A Scenario That Lets You Colonise Mars....

[Immortal Wombat]

...nearly.

The scenario is starting in 2024, with four civilisations sending a colony up to the surface of Mars to capture territory before the others can. Most of the units are abolished, all the Ancient, renaissance, and most Modern advances are deleted, and a lot of improvements are ready-built inside the cities (CTP1 space cities under force-fields), but I think the game will retain challenge, as the map is 80% desert, and so needs substantial terraforming. CATCH: Public works are sent from earth, 3000 at a time, every 3 turns. Use it wisely.

I have almost sorted the map, game files, units, AI etc, but I need two things:

1) I read somewhere that to get the civilisations you want in a game, to delete the rest from civilisation.txt and civ_str.txt, and start a game using just those you want. When I do this (cut them down to 4 civs - USA, Europe, China, Russia) the game crashes to desktop without an error message. Do I need a minimum of 8 or something ?

2) SLIC. Having spent most of this afternoon wrestling with aspects of Dale's FPH mod, Alex mod etc. i have realised that I am utterly incapable of doing this, so I present in pseudocode (qbasic style) what I think I need to make the scenario interesting:

Trigger1: BeginTurn: let turncount = turncount + 1
if turncount = 3 then (add 3000 pw and let turncount = 0)
else end


Trigger2: BeginTurn: let turncount2 = turncount2 + 1
if turncount = 24 then (create a settler in capital city and let turncount2 = 0)
else end


Trigger3: No idea how to do this, but basically if the USA or Europe are at war with China or Russia on Mars, then on earth, the emigrants would stop coming so no more settlers arrive, until the nations are at peace again.

If USA or europe are at war with China or Russia for too long (a year, 12 game turns maybe), then drastic measures are taken by china (redirected asteroid, oops ) or russia(stray nuke), and all the Martian colonies are deprived of all future settlers and PW.

If anyone can help put this scenario into reality, I would be very grateful. Thanks in advance.

[Hassan]

I can't help you with the SLIC, but I sure can make the map. Also, you might want to include Japan as well. -Do you plan on makeing new units? And also have you thought about what the AI may do with this map?--It may just set there in a comotose state, you may need some AI modification.


-Hassan

[Dale]

// Triggers 1, 2 & 3
 
int_t turncount1;
int_t turncount2;
 
// Begin Game stuff
 
HandleEvent(BeginTurn) 'BeginGame' pre {
     turncount1 = 0;
     turncount2 = 0;
     DisableTrigger('BeginGame');
}
 
// Turncount1 func
 
void_f Turncount1(player) {
     int_t playernum;
     playernum = player;
// Whatever command is to add PW to a player using playernum (don't remember it)
}
 
// Turncount2 func
 
void_f Turncount2(player) {
     int_t playernum;
     city_t tmpcity;
     location_t tmploc;
     playernum = player;
     GetCityByIndex(playernum, 0, tmpcity);
     if(CityIsValid(tmpcity)) {
          tmploc = tmpcity.location;
          if(GetUnitsAtLocation(tmploc) < 12) {
               CreateUnit(playernum, UnitDB(UNIT_SETTLER), tmploc, 0);
          }
     }
}
 
// Each Turn stuff
 
HandleEvent(BeginTurn) 'EachTurn' pre {
     turncount1 = turncount1 + 1;
     turncount2 = turncount2 + 1;
     if(turncount1 == 3) {
          Turncount1(g.player);
          turncount1 = 0;
     }
     if(turncount2 == 24) {
          Turncount2(g.player);
          turncount2 = 0;
     }
     if(AtWarWith(player[x], player[y])) { // player[x] and [y] refer to Civ number of USA & China
          turncount2 = 0;
     }
}

It'll be something along those lines. You might need to have turncount1 & turncount2 as arrays if you need the values stored for each Civ, but that's an easy change. The AtWarWith(..) statement will need you to put in the numbers of the relevant civs. IE: USA is player3 and China player 5. AtWarWith(3, 5). There'll be a few other if(AtWarWith(...)) statements for the other war conditions.

NOTE: Untested and untried. Probably full of bugs.

