Planetfall, the Alpha Centauri total conversion mod for Civ4 BtS

[Maniac]

Requires Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword patch 3.19

DOWNLOAD HERE - both the main file and the latest patch

Optional: the SMAC sound files and the SMAC movie files in four parts: #1, #2, #3 and #4
See the FAQ in the next post on where to place them. THANKS to WarKirby for providing the sound files, and to sylandro for providing the movies.

***

Earth, 2060. A small group of colonists leaves the ravages of Earth for a distant planet orbiting Alpha Centauri's primary star. Their ship, the United Nations Starship Unity, carries them on their journey to a new world and a new hope for humankind. Along the way a reactor malfunction damages the Unity, precipitating a crisis among the ship's seven most powerful leaders. As they enter the Alpha Centauri system, the crew splits into seven distinct factions, divided not by nationality, but by ideology, and their vision for the new world. After the ship breaks apart, the seven leaders guide their chosen crew down to the surface of Planet, seeking their destiny beneath an alien sky.

Planetfall is a mod for Sid Meier's Civilization 4 that uses the storyline and characters from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, combined with gameplay that takes the best from SMAC, Civilization, and the modding community.

Planetfall is not a clone of SMAC using the Civ4 engine, but rather incorporates the Factions, general storyline and Characters combined with new gameplay modifications to allow for more strategic gameplay.

***

Design & Programming: Maniac
Graphics Lead: Lord Tirian
And many other contributors. See Readme.

Besides in this thread, you can also discuss Planetfall in this forum.

[Maniac]

Q: Planetfall crashes right away when I try to start the game. What's up?

A: There are two common causes that prevent people from getting Planetfall to work:

1) they don't have patch 3.19
2) when using Windows Vista, they haven't disabled User Account Control (UAC)


1) they don't have patch 3.19

There are many people who swear they have the latest official Firaxis patch 3.19, but then it turns out they haven't. A big reason is the automatic updater inside the game doesn't work correctly. If that's how you believe you got the latest patch, download the patch "again" from here and install it manually to be sure.

2) when using Windows Vista, they haven't disabled User Account Control (UAC)

"What is UAC and how do I disable it?"
This is answered here:
For Windows Vista
For Windows 7

Q: Where do I need to place and extract the BIK movie files I just downloaded?

A: You need to place them in Beyond the Sword/Mods/Planetfall v1x/Assets/Art/Movies. The files have been archived into .rar format, so you'll probably need WinRAR or 7-Zip to extract them.

Q: Is it possible to hear the original SMAC voice quotes in Planetfall?

A: Yes it is. Many of the tech and base facility quotes are used.

To enable the voice quotes, you should copy the SMAC fx and voices folder into the Planetfall Sounds folder, as indicated on the screenshot. If you do not do this, you'll just hear a 'ping' upon researching a technology.



Q: But I don't own SMAC, and I want to hear SMAC sounds!

A: Sorry to hear that. You may be able to purchase it here though. But do hurry. Good things never last.

Q: Are there recommended settings, when playing Planetfall?

A: Yes.

Map Size: Standard (bigger maps cause performance issues and are a lot less useful for me to hunt for bugs)
Era: Use Arrival for playing the original seven factions. You need to choose the Expansion Era to play the four SMAX factions.
Settings:

• Advanced start (the one which allows to purchase stuff): Not recommended, as no AI code has been added to make the AI consider a Hybrid strategy right from the start.
  
• No Barbarians Not recommended, as it disables a key element of the mod.
  
• Raging Barbarians Only recommended, if an extra challenge is desired.
  
• Unrestricted leaders Not recommended as leaders and their factions are designed as a complete package.
  
• Choose religions Not recommended - PF's religions carry special effects and have their fitting place in the tech tree; also causes interface issues.
  
• No technology trading Not Recommended - interferes with the following, default setting.
  
• No technology brokering Should be activated, because Zakharovs trait depends partly on this setting.
  
• Scattered landing pods Can be activated to enhance AI performance in exchange for less early conflicts, but the mod is desiged for having this disabled.

Q: How can I best help playtest for bugs and crashes?

