Questions for Modders

[Trenacker]

Some questions about modding (yay!):

• Is it possible for ground units to capture? Would it be possible to replicate the mechanic first seen in Civ 3, wherein attacking a worker or settler created a percent chance to capture?
• Is it possible to play a game with more than 7 factions represented?
• Has anyone ever added new technologies, facilities, or wonders to the game? If so, can somebody point me in that direction?

Cheers!

[Buster's Uncle]

1. I don't think so...  (If any .exe modders see, would it be feasible to mod the Marine Detachment ability to work for land units?)
2. The .exe modders all swear up and down that it's pretty much unworkable.
3. Try here: http://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?topic=20171.msg108749#msg108749 -But nobody seems to know how to make any that do anything.

[Chiu ChunLing]

There is the mechanic by which Alien Artifacts are captured and lone units can be mind controlled by probe teams, so obviously it's possible.  It just requires that the unit you're trying to capture be an Alien Artifact or that you use a probe team and spend the Credits to pull of capturing the unit.

It is possible to make the Native Life Forms play as a faction...they don't do it very well, though.  The engine has some hardcoded limitations that keep the Native Life Form faction from working in a coherent manner.  But the engine uses an 8-bit flag system for multiple tasks, like tracking technology advances and turn progression, number of human controlled players, etc., so having more than 8 total factions isn't possible without rewriting the game engine (and one of those is hardcoded to not work in a cohesive fashion).

You can create up to ten custom technologies in SMAC (and revive a few deleted ones), I understand that most of these are used up by new techs in SMAX, but you can still create and enable the remaining ones.  These can be made to have several effects through the tech flags, like increasing commerce, boosting fungus resources, counting as a secret (hence giving the first player to discover it an extra tech), boosting probe teams, etc.  You can also change the various weapons/modules and armors to have different tech requirements, as well as facilities and such.  I made a bunch of end-game "transcendence" techs that boosted the nutrients and energy from fungus (to represent the described uploading of the population into Planet's natural neural net), as well as reenabling a couple of disabled techs (Force Field Mechanics and Dynamic Economics).  You can (probably) add some new facilities, but other than maybe giving them negative maintenance costs I'm not sure what benefits they could have.

Someone mentioned creating some extra secret projects, and there are some values after the secret projects that might make them do something, but I don't know what.