Settlers 6 and Colonization 2 Modding

First off, for the past few days I have been completely engrossed in Settlers VI - Rise of an Empire. I'm feeling a little short on words today, so all I can come up with is that I think it "kicks ass."

I'm almost through the campaign missions, and I have been enjoying myself quite a bit. It's the perfect blend of RTS for a turtle like myself. Basically, it has elements of both combat and base- (city-) building, but with the building elements fleshed out much more than the combat elements. This is almost always the opposite in RTS titles, with buildings only being a means to create different and better units.

So focusing less on martial topics, it leaves you free to create a large and prosperous town in its fictionally generic medieval world. (No magic or monsters - just plenty of mead, Vikings and large-chested wenches.) I suppose you could think of it as carebear RTS. And it is precisely what I was looking for.

The last couple posts I was musing about my desire to see a Pot Growing Tycoon game. While I wrote it in the hope some amateur designers or modders will see and be inspired, I've decided to take the plunge and work on my version of it. Despite knowing absolutely nothing about game design other than what I learned from playing the wretched time-sinks over the years.

So first thing I realized is that considering the main limitations of time, motivation and technical knowledge, I would not be well-served in attempting a grandiose web application, let alone a stand-alone executable. So the obvious choice is to begin a mod for a pre-existing game.

My first thought was, as you might have guessed, Settlers 6. In fact I think that Settlers makes the perfect framework for the game I had in mind, as it focuses on resource acquisition, refining and building with a small amount of combat mixed in - almost exactly as I had imagined it. However, while Settlers boasts an excellent map-making tool, either it won't allow the level of customization I want or modding with it is not realistic given my three main limitations.

So I have been thinking about it, and at the end I thought Colonization 2 might make a good game to receive the "Pot Grower" touch.I am also thinking it will be the (relatively speaking) easiest to mod.

First, a great deal of the actual modification can be done simply through XML files and secondly because it is based on Civilization IV, there is already an abundance of resources to make use of in the case of customized units as well veteran modders to ask for help. Plus, I am very familiar with both Civ 4 and Colonization so win/win if you ask me.

At this point I am having a bit of trouble reconciling the differences between what I had in mind and the constraints that will be placed on me by using Colonization. Mainly I had in mind a game that plays out in a roughly similar way to Children of the Nile, Settlers, or even Hinterland. Settlers comes closest, however. Colonization like Civilization focuses more on macroscopic view with the building of multiple bases and distributing material between them.

This can still work, though. I suppose I need merely keep Railroad Tycoon rather than Rollercoaster Tycoon in mind, perhaps. I also find the trade the system used to interact with Europe to my liking in the context of this mod.

As I envision it currently:

1. Rather than building "cities" or "forts" the players will build illicit growing operations and they can build a network of these farms across the given territory. This can bring players into conflict with each other and with the locals.
2. The territory will also be inhabited by "natives" - in this case the locals with established towns with residents and security. Security consists mainly of police, which will also patrol the roads and randomly stop pot farmer units.
3. Pot farmers will earn the bulk of their income trading items - largely pot - to some degree with the locals, but mainly to the "Big City" which replaces Europe in this mod. In the big city you can also import specialists - i.e. Trimmers and Thugs as well as buy goods like guns, plant clones or growing equipment. Of course locals will also trade items like these back and forth as well.

Some things to think on further:

1. How to resolve the hidden aspect of the pot farm with the locals? In other words, the local security must not inherently know about the existence of the pot farms or network. And if there should be a mechanic that enables them to find out and attack the farm.
2. And in Colonization, the fights are life-and-death. There would need to be a way to account that most busts go down without gunplay let alone deaths - and ultimately result in jail or prison. If a player is found out by the locals and raided, how would that play out?
3. Should the farmers be allowed to take over entire towns of locals? If you spend all the money you make selling pot to fund a small army, what would stop you the player from simply destroying the nearest town (whether or not it is a nuisance)? This is completely unrealistic, I need to find a way to address it.
4. At the same time, there should be a mechanic to allow infiltration of local towns by farmers in order to change laws or bribe officials. Perhaps this could be handled by setting the locals as decidedly neutral to the pot-growing issue but use them as spawning points for police units that attack-on-sight pot-farm units.
5. The police units could use a non-combat animation similar to the one used when a worker unit is captured in Civilization when busting a farmer unit - in fact, they could become literally captured and stored in a jail. Then they could be released after X turns, released early through the diplomacy (lawyer) screen, or busted out with a "thug" unit.

I suppose the whole conflict of life-and-death versus liberty-and-imprisonment could be resolved by making the player some shadowy ubermensche much like in the Civilization series. But while it would be impossible for the player to be busted, it would be all-too-common for his units. And eventually if the right combination of diplomacy, secrecy and thuggery are not employed the result will be the confiscation of all farms and units.

I wonder how deep into Civ 4 territory you can go with Colonization? The thought just occurred to me that the espionage tactic could probably be used to both hide and discover secret farms. One would imagine the locations of farms between players would be secret as well.

Hmmm. Stealth Civ - I'm starting to like where this is heading. I'm going to head out for a gravity bong and ponder this some more. If you would like to add your thoughts on my pot grower civ mod, please do so below!