Play with all factions?

[-Ab-]

Hi,

I just got SMACX after years of plain old SMAC and im wondering if theer is any way to mod the game so you could have all the factions from both games at once
I prefer to play on extreamly large custom size maps (120x160 or greater) and it seems logical step to have all the factions
I can see one problem in the planet council screen having room for only 7 voters so perhaps only the original factions could vote but think of the other factions as break away forces
eg the cult as a lunatic fringe of the Gians or the Cyber guys as one of Zarkovs experiments gone wrong and therefore they get no vote (obvioulsy the aliens dont)
I would really love to play a game with all of them in but i am clueless as how to go about making it happen
So if theer is anybody with the ability and will to make this happen pls post and maybe we could chat

[Googlie]

Unfortunately this has come up countless times over the last few years, and there seems to be no way that the game can be expanded beyond the seven factions plus alien lifeforms (the latter is able to be modded to give some unpleasant surprises, like giving IoD's the ability to capture ships, etc)

Several players with vastly better programming skills than most have spent hours considering how it might be done, but have given up trying

(and try 500 x 500 maps - you might want to give the AI some faction benefits like tree farms or hybrid forests, though, as they really don't know what to do with all that real estate - with TFs and HF's they at least do plant forests everywhere)

[-Ab-]

hmm



damn

but how hard can it be?
i can see issues with the council voting system but other than that exactly why can you just make teh ai play extra factions?
i was kinda hoping it would be a case of editing a text file somewhere (as if it be that easy
)
its gotta be possible tho
or maybe not
bah i know nothing

btw i wouldnt play a 500x500 map cause the ai is well and truely clueless on it
apart from teh fact im on a p4 with xp and the game can barely handle pathfinding on 120x160
its playable with larger maps but not much larger and even on "huge" map i have learned to use click/go to instead of pressing to send due to crashing so often

hmm
its gotta be possible somehow

[Commy]

I bet it is, truely, but the work involved...graphics for council, commlink, would have to be changed...faction selection changed...everything would be changed...programming would be entirely different...

[Zoetrope]

MOO2 only has 8 empires, and the saved game data (presumably parallelling the executable's internal data structures) are fundamentally tied to this number. It may be likewise with SMAC.

If we had the source code we could fix it.

[Senethro]

Recreate SMAC in Civ 4? The different code might present new opportunities.

[Barinthus]

Oohh man I wish we could do that.

But CIV, mmm interesting thought.