Re: Colonization (and other questions)

[Hans Ronne <hronne at pp dot sbbs dot se>]

>Is there a game library similar to Sid Meier's classic
>Colonization (still one of my favourite games)?

Not really. What we have so far is a Civ 2 emulation module and the
Advances Through History module, which is like Civ 2 but with a more
realistic research tree. If you would like to write a Colonization module,
you could start with one of these. There is also a Voyages of Discovery
module that Stan is working on. It may end up looking like Colonization.
You would have to ask Stan about that.

>Can the game map be partially random and partially fixed,
>e.g. Europe plus a random "New World"?

No, but superimposing a known map on a random map should not be too
difficult to implement. Interesting idea.

>Can materials be transformed, e.g. can a smith change metal
>into tools?

You can specify that a unit produces one material type each turn if it has
a specific amount of another material type available. However, the second
material type is not consumed in the process. This may seem weird, but the
code is used only in one game (empire) where the required second material
type is "civilians" (sic).

I think it would be more intuitive if the second material type was consumed
in the process. This would also make the kind of explicit conversion you
are asking for possible. Perhaps we should change the code accordingly. The
"civilians" in empire could be handled as a unit type that can do
production provided certain other units (facilites) are available in the
same cell.

Alternatively, we could keep this rather unusual material type, and specify
a new consumption-on-production table whose entries would be set to 0 in
empire but 1 in games that allow material converion.

You can also specify that one material type is automatically converted into
one or several other material types at the start of each turn. See the Civ2
module, where "arrows" are converted into "taxes", "luxuries" and
"science".

Hans

Hans Ronne

hronne@pp.sbbs.se