moon do not usually create huge impact craters.
 
JBG was AWOL for a good portion of the developement. He had a Civ2 version that the rest of us modified and morphed into what you see now.

We haven't tried to contact him in quite a while so that's why we're planning a newer, different approach soon. This version will get some of the new features implemented to try them out, but won't likely get updated or polished with pedia entries and the such.
 
joelwest said:
I was curious how you plan to implement meteorite damage or debris. On the real Luna this is big concern due to a total lack of atmosphere to disintegrate them. Hence real Luna colonies would no doubt go underground as soon as possible.

May be you have in mind road damage due to meteorites???

Belizan has planned to do this via python as random events. There would be checks per turn about a random event hitting a tile and potentially devastating it (unless under some technological shield or some barrier). Underground has been discussed, but graphically it would be boring. Once roads become maglevs or something similar then you can eliminate some debris damage assuming the structure is more sound.

OT - It feels good discussing the SotM again! ;)
 
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