------------------
Rommell to a sub-commander outside Tobruk: "Those Australians are in there somewhere. But where? Let's advance and wait till they shoot, then shoot back."
[This message has been edited by Dale (edited March 25, 2001).]

[Starfighter08]

Civ2 had a very well done Mars scenario. Only problems were that you didn't know where the good locations for cities were and that you started at the same place in every new game.

Don't know where I have it now but if you manage to see it, this might help you. BTW cool idea to get colonists and PW from Earth. I'm looking forward to play it.

[Immortal Wombat]

Hassan-

quote: Originally posted by Hassan on 03-25-2001 01:46 PM I can't help you with the SLIC, but I sure can make the map.

Thanks for the offer, but I have a basic one already.

quote: Also, you might want to include Japan as well.

I don't know much about their space capacities, but I may have to include up to 8 civs anyway.

quote: -Do you plan on makeing new units?

I was considering it. I thought a sub-orbit unit carryer would be nice, the space-plane sprite is getting a bit boring Any ideas...?

quote: And also have you thought about what the AI may do with this map?--It may just set there in a comotose state, you may need some AI modification.

I had thought about this, and I think the AI will need some serious sorting, but I'm sure any things that need sorting will come out in the playtesting... any volunteers (gimme til april though, I got exams coming)

Dale -
Thanks a lot, I really am hopeless at this, even when I copied and pasted to get a messagebox up I managed to mess up oh well.
Thanks again.

Anyone -
How do I get just 4 civs onto the map? I'm stupid

I might have an alpha version by early April

[Hassan]

Immortal Wombat:

As for the map: Ok, I'm gonna make my own anyway, probably a semi-terraformed version as in "Blue Mars".

And as for Japan? We all know that ESA launches their own rockets, as does Russia and the US, the NASDA (Japan) does as well. They even have their own labs on the International Space station. Now, I'm not a big Japanophile (is that a word ) but they do have good space tech, infact they've invented their own cargo-shuttle for the International Space Station. Anyway, they should be included.

BTW, there is actually an association, The Association of Space Explorers, where each member nation has to meet the following requirements:

I. Membership in the Association of Space Explorers is open to any person who has made one or more orbits of the Earth in outer space (as defined by the IAF). ASE is currently comprised of over 270 flown individuals from 28 countries

The Members are as follows:

Afghanistan
Abdulahad Mohmand (Soyuz TM-6)

Austria
Franz Viehbock (Soyuz TM-13)

Belgium
Dirk Frimout (STS 45)

Bulgaria
Alexander Alexandrov (Soyuz TM-5)
Georgi Ivanov (Soyuz 33)

Canada
Roberta Bondar (STS 42)
Marc Garneau (STS 41G, STS 77, STS 97)
Chris Hadfield (STS 74)
Steven MacLean (STS 52)
Julie Payette (STS 96)
Robert Thirsk (STS 78)
Bjarni Tryggvason (STS 85)
Dafydd Rys Williams (STS 90)

Costa Rica
Franklin Chang-Diaz (STS 61C, STS 34, STS 46, STS 60, STS 75, STS 90)

Cuba
Arnoldo Tamayo-Mendez (Soyuz 38)

Czech Republic
Vladimir Remek (Soyuz 28)

France
Claudie Andre-Deshays (Soyuz TM-24)
Patrick Baudry (STS 51G)
Jean-Loup Chretien (Soyuz T-6, Soyuz TM-7, STS 86)
Jean-Francois Clervoy (STS 66, STS 84, STS 103)
Leopold Eyharts (Soyuz TM-27)
Jean-Pierre Haignere (Soyuz TM-17, Soyuz TM-29)
Jean-Jacques Favier (STS 78)
Michel Tognini (Soyuz TM-15, STS 93)

Germany
Reinhold Ewald (Soyuz TM-25)
Klaus-Dietrich Flade (Soyuz TM-14)
Reinhard Furrer (STS 61A)†
Sigmund Jaehn (Soyuz 31)
Ulf Merbold (STS 9, STS 42, Soyuz TM-20)
Ernst Messerschmid (STS 61A)
Thomas Reiter (Soyuz TM-22)
Hans Schlegel (STS 55)
Gerhard Thiele (STS 99)
Ulrich Walter (STS 55)

