Modelling a space scenario - Looking for tips

[ravagon]

I'm currently playing around with designing a star trek scenario (ToT) based on the wargame Federation and Empire, which is a strategic level variant of TFG's Star Fleet battles.

All of the major races are playable (although this may not work out too well in practice ) - Feds, Klingons, Romulans, Hydrans, Lyrans, Kzinti and Gorn.
The Orions (and the Andromedans later in the game ) I can represent best by the barbs I think.
The others I'll have to leave out. No LDR, WYN's, Tholians or ISC.
Almost all units (ships) will be ground based (using desert or tundra as space methinks) a la Koby's ( )ST Dominion war.
Starbases/Battle stations will be naval units (giving them an offensive capability but no actual movement - I hope ).
Planets provide a whole ton of resources. The surrounding space virtually none - hence most of the pop will be devoted to specialists to account for the low trade/income. I'm not entirely sure how AI's handle that sort of thing though ...

I was going to model the effect of the homeworld shipyards by a tech collapse event should the homeworld fall - losing the ability (tech) to build cruiser-and-above ships until they've been researched again (To represent the necessity of building of constructing a new shipyard before capital ships can be built).

For those who've done something similar - are there any major pitfalls to avoid before starting out? Any major holes in what I'm trying to do? That sort of thing.

I have the AI settling bit sorted out (only colonizing grass/plain squares) but I'm not entirely sure how to work the terraforming. Are there any circumstances under which AI's transform terrain?

[techumseh]

Originally posted by ravagon
Almost all units (ships) will be ground based (using desert or tundra as space methinks) a la Koby's ( )ST Dominion war.
Starbases/Battle stations will be naval units (giving them an offensive capability but no actual movement - I hope ).

Sorry Rav, I don't think ships on land can attack, at least into another land square. One suggestion is to make them air units with a range of 1, on an airbase. Alex the M did this in his old scenario "The Conquest of Quebec" to simulate shore batteries, and it worked well. They didn't fly off into oblivion, but would attack adjacent units. Barbarian units with a MF of 2 on a fortress behave in the same way.

I was going to model the effect of the homeworld shipyards by a tech collapse event should the homeworld fall - losing the ability (tech) to build cruiser-and-above ships until they've been researched again (To represent the necessity of building of constructing a new shipyard before capital ships can be built).

This sounds perfect. I'm planning a similar event for the WWII multiplayer scn. I'm working on.

For those who've done something similar - are there any major pitfalls to avoid before starting out? Any major holes in what I'm trying to do? That sort of thing.

It sounds workable. I've got a couple of suggestions:

Make the space terrain impassible and give the override flag to starships only. This will keep settlers, etc on the ground.

Since you're using ToT, why not use a second map to represent warp drive? If space terrain on map 1 has a fairly high MF cost, ships with warp drive can transport to map 2, where space has a much lower MF cost (it can even be 0!). They can move back to normal space when they near their destination. This is not too hard to do, and I'd be glad to show you how. The drawback is that I have no idea how the AI will use this.

I have the AI settling bit sorted out (only colonizing grass/plain squares) but I'm not entirely sure how to work the terraforming. Are there any circumstances under which AI's transform terrain?

I have never seen the AI use terraforming. You can set the terrain to change when it's irrigated though, which would solve that problem.

Good luck with your project. I'd be happy to help with any ToT questions you might have.

[ravagon]

Originally posted by techumseh
Sorry Rav, I don't think ships on land can attack, at least into another land square. One suggestion is to make them air units with a range of 1, on an airbase. Alex the M did this in his old scenario "The Conquest of Quebec" to simulate shore batteries, and it worked well. They didn't fly off into oblivion, but would attack adjacent units. Barbarian units with a MF of 2 on a fortress behave in the same way.

Bother. I'd hoped using naval units would work. The airbase/range1 combo isn't good for human players as some tend to accidentally move them, hence run out of fuel and crash (well, ok, I do that ). Plus it only gives a single attack. I may have to settle for making them move=0 units instead if it doesn't work...

Make the space terrain impassible and give the override flag to starships only. This will keep settlers, etc on the ground.