Often the source of a crash happens a couple turns before the game actually crashes. So only posting the turn the game crashes sometimes is not enough. May I therefore ask to open CivilizationIV.ini - which with me is located in My Documents\My Games\Beyond the Sword - and change to the following values:

; The maximum number of autosaves kept in the directory before being deleted.
MaxAutoSaves = 150

; Specify the number of turns between autoSaves. 0 means no autosave.
AutoSaveInterval = 1

Having MaxAutoSaves at 20 or so should also suffice.

If you suffer a crash, please immediately copy all your autosaves - located with me in My Documents\My Games\Beyond the Sword\Saves\single\auto - into some other folder, before you start a new game (because starting a new game deletes all autosaves). I may request to send me the latest couple autosaves if I can't find the problem in the turn of the crash itself.

Q: Help! I can't see any fungus on land!

A: Your computer probably has an older graphics card. Fortunately there's a solution to make all features visible. It won't look as pretty, but at least you'll be able to see where there's fungus.

The solution is like this. In Planetfall\Assets\XML\Art there's a file called CIV4ArtDefines_FeatureLoGfx.xml - rename it to CIV4ArtDefines_Feature.xml, overwriting the file currently named like that, and problem solved.

Q: Does Planetfall include a Unit Workshop?

A: No it doesn't, and it won't.

Q: Does Planetfall include elevation terraforming and planet busters creating big craters?

A: No, Planetfall does not include these features.

Q: Does Planetfall include Blind Research?

A: Personally I feel picking your tech strategy is one of the biggest decisions you make in a civ game. I therefore do not see the attraction in Blind Research at all, and do not wish to spend any time on coding that myself. If someone else would code a Blind Research system, I would of course add it to Planetfall.

Barring that, you could just follow the recommendations you are given when you need to pick a new tech: there are always two techs recommended.

[Selrahc]

Some general critical feedback. Overall though this is a very impressive job, and I'd like to thank you for putting the effort in to make this thing.

1. Leader balance is all phlooey. I've not messed about much with the expansion leaders yet, but the "Original 7" have a wiiiiiiiiiide curve of strength.

Top of the heap are Sister Miriam "Perma Golden Age" Godwinson and Chairman "I have infinite production" Yang. Down at the bottom you have poor CEO Morgan, who gets jack all until some expensive technologies are researched, and gets lumbered with a very significant early game penalty on top. He absolutely needs some sort of early game buff. There's some variance between the remaining four, but they all feel much more on a plateau. If we're aiming to get them all up to Miriam/Yang levels, some wide scale buffs will be needed.

2. Unity Pods! Argh.

3. Secret projects balance. The early game secret projects(most of which can be easily ripped out from under you by Unity Pods ) are generally very interesting and have quite powerful effects. The later game secret projects are a lot more meh.

4. Is there a particular reason why Hybrid forests are unlocked so late in the tech tree?

5. Food(in particular, Grenade Fruit and Fungicide) resources should be visible from the start. They're such a key factor in settling cities that making them not appear undermines a lot of the beginning game planning.

6. The "Corporations"(Nanoreplicator, Weather Control, Brood Pit, Living Refinery) don't seem to be working. Or am I just missing something?

7. I've not really looked at spying yet, partly because it seems like its quite late before you can really get it operational. Any thoughts about it to share?

8. Siege tanks seem to be so strong that they dominate combat for a long time. I'm not entirely against that, but is that the intention?

[Maniac]

Please use this thread to ask gameplay questions, or report balance issues, or anything else you want off your chest.

Imagine a 5 player game. A rushes B. C intervenes, D and E watch. A, B and C are all weakened. D and E continued growing stronger.
This is why precedent has shown that intervention is not going to act as a balance. People are incentivized not to intervene.

But if none of C, D and E intervene, and A wins an easy victory, C, D and E are screwed too, no? To me such diplomatic issues and dilemmas seem an inherent part of the game. Also, doesn't that dilemma exist regardless of how many turns have passed, or how close together the players start? Why does conquest become "fair" when it happens later in the game or when players start further apart? I could see the point when only two players A and B were close together, and the other three far apart, as that could affect players' A and B their chances positively or negatively. But that argument doesn't count if everyone is guaranteed to start close together (or guaranteed to be more isolated as part of their faction ability, in the case of the Hive and Spartans). An early rush seems to me like an inherent part of the game, a high risk-high reward strategy. Like a Zerglish rush. No one's going to say those should be forbidden, right?

RE: Unity pod popping
Unity pods cascade. Bob in the current PBEM popped lots of explorer units with his early unity pods, and used them to pop dozens of pods. I popped some cartographic data and some energy credits, then had all further exploration blocked by worms.

