my understanding is that there is a bit mask which is applied to the game, and it is an 8-bit mask. Thus only 8 Factions (including NL) are allowed in a given game. I have been able to trick the game into allowing 8 factions (i.e. I set up the 8th Faction as a playable faction), however it ain't pretty, and it crashes the game continually.
I suspect it would be a lost cause, though. Praying for a saviour to come about from the masses seems to be not a good solution. I hate to be pessimistic. Age of Wonders for a cult game community has one thing we do not: rabid eastern European fanatic coders that live to .exe mod and have massive fanbase and support. Also, I have reservations. Most coders I have known are not to receptive of some guy's ideas unless that person is a coder himself. Not to say they do not take suggestions. It is just they are the ones doing the "work". As such, what the community or myself feel is the number one goal, they may not.
First off.. and for coders, this seems to not be as "exciting" as adding new content or Total Conversions since it is work. More than 7 factions.
Notice what I feel is the "useless" function of the faction select screen. Why do I need three buttons up top for SMAC only, SMAX only, and mixed? Shouldn't just a pull down suffice?
Now, unit maximum MAY bite us. I think Scient or Kyrub tried to lift the unit max but it bit him. With 14 factions, we could be pushing this.
Not sure about maps. Starting positions would have to be made for more than 7 factions.
NUMBER 2
Map Pack
I feel sorry for the multiplayers. They only have one map which is the veteran's map. Even the FPS crowd has several competition maps.
Any expansion would include the more popular competition maps. Maybe a scenario.
NUMBER 3
SMAX Palette/ graphics overhaul/ modern gfx card (HD) issues.
We do not need 3d graphics. But, it would be nice to display more colors and have a higher resolution. Resolution support for more modern graphics cards would be cool, too.
The controversial part: :)
Most expansions offer additional gameplay. Beyond the Sword for Civ 4 offered espionage, corporations, and a host of other things. Gods and Kings offered the more as well to Civ 5. Each modern Civ has had expansions. There are those that say Civ 5 will get a third. Where is AC's third expansion?
Orbital/ sattelite warfare.
Creature Bestiary. More Native units to wreak havoc would be awesome.
I had checked Scient's thread and I know he used a disassembler. I did not know he was going all hardcore machine language!
I was assuming that the Firaxis team would have at least used a higher programming language to actually build the game.
The Orbital warfare deal really intrigues me. Now, I wish i had the perfect solution. But, unfortunately no other game that has been published has ever dealt with orbital warfare mechanics. SMAX is the only one with even a basic system. Even then, it is not much compared to the richness of the rest of the game.
I do agree with you on Sky Hydroponics labs though the purists (who more than likely are ALSO abusing Cloudbase Academy) are going to freak.
I go a bit further. I still do not see why an advanced society would put farms in space even with unlimited energy just to ship back dirtside when most games still have lots of undeveloped land.
Sky Hydroponics Lab- I maintain the position food for land bases would not be grown in orbit. BUT- if you actually had BASES in orbit, it would be a base facility. After all, there are no workable tiles in space. Nor do I think Planet's moons have an atmosphere or any tiles that can be worked for nutrients unless you put a pressure on that tile. If anything aerospace complexes would have to ship nutrients UP and be given a PENALTY per orbital lab:) Almost all the transhumanist visions from the 1960s on up envisioned food grown in orbit to support those LIVING in orbit. Larry Niven in a 1980s short story even had one character joke to another on his way to an Earth-Moon L2 station with a hydroponics lab that liquor being shipped up cost as much as replacing a liver from drinking so much liquor! But, the Hydroponics Lab was a base - A moon mining base that caught material launched from a mass driver. They had several hundred hungry workers to feed!
Orbital Defense Pod. SDI/ aka Reagan's "Star Wars" had more applications than just nuke interception. It is the reason Gorby was raising hell. It was also a fearsome orbit to surface weapons platform! Now, you could say with advanced guidance, this could be done on ground, too. But, unlike ground, you are not getting the weapons in the sky with chaos infrantry.
Orbital Power Platform. Now, this is actually realistic AS IS. But, you forget that one of the reasons no one has done this yet in adddition to cost is this can be a formidable weapon, too! Instead of zapping power down to a substation, you could just zap entire cities! EMP blast, eat your heart out...lol.
Now, one thing that could be done to further weaken Cloudbase is to unattach the bonus for Power Platform away from aerospace complexes. Instead, make the bonus from this come from some kind of substation facility. I would not want the juice being zapped down anywhere near my spaceports.