All of the (planetary) ground units (Planetary defense batallions, Ground phaser units, etc) are going to be move=0 units. Settler types are colony/survey ships, hence will have movement. The impassable flag is going to be reserved for certain nebula types and the override for certain ship classes.

Since you're using ToT, why not use a second map to represent warp drive? If space terrain on map 1 has a fairly high MF cost, ships with warp drive can transport to map 2, where space has a much lower MF cost (it can even be 0!). They can move back to normal space when they near their destination. This is not too hard to do, and I'd be glad to show you how. The drawback is that I have no idea how the AI will use this.

Done that. The second map is a sort of a phase space and is reserved for the Andromedan transport network (a system of relay satellites that enabled their ships to transit the galaxy at warp 15 or somesuch. ie: Much much faster than the rest of the races). The other players won't get to access this until near the end when the Andro invasion is in full swing.

I have never seen the AI use terraforming. You can set the terrain to change when it's irrigated though, which would solve that problem.

I haven't either unfortunately. I didn't really want to waste all of my river squares by making them invisible and putting them on planets though (otherwise you wouldn't be able to irrigate, well, except for the cheating AI ).
Thanks for the input.

[techumseh]

You can use mining the same way, I'm pretty sure.

[ravagon]

*bump*

Um.
The mining thing doesn't seem to work too well, except for hill/mountain terrains. ie: The AI settlers don't want to mine the others. I vaguely remember running into something like this before. I suppose it's hardwired in some way - similar to the settler-types only going for grass/plain squares.
I may just have to put down more "rivers/oceans" than I wanted to.

Using naval units (as stationary units with an intrinsic offensive capability) on a land map seems to work just fine. Except that the AI naval units never attack anything. Even changing the cost of a battleship to 10 and surrounding it with a horde of cost 160 warriors didn't incite as much as a twitch.
They seem to be regarded as in port when attacked too.
I'll have to stick to the move=0 units after all.


Something else I've come up with but I have no idea whether or not it'll work, and probably not for the AI;
Replacing a destroyed starbase or battlestation.
[A move=0 unit (with a good defense) that exerts a ZOC and has the carrier flag.]

(a) Build a mobile logistics base (mlb - slow clunky expensive thing) that does actually have movement points.

(b) Move base to old starbase site (a fortress square).

(c) Research upgrade tech - which will obsolete the mlb and, using Leo's (renamed ) upgrade to the move=0 BS/SB.

(d) Collapse the BS/SB tech after the upgrade so that more mlbs can be built.

Requirements;

(a) Leo's for all AI's. Can civtweak or the editor (copy all improvements) do this?

(b) All mlb's (not just the one just built and including those under construction) would be upgraded as soon as the tech research was completed. Nothing I can do about it really.

(c) AI's probably wouldn't move the mlb's back to the same (chokepoint) position - hence may have starbases in planet squares. ie: It'd make it much harder for other AI's to take such a system.

(d) I have absolutely no idea how the AI would react to the tech collapse. At a guess not well. ie: If it lost the tech it'd start researching it again (if it ever did so in the first place) without any mlb's to upgrade.


If anybody has the patience to plow through all of that, feedback, anything I've overlooked, improvements, etc would be muchly appreciated.
cheers

[Gelvan]

Regarding terrain: have you changed the number of the AI minimun tech for changing terrain?

;bonus = # extra production from that change
;
; turns = # turns for settler to make change
;
; ai = Minimum govt level necessary for
; computer player to want to perform irrigate/mine
; 0 Never
; 1 Despotism
; 2 Monarchy
; 3 Communism
; 4 Fundamentalism
; 5 Republic
; 6 Democracy

Desert, 1,2, 0,1,0, yes, 1, 5, 5, <----- THIS NUMBER

I have changed mining on forest to be possible and set AI to fundamentalism and it worked, they've built their monasteries on forests. Europe looks nice, with all those monasteries. *g*

The problem of needing rivers for irrigation can be solved, by using the rivers EVERYWHERE and set the road movement multiplier to 1 in the rules text. Then simply make rivers invisble and make every terrain produce one trade less and give them also 50% less defense value (the second number after the name of the terrain - just reduce it by 1). Than you can irrigate everywhere. Of course by doing this you would "waste" rivers AND roads which maybe isn't such a good idea.

