thinking about an animorphs scenario

[lord of the mark]

Ive never made a scenario, though ive played plenty, fooled around a bit with the editor (in TOT) and wrote a tech description file for Cullivan's "ancient empires"

Now Ive got a request from my kid to maybe make an animorphs scenario.

First of course i'll have to actually read some of the books, since i mainly know them from what my kid tells me, and she doesnt read them with an eye to what a civ scenario would need.

Biggest technical problem likely to be the animorphs themselves - since they can change forms, and i dont know of a good way to do this in civ. the yert takeovers should work something like the Borg takeovers in ST:BAQ. (I personally think that the authors of animorphs ripped the whole concept from Star Trek anyway)

I'll come back with more specific questions when and if i get farther along.

Meanwhile - anyone ever try anything like this (and animorphs scen. that is?)

anyone else here at all familiar with animrorphs.

[Boco]

Perhaps you could use Leonardo to 'upgrade' an animorph from one form to another. Then any event trigger could be used to start a morph. Still that would only allow unidirectional morphs.

[Mercator]

After a little search got me here I realised I've seen an episode or two from the TV series (including, I think, the first, where some alien gives the kids the ability to morph). I can't add much to that though, so I can't be of any help there, but at least I know what you're talking about now.

... Let's bring up the inevitable again... CSPL. I'm still not familiar with CSPL myself at all, but from what I've read, it should be possible to change a unit back and forth... You might even be able to assign a key to the process so, say, pressing "m" will "morph" or "unmorph" a unit.

[Kull]

Originally posted by Boco
Perhaps you could use Leonardo to 'upgrade' an animorph from one form to another. Then any event trigger could be used to start a morph. Still that would only allow unidirectional morphs.

It all depends on how many unit slots are required. Lets say you you need 30 for the base characters, most of whom can't morph. That leaves 30+ available for multiple morphs back and forth. You could solve the problem of similar names by placing a "weird character" at the end of their names, similar to what was done by Shay Yates Roberts in his Mesoamerican series - in fact, he did lots of cool stuff in those scenarios that might guide your thinking. Plus, if you use a batch file system for multiple rules.txt files, well, the number of morphs doubles or triples.

If multiple civs have to morph, that's possible too. Place Leo's in a city walled off from the rest of the game and use events to swap possession back and forth from one civ to another (by dropping in a unit that will conquer the city). Also make sure it has huge food resources so it grows rapidly and isn't wiped out by multiple changes of possession.

[Boco]

You could solve the problem of similar names by placing a "weird character" at the end of their names, similar to what was done by Shay Yates Roberts in his Mesoamerican series

Be careful about your editor. I used one (Wordpad?) that routinely replaced hard-spaces with regular spaces. The elipsis … (alt-0133) looks a lot like ... (3 periods) in the Civ2 display font.

Kull, your bat files is a good idea. In one Rules, Leo upgrades A to B with tech1. In a second, Leo upgrades B to A with tech2. If you're using ToT, you could use TakeTechnology to get back to your starting point. A big advantage of Leo is that it upgrades on the spot. A disadvantage is that vet status is lost. May need to play with Sun-Tzu as well.

CSPL could be more effective, if you know C. I'd check with Angelo and/or Darthveda before going down that route, though.

[lord of the mark]

I dont know C. My kid insists 2 way morphing is necessary, if im gonna do morphing at all. (she seems to like the idea of making each character a civ, and having them produce their morphs in quantity - i find that far from the book, and of course theres the little problem of the limited number of civs. I may just try doing a number of different ways. I like the Leos idea and will fool with that.

Thanks for the advice.

[Kull]

If your only concern is to morph the human civ, there's an even simpler way:

Let's say for grins (since I have no clue how these characters work or what the storyline is) that "Bill" has the power to morph into "Magnetron", but can only do so while inside his Jeep. Create an immovable Barbarian Jeep unit with ridiculously high "D" and two events. One event says that if "Bill" is killed by barbs, then create unit "Magnetron". The other event will do the reverse. In fact, since Bill may need to travel around the map, and the event is driven by the civ that does the killing (not the unit), you could sprinkle the map with several immovable Barb units that he could use as morph generators. You'll have to be careful though, because you don't want the AI civ units to kill themselves against these same units, so you'll have to play around with locations and/or levels of "D" and unit cost.

