Sid Meier's Post-Apocalyptic Civlike Funtime Bash

[Leland]

Six ages sounds too many... the more ages there are, the less "special" they'll seem. Like someone already pointed, it's hard to see a difference between all those ages starting with "re". Besides, the ages should go with some sort of outline/story as to what's going on, especially if the names aren't that telling. Example:

Survival: people cannibalize old resources and try to hold on to basic necessities like food, fuel (mad max!), surviving machinery, and shelter. So basically this is about building your first base of operations, dashing for "goody huts" and establishing rudimentary agriculture.

Recovery: Tentative expansion, establishing connection with other survivors, organizing pre-industrial manufacturing and research thingies.

Revival: A reneissance period, when sciene and industry starts kicking in. Re-discovering ancient secrets and culture, social reforms to accomodate larger nations.

Restoration: End game. Reaching the heights of the ancient wonders. Conquering the continent.

...or at least that's what my first thoughts were. Anyway that's just an example, I think that if you're doing the tech tree, a "guideline" like this is helpful instead of just obscure words, regardless of how many ages you'll decide to incorporate.

[Jamski]

Well, using a CtP2 engine, we can introduce new graphics, bonuses etc with each Age very "easily" And I'm quite fond of my last age "A New Earth" Where it could finally become possible to live outside again.

-Jam

[Leland]

Ah, alright then. But anyway, my point about outlining what each "age" means in more detail than one word is still valid, I think.

[Jamski]

You'll have to wait and see... I was after some names that sounded good.

-Jam

[Jamski]

Well, I've been doing some research - someones made this game already. Its called Survival, and its something between Fallout, Civ2 and Colonisation. I believe it could fall into the catagories of free/share/abandonware, but I won't be telling you any more than that - I don't want to get in trouble for mentioning HOTU again. Its from 1995/6 I think, and its not bad.

-Jam

[Spiffor]

I have managed to get Survival, but it doesn't want to run on my WinXP. Did you use an external program to have it work on our modern machines ?

[Jamski]

You have to either run it in pure DOS (not a DOS box) or change your extended memory settings. Or ask in the techical help forum of a certain HOTU site where the people are actually really helpful. There's someone there who's got every game running under every OS.

-Jam

[Sandman]

Can I just say how monumentally cool this idea sounds?

Yes, radiation. What I'm thinking for the terrain of this game is something like SMAC - each square will have humidity, mineral level, radiation and things like that affecting how productive it is. Radiation makes the land more unhospitable, of course - it could be something like fungus in SMAC, hindering your movement (radiation would damage your units) and generally being a nuisance.

I suppose the most radioactive areas would be the cities, the old military bases and abandoned nuclear sites, which would just happen to have the best stuff to loot. A Geiger counter sound effect would be pretty cool if you sent your pitifully equipped scouts to root around in a old nuclear plant.

[Immortal Wombat]

/drool

[Stefu]

Basically, the thing about radiation is how to make it so that the game isn't *too* punishing. I mean, yes, we're talking about a survival game here so it's not obviously a walk in the park, but especially in the beginning when you have to send your scavengers out to find stuff to use it would be quite sucky to lose a searching party (that incidentally represented quite a bit of your population) to a particularily radiated area. Similarly, mutants and raiders would only start to get started after some turns have passed and player, if he's got more brains than a rock, has already scoured the nearby areas and got his community started.

I've also considered the population model. Basically, the basic unit of population (a pop point) could be 20 people. Like in Col, you assign your people as farmers, engineers etc. I think there should be several levels of profession, ie. if you put your fresh survivors to farm an area they'll produce less food than more experienced farmers. Also, when people get more professional they'll learn new skills, for instance a starting mechanic could fix small faults in cars and machinery, experienced mechanic could fix larger faults, professional mechanic can pretty much put most wrecks you find on the desert on working order, and renowned mechanic builds cars from the scratch. Ways to make your citizens more professional would involve experience and education - searching cities could involve finding all kinds of educational stuff. Also, in the start of the game, some of your survivors could already have some professions (which you might not be able to immediately use).

Some possible professions (I haven't yet finalized all my thoughts about what, exactly, does each job entail):

Farmer, Woodcutter, Carpenter, Mechanic, Architect, Medic, Priest, Scientist, Teacher, Miner, Fisherman, Soldier, Priest, Scavenger...

[Sandman]

I'd just give the player lots of radiation suits, iodine, geiger counters and gas masks to start with, and let them do whatever they want.

What about cancer and sterility? How would they be implemented?

[Lemmy]

I don't think they should necessarily die of the radiation, unless it's really massive.
But merely disable them for a certain amount of time, to recover sort of speak.

[twoflower]

CivApocalypse sounds like it'll be good

[geeslaka]

It sounds very good to me too. What caused the sudden death of the discussion?

[Jamski]

I moved house, and I think Wombat lost interest.

-Jam