Back in the day GC2 was probably the very first game I ever did any major mod work for (major for my limited skill at least). It was all for my personal game and I didn't come to the website, didn't do community stuff, and as far as code I could only (and still can only) do basic xml edits by following instructions. I was able to accomplish a few things though and made probably about 20 or so extra races and factions from my favorite sci-fi shows and movies. Getting the race pictures in and editing the flavor text was all pretty easy. Once you make one race and get it working you just use it as a template and keep going. Making the ships in the creator was easy, though time consuming. The hardest thing was getting the created race to use the ships I made for them which if I remember correctly involved me having to either edit the install files or to make a new string which is about as complex as I get. Tweaking race behavior was easy enough with xml values for the most basic stuff were pretty self explanatory.To get to the point though since this is only a intro post, here's what I propose.There's been plenty of Awesome ships in the Post Your Gal Civ III Ship Designs! thread. Many of which from races and factions we'll all be wanting to use. The U.S.F.W. "mod" will be nothing more than collections of completed races, with full fleets matching their particular universes cannon. Not even a packaged mod unless we all decide to package them per franchise, which would make sense since we don't all like the same sci-fis. In my old game I had all of my favorite Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate SG1, Atlantis, Babylon5, and Battlestar Galactica factions. I also used a bunch of races from those universes who weren't major on their shows as minor factions, like the Betazoids from ST:TNG were a minor faction in my game. They used stock game fleets or random and never had more than a couple ships. They were just a reskin and flavor of the standard minors.List Your Favorites:
Star Trek: The Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Borg, Species 8472, Cardasians, Ferengi, If it has a full compliment sized fleet in the cannon and lore we can model from, which these all do as they are in Star Trek Armada and online having pictures to work from is no problem.Star Wars: Rebel, Empire, and Trade Federation Droid Fleet designs are obvious and easy.Babylon 5: My memory is a little foggy on some names and spelling here. The Earth Forces/or Babylon5 Forces, M'bari, Shadows, Vorlorns. Not sure about some Vorlorn designs, but all the rest we more or less have a full compliment for to work from.Stargate and Atlantis: Earth Forces, Goa'uld, Asgardians, The Wraith, The Ancients, had all these as well.Battlestar Galactica: The Humans and the Cylons. Old school and new school variants.Mass Effect universe races and factions ship designs. I didn't have these my-self, but anything "Space" goes, including races from games, particularly if they already have a full fleet of ships to model from.The important part is that for a major faction, whatever your show, game, movie, etc etc, that there be a good model base of at least 5 or 6 ships from their cannon universe to flesh them out recognizably. No *creative license* making up ships to fill in gaps. We can keep stuff like that in our personal games if we want, but I'd rather not do that with Franchise/Universe/Race packages. The point of us using them is we want to be as close to their "official" cannon as possible within the game's rules. Also, no uber buffing. The highest buffs allowed to retain a game balance and yet match that universes cannon must be limited to "vanilla" adjustments. Borg can be like the Yor for instance, with Yor Max type stats, but no +500% anything or something unbalancing. We don't want to play the same game over and over again and have any one race be too overpowering. If you want to super buff your favorites you can edit those xml values easily after you download a "balanced" universe/race/faction package.List you favorites in your reply Voting on Favorite Designs:With so many awesome ships being made, we can vote as a community on which we like better for which packages, or go with our favorite modder's package for that race, or make your own. I know I can't make all these in a reasonable timetable my-self, and when there's good ones here already I want to use the best of the best. I can make some pretty decent approximations (see below) but I've seen some ships floating around that far surpass my skill.I can only find part of my old GC2 assets, but I did find a model I had made in the ship editor. It's just the blank unskinned model the ship builder uses made out of standard parts. I just can't load it up without re-installing the old build and mod which I don't have anymore. Guess what it is and you win...um, I don't know. Super awesome gloating rights. I'll give you a hint though. It's a ship from a race I mentioned above, and it's a pretty bad azz one.
Or you could always cheat and follow the link back to the name..lol
Of course, anyone doing anything get's full credit for their work. Don't know why I didn't mention that, it's just a given in my mind.
Star Trek for sure!My ideal would be 3 sets:1) normal
Federation, Romulan, Klingon, Ferengi, Cardassian, Dominion (pleaseee don't combine Dominion and Cardassian into 1), Borg, 8472, Breen, Tholian, Gorn, Talarian, (I'd love a Tzenkethi faction but there's no cannon images at all so its unecessary).
