More Pot Farming Mod Braindump

OK, so I bet all of you are tight and ready for an in-depth description of how my Pot-farming Colonization mod is shaping up? Uh, yeah, about that ...

Seriously, I have not (a mere week-and-a-half) later decided to abandon it. I have, however, not being working on it at all. I am still basically at the conceptual stage with a final few issues to work out:

How will stealth/secrecy work? Will it be in game at all?

How do I bring together the way Civilization treats resources and my concept of it?

First, the secrecy aspect I am still clueless about. I have no solid, definable way of dealing with it which is why I am considering leaving it out. But then how do we prevent the wandering police units from wandering onto our farm and shutting it down? Perhaps with buildings or "national wonders."

Originally, however, I had envisioned giving each farm or civ (hereto referred to as "grow operation") a modifier like that used in diplomacy. Or reintroducing espionage from Civ 4 back into Colonization  - or both. Assuming I keep this in the mod, it is likely I will definitely use the former from the outset and introduce the latter in a later iteration. In fact I don't know why I have angst about using something approximating a secrecy mechanic - it is probably due to a lack of the same perspective I suffer with the next issue: resources.

Being a long-time Civilization player, I am having a problem staying focused on the physical scale of the game. As in all the regular civ games, individual tiles represent quite significant chunks of land. One tile is simply not a "farm" or a "mine" but it is taken to represent a small industry of each. A large city occupies a single tile.

In this mod, I am not dealing with cities and nations. The entire area of a huge map for this mod equates to only a few tiles from a regular civ game. I simply need to keep this in mind more as I go over the mod in my mind and on paper.

A useful way I have found at looking at the situation is to view cities and their cultural boundries as houses with their property boundries. This is basically how I am planning for a typical map to play out. The downside is that it will increase the amount of custom graphics needed.

What I have to work out for this is how to morph the city culture rating and boundry growth. I am not sure having actual property value in the mod is worthwhile to the game (though it sounds like the beginning of an excellent real estate Civ mod), and I definitely do not want property boundaries to grow of their own accord from a rating - more land must be purchased with "gold" (which will certainly be changed to US dollars in the mod).

In this way I plan on having the "cultural" boundries set in stone at the beginning of a game with the ability to change shape through purchase or trade. It will also open the door to introducing the ability of putting farms on land not owned by you - i.e. one could play a map where the majority of land is a national park owned by the government.

So that's all I have right now in terms of musings. Once I get it nice and clean, I plan on putting my text documents online for whoever to see. Maybe I'll use Google docs - I'll let you know. Other than that my current goals are to catalogue every unit and building in the game so I can figure out what I need to change, add and delete. Essentially I am dumping the Civilopedia onto a spreadsheet.

I am also slowly familiarizing myself with Visual Studio 2008, but as I haven't touched a compiler let alone written C++ in almost 10 years, you can imagine how that is going. Slow is the key word here. But before I am able to truly move beyond the concept stage and into realizing certain mechanics I will likely have to master it.

If you are reading this and it sounds interesting to you, I welcome any comments below. Though it is true, I am mainly making this mod for my own selfish pleasure, I have no problem sharing and welcome any insights that could help make this a mod everyone can enjoy!

Finally, I need to finalize the working name for this mod. I have to admit I am rather not partial my original name "Pot Farmer Tycoon." Interesting it is not the Tycoon part that puts me off. So I am going to finalize the working title right now: Grow Tycoon. If you can think of a better name, let me know - this is just the working title.