Thanks for the replies
I had a brief look at the license, seems like people are free to use it or modify it as long as they give credit, which i would be ok with
There were some nice standard textures that i used from 3dsMax, space panels is the main one i used on the grey and blue bits. There were some other nice metal textures. The green based a galvanised metal texture too.
About my civ3 mod.... the main problem was how to model space, i went for a 'space as land' approach where there are no seas or boats, the galaxy is all 'land' and every 'spaceship' is a land unit. But then there is no way to make 'ground troops' and the game misses that side of things. If you make space as water, you can have ships and troops, but you have to make each star system a little bit of land in a huge ocean, and the a.i has a very hard time dealing with that kind of map (plus the ocean combat was never very good).
Another problem was how to model space systems, i went for 1 square you could build on, and around it there were 'resources' in space to represent planets. It wasnt a bad system, but a bit wierd when systems are spread out over a 9 square radius of the map, and you can blockade planets and stuff.
Some other problems were the fact that you cant limit how far you can go, you can just keep moving to the edges of the galaxy with your first ships, which was a bit wierd. And the a.i never built mix fleets of many fast, cheap ships to raid and bombard and slow powerful ones. It just always builds the most expensive unit pretty much, using only the most powerful attacks and defenders available despite the cost.
I had a go at making 'star lanes' between stars as the only squares non colony ships can travel on at the start, this limited movement between places you or the enemy have built colonies. But to get that to work properly i need to take the planets out, so theres just the star there that you need to go through in order to go onto another 'star lane'. Otherwise you can hop across planets and onto a new star lanes if they arent placed right, it gets a bit messy.
So anyway, it was a bit fiddly
but maybe ill come back to it someday
