are initial colonies and civ capitals upgradable?

I do not believe it has been done previously and afaik the initial colonies and civ capital are hardcoded into the game.

You can create upgrades for the initial colony and capital by creating new improvements in the PlanetaryImprovements.xml.

Just specify the internal name of the improvement that you want to upgrade. For example:

Code: xml

1. <S_UpgradeTarget>InitialColony</S_UpgradeTarget>

well, i know their placement is hard-coded, and i'm fine with that. i can always tinker with them to make them stronger or weaker as i see fit - even if an 'outdated' colony capital were placed for new colonies and subsequently the first upgrade they'll have, i'm fine with that.

i just thought a logical extension of the government tech line would be superior planet & civ capitals.

Kilgore thanks for the help; i knew that's how it'd work if i tried it. i was just concerned that if they were to be upgraded the game would crash for some reason (simply because they're hard-coded).

well, since it hasn't been tried before, i might as well give it a go. i'll report back here on my findings.

This sounds very interesting, I'm keeping an eye on this thread!

you know, i started working on it last weekend, my computer crapped out, and then i got sucked into an MV game. but i'm a little bored with it, so maybe i'll return to building this mod.

my idea was to make initial expansion less of an expensive drain on the economy by renaming the display name to "frontier colony" and severely limiting it. then the first upgrade is called "colonial capital" and occurs with interstellar gov (with an according boost to the tech's AI value). then a series of upgrades would be available through the 3 government types with slight improvements to a number of its bonuses, and a least one similar upgrade for the civilzation capital.

whadya know, it works.

Nice work! I think your concept of upgradable initial colonies/capital can blend very well into the existing game. And the use of upgradable improvements linked to tech research is a very nice use of the possibilities the game offers to modders.

interesting behavior i just noticed, though. once you research the upgrade tech, the upgrade works just fine... except on your homeworld, you can now also build the initial colony's upgrade (i called it 'colonial capital')... as in, have a colonial capital and a civ capital on the same world. i think i can get around this by making the initial colony an upgrade target for the civ capital (placing them on separate upgrade paths, similar to NLCs vs. discovery centers).

update: well, that seemed to work. the way i've modded it, i've changed the display name of initial colony to frontier colony, and its first upgrade occurs at interstellar gov. the first upgrade to the civ capital (a re-purposed political capital) occurs at star democracy, so the only way you could chose the political capital on an initial colony would be if you cont intergov and stardem at the same time (tech trading). considering the AI's shameless tech trading, i don't think it'd be a major problem - but it could be exploited by a player.