Operational-level game focused on exploring Antarctica - for oil or for magical power, riffing on H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness and similar works.

[Screen shot of standard game played on Antarctic map] [Shot of entire Antarctic map]

The map of Antarctica, at 50km resolution, is based on GIS data from several different sources (credited and described in detail in the map file itself).  The data was all free, but I had to fill out some forms to officially reqest some of it - using the skills I learned several years ago when I used to work for a government remote sensing lab - and I'm sure those form made amusing reading for the scientists who had to approve the requests.

Current status

The map is more or less final, and is in the official file distributions along with a kludge that re-arranges the terrain definitions such that you can play the Xconq Standard game on it.  That's actually a fun game in its own right; the centre of the continent is virtually impenetrable, so all the action has to happen along the coast.  Since it leverages on the Xconq Standard game, "Standard in Antarctica" is pretty solidly playtested and debugged and should remain so.

The native game for this map was more or less abandoned about a year ago when it became apparent that Xconq's rule-based material handling system of the time was inadequate for what I wanted to do with it.  I've since implemented a completely new material-handling system (the "model 1" system, making the old one "model 0"), partly with this game in mind, but I haven't attempted to actually use the old game with model 1 and I think it'll require extensive modifications to even start at all with current Xconq.  At the moment, SRE is a higher priority.  If I remember correctly, I also had a fair bit of design work to do on my planned use of "advances" in this game; I got bogged down in the materials handling when I'd been planning to work on advances.

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