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.

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!