2) for those who like an earlier time period
Earth, Vulcan, Xindi, Andorian, Tellarite, Suliban, etc. basically the Enterprise races.
3) for those who like Voyager and the Delta quadrant
Hirogen, Kazon, Krenim, Vidiian, Malon, Devore
And then there's obviously an abundance of minor races to choose from (I wouldn't use Betazed since its a Federation member, but there's dozens and dozens of minor powers to choose from).For races with not enough ships from cannon I'm sure repeating the same model for different classes is not the end of the world ie. Talarian, Breen, Vulcan, etc. I'm sure many people would gladly give up diversity for the chance to include a power, and its their choice if they then don't want to use it, but many like me would. Especially if they lack the skill or time to make the custom fleets themselves and get the AI to use them.
*snip*
Good call, on second thought having Federation worlds as minor powers could be cool. Play it out, maybe they don't join. Maybe they get conquered by Romulans early
This mod excites me. Hope it works out
While I've never played Birth of the Federation, I'd say that the Star Trek shows provide a reasonable amount of circumstantial evidence for the conclusion that the Federation is a loose union more like the European Union than like a state similar to the United States of America.
- Most of the major shipyards for Starfleet seem to be either in the Sol system or at human colonies, from what I can recall from the shows; this is somewhat unexpected given that the four founding members of the UFP all had space navies at the time of the founding of the Federation.- Starfleet appears to be predominantly human, especially in the upper ranks, and by a rather significant margin. Again, a bit unexpected when all three other founding members had colonial empires and space navies, especially when those colonial empires and space navies probably predate human superluminal spaceflight and perhaps also human spaceflight in general.- Vulcan, Tellarite, Andorian, and human ships all have visually distinct design aesthetics as seen in Star Trek: Enterprise; the Vulcan aesthetic is also established in The Next Generation in First Contact (which also provides some evidence for the early human design aesthetic which predates the airing of Star Trek: Enterprise). If the ships of Starfleet are descended from all four design lineages (as would be expected for a UFP which is united in the same manner as the USA), it would be expected that the ships would be in some way a blending of these design aesthetics (as well as those of any other states which join the Federation). Instead, every Starfleet vessel that I can think of appears to belong solely to the human design lineage, with no features which can readily be traced back to any of the other design aesthetics. This suggests that, by and large, the member states have kept their shipbuilding traditions largely isolated from one another, suggesting in turn that the Federation's military model is more like that of the EU or NATO than like that of a single state.
- The only Starfleet Academy that I can recall being mentioned in the shows is the one on Earth, and more or less every Starfleet officer seems to have gone through there. A little odd for there not to at least be mentions of similar facilities on other major worlds; the only similar facility I recall being mentioned is the Vulcan Science Academy, but that seems to be primarily associated with a separate organization and seems to have its own ships.
Taken collectively, this suggests that Starfleet is the contribution of the human colonies (or possibly just Earth and any colonies which haven't become independent of the Earth government), with other member states maintaining their own militaries or contributing to the common defense in some other way (say, by funding the human space navy in much the way that many of the members of the Delian League funded the Athenian navy in lieu of contributing ships and crews).
I also vaguely recall there being indications that the various member states exchange embassies with one another, which would be unusual if the UFP is more similar to the United States of America than to the European Union.
However, I will say again that this is all circumstantial evidence rather than direct evidence for the UFP being more of a NATO or EU style alliance than a state similar to the USA. Futhermore, it's been quite some time since I've seen the shows, and I know I haven't seen all of them, so I could be misremembering or missing some pertinent evidence on the matter.
Here are some other ideas of popular ones people might well make:
AliensDr WhoDuneFarscapeWingcommanderFirefly
I am guessing some of the factions in these could be minors if you wanted the full package of major/minors, to help really flesh out the mod Browncoats minors for example would be awesome from firefly.
I would really like to see the Honor Harrington universe, I think it lends itself well to GC3.
And don't you go anywhere without Warhammer 40 000 and Battletech universes!
My Whovian friend made a Dr. Who civ. I don't follow the show but he's a lunatic so it'll probably stand up.
http://www.mediafire.com/download/ueew2f8ctufoo36/Factions%282%29.rar
Would be cool to make a star trek map pack, have it include all the know planets in relatively the same place. And if the map is big enough have the borg out on one side with lots of minors around to concur .Even maybe if they are not there at the start have a mega event where the Borg take over a small portion of the galaxy in the corner.Could even do the same for other things like a star wars universe map.tho the Empire should so have a major accuracy penalty hehe always wondered who would win if the Borg fought the Empire.