Hungary
Bertalan Farkas (Soyuz 36)

India
Rakesh Sharma (Soyuz T-11)

Italy
Maurizio Cheli (STS 75)
Umberto Guidoni (STS 75)
Franco Malerba (STS 46)

Japan
Toyohiro Akiyama (Soyuz TM-11)
Takao Doi (STS 87)
Mamoru Mohri (STS 47, STS 99)
Chiaki Mukai (STS 65, STS 95)
Koichi Wakata (STS 72, STS 92)

Kazakhstan
Tokhtar Aubakirov (Soyuz TM-13)

Mexico
Rodolfo Neri-Vela (STS 61B)

Mongolia
Jugderdemidyn Gurragchaa (Soyuz 39)

The Netherlands
Wubbo Ockels (STS 61A)

Poland
Miroslaw Hermaszewski (Soyuz 30)

Romania
Dumitru Prunariu (Soyuz 40)

Russia
Too many to list

Saudi Arabia
HRH Sultan ibn Salman (STS 51G)

Spain
Pedro Duque (STS 95)

Switzerland
Claude Nicollier (STS 46, STS 61, STS 75, STS 103)

Syria
Mohammed Faris (Soyuz TM-3)

United Kingdom
Helen Sharman (Soyuz TM-12)

United States
Too many to list

Viet Nam
Pham Tuan (Soyuz 37)
_________________________________________
It's a surprising list for those of us used to Euro and especially Ameri-centric media coverage, news, etc. You can find out more about the ASE here http://www.space-explorers.org Keep this in mind when choosing the Nations for the trip to Mars

Also as for the sub-orbital lander "dropship", I can draw you a picture of one in one of my may space oriented books. I'm sure we can come up with something cool But I must say the "space plane" in CTP is based on current NASA, ESA, and NASDA research.

Also concerning AI, is the Map, a regular Huge map? I've found that AI's play dumber on larger than Huge maps... or maybe it's just me...

-I'll help you playtest your scenario.

-Hassan

[This message has been edited by Hassan (edited March 27, 2001).]

[Immortal Wombat]

quote: Originally posted by Hassan on 03-27-2001 01:01 AM As for the map: Ok, I'm gonna make my own anyway, probably a semi-terraformed version as in "Blue Mars".

Cool, a whole series!

quote: And as for Japan? We all know that ESA launches their own rockets, as does Russia and the US, the NASDA (Japan) does as well. They even have their own labs on the International Space station. Now, I'm not a big Japanophile (is that a word ) but they do have good space tech, infact they've invented their own cargo-shuttle for the International Space Station. Anyway, they should be included.

Fair enough, I freely admit my ignorance

quote: Also as for the sub-orbital lander "dropship", I can draw you a picture of one in one of my may space oriented books. I'm sure we can come up with something cool

cool

quote: Also concerning AI, is the Map, a regular Huge map? I've found that AI's play dumber on larger than Huge maps... or maybe it's just me...

Small map only. I put earth as normal, and Mars is 0.8 the size, making it *small*.

I'm glad you'd be willing to playtest.

Ben

[Hassan]

quote: Fair enough, I freely admit my ignorance

No, problem, when I went to get the ASE information I was supprised at my own ignorance, I had no idea so many Europeans had been in space, and Saudi Arabia, and Syria?! Who'd have known?

Give me a week or two so I can get midterms and some papers out of the way, and I'll be ready to help you fully with the scenario.

-A "small" map of Mars might be too small, but I admit anything beyond 70x140 is too big, I'll consider this in more depth once I begin to draw my own map... It doesn't matter now anyway, the good thing is you already have maps and playtesting can begin.

-Eric
[This message has been edited by Hassan (edited March 28, 2001).]

[Immortal Wombat]

Hmmm, the SLIC is going slower than I expected, so there is more time to work in. So if you could make a map Hassan (or Omni, or anyone) at normal size, then I would be very grateful.

