[C4:AC] "Units of SMAC" mini-mod

[Senethro]

Sorry for the delay in posting this, but I've been very busy recently.

One idea floating about for a side project that would serve as advertisement for C4:AC was a Units mod for vanilla Civ4. This consists of Supply Crawlers, Terraformers, Probe Team and Planet Buster inserted into the Modern Age of Civ 4 to make it more interesting. I think it will be especially interesting for players as Civ4 doesn't allow you to convert terrain types, conduct terrorism and doesn't have nukes that are worth building.

At the last IRC meeting I got enough positive responses to this idea that I decided to make it official.

Programmiing
Supply Crawler: Pjays own work.
Probe Team: mdbill volunteered at the meeting.
Terraformer: Not yet claimed.
Planet Buster: Not yet claimed.

If any modeller is reading this and is interested in making any of the above units then please make yourself known. (gclarkson, your fans need you)

This thread is for any design/programming/art issues relating to the mod.

More detailed post about specific contents of mini-mod to come...

[Padmewan]

The title of this thread sounds, ahem, like those special issues of Playboy...

Anyway, would would be very excited by anything you're willing to share! It would be extra-cool if the Terraformer had worker animations.

[Senethro]

Supply crawler:
Implementable in Civ4 exactly as in SMAC except is it a non-combat unit? When attacked, is it destroyed/captured/pillaged?


Terraformer:
Could use some opinions here, what exactly would be good for this unit? Here are a few ideas...
Add/remove forest
Add/remove jungle (only on grassland)
Mountain --> Tundra/Hill
Tundra --> Plains
Plains --> Grassland
Grassland --> Plains
Add/remove hill

How are rivers drawn in Civ4? Can rivers be drawn in later in the game?
SMAC super-improvements? Condenser (food+50%, neighboring farms +1 food), Borehole (0/6/6) , Solar collector (+5 commerce on hill, +2 on flatlands, will stack with farm.)


Probe Team:
Again, combat unit or non-combat unit.
Cross borders without war
No visible national identity
Can use enemy roads
Can subert a lone enemy unit (Double hurry cost?)
Can subvert City (50commerce for every citizen, +50% with Courthouse, 50% cost of each military unit inside, cannot subvert capitals)

City operations
Steal Tech
Steal Commerce
Sabotage Random (Building, Production)
Sabotage - target chosen
Incite riots - Cause riot effect or increase unhappiness?
Demolish Nuke Silos - very unlikely to succeed, only if nukes are stationed.

Capital only operations
Free Captured Civ leader - Does this one work in Civ at all?
Assassinate Prominant researchers - reduces accumulated tech


Planet Buster:
Note: Does not actually destroy planets. Perhaps renaming needed.
As we don't have deformable terrain, I suggest that this converts a 5x5 area of tiles into flat desert with auto-kill on all units/cities. Very expensive, huge diplomatic penalty, can be shot down by SDI.
May be good for removing mountains if you want to do a stylish surprise attack.

[Padmewan]

I'm not sure if you are asking for it, but there is plenty of existing code that you can use for some of these functions:

CRAWLER

Supply crawler I see already being worked on here, but there is the "Shepherd" + "Hungry Hungry Cities" mod which would at least take care of the city-to-city transporting.

TERRAFORMER

We do small-scale terraforming in our SMAC remix but the code is easily extensible to do terrain. Have not tried hills and do not know if the graphics engine re-renders properly. I've inquired around about rivers and I think that could require some fairly intense SDK work.

If you want to demo combined improvements (e.g. farm+mine) IMHO the fastest/dirtiest way to do it w/o SDK work is to offer "double improvements" as a bundle -- e.g. "Farm + Mine," which, honestly, doesn't really lose anything compared w/ building a farm and a mine separately. Then you either have the right graphics for both combined already, or you treat one as an improvement and the other as a feature (via Python). This works b/c you can't have a farm, mine, or collector in a forest or other feature anyway. (I know folks are working on this as an SDK mod, but I presume you are looking at a more immediate release).

PROBE TEAM

There are existing subversion mods out that you can leverage for this; adding a price tag is, I think, new; and getting the AI to understand it, even harder.

Inciting riots is in the Assassin mod. Stealing tech is in a bunch of spy mods.

Freeing captured leader is, I believe, possible as demonstrated in one of the modpacks (I believe it's Europa Europa 3).

[ForesterSOF]

You may find lots of what you need for the mini at http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=166767

[Padmewan]

Thanks for the link, Forester, but we're actually waiting for you guys to have some unit models

You are certainly welcome to raid our code, such as it is, and I've pointed you to where you can also find other code (btw there's a new mod in the CFC modcomponents forum that you can deconstruct for faction reincarnation).

If someone can supply me with a Terraformer unit model, I'd be happy to do the coding described for it.

[Senethro]

Originally posted by Padmewan
If someone can supply me with a Terraformer unit model, I'd be happy to do the coding described for it.

Would it be at all possible to do it the other way round? It'll be slightly easier for me to go asking modellers to help us if I can say theres stuff for them to do, rather than "Oh, we might need this and we might need this..."
As regarding the addition of SMAC terraforming, I think we'll just ignore that for now. It'll be too complicated and won't fit in well. So, the terraformer would work twice as fast as a worker at all worker operations, and can modify terrain. The trickiest part of modifying terrain would be enabling the terraformer to go on top of mountains. Comments/alterations, anyone?

And many thanks for your suggestions about the other units! I'll go take a look around CivFan.

[MMC]

Even if we did code the SMAC terraformer, we wouldn't need the model(s) right away... the crawler is only using the indian worker model for now.

[Maniac]

MAD Nukes could be used for planet busters

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=168858

[ForesterSOF]

looks good for PB.

also saw the Allegence MOD and thought Believers.