Then why don't you make oceans to a sun, and put it every now and then? - near planets or even standing alone. There are more suns than class m planets anyway. (And you even could make them a gate to another time, by using a thierd map, which can be reached only through a certain teleporter who cannot be built from Ai and human, which is invisible too and can be found "on" every sun. (by building them, and afterwards change the terrain to an ocean (sun)). Only certain "naval" ships can use those teleports or whatever, you got the idea.)

And I'd suggest to have a look on the mod "Outer Space" don't know where to get it though, so I'll post it here. It has many good ideas I think. Needs FW/MGE though.

good luck! And don't forget some basic informations to the describes.txt (e.g "this is a diplomat type" "this is a settler") just to ensure everyone knows what he's supposed to do.

[Mercator]

Originally posted by ravagon
Using naval units (as stationary units with an intrinsic offensive capability) on a land map seems to work just fine. Except that the AI naval units never attack anything. Even changing the cost of a battleship to 10 and surrounding it with a horde of cost 160 warriors didn't incite as much as a twitch.
They seem to be regarded as in port when attacked too.
I'll have to stick to the move=0 units after all.

How about placing them in a one square ocean... That would also mean they can't be attacked though (if that's a problem). But perhaps you can have helicopter-type air units for a lot of the offensive units. After all, you can set ocean to be impassable, and you can turn off the losing of health...
The only problem would then be the ocean graphic once such a station has been destroyed, but that might not be a problem if you aren't using ocean for anything else.

(a) Leo's for all AI's. Can civtweak or the editor (copy all improvements) do this?

Not possible, there can only be one instance of any WoW. But I guess CSPL should be able to do this.

[ravagon]

Thanks for the input guys

I have changed mining on forest to be possible and set AI to fundamentalism and it worked, they've built their monasteries on forests.

I knew about the AI govt irrigation/mining setting but I didn't know this actually facilitated city-building on those squares.
Can I ask what your government settings were as opposed to the min requirements for AI irr/min of that terrain type? Or rather, were your government types at the same level as the required AI or were they higher?

The rivers are going to be basically a high-density well-travelled route (a la the jump-1 route in the Spinward Marches for any Traveller fans) that gives the same movement bonus as "charted space" (ie: Roads) so it shouldn't make too much of a difference putting one invisible river square on each planet. Most of them though are going to have different graphics simply to break up the usual monotonous space terrain a bit.

But perhaps you can have helicopter-type air units for a lot of the offensive units. After all, you can set ocean to be impassable, and you can turn off the losing of health...

Only problem with this aspect is that the impassable terrain flag doesn't seem to work for air-type units (Or maybe I've been doing something wrong in trying to implement it?) - hence representing all units as air-types would lose this aspect.
Additionally my beloved Hydrans wouldn't be able to operate their carriers.
One other (bigger) problem I've noticed about air units - helo's in particular - is that the AI seems to use them as rouge scout/bezerker-types. ie: Poorly co-ordinated and they don't seem to support each other very well past the early stages when they're attacking en masse from their starting positions.


Keep em coming.

[Gelvan]

Ooops, sorry I forgot I've changed the graphics of the mines to monasteries, so they built MINES under fundamentalism, not city improvements. Er - as far as I know - it's not possible to use minimun gov attributes for improvements. (Sorry for the misunderstanding, I'm a bit to deep in modeling at the moment )

I was refering to this:

"The mining thing doesn't seem to work too well, except for hill/mountain terrains. ie: The AI settlers don't want to mine the others. I vaguely remember running into something like this before. I suppose it's hardwired in some way - similar to the settler-types only going for grass/plain squares. "

In my mod, it works, they do mine other terrain than hills/mountains. I've changed the rules.txt and allowed mining on forest with minimum AI level for mining forests at monarchy and when the AI was crowned he built mines (that is with a monastery graphic in my mod ) on forest types. At Emperor Level. The particular AI is a rational/perfectionistic/civilized one - maybe thats the reason why he did it.