the Alternate Sci-fi mod

[BlueO]

For those of you interested, I posted a nearly completed mod. It contains 3 main features:

1) 12 new units, with graphics to go with them. Not a big deal, but I like the new units
2) City expansion rules. Now, for cities to grow, it will need flat surfaces nearby. The city will grow into those tiles to simulate real city growth. No longer can the players put a city in the middle of a mountain and expect it to reach 20+ size...unless they blast away the mountain! AI will also do some terraforming to make room for the city. And, I think, the world looks way cooler with cities getting larger and larger.

Currently, this part isn't fully tested beyond the ancient age. If anyone would like to test it (without using the editor to increase city size, since the slic code won't recognize that), please do so. There's a good chance that once the cities reach modern age, slic code will fail because I'm unable to test modern, and genetic era city growth yet.

3) More aggressive ai. Again, using slic code, I tried to get the ai to attack more often. This might work best on a huge map where the ai can build a lot of units.

Currently, I'm trying to get the AI do do massive invasion against the human player. Gonna try to implement a pseduo ai-alliance where all the ai the players angered, will try to launch major assaults at the player, at the same time.

If anyone got any suggestions for better ai, let me know. If its simple enough, I'll try to implement it.

You can find the mod here: www.ncal.verio.com/~richl/ctp2.html

[This message has been edited by BlueO (edited January 09, 2001).]
[This message has been edited by BlueO (edited January 09, 2001).]

[XMon]

Sounds pretty cool! A couple of questions: when you say a "town pops up" do you mean another city or, what I think you mean, a tile improvement type graphic of a small town appears on neighboring tiles. Also, are those new units animated?

[BlueO]

yup, you would be right. It pops up a tile improvement type graphic, although it really isn't a tile improvement since you can't make changes to that. I had to use goods sprites to make it work properply. On the upside, as your city grows, you get new goods to trade with.

and yes, the units are animated. Too bad I couldn't figure out how to make black alpha backgrounds. I had to use (1,1,1) palette color, which caused each sprites to be over 2+ megs. So its a memory hog.

[dande]

BlueO,

Sounds like a neat idea. I like your idea of visual city expansion and of wrapping around mountains. Trade must go absolutely bonkers with new items popping up all the time! This might actually be an improvement because in my current game I have very few trade squares w/in my empire and they are all elephant.

I will try to download and test but....Oh time is just too short...

[Bluevoss]

I rather like the units as they are. Is there anyway to get the AI/New City mods without the units?

Also, is there anyway in the slic (whatever it is) code to add in morale for big cities. I'd like to drive it off the two city values in each level of DBDiff. That way, you can discribe at what point unhappyness starts, and how much unhappyness each person over that point is worth.

This is really interesting.

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Bluevoss-

[BlueO]

Yeah, to remove the new units, you have to edit the unit.txt and the unitbuildlist in aidata. Originally, I made the new units as a way to increase difficulty level. The governement type those units needed is much inferior than the ctp2 counterparts, and the units themselves are costly and expensive to maintain.

As for the AI that came with the mod, I caught a tons of bugs in the slic code. Needelss to say, the AI in the mod I uploaded is nonfuncional. I think i've corrected all the problems now though, but I hadn't uploaded the new mod version...

As for the city morale, I dunno. I'm sure there's a way though.