You could have built a scout patrol as your first build to do some more popping.

Unity Pods are ramped *UP* goody huts. I wouldn't play another PBEM with Unity Pods enabled.
The Spartan "exploration bonus" pales into insignificance compared to the effects of popping some unity rovers or choppers.

If I was going to reccomend a fix, I would say dramatically increase the negative effects of popping pods. Make all/most pods not popped by Culture generate Mindworms. This is a blatant ripoff of the idea behind lairs in FFH, but I think it works. If you're going to have super bonuses available in the early game, have them tempered by risks.

Popping a great result is fun. Being one of the players that isn't getting great results, and is probably resigned to ignominy due to it is just immensely frustrating.

Here are some ideas. Feedback welcome.

1) Turn the Chopper into a unique pod result: only one player can get one. That way the flavour of the Unity Chopper of SMAC is kept, and there's a reward for early pod poppers.

2) Currently the Unity Rover can't get bad pod results. I could remove that. If I include more bad pod results (for difficulty levels higher than Noble, to save the AI), it would mean unity rovers have a higher chance to die, and there's less chance for a snowball effect. I would still keep the no bad results boolean for Rovers though. I feel that if a player spends those crucial early turns researching Doctrine: Mobility instead of something more economical like a terrain improvement tech, the pay-off in terms of pod popping should be high. As a side-effect, the Spartans starting with Doc:Mob becomes more significant.

3) I'll need to test, if I give the Supply Trawler/Crawler a world limit of 1, if everyone gets messaged when one is 'born'. That way other players have a better idea of their chances to get the remaining unity bays.

***

Other issues which have been mentioned:

4) I could give the Morganic HQ +1 mineral to counter their -10% military production.

5) Fix stockpile energy bug.

6) Fix Believer cultural golden age interface. Also, opinion is the threshold is too low. Needs playtesting to determine better value.

7) Add a list of what tech great people can bulb to the datalinks.

8) Make AIs more likely to sign defensive pacts if one faction is gobbling up others one by one. Hopefully this can counter an endless siege tank rush.

9) People have commented that the Morganic foreign trade bonus and the University tech brokering bonus is actually a penalty in multiplayer. I'm wondering, if the other partner in the deal also got a benefit, be it a smaller one, would humans then be willing to trade with the Morganites and University after all?

For instance, trade routes with the Morganites could get a +25% bonus (+100% for Morgan), and so be more profitable than those with other factions.

For Zakharov, perhaps if techs are traded, both trade partners could get a lump sum of research points added to their current research project?

[Maniac]

1. Leader balance is all phlooey. I've not messed about much with the expansion leaders yet, but the "Original 7" have a wiiiiiiiiiide curve of strength.

Top of the heap are Sister Miriam "Perma Golden Age" Godwinson and Chairman "I have infinite production" Yang. Down at the bottom you have poor CEO Morgan, who gets jack all until some expensive technologies are researched, and gets lumbered with a very significant early game penalty on top. He absolutely needs some sort of early game buff. There's some variance between the remaining four, but they all feel much more on a plateau. If we're aiming to get them all up to Miriam/Yang levels, some wide scale buffs will be needed.

Well I have to admit if some faction feels bland or underpowered, it's simply because I have a lack of inspiration for possible traits for them. I find the University very boring to play for instance, but I have no idea what I could add to make them more interesting. It's hard to make 12 factions all unique.

What makes matter worse, is that I have a cool idea, it usually only fits for the factions that already have enough bonuses. For instance Perpentach changing traits would fit for the Hive, which is subject to Yang's whims. But the Hive already has a long list of traits... Civ5's Persian movement and combat bonus under golden ages would fit for Miriam, but once again, she already has enough stuff.

Morgan used to be able to hurry units with gold, but that ability got moved to the Data Angels, leaving the Morganites less unique. So anyway, I certainly agree some factions need a boost or something more unique, but at the moment I'm lacking ideas.

3. Secret projects balance. The early game secret projects(most of which can be easily ripped out from under you by Unity Pods ) are generally very interesting and have quite powerful effects. The later game secret projects are a lot more meh.