Be careful asking questions like these; they are the things that forum wars are made out of.
At any rate, my vote goes to the Empire. The Empire has a significantly larger industrial base, Imperial warships appear to me as though they're likely significantly more powerful than Borg ships, there's no evidence transporters can get through Star Wars shields, there's no guarantee that the Borg are capable of assimilating Star Wars technology even if they're capable of capturing it (after all, they weren't capable of assimilating Data, and machinery of a complexity similar to Data is so commonplace in Star Wars that just about everyone can own some of it), Star Wars uses an FTL system significantly faster than most of Star Trek's FTL systems (~hours to days to cross the galaxy as opposed to decades to cross the galaxy, and the Star Wars galaxy is supposed to be bigger than the Milky Way, though I'm not sure if the 120,000 ly figure comes from something that's still canonical after Disney threw the EU out) and which doesn't have the limitation of relying on infrastructure (i.e. Borg transwarp network).
It may not be all that helpful an idea; just bought into the game this week; noticed on the ship selection that you
can choose ship material and texture.. along with colour. Does this mean that you could change the material of mod ships like you can in Star Trek Online?So it could be the case that you choose to have a Star Trek the Motion picture Enterprise texture applied to the TOS version of the ship?Or if could just be tweaked so that you get a different colour Warp engine and Deflector dish design?
Could even do the same for other things like a star wars universe map.
Its a nice idea but most planets in Sci Fi do not have a placement ie. Cardassia.
And you have to keep in mind that this is a flat map and space is not flat. I've made a real star map of known Star Trek planets and it would be impossible to recreate in a game without a 4 dimensional star system mechanic. For instance I'm attaching a screen shot of the known systems of the Star Trek Universe:
http://imgur.com/Ff48Arr
Romulans in green, Klingons in red, neutral worlds in white, neutral zone in grey, Tholian in bright orange (Omicron Cephei only), Ferengi in dark orange (Hupyria only), Cardassian in yellow (Alioth only), and the Sheliak Corporate in purple (Tau Cygna only) - as you can see the positions pretty much match "Star Trek: Star Charts" if you look at in flat, but you don't see depth, and so those Federation worlds that look close actually are many light years apart. A "same place" map is impossible"Its a Galactic Civ 3 mod, keep that in mind. It wouldn't be a whole new game
Interesting, will have to check out those posts... I did a bit of texture work on Galciv two, mostly bump and spec maps on some of the ships in the Star Trek Mod.I think I uploaded some for the NX and TOS Enterprise on the Galciv2 library.Think I'll experiment a bit on adding a new texture/material to stock options first.
Alf race would be cool. I want kitty eating aliens in my galaxy.
Iain Banks culture series GSV
I'll try the copy paste route, thanks for the advice. My main interest is working out how to create new materials/textures for the ship selection... can't seem to get any to show up yet.
Daaaamn, RavenX when you try to get something together...
I've never heard of that myself, but if you can do a cannon ship compliment for them, sounds good. Just point me at the pictures you want for the faction, leader, logo, etc etc.
You should read the books, very reminiscent of wooden navy ship combat, very interesting. And several factions, if I remember correctly there should be some schematics that were in the books for ships...
Hmm, I'll see if I can find something better but that should do for an idea of ships, not that I expect any one to make them (probably gonna use generic ships in the end). Let's see hmm Manticore
Can't find better at the moment. (Star Kingdom of Manticore, Queen Elizabeth III of house Winton )
Logo...
Need to do some cropping on that...
*EDIT* Just noticed that no one seems to have guessed soooooo...
RACE: Wraith
SHIP: Wraith Hiveship
TV SHOW: Stargate Atlantis
Now do I get my "Super awesome gloating rights"?
Hope that can do something.
Sorry can't help more been busy as of late.
Cheers!
-Jeff26jeff
Can't find better at the moment. (Star Kingdom of Manticore, Queen Elizabeth III of house Winton )Logo...Need to do some cropping on that...
*EDIT* Just noticed that no one seems to have guessed soooooo...RACE: WraithSHIP: Wraith HiveshipTV SHOW: Stargate AtlantisNow do I get my "Super awesome gloating rights"? Hope that can do something.Sorry can't help more been busy as of late.Cheers!-Jeff26jeff
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