A blog all about old, free, or bargain games I find. Not limited to computer games, either.
Published on November 20, 2009 By MagicwillNZ In WOM Mods

I posted a little while ago about a space colony mod, and someone expressed a vague interest. That was enough for me to churn out some concept art and write a little bit of background and key features. Since other people seem to start planning out their own mods, I'll also start.

DARK REPUBLIC

A Colonize 'n Conquer mod for Elemental: War of Magic

SYNOPSIS

One political party has dominated the Republic for thousands of years: Unity. Under it the various squabbling political parties have ceased infighting to pose a unified front to the vastly more powerful alien empires, confederacies and democracies that populate the Milky Way. On the surface, humanity is strong and independent.

But far from Earth and humanity's core holdings, it is clear that these old political and social rivalries have reached a bitter boiling point. Outside of the Republic lies the Green Belt, a region of rich and fertile planets as yet untouched. But these planets that were meant to be shared for all of humanity are being fought over. Once green paradises are burnt to ash merely to deprive someone else of it. This, all for an edge in what is felt to be an inevitable civil war to come. Meanwhile those on Earth are ignorant of these secret wars, but Unity is beginning to catch on...

You are an agent for one of these desperate factions, here to expel all other interests and put into place your own. If you cannot secure the planet, you are to destroy it, however you can. May your actions give you victory, commander.

 

TENTATIVE LIST OF FEATURES

-- Powerful terraforming technologies allows you tailor the planet to your colony's needs, while depriving it from your enemy. Turn lifeless planets into verdant paradises.

-- Depending on your proximity to Earth, the gameplay will change. Closer to Earth political intrigue and diplomatic leverage will be much more important, while further away there is less oversight allowing you to do much more aggressive actions with fewer repercussions.

-- Not only military, social, diplomatic, and research victories, but also an armageddon victory where you deprive your enemies of the planet by making the surface unlivable.

-- Saves your destroyed planets so you can try to claim its blasted, ruined surface later, along with your old ruined cities.

SOME CONCEPT ART

OK, a little note. I'm not a professional artist, and I did these freehand in GIMP along with the Smudge tool, so it's pretty crude. I just want you to know that before I start sharing with you my ugly-ass art. It's concept art, so it's allowed to be.

 

 


Comments (Page 3)
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on Jan 02, 2010

I'll cook up an transparent glassy icon for you, and do it a bit better this time. Nice circuit thingy!

on Jan 02, 2010

No where near the same as the last one, but this evil holgraphic imagercan become a good holographic imagerwith a simple hue tweak.

on Jan 02, 2010

Holy crackola! I'll import these right now...

on Jan 02, 2010

[GRAPHICS]

Hmm... It looks pretty good... though rather inappropriate for a farm. I think this holo deserves a special role...

 

 

 

Now THAT is cool.

on Jan 03, 2010

Hoo yeah.........

on Jan 03, 2010

Damn Scoutdog, those look awesome!

on Jan 07, 2010

Thank you Scoutdog for the welcome .  Unfortunately I don't possess those skills.  Wish you and MagwillNZ well on your Dark Republic Mod. 

If you have any 3D modeling skills, MagicWillNZ and I would appreciate it if you could mozy over to the Dark Republic mod at some point in the future......... did I mention we have avatars for "sale"? 

As far as the Avatars go..um I haven't decided yet, maybe if you have a Mystic X avatar created?

on Jan 07, 2010

Thank you Scoutdog for the welcome .  Unfortunately I don't possess those skills.  Wish you and MagwillNZ well on your Dark Republic Mod. 

If you have any 3D modeling skills, MagicWillNZ and I would appreciate it if you could mozy over to the Dark Republic mod at some point in the future......... did I mention we have avatars for "sale"? 

As far as the Avatars go..um I haven't decided yet, maybe if you have a Mystic X avatar created?

on Jan 11, 2010

Hehe... well, I experimented with some map modding. Didn't turn out so well...

I had no idea that the original png was rendered so huge ingame... those lines did look good when they were much, much smaller.

I was going for the "command console" look, but for now, it's back to the drawing board. I didn't want to resort to the "green grid", but that's generally what command consoles look like.

on Jan 11, 2010

You could always do a blue grid, or even *gasp* yellow! ............ in all seriousness, it might be worth a try to see how the game engine reacts to oversized images...... i.e. does it shrink them or tile them bigger or just crash: if you can make one image fill up the whole FOW, you could have it be a radial projection or perhaps a reconstruction of the tactician's computer desktop........ I have to do some homework so it'll be a while before I can test, but.........

on Jan 11, 2010

Good news and bad news: while making a larger picture does work (it causes the FOW squares to expand and be tiled less frequently) somewhere between 724 and 6516 pixels (big range, I know) the game becomes hideously laggy, so creating a single image to cover the entire map is out of the question.