Anyone actually use these? In a perfect world, A real "survey" sattelite would remove fog of war. You would place this in geostationary orbit around whatever region you wanted to keep track of. Now, if you wanted a basic "whole world" map like what is revealed when you first launch any sattelite without revealing units, you launch it in a orbit that it eventually traverses much of the planet. For this reason, I refuse to play any future tech game with fog of war. Trust me, even in this age we know what is happening across the globe in every city in real time if we want.
Probe team sattelite. Yeah.. why build what you can subvert. Think what the Transformer did to the sattelite in one of the Transformers movies. If you want to get fancy, you could have your own missions, too, in addition to taking over the sattelite or orbital facility.
Reasearch Station. Conducts experiments made better in a microgravity enviroment. SMAX's version of the ISS. Provides research.
Actual bases (cities) in the sky.
One other thing is not actually a platform, station, base, or sattelite would be debris. Particularly if Yang and Santiago go nuts and start blasting things out of the sky. When the Chinese blasted and old sattelite out of the sky, they created a huge cloud of debris that threatened other equipment up there! It has been suggested in the old Paladium Rifts world that even though the setting had futuristic weapons and mechs and such that there was no global communication or sattelites because of some ancient war that littered the orbit with thick space junk clouds. This would be a huge concern.
Triple post.. but I am on a roll.
Secret Project: Space Elevator. No. It should be a facility you can build. A VERY, VERY expensive one- but able to built nonetheless by any base meeting the latitude requirement. Problem is - and why I think the space elevator could cause issues for any empire - is it would be a very ripe target for terrorism. Blow that thing up, you could have a supersonic thousands of mile long nano carbon cord destroying everything in a random straight line as hit hits ground at worst. Yeah. As Roze, the Space Elevator is the first to go if she sees it! Authur C. Clark and others viewed this as a facility. Some paper I have seen even predicted multiples of these on low gravity worlds like moons and dwarf planets.
How about we give satellites armour and weapons, and put them in the workshop?
Perhaps seperate out the aircraft and spacecraft parts of the aerospace complex to two different facilities?
All too complex without exe editing, those things, though.
Trust me, even in this age we know what is happening across the globe in every city in real time if we want.
How about we give satellites armour and weapons, and put them in the workshop?
Perhaps seperate out the aircraft and spacecraft parts of the aerospace complex to two different facilities?
Let me explain. SMAX outputs and recieves information, if you set it that way, to TCP-IP. This information I think contains all current game data. It works (in theory) by tricking the game into thinking it is playing MP then altering game information and sending it back. You could have an external program get all this data and add the orbital/moon-planet stuff on top of it. Of course, it will have it's own AI that reads what the game AI is doing and cooperates with it. It could also send information that affects the map and world in game and vice versa to the external program suborbital world. Units could be erased from SMAX and put into the external program. The advantage is that you have the code in whatever programming language you are profecient at and the community has the source code. Disadvantage is, I may totally be ignorant and wrong and this could never work.
*Yeah. Sensor under base is an EXPLOIT. Pure and simple.
*Let me think for a second in game terms about orbital debris clouds. Some real life sattelites DO have a limited amount of propellant to be able to boost to get out of this. In game terms, this probably is handled out of game. Still, I like the mechanic and most sattellites are sitting ducks. Maybe set up that for every debris cloud there is a percent chance equal to the number of clouds a random sattelite gets destroyed. Orbital defense platforms can take out these clouds. Maybe there is a way for ground missile to do this too.
Well, to start, I think it is time for the Cloudbase Academy and it's connection to orbital cheese to be lessened. I still think Cloudbase should be the word for guys that love big air. But all those minerals and nutrients?
My proposal: Cloudbase should still give you all the aerospace complexes to make your air units uber and help you versus folks dropping drop troopers into unguarded bases. But, receiving power and nutrients and minerals is a bit too much. Either tie that ability to another existing facility or add another. Once again, though you are looking at UI.
It would be really cool to have a on/off switch for this rule in game under options to please any purist sandboxers who do SP and do not care about balance.
In "reality" a base could be built around a sensor, just as cities have developed around forts/castles.
What if in addition to being something a former can build, a sensor were also a base facility, and therefore something a base could put up after being established, and something which a probe team could sabotage? Possibly also something that has a chance of being taken out by artillery or air strike, because it's sensitive equipment on an exposed tower.