Okay, I'm back in action. I was thinking a little bit more about the tech trees, and how the Progenitors and other factions would work. It would have three main tech trees: 1) Human factions (weapons, shields, facilities, etc.), 2) basic items (colony components, minesweepers, etc.), 3)Progenitor tech. All but the basic items would be racial techs (so humans cannot understand the Progenitor tech and vice versa).
I was thinking that the Progenitor techs would be fewer in number, but more powerful and expensive to research. We'd probably have to be very creative with them, considering there really wasn't much explanation of how all the progenitor stuff worked in the game.
The human ones would be very similar to the SMAC tech tree (as you described them, Hugh), including psionic weapons, ability to develop mindworms, industrial nanorobotics, etc.
I think the main thing we should do is keep the tree pretty simple overall, but interconnected and balanced so one can pursue different strategies and win (just like SMAC). We don't want uber weapons like the PPB, or uber advanced traits like religious.
As far as the images go, I don't think we need to go crazy with the ship sets. We can make a few ourselves, but for the rest we can just use the SMAC faction pictures with some of the standard SEIV ship sets. The only original ones we'll really need are the Progenitors and the mindworms/space monsters. Everything else (Gaians, Pirates, Cyborgs) is just a bonus.
For the other images - Taera do you think we can rip off the component images (missile launcher, laser, etc.) from SMAC? That would be helpful. We'll probably have to make our own facility graphics (although we can probably use many of the standard SEIV ones for that too).
For the speech files, I'll do some mining of the quotes in the game from the various factions, and blend them into to my AIs.
On the whole, I think our philosophy should be to keep it as simple as possible so we actually are able to complete the mod. Let's not make work if we don't have to!
So, what do you think?
[ July 07, 2003, 02:57: Message edited by: Chronon ]