Another potential problem is that there is no SLIC function I can find that lets you alter the amout of stored Public works, can anyone confirm this? If this is the case, then the triggers will have to work differently and I can't think of any workaround. So any ideas how terraforming is possible without PW ?

Thanks,
Ben

[kaan]

VOID SetPW(player, pw)
Set the player’s public works to pw.

and

player.publicworkslevel - The amount of public works stored

should come in handy :-)

-klaus
[This message has been edited by kaan (edited April 05, 2001).]

[Immortal Wombat]

Thanks kaan, I guess I missed that in amongst 21 pages of SLIC functions. Locutus, any idea when your guide to SLIC will be ready?

[alley_cat]

when do you think the first public beta will be released (or maybe there is one and I was just too stupid to not find it)?
And if you need any help, I can give it to you. I don't really know SLIC but I did help to Wes in the Med Mod, and did the job he gave me pretty quickly (working on the GL). So if you need any help in anything, except complex SLIC code, I'm here.

------------------
Let people hear what they want to hear

[Immortal Wombat]

Hi
Most of what's left is SLIC so I have no idea how long it will take to get a beta release. I'll spend most of today on SLIC though, and if all goes well, I'll let you know tomorrow.

If you want to help, some ideas for new units, techs, and city improvements would be very much appreciated, and then I suppose a tech tree at some stage will have to be made.

At the moment, getting the SLIC done is dependant on the existance of this scenario, so when that's done, I'll have time to sort things out. Thanks for the offer though alley_cat

------------------
Whoever said SLIC was easy once you got used to it, was probably telling the truth. If anyone tells you that getting used to it was easy - they're lying
[This message has been edited by Immortal Wombat (edited April 09, 2001).]

[alley_cat]

Here are some ideas for things you can add to your scenario. I will add more later. You should think by yourself (I can also help) what will their attributesbe.

Ore mine
Water mine (did you know that H2O was found there?)
Space station
Shuttle factory
Space research center
Solar plant
Underground mines
Ore refinery (increase the amount of resources gathered from the Ore mine)
Hyper Space entry
Laser tower
Drone post (increases view)

Shuttle
Hover tank
Astronaut
Space colonizer

[Immortal Wombat]

Thanks alley_cat, most of those I have already included, but the rest I will add, and adapt the tech tree to give suitable enabling advances.
I think that considering how far we have got in the last 300 years, the next 300 years have not fulfilled their potential for depth of research in the future ages.

[alley_cat]

Red stuff factory (where Red Stuff is the metrial that the surface of mars is made of. Lets say that this metrial is excellent for weapons).
Universal Bank
Mars tourist fun expedition (in case you didn't understand, this increases money)
Mutant
Marsian (or however you spell a native creature from Mars). This creature Wouldn't need Oxygen to breath and will have bonus in movement

[Immortal Wombat]

To all who care: The SLIC is going well, and hopefully I should have a beta out by the middle of next week, assuming Omni can upload, my wonder-unit mod isn't up yet, and I mailed it about 2 weeks ago.

Anyway...
I played a few turns, and I realised that civ on Mars is hard, but then so would life be in real life. But I thought, we would have Earth as back-up, so I'm implementing code to grant advances to players every few turns (not too often, but enough to simulate a good civ-empire back on earth).
These triggers are also disabled by a destruction of earth.

I just had a sudden thought, the SLIC is working, the text files are mostly done, but there is one that I could do with some help with (hee hee).

Its boring, its laborious, its not much fun, but does anyone want to write me a turnlength.txt ?

It consists of a list of turn numbers, followed by their dates and years, eg.
1,May 2020
2,June 2020
3,July 2020

exactly like that, only I need about 200 turns...

And does anyone have any futuristic building graphics?

Ben

PS. A native creature of Mars is a Martian

Thanks everyone for all the help.

[Fuzzball]

Awesome ideas. Love your work .slic drives me nuts lately too, so I can totally sympathise there. I wasn't going to edit much of it in my scenario, but there's always a few more little things i want to fix up that just can't be done without writing some .slic documents....
I think I might have some graphics around somewhere you could probably use. I can edit the formats to tga's and tiff's for you in any size you want. 96x72, 160x120, and 72x72 ya? I'll send you some sample's in a few days or so, ok? I'd send them today or tomorrow, but I have to hunt them up, and I seriously have to sort out some sounds and stuff here too. I'd offer to animate the work for you, but you read my thread about the .spr animation. Call me a dumbass, but sprites hate me
I'd be happy to be one of the game testers for you too dude, if that's cool. Cheers.

