STARGATE SG1 by Kobayashi

[Paul Hanson]

Excellent work mate! Very challenging.

Just a few gripes though (mostly cosmetic):

- It's Bra'tac, nort Bray'tac (easy mistake to make, mind)
- The gun the SGC used before the P90 was the MP5, not the M5
- The F-303 ought to be called the BC-303 (it is refered to as such in at least one episode, although I can't remember which one exactly)
- The Serebus should be called the Seberus
- The units you've named the "Kull" (Anubis' super soldiers) are not refered to as such, IIRC. I'm fairly sure you're getting a little mixed up here, because I was under the impression that they're called "cold warriors" or "Anubis drones"
- I'm not sure how easy it is to pull off given the limited Civ2 palette, but Jacob Carter's dress uniform should be a darker shade of blue, and SG-1's field uniforms a darker shade of green
- There doesn't seem to be any reward for killing System Lords. I managed to ambush and kill Cronus but nothing happened. Is this intended?
- I'm guessing you did it for gameplay reasons, but having Earth being attacked by Surrakin ships on a regular basis doesn't seem to make much sense. Perhaps some sort of Aschen ship would make more sense (although I'm aware that you'd have to use some artistic license here)

Aside from these minor niggles, a throughly well-made scenario of the kind we've come to expect from you.

[kobayashi]

- It's Bra'tac, nort Bray'tac (easy mistake to make, mind)
- The Serebus should be called the Seberus

As someone pointed out earlier, O'Neil and Teil'c are mispelled throughout and I just realized that the word Deity is mispelled throughout too - that's what you get when they don't publish an encyclopedia like in Star Trek. Some people say the Linvris is supposed to be Linvirs? If I ever get around to an update I will be sure to check for spelling.

- The gun the SGC used before the P90 was the MP5, not the M5
- The F-303 ought to be called the BC-303 (it is refered to as such in at least one episode, although I can't remember which one exactly)

ah MP as in machine pistol (even though it looked like an assault rifle). Yes you be right.
As for F303, now that you mentioned it the ship was referred to as the BC303 on one occassion. But so far in the show there is only one of it and its normally called the Prometheus/X-303. I'm only speculating (wildly) that the mass production version will be called F-303 just like in the case of F302.

- The units you've named the "Kull" (Anubis' super soldiers) are not refered to as such, IIRC. I'm fairly sure you're getting a little mixed up here.....

I am very sure about the word Kull. check out under races

http://www.gateworld.net/omnipedia/index.shtml

- Jacob Carter's dress uniform should be a darker shade of blue, and SG-1's field uniforms a darker shade of green

you got a good eye and yes you can even with only 256 colours to work with - I was just sloppy?

- There doesn't seem to be any reward for killing System Lords. I managed to ambush and kill Cronus but nothing happened. Is this intended?

True, true. I ran out of event space and I had to delete all the rewards except the one for killing Sokar - that's how I squeezed in the destuction of Abydos and Lost City.

- I'm guessing you did it for gameplay reasons, but having Earth being attacked by Surrakin ships on a regular basis doesn't seem to make much sense. Perhaps some sort of Aschen ship would make more sense (although I'm aware that you'd have to use some artistic license here)

True on all counts, as you said....AI only gets one kinda ship and I thought the Seberus could be a generic ship which any race could buy from the Hebridians.

Aside from these minor niggles, a throughly well-made scenario of the kind we've come to expect from you.

I am very pleased to find another SG1(tv) fan and glad that you took all this trouble to look through the scenario in such great detail. Thanks much for your comments and support. How far are you into the game or you already finished?

[Paul Hanson]

I'm on turn 124, and not doing spectacularly well, it must be said. I've destroyed Apophis' fleet at Vorash, but aside from that I'm stuck while I research more techs. Earth is pretty much under siege; aside from constant assaults from Jaffa (which are stopped by the iris), I've got Seberus' bombing me from orbit regularly, and the Replicators are knocking at my door.

The problem is that I simply don't have enough resources. Like you point out, I've got a good eye for the details, being a huge fan of SG-1, but my Civ2 skills are somewhat lacking.

