I'm curious: is a space empire mod possible?

[The diplomat]

Will it be possible to mod civ4 into a space empire game similar to MOO? Obviously, you'd have to change everything. Terrain tiles would have be changed to nebula, stars, planet, asteroid, black hole tiles, techs would be completely different, units would be space ships etc...

But would such a drastic mod be possible?

[DougM]

i don't see why not

You could pretty much do it now. People have already demonstrated that all of the necessary parts are at least mostly possible. How you'd translate buildings/cities into stars/planets/planetary improvements would probably be the most interesting part.

[Vince278]

I could see it working if the map is done like MOO1.

[Locutus]

It's (sort of) been done for CtP2, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible in Civ4...

[Josquius]

Totally possible 'scientificly' the 'engineering' would be a total ***** though (needing to totally redo all the graphics....)

[Vince278]

Yes, I can do everything BUT graphics. My mods would look like they were drawn with a crayon.

[Gyromancer]

There was a scenario in the Civ 2 Scenarios expansion that did exactly what you are thinking. It was called MooJr. It was a pretty neat implementation, but there was no random galaxy generator, so replayability was pretty much nil.

Planets were 1 square islands. You'd plop a settler (colony ship) down and have all planets within the 2 square radius as your workable tiles. There were lots of space themed "wonders" Certain techs enabled specific spaceship units. Each player (race) had their own specials. I remember the Klackons were pretty darn cool....

I wonder if Civ4 is moddable to the point of allowing ship design by component.

[Badtz Maru]

Originally posted by Gyromancer
There was a scenario in the Civ 2 Scenarios expansion that did exactly what you are thinking. It was called MooJr. It was a pretty neat implementation, but there was no random galaxy generator, so replayability was pretty much nil.

Planets were 1 square islands. You'd plop a settler (colony ship) down and have all planets within the 2 square radius as your workable tiles. There were lots of space themed "wonders" Certain techs enabled specific spaceship units. Each player (race) had their own specials. I remember the Klackons were pretty darn cool....

I wonder if Civ4 is moddable to the point of allowing ship design by component.

I think the best way to do it was using the promotion system - this is something I considered for a non-space mod, having it so certain techs allowed you to make buildings that would give your units specific promotions, i.e. Cover if they can build shields, Shock (for mounted units) with the stirrup, etc.

[Gyromancer]

Ooooh, that's a slick idea!

So I guess you'd handle the components with different "automatic" upgrades that would trigger for new builds once you had the tech or built some building on the planet. That way' you'd still have room for "crew upgrades" that come from experience. Each "shield" upgrade would come from a different tech/building, and would be designed to accumulate with the others to specific levels.

Weapon upgrades seem trickier, since they would generally be mutually exclusive. You wouldn't want a ship getting the bonus for fusion beams as well as neutron blasters.... Maybe you'd have to just give the weapon upgrades generic names instead. It seems tricky to set up a method to upgrade ships when you develop a new tech. Maybe there's some stuff in the modding tools that let you add new promotions after a certain event triggers...