Weather simulation for Civ 5

[Iconian]

An idea occurred to me, and I'm wondering if anyone's tried it.

The idea is something like this: a mod that spawns a single city out on a secluded snow tile, far away from everything basically. That city starts off with modern technology, while all the other players start with just the basic agriculture.

The super advanced city is neutral and builds nuclear submarines, and sends them around the map. The subs can hold dozens or hundreds of nukes each and they're extremely cheap for this civilization, so it basically has an infinite number, and there are a lot more types of nukes. Some affect just a single tile, and others have a radius of 1, 2, 3, 5, maybe even 10 tiles.

The nukes have 500 range or something, so the submarines can launch them anywhere on the map. And they do this regularly--in fact, this civ probably launches 50 of these nukes every turn, randomly, at different spots across the map.

However, they aren't real nukes, but rather basically weather nukes. Instead of creating fallout, they create weather patterns--droughts, floods, hurricanes, that sort of thing. They might do a little damage to units in the area, as well as modify the yields of the tiles. Drought nukes would definitely reduce the food output of tiles. Flood nukes might increase food output but reduce other outputs, and if the flooding is really bad, even the food output might go down.

The nukes would also vary by how long their effects last. Droughts might go on for 5, 10, 20 turns or something, while floods might be over in 3 or 4 turns.

And there are a lot of other possibilities, but I thought I'd throw this out there. I'm thinking of trying to make it myself, but I'm not sure about how to get the city to spawn in arctic locations, or how to make it neutral, or how to get it to randomly shoot the nukes all around. I also don't know how to add new graphics to the game.

Thoughts anyone?

 

[Tekamthi]

is this really a "simulation"?

If so, what they taught you about how the weather works is much more exciting than what I learned as a kid

 

[Iconian]

It simulates weather in Civ 5. In fact, I believe you can call the weather system in any game a weather simulation. There are likely a number of different ways to simulate weather, and this is one.

Sure, hyper-advanced submarines launching infinite weather nukes across the world may not sound quite right in light of what modern humans understand about meteorology.

But lacking other options, this one at least seems . . . functional, and probably better than nothing.

On this note, does anyone know of any existing weather mods for Civ 5? I looked in the Steam workshop but couldn't find anything.

 

[Tekamthi]

there are two that im aware of -- one makes a storm unit and would probably be better suited to this concept than submarines and nukes etc. The other is linked in my sig, and uses a hybrid improvement/feature to achieve a dynamic in-plot effect, albeit applied to many plots.

the idea strikes me as something interesting for a fantasy-esque civ rather than a general "simulation" -- regardless you could also make a completely invisible unit i believe. Why not just give it to the barbs? To me having "nukes" implies we'd be seeing a lot of the nuke animation, which maybe is not what you had in mind but if it were, that would be kinda out-of-place -- there are other ways to apply area effects.

imo the best way to approach this is via scripting in lua -- you're welcome to use what i've started in my mod and build from there, its got a basic procedural storm plot -- i'm not interested in generalizing it beyond .dll mods but i'm sure there'd be an audience if you could figure out a good way to do it. i can't recall all the limitations I had identified for a vanilla version but i think it being pillage-able was one of the main dealbreakers

edit there's also a "global warming" mod somewhere on CF and/or steam that sounds somewhat like what you're thinking of, albeit only in the general maluses etc., not use of units and nukes