Events and quests in Final Frontier

[Heraclitus]

I really like the feel of this mod, but I’ve only played a game or two. The main issue I have with it is the AI and the somewhat unbalanced pirates. In my games I didn’t have any random events or quests. I assume they are not part of the scenario, which is a shame and hurts the immersion a bit.


My question is whether there is a patch for this mod, that improves the AI or perhaps balances the space pirates. I assume that no new graphical content can be added by any patches made, but events and quests don’t fall into that category. Why couldn’t any be added?





I’m also interested if there are any mods that use the reusorces and general game play of final frontier as a basis. I could imagine a very fun scenario that replaced the space-civs with the SMAC factions or Star Trek races.

[snoopy369]

Jon Shafer (Trip) is the firaxian and former apolytoner who made this mod, and i'm sure he'll be around to answer questions at some point ... They've updated it in previous official BtS patches, and there is a new BtS patch in the work according to Alex (lead programmer/designer on BtS).

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by snoopy369
Jon Shafer (Trip) is the firaxian and former apolytoner who made this mod, and i'm sure he'll be around to answer questions at some point ... They've updated it in previous official BtS patches, and there is a new BtS patch in the work according to Alex (lead programmer/designer on BtS).

Thanks for the into.

Jon Shafer right, has he got any threads started on CFC? Is all the stuff part of the official BtS patch? Is there perhaps a semi-official patch that adds stuff, like the one in the WW2 scenario?

[snoopy369]

Jon's an Apolytoner, but I imagine he posts occasionally at CFC when needed. He actually works for (gets a paycheck from) Firaxis, as opposed to Dale who does not as far as I know. Road to War (and Rhye's and Fall, and Fall from Heaven) were all fan-mods that were included on the BtS distribution because of their popularity and completeness.

Final Frontier is a Firaxis produced scenario, and so part of BtS officially. Thus, patches for it would generally come in the main distributed patch, and Jon can't individually release anything (he works for Firaxis, so it's up to them what to do).

[Jon Shafer]

I have a fairly lengthy thread over at CFC dedicated to Final Frontier. You'll find a post 3.13 patch update you can download as well. Doesn't fix a whole lot, but does change some stuff that isn't yet in an official patch.

Events and quests weren't added to the original because of time constraints. About 2/3 of my time during BTS was dedicated to the rest of the product so that left only 1/3 to do all of Final Frontier. I'm now working on something new so I won't be "adding" any new content like quests and such, although I do still try to fix bugs and add things like popup help for the planets. If you elaborate more on the problems you've been having (with the AI and Pirates) I might be able to address it with a fix. AI is tricky though, especially in mods.

If you're looking for mods based on Final Frontier, CFC has a couple being worked on. Here is a thread for a Star Trek mod based on Final Frontier. You can also hunt around and look for more.

Glad you've enjoyed playing thus far.

Jon

[Solver]

I have a fairly lengthy thread over at CFC

Snoopy: don't call Jon a "former Apolyton", that only encourages him

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by Jon Shafer
I have a fairly lengthy thread over at CFC dedicated to Final Frontier. You'll find a post 3.13 patch update you can download as well. Doesn't fix a whole lot, but does change some stuff that isn't yet in an official patch.

Events and quests weren't added to the original because of time constraints. About 2/3 of my time during BTS was dedicated to the rest of the product so that left only 1/3 to do all of Final Frontier. I'm now working on something new so I won't be "adding" any new content like quests and such, although I do still try to fix bugs and add things like popup help for the planets. If you elaborate more on the problems you've been having (with the AI and Pirates) I might be able to address it with a fix. AI is tricky though, especially in mods.

If you're looking for mods based on Final Frontier, CFC has a couple being worked on. Here is a thread for a Star Trek mod based on Final Frontier. You can also hunt around and look for more.

Glad you've enjoyed playing thus far.

Jon

Thanks for answering my questions and providing those links, I'll take a look at them as soon as possible.

Sad to hear that no events whatsoever will be added to the official version of final frontier. I hope you don't mind me asking, is adding events&quests for FF harder than adding them to vanilla civ4?

I haven't really looked into the FF folder so I really don't know how extensive the modifications to civ4 are....

[Heraclitus]

Is there any mod out there that does this?


In case there isn't I would appreciate people would post what they think events and quests could be. Please be creative and try to link them to the universe of Final Frontier. Use your imagination.


Event: Deep Impact

A comet has struck [planet], killing millions of people (loose 1 population if pop =/= 1, unhappiness) should we:

a) Send them aid to help the rebuild (pay x gold, no buildings lost, base event unhappiness remains, however you get +1 )

b) Instruct the local star ships to help the survivors (+20% chance of success for each space ship fortified in the, no )

c) There is nothing we can do (base event , +1 extra "You didn't do anything to help us!", loose random buildings)

[ben04]

Events basically work the same as in vanilla BTS. Buildings however don't as you can have several buildings of the same type in one solar system! Therefore the destroy random building part is going to be hard.

Some time ago I tried to mod the AI. It worked out pretty well but the problem is, that all the modification compared to the original AI are written in Python. This makes it quickly very slow. However the vanilla Python code is far from being well optimized.

[Heraclitus]

Is there no way to determine on which planet a building is?

[ben04]

Of course there is but lets say it is a bit hackish.

The underling city contains only the buildings on the current selected planet. What is build on the other planets is only stored in Python (which is basically undocumented) and when you switch the selected planet the python code basically destroys every building in the city and builds those it has in it's list.

Basically this means every vanilla civ way of doing things will only affect buildings on the selected planet and risks to desynchronize the python part with the vanilla civ part and cause strange bugs (like for example switching the selected planet rebuilds the destroyed building...).

The FF way of doing things has a big change of being buggy or not existing at all.

This is also the reason why you can't queue buildings on different planets.

[Heraclitus]

Hm, perhaps Meteor Shower is a better event.


People please suggest events that I should try to implement in my mod and please tell me if there already exists a collection of events for FF that I could expand, I would really hate to duplicate effort.

[ben04]

I moded again.

The Python file is supposed to replace Final Frontier/Assets/Python/CvFinalFrontierEvents.py . Be sure to backup the original file however (by for example renaming it).

What changes:

• The onBeginGameTurn event is processed a lot faster. The original code looped about 3 times over every plot of the map. The new code looks at at most half the plots. Most of the time it is by far less.
• Pirates no longer spawn close to your borders. There has to be 2 not visible plots between the new pirate and any player. (Because of a little optimization in a few rare condition there may be only 1 not visible plot.)

There is a bug in the code that I did not fix (which however was already in the original code). Pirates always start to spawn on turn 30, no matter if you are playing on fast or marathon.