"Dear SPDT, I wish that..."

[Rasbelin]

Wishlist for Stella Polaris

This is the official Stella Polaris wishlist thread of ACS Forums. The wishes found here are feature and other wishes regarding Stella Polaris.

You can use this thread for making your personal wishes about Stella Polaris and its features, design, concepts etc. Any wishes posted in this thread will be read by a SPDT member and in the case your wish requires more specific details or if we have any further inquiries about it, you will be contacted. When you post your wishes, try to make them clear and provide any additional information if you think it would help to understand your wish/es.

All wishes can't ever become true, but by posting your little wishlist (please, no lists with 20 000 words ) you can make your opinion public and try to get your wishes included. Wishlists are also a good source for sparkles to new ideas, so it's not waste of time to publish your wishes.

Thank you for your time when you posted your wishlist!

May a wish come true.

[Mark123jansen]

an aerial view mode like in CIV III where you can see your bases and all the improvements you've made

[Sandman]

I wish to know if any of the ideas that I suggested ages ago on the FreeAC forums are still under consideration.

The two that I remember are airships and research bases.

[Vultur]

The two that I remember are airships and research bases.

I think that research base will be implemented in the game . I don't know nothing about unit design, sorry.

Now, my wishes:
I wish ART:
Concept Art:
How the units/bases/random events/... will look like? Please post every drawing/photo/... that can help to imagine every aspect of the game. Any image format is good.

Map Art:
Please post anything to help to have a better graphic.
GUI:
OK, Cancel and other buttons (normal,mouse on,pressed,unavailable mode for every button), Map Interface, etc.

Weather Layer:
0: Desertic (sand and such)
1: Arid
2: Dry
3: Normal
4: Wet
5: Rainy
6a: Monsonic (jungle and similar)
6b: Stormy (ice and similar)

Rockiness Layer:
0: No rocks
1: Few rocks
2: Some roks
3: A lot of rocks

I wish to remember that we'll have isometric tiles 64x32, with transparency color (255,0,255 in RGB scale)
PNG image format strongly recomanded.

[aaglo]

Vultur -
I will try to find time to take a look on the things you wished for... be patient, my friend.

[Jeremy Buloch]

Oh goodie~goodie. A wish list!!

I wish, I wish apon a game... that there would be confirmation screens that popup for most of the major features of the game. Of course this option could be turned off. It would provide help if someone clicks the wrong button. So it would provide flexibility for the User and is, I think good to have.
-J.B.-

[Michiel]

Hm.. I'd prefer that the default setting will be off. Confirmation screens iritate the hell out of me. They're not welcome in a game.

But ok, maybe in a tutorial game, or with an option in the menu or something.

[Straybow]

Vultur, you're thinking too much in a SMAC mode. Remember that SMAC is based on the idea that there was little variation in plant and animal life on Chiron, which is too restrictive. I feel that Civ and SMAC and CtP all seemed to forget that tiles are huge. There are many places on Earth where one could draw a 100 mile square that included three or four terrain types and perhaps more than one vegetation class in each terrain.

I'd want this map generator to be more flexible than any of the simplistic maps of predecessors.

[Vultur]

Vultur, you're thinking too much in a SMAC mode.

Yes, I admit that SMAC is my first source of inspiration...

There are many places on Earth where one could draw a 100 mile square that included three or four terrain types and perhaps more than one vegetation class in each terrain.

If you read at Weather Design thread you'll notice a part called Flora_Level. This will be an additional layer of the map, that will represent the native flora; for the moment I've no idea of how many possibilities have, so I haven't asked the graphic...

[Straybow]

Ahhh, I see… I'm not really keen on SimWeather. I know that Firaxis guys said they spent some effort on the rainfall model for SMAC. Did it add that much to the game compared to a static model? I dunno.

I'd say the same for 3D terrain. I've spent enough time in the air to know that, from a distance, land looks quite flat. Mountains look wrinkled like a piece of paper that has been wadded up and then flattened out again.

Does anything in SMAC look like mountains? No, the map just looks like a lumpy tablecloth. Maybe Frxs thought of it as eye candy, but it made play more difficult. How many times have you been irked by mistaking flat for rolling, etc? Using 2D images like Civ2 and CtP (or even plan-view graphics like Civ1) does a better job of representing terrain to the eye.

In Civ2 most of the tiles only use 2 variant graphics, with hills and mountains having a number of designs corresponding to orientations of adjacent tiles of the same terrain. I'd put effort into more and better overlays for landform and vegitation. I would throw away the notion of only 1 type of landform or vegetation in a tile.

Most important, I would want to get away from the notion of only 1 type of improvement on a tile. I've been to one of the larger pit mines in the world; it takes up only a few square miles, including tailings and access roads. The largest is several times as big, but still nothing compared to a tile 50-100 mi square. In eastern Tennessee I saw ridge-tops strip mined flat, but that had no impact on agriculture apart from runoff pollution. The total arable land in use is only 13% of the land area, mostly concentrated along rivers and near population centers.

Human activity concentrates near population centers except by necessity. When necessary, remote resources are mined by populations barely large enough for the task. Tiles are large enough for everything.

[kuushaan]

1) Different native life forms for the StP universe: some aquatic, some terrestrial, some airborne; each one with different statistics/attack values/attack type. For instance: there would be some mindworm-like creatures with psi-attack, some "fungal tower" immobile creatures that throw armor-piercing spines, and some "locusts" that can only damage improvements. Also some kind of "'Dune' sandworms" that from time to time appear in the middle of sand tiles and "eat" mobile units would be okay.

2) A dynamic environment that occasionally "changes" tiles from one type of climate/flora to another to simulate a live environment (for example, the "increasing" forest tiles and the volcanic events in SMAC were some of my favorite)

3) Submersible continents and new lands in the middle of the ocean floor. One of the best features of SMAC was that in which you could try to flood the entire planet due to pollution and polar melting treaties, wow! Then try to recover the flooded land with "solar shadow" treaties, heehaw

Basically, my ideas come from what would be a civ3 diplomacy/strategic-resource model with the smac/smacx 3d-dynamic-terrain/espionage model.