Dunewars mod for CivIV

[Eyeball]

Sorry, nope. Read the thread - the missions listed by the different spy types are the ONLY things those spies can do. So the only spy who can steal tech seems to be the Ixian spy drone, for instance, which blows.

At least that's how it seems to me in the game. Not sure if I've got an outdated patch or something.

 

[DakaSha]

yeah i edited it

 

[Dead Guy]

Hmm, I can't seem to build Mahdi missionaries, even though I've built lots of temples. Neither can I build their, um, Cathedral building.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

captain obvious: did you convert?

 

[Eyeball]

I don't believe a Mahdi missionary unit exists. It spreads via religious diffusion passively as well as by conquest. Take a city as a Mahdi-worshipping civ and it immediately converts to Mahdi. Its Civpedia entry says as much.

Currently playing Bene Gesserit trying for an espionage type game. Works bloody well, mainly due to the Mahdi relgion. Converted to Mahdi early on, cranked out enough cheap and relatively powerful Mahdi Jihadis to keep the extremely warmongery Ix off my back. I then beelined for the techs giving the ability to build the comically powerful +100% espionage wonder and put all my +espionage wonders in one city. I tried culture-flipping some cities (first time I've tried that) but the first spy unit seemed depressingly ineffective.

Then once I could buy the Bene Gesserit's 2nd spy unit, I diverted all espionage points towards the Ix without lowering my research spending from 100%, gaining about 500 espionage points per turn. This allows me to espionage-annex a major city every 5 turns or so. At the end of my current play session 250 turns into a Normal game, I've bought 4 Ixian cities without them having the guts to DOW me.

So yeah, the Bene Gesserit spies seem pretty overpowered as they're the only ones who can buy cities. Compare this to the Ordos saboteur who can simply blow up a building every now and again and you've got some pretty bad balance issues spy-wise. And the Ordos are supposed to be all about covert ops!

 

[Dead Guy]

Yeah I think you're right, I got the impression from reading part of a building description, required to build mahdi something or other that sounded like another building, but might've been the upgraded zealot, I can't remember the name of it.

 

[zeitgeist]

I've been playing this since it was posted, and there are some things that bother me: after a while, even with unique units and improvements, all the factions end up playing very similarly and (within one faction) your cities end up being pretty much the same (to about the same extent they do in vanilla Civ4). I guess I expected more radical differences between the factions (the Fremen are probably the best I've noticed so far in that regard). Might be somewhat related to my boring conservative playstyle though.

Also, spice seems to have been relegated from the resource to just a resource and there doesn't seem to be a space-related victory condition.

The map is nice, how the terrain is handled is also pretty good (desert=sea, but not quite), the spice drying up and exploding, the race to the polar region etc. It feels a bit weird to be playing a Civ4 game without roads. I read some thread in which they apparently put the roads back in in an earlier version, then took them out again. Perhaps some sort of a "concrete slab" mechanic should be introduced.

 

[Eyeball]

But there IS a spice related victory. Control 60% of spice = win. Although with the limited economic model of the Civ games, this really seems to be just another "domination" victory since you need to take enemy cities to control the spice.

Spice pretty much is THE resource, too. +3 gold per turn per improved spice tile inside your cultural borders, +0.15 per spice if you have spice silos and +2 per spice if you have the CHOAM holy city. I'm trying really hard foostr a terraform victory, but the massive gold boosts from spice are hard to compete with since turning the country green takes so darn long.

More than anything, this mod has highligted to me how shit I am at Civ. Keep getting outworked, outteched and destroyed even playing on Noble, and everybody seems to hate me. Also, the Fremen seem to end up being top civ in every game I play followed by the strangely hyperaggressive Ix. Harkonnen suck ass, at least when controlled by the AI.

 

[zeitgeist]

But there IS a spice related victory. Control 60% of spice = win.

There is? I figured it would be described in the Arrakis Spice civic or the Dune Wars concepts portion of the encyclopedia, but it only had the Terraforming victory mentioned. Did I miss any other unique victory type?

Spice pretty much is THE resource, too. +3 gold per turn per improved spice tile inside your cultural borders, +0.15 per spice if you have spice silos and +2 per spice if you have the CHOAM holy city.

That's close to what I meant actually, spice=gold, it's not treated in the exotic, culturally significant manner I think it's supposed to be. The very concept loses its charm when reduced to the basics like that.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

it's a mod for civ4. what do you expect? to be hugged by gurney halleck every time you launch it?
it's still a much better game than most of the crap sold nowadays.

 

[Eyeball]

But there IS a spice related victory. Control 60% of spice = win.

There is? I figured it would be described in the Arrakis Spice civic or the Dune Wars concepts portion of the encyclopedia, but it only had the Terraforming victory mentioned. Did I miss any other unique victory type?

