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Plumbean
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madison ohio
Oct 2001
time: 00:16
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A few Ideas maybe make it on a giantmap 256x256 where you could terra form the terrian at a slow rate.Maybe some goodie huts with advanced tech,Maybe some alien life forms,and maybe after a while super humans who where born on the plant that are Stonger or tougher than normal humans,Even after a long time of terraforming the planet new graphics that allow air breathing
Last edited by Plumbean on 12-12-2001 at 19:37
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heardie
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I think it has to be like the FW scenario to work no matter what, ie. A terraformed world
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SpaceWeasel
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Gainesville, FL
Dec 2001
time: 00:16
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Some ideas I thought of off the top of my head - I'm also very interested in this topic but I am working on my own mod at the moment.
Improvements: Solar panels (shields) Hydroponic Farm (food) Tubes (road) Maglev/monorail (rail)
Ice or water would definately be a strategic reesource. It would make for a very interesting early-game dynamic to have a building that required water/ice in the city radius to grow beyond the first size level (which should be low). Then a later tech would allow you to build something like a Permafrost Pump that could let any city grow over this initial size. Ice would have to be common but it would make the early game VERY interesting and competitive. Although it could also be unbalancing, of course.
Exploration should be important early on. Have a robotic explorer and a long-range plane that can only fly recon.
What about barbarians? Here's an idea: immobile "space worms" with a high defense value that you would have to clear out. Or not =P.
Hope these idea help, I'll post more if I think of them
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HardWay
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Just a quick note; I recently played a game where I dropped a nuke 1 square away from a city. The terrain at ground zero was grassland, and was converted to a little lake (sea/coast square) afterward. So maybe there is a way to convert land---> ocean implicit in the system.
Nice work on the beta terrain, heardie. Looks rocky & forbidding. Tip; You might want to lower the value down to something more similar to the civ tiles, to make it easier on the eyes.
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HardWay
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I'm glad to see that somebody doing a mars mod! Here's my random ideas on the subject, after reading through this thread;
The initial game could be very food-intensive; All native terrain produces zero food until you build 'agro-domes' (ie farms), and then only 2 or 3 food. Then, as others on this thread have desribed, building a terraformer facility produces 'pollution', and global warming would convert rocky un-productive terrain to highly productive grassland stuff. Agro-domes no longer needed.
Alot of the functions of the 'worker' could be broken out in to separate units. Say, for example, a worker robot unit: can build roads and mines, but cannot add to cities, and costs no population to build. (So, if population growth is limited at first, you wouldn't need to keep sacrificing population units to develop.)
You could also set the 'aqueduct' limit to something really low, meaning that you MUST have access to the 'fresh water' or 'polar ice' resource in order to grow to any useful size.
Rivers could be 'underground water deposits'. Also, 'rivers' could be changed to 'underground water deposits'.
I like the idea of some kind of rapidly appearing and disappearing resource. If doing a dune mod, this would be 'spice swells' that appear for a three or four turns, are outrageously productive (like 10 gold or something), then disappear. You would then truck around some little prospector unit that can build a colony on it... hunting these things down. Maybe a 'kelp tide' or something in the ocean... produces mad food for a few rounds, then dissappears...
The 'disease from jungles', could be increased in frequency and changed to 'sandstorms' or 'radiation storm', to reflect the hostile environment. Occurs only in the native martian dustplain areas, maybe, and thereby decreases with terraforming.
Units:----------------------------------------------
Survey satelite station: immobile unit, which can only do recon missions, and cannot be re-based, global range.
Ground Based Laser tower: immobile air defense unit, does air superiority at long range, artillery bombards at short range.
Orbital Laser Artillery station: immobile unit, global range.
Colony hopper: a non-immobile helicopter unit. Like the little lander thing in _2001_ . Can pick small things up, and drop them off. Can be captured. Available early in the game. (I am always irked by space colonization sims that assume that although we can put a self-sufficient population on mars, we would just drop them off with their luggage and no other useful equipment.) Can be used for exploration, AND for trucking stuff around.
Somebody above suggested a 'terrorist unit'; Here's an idea how to do it: It would be a land-based infantry unit with stealth, and could make 'precision bombing' attacks, at a radius of 1, as well as have some minimal-moderate attack and defend values. The point is, they can blow up buildings, and destroy infrastructure, then run away. (Also, disengage/retreat, and all terrain as roads would make sense.)You could also make it be 'hidden nationality', like the privateer, so you could do things covertly. Ahem, like in real life. Requires 'terrorist cell' building to construct. Available only to certain factions or gov't types, maybe. Not sure if this will get strange with air superiority,... perhaps somebody could try it?
Buildings & Wonders:----------------------------------------------
Maybe the 'aqueduct' blg is 'water sythesizer', with a very high upkeep cost. Generates H20 out of the air and assorted rocks.
Terraforming station. Produces Terraforming (ie pollution)
Atmosphere processor: big fusion station. Produces an immense amount of Terraforming (ie pollution), but can melt down. Think of the big thing in _Aliens_.
'Cloning Vats' Wonder. Allows you to build 'clone workers', which cost no population to build. But are in all respects identical to a worker, and can be added to cities. So, you can simply BUILD your population to the limit of your food supply. Or, for whatever purpose you chose to put them... (Yeah, I know its a rip off of SMAC... but this makes a little more sense.)
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SpaceWeasel
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Gainesville, FL
Dec 2001
time: 00:16
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Basically it would be like a worker with low production cost and no population cost, that could add to cities. However, I don't think it would necessarily work b/c I think the add to city command refers back to the population cost command. What you could do is have it act like the Longevity wonder (+2 pop instead of 1). Also, I don't think you can tie building a specific unit to having a specific building...
