More Grow Tycoon Ideas

In the course of dissecting Colonization (and to a lesser extent Civ IV), I have come across a few other ideas I have for my illicit-pot-growing Colonization mod, currently code-named Grow Tycoon that I wanted to briefly write down here both for myself and for anyone else who might happen to read this and be interested.

First, I haven't mentioned it but from the beginning I have planned on morphing the Founding Father system into a plant varietal system. Meaning rather than accumulating points and spending them to have a historical figure join your cause, you will accumulate points and use them to research and/or cross breed strains of pot to come up with other strains to grow.

I would like to have a mechanic that has a more sandbox feel - similar perhaps to the way one would create new units in Alpha Centauri. The player could mix and match to create strains that have specific bonuses (easier to grow, worth more money when sold, etc.), however for this mod I want to keep it as simple as possible. So an easier alternative given the Civ 4 engine is to simply make pre-defined strains that are researchable along a "tech tree" or in the case of Colonization the "Founding Father" tree. Plus, I always have fun coming up with silly names like Spanish Trampoline and it might make a nice way to pay homage to some real-life historical strains like Maui Wowee or Northern Lights.

Another thing that I have had in mind this whole time but I believe I have not mentioned is crucial to my decision to use Colonization as a base rather than Civilization IV itself - the town and trade system. Because pot farming in real life is itself an industry I want to preserve that (Tycoon) element by using the city-building aspects of Colonization. Where it uses schools, cigar-rolling factories, stockades and the like, however, I will be using (water) wells, generators and CCTV security systems. All which, like Colonization, must be constructed over X amount of turns and be manned by a "colonist" (I still haven't come up with a generic unit name yet).

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the scale of Grow Tycoon's world is much reduced from that of the other Civ games. But I was still having a hard time working out exactly what that means to the game. The way I have decided to approach it is to leave the basic mechanic largely unchanged and chalk up the scale difference to nothing more than graphics and text.

Which means you will still be using a unit to construct farms outside of your city, but it will be presented as constructing fields outside of your base camp. The base camp (like the Civ city) houses your workers and contains all your important buildings. From the base camp management screen (city management screen) you can assign your workers to pot fields you have constructed or other duties I haven't come up with yet. An example for a potential tile assignment would be guard duty that provides a bonus to defense from the Law or criminal gangs.

I'm going to end this here for today. As I am finishing the task of fleshing out my basic concepts I am turning more an more to creating specific units. Like the wagon - a land resource transportation unit - which I want to have a few different versions of to take into account for things like SUVs with hidden compartments, tractor trailers that hall other goods to disguise your contraband or basic cars that can travel fast but have a higher chance of getting caught by the Law. Or maybe only have one basic land transport unit that takes advantage of the experience-point system (but then how will it gain xp if it is destroyed on being caught?). That's the kind of stuff I have been moving on to lately, which I suppose means development is proceeding at a fair pace.

If you are familiar with Civ 4 and/or Colonization and would like to make some suggestions, I whole-heartedly welcome them! If you aren't familiar with Sid Meier strategy games and like turn-based strategy I also recommend you give them a try. Modding in Civ 3 was good, but as you might have seen modding in Civ 4 allows you to do almost anything you want with the only real limit being your time and expertise.