How to make a good faction?

[Stefu]

Here are what I think.

1. Be innovative, god dammit. Whatever you do, DON'T make faction that is modelled after some pop culture thingy, like Star Wars or Final Fantasy or something. God, I always get embarrassed for the maker when I see one. And equally bad are something that obviously is not centered around certain philosphy of life like normal SMAC factions, but rather some Earth thingy author wanted to, for reasons only God and he knows, use. This includes factions like Wrestlers, Police and Americans. No, those fellows are very unlikey to form factions in planets.

2. Try to invent innovative "sentences" for txt file. If someone has used bit of innovation in them, they are fun to read and contribute greatly to the atmosphere. Don't be redundant, and add a bit of humor in them - not too much though. And spellcheck them - it's embarrassing to see someone making trivial spelling errors.

3. Balanced factions are way to go. There is good rating system in http://www.crosswinds.net/~smaccf/fac-tool/faq2.htm and it should help to make faction a balanced one - about 7-9 points would be good, IMHO - but only playtesting will finally show it.

4. Graphics, graphics, graphics! Leader heads are hard, I know, but DON'T try to draw them yourself unless you are artist comparable to Leonardo Da Vinci. You can see results in FreeChina's "Socialistic" and "Anarchistic" factions. Uurgh, I get the blisters again. Photograhps are acceptable, but if you want good, drawn ones, http://members.xoom.com/acchiron has some good ones in Art section, and if you want real challenge try messing up with Talking Heads in fallout.gamestats.com - both in FO1 and FO2. There is one faction already to do this, and it looks great. Symbol is nice too, remember to make it simple yet elegant, and new bases are nice addition.

So, if you feel your faction is according to these principles, by God, what are you waiting? Email it to me at tatuahpo@pelu.jns.fi! (BTW, Famyn, where are those factions you said you'd send?)

Or, you could contribute to this list, of course, but that goes without saying.

[Q_tip1976]

Stefu,

I agree with your comments on new factions completely. Deffinately too many lame concepts an dpoor graphics. I do however think that in teh context of a modpack the use of pop culture can be cool. (Because you create a new environment where their pressence makes sence.)

Anyway in the interest of creating more good factions here are a few things I have learned about faction graphics (I've just completed my first new set ) That hope will help other creators out there.

1) Faction leaders need look drawn well but can't look like a photgraph to fit in with the game. I've found that 3D graphics sights are a great way to find potential leader graphics. If you find a face that looks appropriate to your faction crop the photo in Paint Shop Pro and resize it. Use the blinds option to give the picture the same look as the rest of the leaders.

2) The biggest problem with new bases is they usually look 2-dimensional. Create your bases in a 3D modeling program and import them into PSPro. There is one called Blender that is free ware: (http://www.blender.nl/) it's a bit of a pain to learn how to use but it's FREE and pretty powerful as far as I can tell. (You can order the instructions fro $40 but I was able to get by without them.) Make sure that the right side of your base is the light side and the left side is the shaded side. (I've seen several bases that were nice but the shading was the opposite of what it should be!)

3) The symbol was much harder than I thought it would be! Use blinds to give it the horizantal banding and adjust the brightness (easy to do in PSPro) to match the symbols in the rest of the game. When your symbol is alot darker or brighter than all the others it's very obvious.

4) New sentances and base names aren't hard to make different, although funny or imaginative can be a challenge. But even a boring base name is better than Hive2.

I don't have alot of experience playtesting yet but it's very easy to overpower your new "pet" faction try to stay objective and get imput from others about balancing your faction. (This BB is a great place to do that)

These are just a few lessons I've learned.

[EternalSpark]

Sometimes, though, Hive bases look the best, esp. if they don't start out with PDs..

[Sinapus]

Hm. Tried that faction rating system on one of the factions I've been toying around with and came up with a 9.... you do just add up the values you end up with, right?

Alas my graphics abilities are rather bad so I only have the Peacekeeper files with a slight alteration to the faction color files to give it a different shade of blue.

I'd like to add that you might want to playtest and make sure that the special ability you wish for is there, or you might want to change the 4 points for free ability (preq) to -4.

Unless I did something wrong while playtesting, the Drop Pods special ability refuses to function when it gets added to your units. Anyone try to make a faction with that one?

I've noticed the Marine Detachment ability doesn't add the graphics when it appears on your units either, but don't know if it actually works or not.

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|"Anything I can do to help?" "Um. Short of dying? No, can't think of a |
| thing." -Morden, Vir. 'Interludes and Examinations' -Babylon 5 |

[Famyn]

They're coming. I've had a busy week.

Do you want them all (8 factions) in a big zip file, or do you want them individually...

[Stefu]

Unless big zip file is over 1.4 megs, I'd like to have them in that format.

[Famyn]

Zip file too large. Each zip is roughly 300+k. I'm sending them now.

Please post any bugs you find. I have looked over and over at the files, finding mistakes and trying to power up the factions, as they all seem a tad weak (except Night, which is too powerful in the hands of a player).

If you have suggestions, I'd be more then happy to hear them

[Famyn]

Oh, btw, add them directly to your alphax.txt. Me and FacEdit don't get along, and all it'll do is mess up my files.

Or, go ahead and use FacEdit, but after all the factions are added, re-unzip them into your alpha centauri folder again, to undo the damage that FacEdit will do to the files.