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heardie
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'Finished' one set of terrain graphics
 Attachment: xggc.zip
This has been downloaded 3 time(s).
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heardie
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Screenshot:
 Attachment: screen.gif
This has been downloaded 263 time(s).
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HardWay
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Update on the terrorist unit:
I tried it with the editor, and as soon as the unit was built -- game crashed. Will try to isolate exactly what the problem is. Suspect that it is related to putting 'air missions' on a land unit. Dang.
Wish firaxis would allow the editor to warn you about a potential bad configuration.
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Loader2k
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Hallo everyone.
My 2 cents:
1. Oceans on Mars?
Oceans on Mars from the beginning would be quite strange. But a map needs oceans or an equivalent. So just take an equivalent. Make ground regions, lets call them plains, on which you can build and settle ("plains" here stands for different types of regions). And as an ocean equivalent take "dust". Normal units cant cross dust (maybe because of sandstorms, sinking, or just the (abstract) necesserity to refuel regularly or whatever). Units that can cross dust can also cross plains (so actually it would not be exactly the same as ocean), but these would be expensive.
2. What does make the Mars-Mod different from Civ, SMAC and other Mods?
I think it would be a good idea to design the mod so that the player has to use the modern concepts from Civ from the very beginning. SMAC started like Civ... at the beginning ground units for a long time, then aircraft and planetbreakers (=Nukes) just shortly before the end. I seldom put those modern technologies into use, because either the world is very peaceful until they are discovered or it is so much work to manage the empire in times of war. I´ve fought so many wars with archers and legions and so few with planes.
So i think it would be interesting to have aircrafts as the standard fighting units right from the beginning (in fact i would even make settlers aircraft and give them an operational range of settling if possible) and to give the civilisations nukes very early and so on.
In fact i would make ground units very expensive. So that you would use aircraft whereever you can (it would be cheaper). But since aircraft have limited range, u would sometimes need expensive ground units or take an even more expensive carrier with you, that is able to pass plains or even dust.
3. Concerning terraforming and colonizing
Being dependend on terraforming sounds nice, because destroying those installations in a war could create a huge problem for a city. That also works in late Civ-Games when a bombarded city starts to starve, but i think an even stronger effect (no food at all without "irrigation", so that a city would _massively_ starve after a bombardement; i wouldnt implement permanent change of terrain) would be interesting in times of war. On the other hand i would be careful not to put too much micromanagement into the game (commanding workers is boring).
And since it´s Mars we are talking about i would only make a few places suitable for founding a city. So that u dont have the whole map settled like in Civ, but only important places. That would strategically be very interesting. Would also make for less micromanagement in the late game.
4. Concerning science
What to research? Problem is that the colonists come from earth which is very well developed and you would assume that the science labs there research alot quicker than some new colonies. So why research? In SMAC the colonists had lost this knowledge and science was mostly about re-inventing all that stuff. One possibility.
Another would be that most science on Mars cycles around new strategic ressources. Lets say there are 12 strategic ressources, you get access to 3 per age, and every tech puts one of the three ressources of its age into use.
Greetings,
Loader.
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heardie
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Anyone want to see the *pcx of the Colonist?
Go ahead...
Attachment: colonist run.zip
This has been downloaded 13 time(s).
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pwyll
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hmmm i can see the picture...
here's the url -> http://www.geocities.com/nichols92295/mars.gif
pwyll
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joost1110
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Holland
Jan 2002
time: 05:16
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What if you would change the graphics of ocean to dust or something, and make it changeable to sea with pollution (terrafroming). Then you can't build on them and with enough pollution they would just change. Or you could make a unit, named terraformer for example, with the same effect as a tactical nuke (just change the graphics). When you hit one of the 'dust' terrains with it, it would change to sea. Makes those units not very expensive either. This probably won't work for the AI (I guess none of the ideas in this thread will work with the AI, so the human player would have to do all the terraforming).
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Reptilicus
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I don't think crapping out units is a good idea, nor do I think that air units would be suitable on mars being as there is very little atmosphere. Perhaps things like balloons you can get at the beginning, which is your main scouting units.
Nationalities.
To balance out the different nationalities, they can all land at different times with different units. For instance, America can land first turn with two brilliant scientests and a chemical plant, but then the chinese show up next turn with two cities expert craftsmen, etc.
Mars doesn't have oceans, so they need to go. I do hope it is possible to have oceans show up in late game.
Dust storms shouldn't be a random unit occurance, but something that lasts a few turns and covers a large part of the planet. During a sand storm, all the terrain stops producing and units are slowed, and air units are destroyed.
Power should be important. So, you need a power plant to have so many improvements, and maybe there can be a dueterium plant as a small wonder.
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heardie
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quote:
Originally posted by Reptilicus
I don't think crapping out units is a good idea, nor do I think that air units would be suitable on mars being as there is very little atmosphere. Perhaps things like balloons you can get at the beginning, which is your main scouting units.
Nationalities.
To balance out the different nationalities, they can all land at different times with different units. For instance, America can land first turn with two brilliant scientests and a chemical plant, but then the chinese show up next turn with two cities expert craftsmen, etc.
Mars doesn't have oceans, so they need to go. I do hope it is possible to have oceans show up in late game.
Dust storms shouldn't be a random unit occurance, but something that lasts a few turns and covers a large part of the planet. During a sand storm, all the terrain stops producing and units are slowed, and air units are destroyed.
Power should be important. So, you need a power plant to have so many improvements, and maybe there can be a dueterium plant as a small wonder. |
Except that most of this isn't possible with the editor. Maybe if there is an expansion pack, but for now, we are stuck.
Also, I understand about air units, but I believe they still need to be in - can you imagine a game withouot air power?
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11-12-2001 11:54
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