The Culture Mod

[Sabaoth]

I've been folling around some with my own race The Culture looseley based on the books by Iain Banks. Now i want to take my race one step further. In Banks books, The Culture travel in Huge General Construction Vehichels, home to millions of people, in addition to ringworld like orbitals. What i would like to do is a Mod where my race cant colonize planets. Instead of starting with planets they start with a number of GSV's, identical to SEIV planest in most aspects, but they can move around and they dont generate rescources. My race would later in the game, after some sturdy research work, be able to build orbitals and free floating habitats without the ability to move around.

Is it possible to create a mod for such vehichels?

I guess the main problem is to incorportate population on the ship, and make the production of the ship increase in proportion to the population.

Do you think this is a good idea, or am I just ranting?

[Andr�s]

Something like the nomads in the Pirate and Nomads mod?

[Suicide Junkie]

Aside from the fact that population levels have zero effect on ANYTHING spaceborne, you can do that.

Give them something like a P&N Battlemoon, plus some extra hull sizes for those others you mentioned.

The only way to start without planets it to play the first few turns, build that worldship, and then abandon your homeworld. Then save it to be used as a scenario.
Pretty easy to do, so its not that bad.

[Taz-in-Space]

Well, the only problem that I see is that you CANNOT produce research with components. You need facilities and that means planets. Also your population will NOT grow on a ship. Again you need planets for this.

These are my major irritations with the P&N Mod. The Nomads CANNOT be truly nomadic and still research and increase population.

[Sabaoth]

Hmm, bummer. I figure there is no way to make planets move either? Another thought is to use alliances whose sole purpouse is to produce research. My idea is, if you could make another race, that are very friendly to my Culture race, and that allways will maintain a trade and research alliance with them, reserach points will be made available to the Culture. I don't know the extent of tweaking available regarding alliances, but the best thing would be if there is a possibility to affect the amount of research, minerals, organics, radioactives and intel produced due to an alliance between two specific races.

I allready see all kinds of problems with this, but I really fancy the idea of monstrous worldships.

[dogscoff]

Problem with your latest idea there is that if your culture race has no planets, other races can't make contact with them, which means no treaties and no T&R alliance.

Bummer.