As regards your counter-points, it seems you are correct with regards to the Kull. As for the F-303, F is a USAF designation for fighter, which the Prometheus certainly isn't. I'll leave it up to you as to what to call it, but consider this my two-penneth on the subject.

The Minor Goa'uld alliance was definitely the Linvris (before being killed off by Machello, of course).

Aside from these, I can't think of anything else to add. Just a few little tweaks and this will be as close to perfect as a scenario could get.

EDIT: Apart from one more small spelling mistake: Kelnowa -> Kelowna

[typhoon]

I know that it may not be faithful to the show, but it would have been fun to see the Russians getting to keep the Stargate they found in the Pacific and competing with the SGC.

[Vlad Antlerkov]

Originally posted by kobayashi
you mean the scenario launched ok and when you tried to continue during a second session it crashes?

Yes.

Does this happen repeatedly or just one time?

Aslo have you got a fully patched CIV MGE version?

Repeatedly. When I did this, it was without the No Limits patch, FWIW. With the No Limits patch (which I reinstalled about a half-hour ago), the problem disappears.

So really, it's no issue at all, unless you're unpatched.

[kobayashi]

Originally posted by typhoon
I know that it may not be faithful to the show, but it would have been fun to see the Russians getting to keep the Stargate they found in the Pacific and competing with the SGC.

Originally Pentagon was the Russian Gate. However, as i began to build some SGC wonders in it it seemed increasingly inappropriate.

At one point I toyed with the idea of having the gate destroyed and requiring some task to relink earth to the wormhole network ala the second gate but it was a lower priority event and there wasn't enough space to squeeze it in.

[our_man]

Right, I'm about 200 turns in my new game (my first game didn't go so well ). I'm currently researching the X-302; there doesn't seem to be much left for me to do except start attacking the Goa'uld. I've destroyed the time dilation device so I can wipe out the rest of the Replicators at my own leisure.

Overall, I really enjoyed this scenario. The balance between empire building and 'quests' is spot-on. A few comments on problems I had though:

- The computer has built cities on the wormhole terrain in both my games. What terrain are you using to represent the wormhole? If it is grassland/plains might I suggest switching to swamp/jungle as the computer will not build cities on this terrain.

- It can be very annoying travelling by wormhole and having to engage in 3-4 battles (or have to find a different route entirely if you bump into the Asgard) before you reach your final destination. I can't see a way around this though, so I'll probably have to put up with it.

- About the Asgard; in both games they have attacked me. While I have no-one to blame but myself for the first game (I was hanging too near their cities), in the second game I had sent one of my spacecraft up to take out the time dilation device and they attacked me without provocation! Would it not be better if the Humans and Asgard were allied, or would this not work for game mechanics?

- I only watched the first three seasons of Stargate, so I'm a bit lost with regard to a lot of the wonders/improvements. If you're considering an update, it would be great if you could include a small one line blurb for these (a la your other scenarios).

[jasev]

Kobayashi, I'm updating the bestonet section @ the SCS... May I upload this version of your scen or are you thinking in an update at short term?

About the scen itself:

I've noticed that the damned Go'aulds tend to plunder the Gates. Can't anything be done about it? Turning the Stargate into a terrain type, for instance.

- The computer has built cities on the wormhole terrain in both my games. What terrain are you using to represent the wormhole? If it is grassland/plains might I suggest switching to swamp/jungle as the computer will not build cities on this terrain.

Would it not be better if the Humans and Asgard were allied, or would this not work for game mechanics?

Completely agreed

[kobayashi]

Reply to Our Man

I've destroyed the time dilation device so I can wipe out the rest of the Replicators at my own leisure.

Unless they have stolen a few techs from the Asgard or anyone else

- The computer has built cities on the wormhole terrain in both my games. What terrain are you using to represent the wormhole? If it is grassland/plains might I suggest switching to swamp/jungle as the computer will not build cities on this terrain.

