Custom Factions: Trench Dog edition

[bvanevery]

I don't take chances with things like that.  I remember some road in a National Forest that had water going over it.  I got out of my car to look at how much.  I probed the water with a stick to figure out the depth.  It wasn't much, but I decided to take no chance.  I couldn't probe all of it, and if anything went wrong, I'm the one who would be stuck miles from nowhere without aid.

And I always camped on high ground.  People die doing stupid things like camping at the bottom of a river bed that's known to flood periodically.  So yeah the 100 year storm comes through.  You're the one who's dead, not the actuary.

[Trench Dog]

Wise words. I took similar mottos myself, especially when out in the bush.

I actually have an idea for a faction; looking back at the Motor Tribe one- an actual serious idea.

A sort of "nomad" inspired faction where its meant to travel fast and long, and instead of normal colony pods; have colony "speeders" that travel faster. Does anyone know how to implement this? I also had a wild idea of doing a helicopter based one but I feel like the AI would be too stupid to properly do that.


I also got another faction idea in mind; but I feel it would be immensely overpowered:

An aircraft focused faction of some sort. Cloudbase Academy in its theme, aircraft enthusiast types who got a philosophy of "being as free as the wind" sort of deal.

[bvanevery]

Making a Speeder or Hovertank predefined colonization unit is trivial in alphax.txt.  The trick would be making it only available to 1 faction.

I recently posted a thread about making a tech that a specific faction starts with.  The predefined unit could be given that way.  The downside is that if you click too far back on prereq techs in the Datalinks, it'll crash the game.  If you're willing to tell your players not to do that "or suffer the consequences", then you're fine.  I'm not willing to do that for my own mod, because I want the broadest possible adoption for my releases, and I don't want to be blamed for introducing bugs.

Actually I just realized you could do it in a non-buggy way.  It would have to be a late game tech, and a "leaf" dead end from some other tech.  Only the faction you want to have it, gets it at the start of the game.  This approach might have some skewing effects on some kind of tech cost mechanism though.  Like everyone else is working on Tier 1 techs and now you've got a Tier 10 tech, might change some cost formula somewhere, due to the average having such a high tech in it.

The faction could still trade away this tech to other factions.  You can't stop them from doing that.  So strictly speaking the idea of a faction-specific unit does not exist in SMAC, like it does in other games say Civ III forwards.  But you can definitely have a faction start with a kind of unit that others don't start with.

I seem to recall that Needlejet Colonists do actually work.  You can fly them out and actually build cities with them, on land at least, IIRC.  Problem is, the AI won't do it.  Has no clue.  So I removed that from my predefined unit designs, once I realized it would just make the AI do something pointless.

That's a general problem with predefined units.  I've concluded that they're for getting the AI to do stuff.  If the AI won't do something reasonable with a unit, it shouldn't be in there, because it'll just water down the AI's production into pointless stuff.  I've come up with a number of units that would be nifty for human players, but the AI can't handle them, so I discard the designs.

[Trench Dog]

Making a Speeder or Hovertank predefined colonization unit is trivial in alphax.txt.  The trick would be making it only available to 1 faction.

The faction could still trade away this tech to other factions.  You can't stop them from doing that.  So strictly speaking the idea of a faction-specific unit does not exist in SMAC, like it does in other games say Civ III forwards.  But you can definitely have a faction start with a kind of unit that others don't start with.

I don't got any problem with that really. Because its technically possible to design it anyways in the workshop.

(click to show/hide)

I seem to recall that Needlejet Colonists do actually work.  You can fly them out and actually build cities with them, on land at least, IIRC.  Problem is, the AI won't do it.  Has no clue.  So I removed that from my predefined unit designs, once I realized it would just make the AI do something pointless.

That's a general problem with predefined units.  I've concluded that they're for getting the AI to do stuff.  If the AI won't do something reasonable with a unit, it shouldn't be in there, because it'll just water down the AI's production into pointless stuff.  I've come up with a number of units that would be nifty for human players, but the AI can't handle them, so I discard the designs.

That's my biggest problem, will the AI be too stupid to use colony rovers even? Either way, been drumming up a new faction.

The Settlers of Chiron, a faction focused on population growth and wealth.

Led by Indonesian woman Zeyda, (no surname due to her ethnicity) a former refugee and disaster relief officer in the UN and other organizations, she helped organize efforts against the likes of thermonuclear war and climate change.

The Settlers of Chiron are comprised of refugees the world over, and follow a philosophy of living in peace and pursuing their own ends, preferring to have their communities grow unhindered.
She starts aquatic, but her faction suffers both morale and probe deficits as they are pacifists, many of which are scarred refugees from either Earth or asylum seekers fleeing the grips of more pervasive factions and their conflicts on Chiron.

For installation just drag and drop all the files into your Alpha Centauri folder, nothing much more to it than that. Let me know your thoughts!




Edit: Note, debating on nerfing this one a tad; but shall see.

She starts with 2 additional sea colony pods, doctrine flexibility, aquatic faction tag, hab complex and -2 morale and -1 probe. Her AI is non-aggressive.

Player test wise she was very easy to boom with and she can easily climb to bases with over 10 pop by about the time you get gene splicing and other sorta mid tier techs. I do think she'd get her arse kicked in any serious war though, I avoided warfare by being diplomatic, giving up techs and such when asked/demanded.

[bvanevery]

That's my biggest problem, will the AI be too stupid to use colony rovers even?

No; in fact, I've seen the AI design and deploy a Fusion Speeder Colony Pod all on its own.  If you predefine a Speeder Colony Pod, it's going to be a Fission unit.  The question is whether the AI will choose to build it.  The AI will build a Trance 3-Res Colony Pod on an Infantry chassis, so it doesn't seem particularly averse to more expensive units.  Also you could customize the build cost of the unit.  Bear in mind that eventually, everyone will get this cheap colony unit though.

I don't think I've seen the AI design a Fusion Hovertank Colony Pod unit.  If you predefine it, it will be Fission.  I don't know whether the AI will choose to build it, you just have to run an AI only game and see what it does.  I didn't predefine this unit because by the time the AIs get hovertank technology in my mod, I wouldn't want to encourage them to settle anymore.