Spice pretty much is THE resource, too. +3 gold per turn per improved spice tile inside your cultural borders, +0.15 per spice if you have spice silos and +2 per spice if you have the CHOAM holy city.

That's close to what I meant actually, spice=gold, it's not treated in the exotic, culturally significant manner I think it's supposed to be. The very concept loses its charm when reduced to the basics like that.

Yes. Click the red fist in the main game to check your progress on different victory conditions or press F8. Your progress towards a spicey victory is listed under Spice Monopoly.

 

[Zero Credibility]

Played it over the weekend and I like it a lot. Sure, some parts aren't exactly lore friendly, a lot of stuff just had to made up because it was never given in the books, and the mod itself needs more polish (especially in the documentation). But really, it is a great mod - it made me start reading Dune again.

 

[Smashing Axe]

Do you guys play toroidal or cylindrical? I've been playing toroidal and I must say it has a significant effect on gameplay, the polar region becomes amazingly good. Perhaps too much so. In the early half of the game, getting to the snow gives me a significant enough lead to remain in front throughout. That said, I don't like the rate at which one builds settlers, I feel too much pressure to expand outwards quickly before the computer gobbles up land. They're not aggressive enough to attack while expanding so you can build a settlement on the other side of the map feeling fairly confident that it will remain in your hands with only token defense.

 

[Malakal]

Yes, in early game the main threat comes from barbarians ie Arrakeen who arent much of a threat really. Its a land grab in full force. I dont like that part too.

Of course player has to consider economic aspects of overextension, after all you can easily go bankrupt. AI has no such issues.

 

[Zero Credibility]

Early on fast expansion is the way to go, and the AI certainly goes for it. Unfortunately it also shows how blatantly the AI is cheating - the AI is simply producing settlers at much greater speed then I ever could. By the time I finish my first settler, the AI is finishing his second one already. And I'm not playing on a high difficulty (although I am playing on marathon setting - that could be messing things up). I understand that AI needs bonuses to compensate for the lack in its strategy, but double production speed is just too much - it shows that the AI is critically flawed. But I suppose this is a criticism of AI in Civ 4 in general, not Dune Wars.

Maybe it would be better if tech for crossing the deep desert is not available from the start. That way the polar region would be out of reach until you research a way to get there, instead of turning the start of every game in a race for the polar cap.

 

[Ulminati]

Wouldn't that just turn the start of every game into a race for deep-desert-crossing-tech?

 

[Dead Guy]

Or allow the Fremen to comfortably grab the entire polar cap with their automatic desert walk.

 

[Zero Credibility]

Wouldn't that just turn the start of every game into a race for deep-desert-crossing-tech?

Yeah, but it would still be better then a pure expansion race from the start. You would need to build cities first, pump research and then build settlers and transports. By that time the player might find it better to just go on a offensive instead of wasting time on building settlers. Just make it so that the starting thopter scout can’t transport settlers. As for the Fremen, yeah, keeping their settlers out of the desert early on would be necessary for this. But so what - it's not as if there is not enough lore rape in the game as it is.

 

[Destroid]

What happens at the polar cap that makes it so amazing?

 

[Dead Guy]

H2OOHHH, OOHHH YEAH!

also lets you cover quite a lot of desert from there I guess, which means more spice. That must flow. And it's always uninhabited.

 

[Eyeball]

Santa lives there!

Also, the basic "ice" tile is one of the best tiles in the game, unlike regular Civ. It may be difficult to grow corn on ice, but it sure is easy to get water out of it!

The "polar water" resources can be drilled for, and there is a building you can build in every city that gives you bonus food for every polar water resource you control. In my last game, I controlled just 1 polar city and still got like +4 food in every single city in my empire because of it!

I like the Polar Rush, personally. Makes early game exploration extra important and gives you an indication of what direction would be a good idea to expand in to prevent the other factions from grabbing all that juicy ice.

 

[KoolNoodles]

Been having some fun with this, I knew there was a reason I kept Civ4 installed all these years(also for LAN parties). Music pack really adds that extra "spice" to the game. Helps you get over some of the humps of the game engine/design and just wander into a Dune-ish world of worms and sardukar.

 

[Ulminati]

Music pack really adds that extra "spice" to the game.

Brofisted your post just so I could UN-brofist it for that awful pun.

You'll have to do better to worm your way into our good graces.

 

[DakaSha]

 

[Dead Guy]

I was watching this science show on the telly, it was about the passage of time and how everything is in decay. The guy trying to explain how this works took a helicopter out to the coast of namibia and built a sandcastle, so illustrate how it would eventually spontaneously become a dune. Because sand always forms a dune in the wind. And then he said that if he wanted to make a dune, all he would have to do was essentially to drop a great deal of sand in a big pile and then wait, and he would get something that looked more or less like a dune.

And this reminded me rather of Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson.