Mars: 2020 Beta

[Immortal Wombat]

...is up at http://www.mydocsonline.com
login: hexagonia
password: hextapul

THANKS VERY MUCH TO HEXAGONIAN for turning his mydocs account into an alternative CTP2 database

Please test it out, and give me any suggestions/complaints to:
weaver1@tinyworld.co.uk

I know it is not the finished product, but please try it, its a start

This is the readme:

This scenario is designed to be a challenging simulation of the colonisation of Mars in the early 21st century. Lots of aid is given from earth, so if you annoy earth, you are likely to lose out in terms of resources.
It includes: New units, new buildings, new techs (all related to terraforming), less wonders, SLIC events.

As this is the BETA version, there will be errors in the code, and I have done my best to sort them, however, I am aware that sometimes the unit build-list is missing some units, and sometimes the colonists fail to turn up at turn 48. If anyone can explain, or even solve these problems, I would be very grateful, and if the interferes too much with gameplay, I will try very hard to solve them.

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The Scenario
======================================

Triggers via SLIC:

1) A colonist unit appears in your capital every two years (24 turns) to simulate emigrants from earth.
2) You are given 2500 PW and 200 gold every 6 turns. This simulates the bi-annual replenishment of suppies and gold from earth.
3) If you go to war with someone (with the exception of player 6, who was meant to be Iraq), then your supply of PW and gold is stopped, and diverted to the war effort on earth.
4) A militia astronaut appears in your capital when it is built.
5) Your research is cheaper than genetic-age advances are normally because of the additional funding from earth, which does most of the research for you.
6) You win when you control 3/4 of the worlds population.

To Win:

You must have 3/4 of the world's population under your control. It is unlikely that the present AI will be able to do that, but it should be quite a challenge for you as well.
For warmongers, it may be possible to win by conquest, but you will have to act quickly to conquer before you run out of resources. The alternative way to win is to make your cities much more successful than the opposition, ie. build lots of tile improvements, and do lots of terraforming. I would suggest that this is the better way to win, though not necessarily the easiest. In actual fact, supporting many conquered cities without PW will be very hard, and yet expanding to new cities sites without conquest will also be hard. The trick will be striking a balance.

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Ben

[Immortal Wombat]

Hmmmm, the scenario is buggier than I expected, take my advice, unless you want input into version 2, wait a coupla months...

[Anarkix Wrex]

I liked this scenario. It needs a bit of tweaking, I didn't find many bugs but the gameplay was very easy.

One bug fix. The lack of settlers after the first two years is caused by the SettlerCount = 0; line not being executed. I don't know why it isn't executed but an alternative way to code it that works is to add the following after the increment line

SettlerCount = SettlerCount + 1;

if(SettlerCount > 25) {
SettlerCount = 1;
}

So while it isn't put back to zero when it should be, next turn it gets bumped back from 26 to 1.

The consequence of war messages are all set to go to player 1, no matter who is actually at war. They ought to be set to go to the appropriate players only. Also they appear every turn which quickly gets annoying. Another way of doing it would be to use the same sort of trigger that gives the PW and gold to send out the consequence messages and enable that when the the PW trigger is disabled. Then you either get the goodies or the message.

There is something wrong in the victory trigger. It always gives me victory when I get my 3rd city even when I have nowhere near 3/4 of the pop.

On gameplay tweaks, I think setting the food slider to minimum is too beneficial and recommend increasing the food eaten at the lower slider settings. Also, I think the food and scientist specialists should be scaled back a bit. The AI needs tweaking. I saw virtually no effective use of its PW and I was growing cities from 3 to 30 while it went from 3 to 4. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to do this.

It was a lot more tricky getting started with the Democracy government rather than the Communist. If this is not the intention then the production multiplier could be scaled back a bit for Communism.

One naval unit would be nice. I wanted to terraform enough sea and then sail round Mars but there wasn't any boat to build.

The civ2 Mars scenario was one of my favourites and this one is going in the right direction.

[Anarkix Wrex]

I think I can see the problem with the victory condition. The 'population' trigger only counts population for civs which have at least 3 cities and the rest are not counted. So the 'populatiocounter' trigger only add up civs of at least 3 cities for the world population. Therefore it reckons that the first civ to 3 cities has 100% of the Mars population at that point. Possible solutions: either get rid of the size greater than 2 condition in 'population', or initialise player1pop etc to some suitably large positive number that is used until player1 gets 3 cities.

[Immortal Wombat]

Thanks for the help and suggestions, Anarkix.
Version 2 will see a lot of changes, this was just to guage what people wanted, and how to implement it. I will put a naval unit in, once I overhaul the unit system.

quote: Also they appear every turn, which quickly gets annoying.

That was the intention, but I'll change it if everyone complains.

Ben

[David Murray]

quote: I will put a naval unit in, once I overhaul the unit system.

I didn't know Mars had any water?

[Fuzzball]

Sure does. Heaps of it. Apparently Mars was once a very wet planet on the surface. The existence of underground waterways on Mars may yet be proven, and the atmosphere also contains some H2o. You can find some of the facts here There's a hell of alot of info in regards to Mars here too. Hope that clarifies things for you.
[This message has been edited by Fuzzball (edited May 05, 2001).]
[This message has been edited by Fuzzball (edited May 05, 2001).]

[Chris B]

Finally, a new project after all these months!!!
Thanks guys for not giving up on this game
[This message has been edited by Chris B (edited May 05, 2001).]

[Chris B]

Finally, a new project after all these months!!!

[Immortal Wombat]

quote: Originally posted by David Murray on 05-05-2001 07:24 AM I didn't know Mars had any water?

The aim of the scenario is to colonise Mars. The easiest way of doing that is to add your own water. I originally left out all naval units, but then it was pointed out that once you synthesised H2O on Mars, and planted some trees, you'd have wood to build simple vessels. Just coracles I think to start with though.

[Fuzzball]

Hi Wombat. How's the work comin' along dude? Think I can play some more of your creations soon? Hope it's all goin well for you man. Lookin forward to the next version.

[Immortal Wombat]

Yeah, sorry, I don't have a lot of free time at the moment, but in two weeks, I will be able to work on it fairly solidly, and then it will be another coupla weeks from then
Looking at quite a while. In the mean time, I will be grabbing 5 minute snatches at a small OneCityChallenge scenario (The 1st for CTP2 I believe), so that will go up sometime next week. Check it out for more Wombating fun! !

Ben

[Fuzzball]

Lookin' forward to it