[Immortal Wombat]

Wow, thanks a lot, I was about to release a beta version, in the next few days. I solved most problems with it now, just the AI I'm not sure whether it will work or not. I think that I can hold it a little while longer for some decent graphics

Fuzz, if you need some simple slic help, mail me, I might be able to help solve it.

PLAYTESTERS:
Hassan
alley_cat
Fuzzball
Hexagonian (or should I ask first? )

anyone else want to playtest next week ?

Oh yeah, and check out my screenshot from my most recent "game" :
http://member.aol.com/wvrs4

Notice:
City graphics, colonist, city build, sciences, date, terrain (the water I added myself), crowdedness.

[hexagonian]

Sure, but I might not be able to get to the testing until later in the week. I have been pretty busy lately - most of my file alteration work has been done at work during slow times (can't play though, because I work off a Mac) and I had had only a couple hours in the last two weeks at home to do any playing - other than tesing your great SLIC additions to my mod.
[This message has been edited by hexagonian (edited April 21, 2001).]

[Immortal Wombat]

Cool, the stuff is all flooding in to my inbox...
Martin G kindly did a turnlength.txt up to 2050, giving 360 turns to work in. As its small map, you will probably have found some way to win by then.
Fuzzball also sent me some pictures that will be included as well.

The scenario is very difficult, as Mars is very inhospitible. At the very start, the research will be slow, but to speed it up, you could risk starvation, as the Martian terrain is not known for its farming ability
A new batch of colonists will arrive every year and a half, so the planet's best city spots get filled up very soon. After that, it is a race to terraform the desert of Mars into terrain that you can live on.
I'm afraid for all the warmongering type players, you will find it very hard. If you declare war with one of your earth "enemies" (eg. USA declares war on China) then all your Public works and gold supply from earth will stop, and if you are at war too long, then earth will be destroyed, or the space programme forgotten about, and no more settlers will come either. Then you are stuck, all alone on Mars...
If you like micromanagemnt to get each city producing the best it can, then this will probably be quite fun for you.

The thing I like best about the scenario is that I have added a way to terraform the land into water, after researching the "H2O Synthesis" advance. I also added that into the AI texts, so the AI should be able to use it as well.

After the beta is out, I will try to make the AI more suited to the scenario, as I would think at the moment, it will not be much of a challenge.

Thanks to everyone who helped.

Ben

EDIT: Hex, I was going to use that location field when I was king meany
[This message has been edited by Immortal Wombat (edited April 22, 2001).]

[Martin Gühmann]

"Must Playtest!" That would be something different compared to city sprite making. I finished CityMod2 nearly, therefore I will have more time to test it. By the way do you consdered a name of your scenario? What about Colonisation of Mars in a Colonisation of Space scenario pack. Then we could make a senario that lets you colonise one of the ice moons in our solarsystem. Live there would be harder than on Mars.

360 turns: Mmm I will find a way not to win by then. But I am afraid that the same is true for 720 turns. I should translate it.

-Martin

[Immortal Wombat]

I emailed it to Omni, but then got it returned later because his mailbox is too full or something. So I can't get it up to the database. I'll email it to everyone who posted here.

The scenario is entitled: Mars: 2020.

2016 is the next launch window for landing on Mars, and I figured on a 4 year trip.

I guess a scenario pack of all the planets would be good, but a little repetitive after a while. If there was a way of making it so you have to have completed Mars to get to the Belt, then that to get to Europa, or Titan or whatever.
Actually, if there was someway of encyrypting a password into a messagebox, then I could make that an entry requirement for subsequent scenarios. But I digress...

When I have the time, I will maybe do that, but I have to go back to school now, and then I have exams in 6 weeks (aaaagh)

Its been a good easter. Thanks everyone.

Ben