Mars Mod Thread 1: Planning

[heardie]

Also see http://www.trakoria.f2s.com/mars.php for the MArs section

[Gromit]

Re: The Terraforming Issue

What if there was a wonder available early on that had a pollution output level of around two hundred or so. The city that built it would be stagnant because of the pollution (just imagine it as a terraforming facility as opposed to a city). The wonder could become obsolete at a point that seems approriate after testing.

It seems to be possible (untested) to change the properties of a terrain type so that you can edit what it changes to when global warming occurs. For example, Jungles and Forests change to thier base terrain types - Grassland and Plains. If you made it so that:

- Mountains changed to ocean.
- Hills (food value 0) to sea.
- Tundra (food value to 0) to coast.
These are just some ideas and I haven't tested them but I hope they help.

[mfauzi]

Re: Re: The Terraforming Issue

Originally posted by Gromit

It seems to be possible (untested) to change the properties of a terrain type so that you can edit what it changes to when global warming occurs. For example, Jungles and Forests change to thier base terrain types - Grassland and Plains. If you made it so that:

- Mountains changed to ocean.
- Hills (food value 0) to sea.
- Tundra (food value to 0) to coast.
These are just some ideas and I haven't tested them but I hope they help.

Hmm... that's a really good idea! We can start the map with the pre-global warming tiles first and then when there's global warming, more and more tiles will change into this.. But I wonder how many tiles we're allowed to have and if we can advance tiles more than once (for example like mountains -> hill -> plain)

[Gromit]

There may also be a crashing issue with units caught on tiles that change to sea.

[Lemmy]

Re: Re: The Terraforming Issue

Originally posted by Gromit
- Mountains changed to ocean.
- Hills (food value 0) to sea.
- Tundra (food value to 0) to coast.
These are just some ideas and I haven't tested them but I hope they help.

mountains to ocean?
aren't mountains generally speaking the highest places on a planet, then how could they turn into ocean?
i was thinking at first you have a map with a lot of desert like tiles and then they turn into plains, later grassland and eventually forests and jungle.
There could be two sorts of desert tiles, one that turns into ocean and one that turns into plains. That way you could simulate high and low ground, the low ground would turn into seas and the high ground into forest eventually. Mountains and hills would stay the same.

what you get is:
desert tile 1 -> plains ->grassland -> forest -> jungle
desert tile 2 -> coast -> sea -> ocean
maybe with a polar tile that turns into desert tile 2.

but did anyone test if it's possible to change what tiles turn into after pollution?

[Gromit]

Unless the vast majority of the map is made up of mountains/water, in other words un-settlable terrain, the AI will builld cities on land that is intended to disappear and therefore will probably (knowing the AI) lose half it's empire as a result. Thus resulting in an easy game.

On the matter of wether it's possible to change what terrain turns into as a result of global warming, I played a custom map, to engineer tons of pollution and not only did oceans not appear, but not a single square seemed to be affected... Strange, since three quarters of the map was polluted and I set all buildings to pump out 100 (max) pollution per turn.

I'm stumped.

[Lemmy]

Unless the vast majority of the map is made up of mountains/water, in other words un-settlable terrain, the AI will builld cities on land that is intended to disappear and therefore will probably (knowing the AI) lose half it's empire as a result. Thus resulting in an easy game.

you could make it so that the player also doesn't know what will disappear and what will stay by making the two desert tiles exactly the same in appearance.

On the matter of wether it's possible to change what terrain turns into as a result of global warming, I played a custom map, to engineer tons of pollution and not only did oceans not appear, but not a single square seemed to be affected... Strange, since three quarters of the map was polluted and I set all buildings to pump out 100 (max) pollution per turn.

well i just tested it, i made the palace produce 99 pollution, and after a while i saw plains turning into grasslands. and the only pollution on the map was near my capital city.

But i didn't check if oceans were appearing, i made it so that tundra changed into coast into sea into ocean, but my starting position wasn't very close to the poles.
One thing i did notice, tiles only change within your territory, but maybe i tested it too short to see it happen outside my borders.

here is an screenshot from before global warming :
look at Pasargadae, it's build on a plains tile.


and here is one after global warming
Pasargadae's city tile is now grasslands

[heardie]

Nice idea.

but does it work outside your territory

[mfauzi]

Hmm.. I don't seem to see any changes, but maybe I didn't look properly. Anyway, regard the terrain outside your territory, maybe it's because you will need to explore those areas again (or switch maps with the other civs) to get them updated

[Jer8m8]

Here's a map of the red/green/blue mars books:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~fwb/rgbmars.html

Click Map

[heardie]

Here is a bic of that map converted straight from that bitmap..

I don't have time to preview it now, can somoeone use a ctility to reveal the map, then post the screenshot?

[Jer8m8]

I was downloading the patch, so I can't give you an in game shot, but the map has a ton of water

[heardie]

Umm...don't bother wrong bic was attached

The other one didn't work anyway

[croxis]

I have just received a newsletter form JPL that they have found that the ice caps on mars are eroding. They say mars is warming up. I guess that the "pot holes" on the caps keep getting larger and larger each year, and that the CO2 level at the polar regions are rising as well.

[Glostakarov]

To really do this mod justice would require an event editor and more terrain types. Right now the number of terrains is unchangable, which is why there's been no swamp added (that I know of). If they change things to allow us to add terrain types you could have terrains in sets of low, medium, and high altitude.

With an event editor you could make it so that when pollution reached a certain level, all low altitude plains and low altitude grassland became ocean, low altitude hills become sea, and whatever butts up against the sea becomes coast.

How do you turn a bitmap into a bic?