[Kull]

One problem with an event sequence like this is that Bill and Magnetron will always appear in exactly the same place. If your scenario calls for Bill to progress from one place to another (let's assume this is some kind of adventure with a goal and not a totally open-ended civ game), that could be a problem - but it can also be handled as part of the adventure:

During the first part of the journey, everytime Bill/Magnetron morph, they go back to the same starting point. But eventually they reach a point where Bill/Mag do something - capture a city, kill a particular unit, etc. This will trigger an event that puts a blocking unit on top of the first location that Bill/Mag always appear on when they morph from one to the other. Now their morph event will progress to the second location on the list, and voila - that location is right near their current position on the map. By using the same method, Bill/Mag's appearances will follow their adventure.

Just be sure it's impossible for another civ's unit to randomly occupy that location during a morph event, or things could really get messed up. But there's ways to do THAT, too!

[lord of the mark]

i think giving morphing to only one civs works. Other than the andalites, the only folks who can morph (IIUC) are a half dozen human kids (the animorphs of the title)and one yerk (bad guy) who somehow got the power. The human animorphs are ALWAYS allied with the andalites anyway, so might as well make them one civ.

Not sure about the BAT file approach though. going out of the game to run the file everytime you want a change (these morphs happen on fairly short order) would seem to be rather awkward. Fortunately i think they can morph anywhere. But having them show up in the capital via events would probably still be acceptable. Or perhaps we could have them morph in one direction via Leos, and morph back at the capital. Hey that would work. I think they could only have one "battle" morph at a time, and would always morph back to human.

[Boco]

Is this for ToT or an earlier version?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Boco
Is this for ToT or an earlier version?

I have TOT only.

[Boco]

Ah! In that case, you could use CityProduction as a trigger. When a particular improvement (e.g. an obsolete WoW) is built, a GiveTechnology action is triggered. That technology is the trigger for a Leo upgrade to the morph of a specific character. So for each character, have a linked improvement and technology that morphs it. That way the player selects which character to morph by selecting the associated improvement in a city build dialog.

As far as morphing back, perhaps you could use a UnitKilled trigger, or make the morphed version a range 1 air unit with no base or city in range (gee Kull where did I see that ). You could then put some morphing text in @FUEL of games.txt. Since you know that it'll be gone in a turn, the human form could be created in the square(s) of your choice.

Btw, Techumseh's Red October is a good case study for the using Leo upgrades. Although you may already know how to do it, I'll list an example that helped me:

German Inf(S),Ban, 0, 0.,0, 0a,8d, 2h,1f, 5,0, 1, no, 000000000000000
German Cav(S),Ban, 0, 0.,0, 0a,6d, 2h,1f, 6,0, 2, no, 000000000000000
Au-Hun Inf(S),Ban, 0, 0.,0, 0a,6d, 2h,1f, 4,0, 4, no, 000000000000000
Au-Hun Cav(S),Ban, 0, 0.,0, 0a,4d, 2h,1f, 5,0, 3, no, 000000000000000

German Inf, AFl, 0, 2.,0, 6a,4d, 2h,1f, 5,0, 1, Ban, 000000001000000p
German Cav, AFl, 0, 3.,0, 6a,3d, 2h,1f, 6,0, 2, Ban, 000000000000000
Au-Hun Cav, AFl, 0, 3.,0, 5a,3d, 2h,1f, 5,0, 3, Ban, 000000000000000
Au-Hun Inf, AFl, 0, 2.,0, 5a,4d, 2h,1f, 4,0, 4, Ban, 000000001000000

Ban is the transistion tech for these units. Each of the four static units has a unique role, so each one upgrades to the unit with the same role whose preq is Ban. In this case, Ban created an instant mobile army of four unit types.

Don't know how practical any of this is, but it's fun to puzzle out.

[lord of the mark]

these sound like good ideas.

Ive never doen a scenario before, so I may have bitten off something too hard. I hope to give it a try though.

Thanks