Same issue here. It's hard to come up with original ideas for 20+ secret projects, 12 factions and some 70 techs. Ideas always welcome! :D

During my next Planetfall coding craze (not now - currently I'm playing Oblivion for the first time ), I plan to add the Neural Amplifier at Social Psych, which will allow one to gain great general points from barbarian combat as its main benefit. That's yet another early game secret project though. There should be some more late game secret projects.

Hmm, how about a wonder which allows you to assign unlimited engineers, merchants or scientists?

4. Is there a particular reason why Hybrid forests are unlocked so late in the tech tree?

Where else could they be? They are storywise the culmination of merging the Terran and Chiron ecologies. A Hybrid ecological strategy is supposed to have an evolution of first settling near existing fungal patches, then secondly expanding those patches with bioreactors and a little later planting fungus yourself, and as the final crowning achievement hybrid forests. With Communes as cherry on top if you still haven't won by then. If anything, I feel the game moves too fast for a Hybrid player and you don't really get to experience such distinct phases.

Anyway, as a good player also skilled at early rushes, I assume the game is already long over by that time, and you never reach the end of the tech tree. The majority of players get to experience the whole tree though, and don't see stuff you see as late, as late. Alas, the curse of being a good player. I try (well, in the rare times I still work on Planetfall) my best to improve the AI, so that veteran players can have a good experience as well.

5. Food(in particular, Grenade Fruit and Fungicide) resources should be visible from the start. They're such a key factor in settling cities that making them not appear undermines a lot of the beginning game planning.

That would make the Xenobiology and Soil Enrichment techs more boring/less valuable however.

6. The "Corporations"(Nanoreplicator, Weather Control, Brood Pit, Living Refinery) don't seem to be working. Or am I just missing something?

They're not corporations in the vanilla BtS sense. They're just normal buildings which provide yields for resources you have, and which hijack the corporation code to save me lots and lots of coding time. They can't be spread if that's what you were expecting.

7. I've not really looked at spying yet, partly because it seems like its quite late before you can really get it operational. Any thoughts about it to share?

Your definition of 'late' may differ from most players. :D

8. Siege tanks seem to be so strong that they dominate combat for a long time. I'm not entirely against that, but is that the intention?

In my experience cities become much harder to crack when they have a Bunker. However, prefering peaceful expansion while there's still room, I suck at doing early game rushes, so I'm not the authority. I'm willing to be educated on early game combat.

[Bobchillingworth]

I'll hold off on commenting regarding MP balance until I have a little more experience with that aspect of the mod, although I agree with pretty much everything Selrahc posted.



There are a few bugs I've noticed:


* Brood Pits display that they provide some preposterous benefit if you mouseover the icon, like +1,000 science and culture. But when produced, they don't appear to have any actual benefits.


* In my most recent SP game, I was fighting a vicious war with the Spartans, which started after I declared war on Santiago's vassal, Roze. I beat up the Data Angels and they abandoned Santiago and made white peace with me (didn't vassalize them), but I could never make peace with Santiago. It didn't say that she wouldn't talk with me, it actually wouldn't even let me go to a diplo screen with her to discuss terms when I clicked on her name. Not sure why this was the case, none of my civics said they blocked diplomacy with enemies.


* Why do Colony Pods count as military units for production bonuses / maluses? Morgan absolutely sucks because of this- not only is he prone to dying very early due to his inability to quickly produce cheap units to deal with worms / early aggression, but his first colony pods take significantly longer to build than other faction's, setting him back even further. Civ is a snowball game at heart, he can't afford to have all of his expansions be a few turns behind everyone else.


* Not necessarily a "bug", but I think still unintended: the Transcend civic makes Domination wins too easy. That's what happened in my most recent game, I was going for a transcendence win, and three AI instantly formed a team with me. Now, I understand that that is supposed to happen, but since I was the 1st in land mass, and the AI which joined me were 2nd and 3rd, we won the game as soon as the civic adoption resolution went through. I think that once a group of players get lumped into a team, the Domination option should be disabled.

[Sareln]

Pacing is a tough thing to get right.

Talking about the interface for a bit, playing as the Believers, if they keep their GA in it's current form it should get a progress bar on the main view. Perhaps under the faction flag, or if you've ever played with BUG, where they put the GPP bar.

As to their Cultural GA rates, I think if we're concerned with the # of turns they spend in GA, you should make the cost scale with # of cities, but not the number of times you've fired the GA. Since there's a hard (non-slider) cap on the amount of avg. influence you can get in a base, you can then do the math and for what a max'ed out culturing believer should be capable of.