I used Arctic thinking they wouldn't build on it - with zero food and resources too just to make double sure. (I used grass/plains for the moons and planetoids but the AI wouldn't build cities on those) Yep I think that is definitely a problem. Did the AI purposely build bases on the wormhole or did it just stumble across goodie huts? Maybe I can just sweep the wormholes of goodie huts.

- It can be very annoying travelling by wormhole and having to engage in 3-4 battles (or have to find a different route entirely if you bump into the Asgard) before you reach your final destination. I can't see a way around this though, so I'll probably have to put up with it.

I found the same. In fact the inability to use the Goto command was a major bummer and entailed endless dragging on the mouse. Imagine playtesting the scenario a dozen times under these conditions.

- About the Asgard; in both games they have attacked me. While I have no-one to blame but myself for the first game (I was hanging too near their cities), in the second game I had sent one of my spacecraft up to take out the time dilation device and they attacked me without provocation! Would it not be better if the Humans and Asgard were allied, or would this not work for game mechanics?

Same happened to me when I went for the time dialation device too. I did explore some other options. Basically if you are allied, the Asgard will start sending you messages about their research and battles which would be very inappropriate since you had yet to discover their existence at the start. Imagine reading "the Asgard develop irrelevant pursuits" 50 times by turn 200. Since they always only attack near the end, I thought it was the lesser of two evils.

[kobayashi]

Originally posted by jasev
Kobayashi, I'm updating the bestonet section @ the SCS... May I upload this version of your scen or are you thinking in an update at short term?

About the scen itself:

I've noticed that the damned Go'aulds tend to plunder the Gates. Can't anything be done about it? Turning the Stargate into a terrain type, for instance.

As pointed out, there are quite a few imperfections -which unfortunately I can see no solution to. If I were to do an update, it would be mostly to fix the typos and I don't think anyone would want to play the update simply because the spelling was fixed. So I guess you can upload it.

StarGates.Airbase - yes that's another one of those difficult choices.

The stargate was meant as the defensible bottleneck to each planet and started out as a fort until I relaized that the AI would start putting up gates everywhere. As the AI doesn't build stargates, I thought it was the perfect solution - As stacked units don't get destroyed all at once on a airbase.

One alternative would be to have the gates 'off' the planets in orbit and then having units stacked on the gate 'off' the planet. This must be the case as the planets must all be of the same terrain in order to achieve the nine tile planet scheme. I could use one of the spare terrains to do this as suggested - but then the map would shrink dramatically as the main wormhole highways are kept atleast one space away from the gates to avoid ZOC problems. And I can't give iZOC to all units as SG-1 needed it as a special ability in order to accomplish certain tasks. I did think about this during play-test and I really didn't want to redraw the map all over again.

At the same time, the on-planet gate allows certain iZOC invisible units like the Unas pillager and AI spy to get past even if units were guarding the wormhole.

Lastly, the tokra operatives need a built up network of airbases to jump to and from or else they would be very ineffective - not to mention that it would be almost impossible to make the sun go supernova.

So there we have it a very long boring discourse on why the stargate is an airbase even though the AI tends to pillage it.

[our_man]

I used Arctic thinking they wouldn't build on it - with zero food and resources too just to make double sure. (I used grass/plains for the moons and planetoids but the AI wouldn't build cities on those) Yep I think that is definitely a problem. Did the AI purposely build bases on the wormhole or did it just stumble across goodie huts? Maybe I can just sweep the wormholes of goodie huts.

I did a quick check on my game, comparing where I found the wormhole cities to the starting goody hut locations and seeing if they correlate. They don't. It therefore seems that the AI builds cities upon the arctic (wormhole) terrain, which is bizzare. I have never seen the AI build on an arctic square before.

Same happened to me when I went for the time dialation device too. I did explore some other options. Basically if you are allied, the Asgard will start sending you messages about their research and battles which would be very inappropriate since you had yet to discover their existence at the start. Imagine reading "the Asgard develop irrelevant pursuits" 50 times by turn 200. Since they always only attack near the end, I thought it was the lesser of two evils.

What about using the "technology advance" command to slow down the Asgards rate of research by giving them technology up to, say, irrelevant pursuits 20 at the start of the game. This would reduce the number of annoying pop-ups.