Spring RTS Engine

First of all wondering how many of y'all "picked up" this latest chapter in the awesomeness that is GalCiv2. Won't bother reviewing it, needless to say, if you liked GalCiv2 and haven't got bored of it completely yet, it's a worthy addition to the package.

Anyways, I was wanting to make a mod, it's not very hard at all to make custom races, planetary improvements, tech trees etc. and I was going to make a Dune mod but there are already 3 in the works and stuff so whatever. Theres even a "Ultimate Sci-Fi" mod that kinda incorporates a bunch of disparate awesomeness together... I haven't actually played with the latest versions of any of these in a while so I'm not sure how far along they are but... whatever...

What I was thinking about doing is getting together some like-minded creative types and making a few "All New" races... sure they'll probably borrow from other universes a little but the idea is to make some cool stuff that's different from what's in the game but still works in context.

The first step is brainstorming...

My First Idea:
For those who have read the non-Frank Herbert Dune novels you will be familiar with the Omnius/Synchronized Worlds/Evermind... So what I was thinking is we've got Omnius Prime, which is a Galactic Achievement and we've got Omnius Instance which is a once per planet thing... and these do almost everything you would want... and then you have Human Containment that produces food and population growth and you'll just fill up your planet with Pens for the humans... then you have all the gains your race needs be researches... you only have one style of ship but you have a whole string of upgrades to weapons and defences... you research various GalacticAchievements and TradeGoods (and other one per-race) Planetary Improvements and have them all add +1 to planet quality (so you don't lose population space) along with race-wide bonuses... Obviousely you would have to have Erasmus thrown in somewhere to research human culture etc...

That's basically all I've got... so far... it's later then I thought.

Okay, I had a brain thingy... Something about the Old Ones and Cyclopean Ruins... Chthullu and stuff... I don't know how to make the implementation but basically they are really good at destroying planets... invasion tactics almost always loose but they scar the worlds to not being useful... access to things like the spores... and they get terror stars early...

I didn't really like galciv... is there a mod that makes it good?

I wish they hadn't made the combat mechanics so extremely one dimensional and boring, I think that's what made me get bored of galciv2 so quickly...

They had that awesome ship designer setup but it was more or less purely aesthetical. Going trough the tech tree combat was more or less the same the first and last turn, just different colors on the lasers... no interesting design options for the ships, just guns/defens and some minor strategical things like speed/range/detection. And an almost pure RPS system. In fact the whole game was like this, everything was just researching and building the 500% factory ontop of the 400% one, then the 600% etc etc ad infinitum.

Zpock wrote:I wish they hadn't made the combat mechanics so extremely one dimensional and boring, I think that's what made me get bored of galciv2 so quickly...

They had that awesome ship designer setup but it was more or less purely aesthetical. Going trough the tech tree combat was more or less the same the first and last turn, just different colors on the lasers... no interesting design options for the ships, just guns/defens and some minor strategical things like speed/range/detection. And an almost pure RPS system. In fact the whole game was like this, everything was just researching and building the 500% factory ontop of the 400% one, then the 600% etc etc ad infinitum.

Ya. It wasn't anywhere near as interesting as say, alpha centiari.

Twilight of the Arnor adds fleet bonus components so theres a little more strategy to building ships/fleets... also each race has a different tech tree now so it's a little less "I build the 500% factory on the 400% factory" now... for example the Drengin have very little influence techs until a late game building gives each planet a 200% bonus and their influence over the galaxy jumps dramatically.

I'll happily play it again if it adds actual ship combat, which I doubt.