[Darrell01]

-- bumpity bump bump agree bump --

[Xian]

Avoid cliches

Read an anthropology textbook for inspiration

[Darrell01]

I like to base my factions on ideals, much like the rest of the factions are done in the game. The only time I think a pop culture reference would be good, would be a whole modpack, then I could see it making some sense. For instance, I hear there is a Dune modpack out there. That makes sense to me. If you seem to be out of ideas, here is how I look at it.

One thing we can base our faction on is the government type. Fundamentalism, Green, Wealth... Things like those. All you need to do is look at your faction table and start there. Another part of this is looking for the anti-idiology of your faction. Miriam is Fundamentalist, antiKnowledge. What about a Fundamentalist who is anti-Power? That might be some Pacifist faction, perhaps Jianism, where they don't want to hurt even the smallest wormdog, even if its eating their brains.

The second way to base a faction is to look at the Social Engineering Table. Say you want a faction based off SUPPORT. Well, looking at the SE Tbl, you see immediately that Democracy and Thought Control are immediately 2 available anti-idiologies, so perhaps this might be an anarchist group who values personal freedom, but not overall central power.

Another way to base a faction is to base it off some population type in the game. Mentioned in another thread about pop based factions, I talked about an Empath, Talent, and other based factions. Yes, yes, I know Morgan is a technition type based faction, but perhaps we can change him up a bit. One of my personal favorites is Foreman Domai. I think the Drone faction is genius! Plus, once he gets going he gets more money than Morgan. Probe teams help. ;-) Cha Dawn is a mind worm infested faction. Another great idea. So one an so forth. BTW, is Cha Dawn a girl or a guy? Cha Dawn sounds female in the voice acting, but comes up as a guy in the text... And talk about androgeny, that picture...

Another way to base a faction is off a certain technology or secret project. Darsan below me here talks about a faction he made just for the computer to play of a clone faction. Very good. Perhaps you want to make a faction based off of the Cloudbase academy. You have some guy who was an airforce pilot in Israel or Russia, or something like that. Maybe he was a test pilot for Chairman Yang. You could make a faction that found an alien artifact and knows cloaking technology and so they start out with cloaking tech and all thier units have it default. (I say this because this tech usually appears late in the game once I've already won because I've saved up 99 or so alien artifacts, turned them all in, so my shard chopper just shreds the 3res sentinels and silksteel garrisons to pieces.) See what happens.

Base your faction on some faction attributes that are not used often, like Impunity, Penalty, Robust, Immunity. Make a fundamentalist faction who has Robust Research, or Penalty-Democratic so there is a reason not to choose Democratic at all points in the game.

Another way to base a faction is off unit types. You could make a colony faction off the colony pod. That faction could be a colony pod, +GROWTH and +SUPPORT, but perhaps -MORALE, -POLICE and -EFFICIENCY. This faction might have an overall "Manifest Destiny" type ideology, so he is accused of land grabbing and such. The Data Angels are a good example of this. A probe team faction.

You can base your faction off an offshoot of another faction. One guy made a more extreme version of Chairman Yang. Never played it though. There's a Chiron Rangers faction. Here's a militant arm of the Gaians. This is a good example. The Gaian faction is based upon peaceloving peaceniks who would rather lay down arms and let the tyranny of Yang roll over them, but if Morgan wants to burn some fungus to keep warm, watch out! Then they turn into Psi wielding monster killers. Base your faction off a rebellion in another faction. Militant peaceniks, and whalla! The Chiron Rangers.

Base your faction on some ideas or Planet-life or people that come up in the flavor text. The native life includes, worm-dogs, razorbeak and razorwing birds, razorfish, mindworms, locust of chiron, fungal towers, spore pods, isle of the deep, sea lurks, organo-nitrates, sporeflowers, sporerunners, nanotechs, digital sentience, and organic superlube. The people include, Drones, Normals, Talents, telepathi, thinkers, doctors, librarians, technitions, Flowers, trancendi, engineers, human who emulate aliens, aliens who emulate humans, and of course, Captain Garland. I know there's a official story. Perhaps there are some personalities and ideas in there.

You can base your faction off of the other planets in the system and Earth. You have Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon, any of the moons in the solar system like Io, Titan, or Ganymede, Planet, Eurytion, Pholus, Nessus, and Chiron. Perhaps not the entire faction, but perhaps a part of it.

You can base your faction on people who don't believe any of the faction leaders about Earth and think the whole thing is a made up giant conspiracy and break off the other factions to go thier own way.

But mostly, you are going to want a mix of some or all of this to make your faction. Give your faction depth and pour some creative ideas into it and fill out your flavor text. Look for the base names post done by me and fill up your base names list so easily with both base names and seabase names.

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by Darrell01
I like to base my factions on ideals, much like the rest of the factions are done in the game. The only time I think a pop culture reference would be good, would be a whole modpack, then I could see it making some sense. For instance, I hear there is a Dune modpack out there. That makes sense to me.

From my perspective I think one of the main themes here should be what are you trying to accomplish with a new Faction. If you are trying to just add a new Faction that the community in general will accept, then you should go for balance, as well as making it something believable and fitting within the existing framework. If its a part of a modpack, then it should fit within the theme of that environment, as well as also focusing on balance.

One of the things I learned from Smacksim is to design Factions simply for the AI to use: balance then goes out the window! A good example of this would be the Autocthone Faction that I recently introduced in an SP Challenge. They are not a very balanced Faction and would not fit well into a regular game environment, however in an SP Challenge they are an enjoyable AI opponent to deal with! If you are into more significantly challenging SP games, then I recommend this avenue for Faction development!

D