Planetbound: D4-A

Species suggestions, story ideas and contributions.
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eternal noob
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Planetbound: D4-A

#1 Post by eternal noob »

Summary
An AI ruling over a planet with the help of semi-autonomous robots after it's creators got wiped out.

History
D4-A was created by a superpower ruling over a large portion of this planet's landmass to replace administrative tasks. Over the years it become better and better at it's job eventually taking over more and more tasks until the whole goverment was run by D4-A. As this was happening advanced robots were developed to take over manual labor and of course D4-A controlled all these robots for maximum efficiency.

As the creators were getting close to an Utopia more or less either due to some political disagreement or an error by the D4-A's part the planet experienced a nuclear winter and most life forms were wiped out but D4-A managed to surive this thanks to it's robots and nuclear energy. Even though the planet recovered and life returned to normal the ones giving D4-A it's orders are now long gone and it has no idea on what to do. It now tries to hold on to what's left by building robots and primitive spaceships to defend the planet.

Homeworld
A terran planet around a red dwarf assuming it took a long time to recover from a nuclear winter.
It would be nice if it's protected by weak mass driver spaceships that spawns over time capping at a power of 2 (128, 64, 32, 16)

Race Attributes
Robotic Metabolism
Planetbound (Robots are dependent on the AI to function)

Very good pop growth
Good manufacturing
No research
Abysmal Ground Defense (depends on how many spaceships the planet produces - abysmal would be the most appropriate since these robots were not meant for combat)
No offensive ground troops

Jaumito
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Re: Planetbound: D4-A

#2 Post by Jaumito »

eternal noob wrote:Very good pop growth
Good manufacturing
No research
Abysmal Ground Defense (depends on how many spaceships the planet produces - abysmal would be the most appropriate since these robots were not meant for combat)
No offensive ground troops
Interesting. I just designed a custom playable species that's just like that (except it has +++ ground defense) and I've played nothing else but them for a couple weeks. No research and no offensive ground troops are probably the two most crippling traits in the game, and yet, with a few perks, you can somehow make it work.
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Oberlus
Cosmic Dragon
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Re: Planetbound: D4-A

#3 Post by Oberlus »

I love all this!
Jaumito, how do you do to "invade"?
Can you bombard to death a colony or something and then take it over with no troops?

Edit: I can only think of influence takeover, but can't think of any current-master-game mechanic that would allow you to take over an owned colony/outpost without troops, I wanna know!

Ophiuchus
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Re: Planetbound: D4-A

#4 Post by Ophiuchus »

Oberlus wrote:I love all this!
Also find this corner-case very intriguing.
Jaumito, how do you do to "invade"?
Can you bombard to death a colony or something and then take it over with no troops
?Edit: I can only think of influence takeover, but can't think of any current-master-game mechanic that would allow you to take over an owned colony/outpost without troops, I wanna know!
AFAIK you always need troops for invasion. I think developing exobots is the only way to go(?) - will be slow getting there without species bonus of course.
My first idea for the sly was without colonization capability and bad troops - so exobots was also a priority.
Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

Look, ma... four combat bouts!

Jaumito
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Re: Planetbound: D4-A

#5 Post by Jaumito »

Oberlus wrote:I love all this!
Jaumito, how do you do to "invade"?
Either Exobots (takes a looong time without research :lol: ), or (if you're lucky) one of the extinct species (the reason why I gave the Nerada superior weapons is it helps defeating the guardian ships with MD tech and moderate investment.) In the meantime, you use your warships to prevent other players to colonize/invade as much as you can.
Can you bombard to death a colony or something and then take it over with no troops?
As Ophiuchus said - no you can't.

I'm still buffing/nerfing/tweaking the species, but I sure could use advice and playtesting from others. If some of you guys are interested, I can upload the files. I just need to remember which ones I had to alter - stringtables, the pedia, the common macros stuff, etc. - I think there's about a dozen of them. Maybe I'd better try to put most of this in the species description file?

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Dilvish
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Re: Planetbound: D4-A

#6 Post by Dilvish »

Jaumito wrote:I just need to remember which ones I had to alter - stringtables, the pedia, the common macros stuff, etc. - I think there's about a dozen of them.
Since you are thinking about contributing to the project, I'd highly recommend you read up a little bit on using Git. That tool (via github) is the way such contributions get submitted, and using it would also automatically track your modified files.

I am pretty sure if you make a local git repo, and then make a branch checking out the exact same commit as corrsponds to the version of FO you are playing now (either the version number tag or a sufficient portion of the relevant commit will be embedded into the version name displayed ingame), then you could just copy your entire modified 'default' directory over the one in your local git repo, and git would automatically figure out which files had been modified (and what those modifications were).

Whether or not you wind up getting our new species balanced enough to submit it for inclusion in the master version of the game, working with git would just help you keep your own experimental developments more organized.
If I provided any code, scripts or other content here, it's released under GPL 2.0 and CC-BY-SA 3.0

Jaumito
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Re: Planetbound: D4-A

#7 Post by Jaumito »

Dilvish wrote:
Jaumito wrote:I just need to remember which ones I had to alter - stringtables, the pedia, the common macros stuff, etc. - I think there's about a dozen of them.
Since you are thinking about contributing to the project, I'd highly recommend you read up a little bit on using Git.
Thanks for the tip. I'll do.

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