I've been thinking about this mod's backstory, and one thing that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me is: Why such a big deal about this one planet? Sapce is quite large, and quite probably filled with habitables, so it really doesn't make sense for ten factions to be fighting tooth and nail for just this one little ball of rock...... a sector or star cluster, sure, but there has to be something special about the game's planet...... a specific material resource that could turn the tide of civil war seems like the obvious choice.... or a gaza-strip style piece of real estate that people cling to with a frevor disproportionate to it's size and pure tactical value alone........ thoughts?

on Jan 11, 2010

[FLAVOR]

You could always do a blue grid, or even *gasp* yellow! ............


Hehe it actually started out blue, but with all the filters I put on it, it came out white. I made a new one today and it looks better, although still isn't really where I'd like it to be. I love the idea of a radial projection, and kudos just for the idea.

Why such a big deal about this one planet?


That's an excellent question, I've thought about this a lot when I built the universe, since Deadlock didn't really address this satisfactorily.

The short answer to this question is that since there's so many uninhabitable worlds compared to habitable ones, controlling a single powerful world secures a lot of area. Having a powerful planet basically "marks territory", giving the controlling faction a launch point to terraform and colonize the rest of the sector. I haven't really gone into explaining colonizing in great detail, but basically the standard procedure would be to colonize specific worlds and then spread out from there instead of colonizing every world in between. Interstellar travel honestly isn't all that good. It takes years to get from one end of the Republic to the other. Some planets are just easier to get to. Even the most technologically advanced aliens haven't improved speed by much.

You could say the universe is in a state of land grab. But the older races have had a few centuries more to do it in. Humanity was late into the space race, and its position squeezed tightly between two huge empires. Here, I drew a crude map:

 


(OK, admittedly, I felt pretty pathetic drawing borders in our galaxy... I had an existential moment there)

Yellow = Us.
Green = The Etarn aka "The Beacon"
Blue = The Cor
Purple = As yet unnamed mercantile race
Grey = Disparate alien empires, confederacies, democracies, monarcies, and so forth.
Arrows represent areas of expansion into the Green Belt

Humanity has always been a little more "insecure" in its position than, say, the Etarn, which is why they are so aggressive when it comes to colonization. They've really pushed expansion to the limit, often using a single colony to claim influence over hundreds of more worlds than it really should be able to handle. So far, this gamble has worked. This is why it's such standard practice to send more than one expedition to a single world... so that the Republic ensures that it gets a foothold.

But, as you mentioned, there is sort of "gaza strip" element to it. Simply, different factions want to hurt each other as much as possible... instead of economically (and intelligently) allocating different planets to different forces, the groups want to take the planet so that others can't use it against them. If they rob each other of a foothold in the sector, then they have a greater claim to it.

I guess it would make sense to have a unique mineral or "spice" to fight over. I'm not against it... I'd just prefer to avoid using MacGuffins until I absolutely have to. I'd rather keep such struggles on a planetary level rather than a galactic level... it's much too easy to have Unobtainium be the driving force in the universe.

Yeah... that was probably a longer answer than you were looking for, but that's my thinking... at least for now.

EDIT: The map above is crude, and doesn't reflect where things will be when I get closer to finishing... it's just a illustration for now.

on Jan 11, 2010

I love long answers. Another possibility is that the goodies on this planet are more political than tactical: say, the planet was discovered by Joe The Famous Explorer or has been selected as a microcosm "proving ground" by Unity, aliens, or somebody else, and thus has a lot of media attention on the people colonizing it. If they can succeed in taking control, they look really good, but if they fail nobody wants to side with them.

on Jan 12, 2010

Scoutdog
I love long answers. Another possibility is that the goodies on this planet are more political than tactical: say, the planet was discovered by Joe The Famous Explorer or has been selected as a microcosm "proving ground" by Unity, aliens, or somebody else, and thus has a lot of media attention on the people colonizing it. If they can succeed in taking control, they look really good, but if they fail nobody wants to side with them.

I would definitely like things like this to happen. I'm going to take a lot of advantage over Elemental's unique world generation to make scenarios like this. I'm not against having "quests" of some flavor either.

Though, I also want the possibility of the game taking place on a complete meaningless backwater too... that might be fun in a different way.

[GRAPHICS]

I've made a new grid and a new ocean tile, using green this time. It's still not quite what I want.... and those seams will eventually need to go away... but it'll do.

EDIT: ...for now.

on Jan 17, 2010

I've realized that you might find a lot of use in I-Mod Productions: they're a german-based (but English-speaking) modding site that could use some new blood to liven it up. They're dedicated primerily to GC2, but they have a currently empty Elemental section that I think this could fill quite nicely. There are a LOT of people with programming, modelling, and GFX skills looking for stuff to do, as well as some space for hosting and assorted tutorials, guides, and the like. I'm over there (although not terribly active) under the name AgentMulder.

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