Bateluer
Lifer
- Jun 23, 2001
- 27,730
- 8
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Originally posted by: diegoalcatraz
Originally posted by: Bateluer
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What I'm looking for: A good simulation or strategy type game that will let me lead a colonization attempt to uninhabitable worlds of varying types, the ability to terraform the world would be a major plus. Don't think it actually exists, but it would make it a wicked cool game.
You might want to check out Alpha Centauri, it's the closest I've found. It was made between Civs II and III. With some of the higher tech, you can use your 'workers' to terraform the land - raise mountains, lower into oceans, etc. Personal favorite method is to use the Planet Buster missiles (what the 'nukes' should have been in the Civ series), which literally reduces a block of squares (cities!) into a water filled crater.
This game also pioneered the social engineering (Civ IV civics) gameplay aspect. I was vexed that Civ III lacked that feature.
Other notable improvements include a custom unit builder.
Played it, not quite what I am looking for. SMAC is an awesome game, but I'm looking for somethinig a bit more in depth.
In my game, you would arrive on an almost lifeless planet, say Mars type. Very thin atmosphere, no plantlife, almost all water frozen at the polar caps. You'd have various methods at your disposal to begin the terraforming process, but the first step would be to raise the planet's surface temp enough to melt the ice caps. You could do that by making factories that produce greenhouse gases, drilling a hold in the ice caps and dropping a nuke in, directing a comet (composed of the proper gases) into the planet or near enough to the planet to release its gases into the atmosphere. Each would method would have its upsides and downsides.
After that you'd have to introduce some sort of plantlife to begin using the CO2 in the air to make oxygen, possibly lichen or algae. And so on. Odds are a lot of the terraforming process would be underway before your colonists even landed on the planet. And if this was a planet like Venus or a moon like Titan, the process would be completely different.
You see where I'm going with this? It'd be a massive undertaking, drawing heavily from our current scientific knowledge about terraforming a planet. See Red Colony.com Not a game, but very interesting to read.