Bring back SE III Player Tech Levels!

[chewy027]

Put me down as a 10

[dmm]

What you REALLY want is a SaveGameFile Editor. This would allow you to do everything that the map editor does, PLUS edit ships, techs, pops, facilities -- in other words, everything.

You could make an enemy with low tech but a big empire. Or an enemy with high tech but a small empire. Or an enemy with sparsely-populated planets with horrible conditions (due to their recent civil war). Or a galactic invader with huge ships and no planet at all (to begin with).

And you could make your own scenarios, such as:
A galaxy-wide catastrophe (roll for it each turn); or
No warp points at first, then someone discovers them, then the knowledge gets transmitted every time first contact is made; or
Natural warp points gradually wink out; or
A race is taken over by its own robots; or
Your mega-empire has a civil war and splits into two.

AND you could merge SEIV with other games. For instance, if you want more hands-on control of space or ground combat, just use your favorite tactical or first-person combat game to determine the results of an SEIV combat. Then use the Editor to override the default SEIV results.

[This message has been edited by dmm (edited 02 May 2001).]

[Barnacle Bill]

quote:

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Originally posted by dmm:
What you REALLY want is a SaveGameFile Editor)

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Yes - the ideal would be to copy the one in Civilization II, where you could open the editor at any point in a game, change literally anything, then save it as a scenario.

[Devnullicus]

I would vote for the scenario editor. The Map Editor is nice, but I think the scenario editor is needed far more to give people real creative control over their scenarios.

[CaptSpoogy]

The Scenario Editor sounds like a lot of work for Aaron. It might be a very long time before we would see one...

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[dmm]

quote:

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Originally posted by capt_spoogy:
The Scenario Editor sounds like a lot of work for Aaron. It might be a very long time before we would see one...

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All we need are two programs -- one that translates the SaveGameFile into ASCII, and another that translates ASCII into a SaveGameFile. Both of these should be easy for Aaron to write. (Or Aaron could just explain the format of the SaveGameFile.) Then modders could write nice user interfaces for changing the ASCII, which would be the hard part. That's basically the way things were done for C&C Red Alert and for X-Wing.

[Devnullicus]

I'm actually pretty good at doing front end programming. If Aaron would like to put out documentation for the layout of the savegame files, I would be glad to volunteer my time to create a scenario editor. I know there are other good programmers on this forum as well and I'm sure some of them would volunteer as well. Maybe we can even split up the work and get it done faster...

All Aaron would have to do is put out the savegame file layout documentation. =)