[Maniac]

* Brood Pits display that they provide some preposterous benefit if you mouseover the icon, like +1,000 science and culture. But when produced, they don't appear to have any actual benefits.

I'll have to investigate. Last time I got that far in the game, they worked fine. Mind you, last time I got that far in the game was like two years ago. After Civ5 came out, I stopped spending time on Planetfall until recently.

* In my most recent SP game, I was fighting a vicious war with the Spartans, which started after I declared war on Santiago's vassal, Roze. I beat up the Data Angels and they abandoned Santiago and made white peace with me (didn't vassalize them), but I could never make peace with Santiago. It didn't say that she wouldn't talk with me, it actually wouldn't even let me go to a diplo screen with her to discuss terms when I clicked on her name. Not sure why this was the case, none of my civics said they blocked diplomacy with enemies.

Were either of you team mate of the Cult by any chance? The Cult is forced to declare war on the faction with the lowest planet attitude. Or were you engaged in a Transcendence war?
If it's not that, I'd need a save to check things out with a debug DLL.

* Why do Colony Pods count as military units for production bonuses / maluses?

So that their production cost is affected by the Police State civic. Makes the civic more interesting I feel.

* Not necessarily a "bug", but I think still unintended: the Transcend civic makes Domination wins too easy. That's what happened in my most recent game, I was going for a transcendence win, and three AI instantly formed a team with me. Now, I understand that that is supposed to happen, but since I was the 1st in land mass, and the AI which joined me were 2nd and 3rd, we won the game as soon as the civic adoption resolution went through. I think that once a group of players get lumped into a team, the Domination option should be disabled.

Good idea.
By the way, I think that too many AI factions end up with a positive Planet Attitude. I'll try to remove the +1 Planet from HQ. My aim is to have on average 40% of the factions with a positive (>= +1) Planet Attitude.

Talking about the interface for a bit, playing as the Believers, if they keep their GA in it's current form it should get a progress bar on the main view. Perhaps under the faction flag, or if you've ever played with BUG, where they put the GPP bar.

I suck at creating python interface. I could add a counter above the player scores. I'm more familiar with the Widget cpp file. Also, Planetfall already has the GPP bar after you research Personality Transcription, so that spot on the screen is taken.

As to their Cultural GA rates, I think if we're concerned with the # of turns they spend in GA, you should make the cost scale with # of cities, but not the number of times you've fired the GA. Since there's a hard (non-slider) cap on the amount of avg. influence you can get in a base, you can then do the math and for what a max'ed out culturing believer should be capable of.

That could end up with some complex formula no one understands, as with the Civ5 social policy counter.

[Sareln]

Ah. Haven't gotten to Personality Transcription yet. Looks interesting for sure. As to getting complicated formulas, I don't think it would be too bad. #'s come out of my rear, but say you have a base with all improvements and max specialists hired can generate 30 CPT without twiddling the slider. Additionally, assume you want the believer to have a maximum of 50% of their turns as golden ages, so you need the threshold to be set where they spend the same amount of turns accumulating culture as being in GA's. So for say quick, that means you want 12 turns to come up with the culture. Take our 30 CPT number and multiply that by 12 and it means we want each base to generate 360 culture per Golden Age on Quick.

So then what you have is instead of incrementing the threshold every time there is a golden age, you want to increment the threshold every-time they gain a base.

So a 5 base Believer would need to grab 1800 Culture for each Golden Age, but a 3 base Believer would only need 1080 Culture.

As a player though, what it comes down to is figuring out how much Culture you need is:

# of bases * constant based on Gamespeed

[Bobchillingworth]

Were either of you team mate of the Cult by any chance? The Cult is forced to declare war on the faction with the lowest planet attitude

Ah, yeah that'd be it. I brought in the Cult not long after I declared on Santiago, and she was on worst terms with Planet.

By the way, I think that too many AI factions end up with a positive Planet Attitude. I'll try to remove the +1 Planet from HQ. My aim is to have on average 40% of the factions with a positive (>= +1) Planet Attitude.

The distribution in my game was about 50-50- Lal, Morgan, Myself (Deidre) & Cult, Domai were all running a pro-planet game. Santiago, Sven, Yang, Zak, Miriam were anti-planet. The rest were too backwards to matter.