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More Details On Civ IV Moddability
dfrankow writes "Gamespy has a preview of the upcoming Civilization IV title, where they go into more details about the moddability of the game. From the article: 'Civilization IV promises to be the most moddable game in the franchise yet. It'll ship with an in-game worldbuilder that allows you to shift units around and redraw the map, similar to a scenario editor. More hardcore modders can jump into XML files and tweak all of the unit stats and variables in the game. Beyond that, users who know the Python scripting language can actually go in and set up scripts and triggers to make game events happen or alter the way the game plays, while a Game A.I. SDK that'll be available shortly after the game ships will allow players to completely change the way the A.I., combat system, or game rules work.'"
And then every battle will be a little FPS shooter with whatever the applicable weapons should be.
*That* would be a kickass mod.
Direct away from face when opening.
This means that Firaxis won't have to put a lot of work into pesky issues like game balance, scenario creation, and AI behavior, because the hordes of mod fans out there will fix all those problems for them.
You know, kinda like this.
With the advancement of graphics since Civ II, the game seems to have been corrupting from a tactical stance. Civ II is still my favorite.
Go to the w3.org and put Slashdot.org through the validator.
And I, for one, am glad this will not be available for Linux.
I've lost too many hours to CivCTP as it is, and I don't need another addiction.
So you Windows people can keep your games, and we will keep our productivity.
After all, all Windows is good for is games, right?
www.eFax.com are spammers
From this day on, Spearman shall always prevail when faced with the terrible might that is...the tank!
Perhaps soon we shall have the legendary battles of "Warrior vs. Tank" or "Worker vs. Mechanized Infantry?"
They have obviously learned from the experiences of games like Stronghold and Stronghold 2 that it is necessary to include such moddability. Indeed, the inclusion of the map and scenario editors will allow for online modding communities to form and flourish. This in turn will lead to increased sales of the game, and increased profits.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
So they're introducing loads of new concepts, like religion and famous people. That's good. More depth is only going to be a good thing. (Maybe they could introduce "fundamentalist" units, which you can infiltrate into opposing civilisations in order to slow their science rates...)
But at the same time, they're dumbing other aspects down to the degree that units only have one combat stat, instead of separate attack and defence ratings?!
I'm really not sure I like that. Half the strategy of the early game comes from trying to keep a balance between fast-moving, hard-hitting units like chariots, and the slow but tough units like phalanxes that you need to hold onto the cities you capture with them. What's going to be the point of a phalanx in a game where a chariot has the same defensive ability and (presumably) moves twice as fast?
I really don't see the rationale behind this particular change. Did anyone really find the two-stat system to be hopelessly complicated?
I'm sorry, but I just don't understand complaints like this.
What would you prefer? NO moddability? Would that make you happy?
Exactly what about the moddability precludes a good original game?
will it run on mac or linux?
Excellent, Civ4 will now be like FreeCivhttp://freeciv.org/, except that it won't be free, and it won't be for Linux. Years after FreeCiv has been trying to be like Civ, with rulesets for Civ1 & 2, Civ4 has succeeded in becoming LIKE FreeCiv! The irony.
It wasn't really a complaint. The Rome: Total Realism mod for Rome: Total War is a great mod that far surpasses the original game. Far, far surpasses it. So, I'm glad that this sort of modding capacity was included in R:TW. In fact, I wish earlier Civ games were as moddable, especially on their AI - they've all been fairly notable (especially the original Civ) for being difficult opponents simply because they cheat. (Civ 1 would periodically decide, "Hey, I want X advance or Y wonder right now," and then just get it, without having to allocate production or research.)
However, I do wonder whether including modding capability will eventually be a calculated move demanded by publishers trying to push a not-quite-ready game out the door, so that their development houses won't have to put as much effort into fixing issues with crappy balance or AI. That's why I made my comment - while being able to mod a game is generally a good thing, game companies shouldn't take it as license to be sloppy or unsupportive.
Thanks for the clarification.
Well, call me a bitter old cynic, but I've pretty much given up on any hope that PC games will start being anything but unfinished stuff shoved out the door. So, well, I'll hope they're at least moddable.
Plus, even if someone actually stopped being sloppy, it can happen that the "flaws" in a game are actually WAD (Working As Designed.) I.e., it's not buggy or untested, someone actually wanted it to be like that. In which case it's easier to just mod the game than argue against their grand vision.
E.g., what if 200 man Phalanxes winning against 20,000 man Tank divisions, on plains, in Civ 3 was actually _intended_? Firaxis sure didn't want to fix it even in the expansions. It was much easier to just roll my own exponential mod than to wait for Firaxis to fix it.
E.g., Black And White had an interface that was broken by design. PM's grand vision was an interface without any icons or buttons taking up screen space, and the players would have to just memorize gestures. EA's internal tested showed that even their professional testers had trouble using that, so for Joe Gamer it just couldn't possibly work. So they demanded icons on the screen. However, PM's ego being the size of a continent, he wasn't going to just give in: he put the icons on the screen, but didn't let you click on them.
Think about it. So they _are_ painted on the screen. They _do_ take screen space. But since they're not clickable, Lionhead and a few fanboys could spew idiocies like "if they're not clickable, they're not icons, and if the game has no icons, they don't take up any screen space." Ergo, an interface image painted on the screen doesn't take any screen space. Utterly idiotic.
I wish they had just let me mod the interface instead of uselessly arguing why that doesn't work. For that matter, I wish they had let me mod the creature's AI. Or at least try to fix the other couple of dozen major flaws. (E.g., you know resource usage in a game is hopelessly screwed up when even the "nooo, the game is perfect" fanboys tell you to use the turbo-click infinite wood/grain exploit to have any chance.)
But the game had a lot of potential. It could have been saved by a good modder or two, and there were a helluva lot more of us willing to try.
Etc. There are a lot more games I can think of, but let's stop here with the examples.
Basically while moddability _is_ very nice to have in a game that's good and reasonably balanced to start with, like R:TW that you mention, I'm _especially_ looking forward to it in games that aren't.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Also, Archers will be given a +15 attack bonus against Modern Armor, and Warrior can now be directly upgraded to Mechanized Infantry for free with the discovery of The Wheel."
-From the Civ IV "Optimized Ruleset," available soon
Cough. Hardly. Civ has been moddable to a varying degree for almost 15 years, and the core modules have never been replaced by amateurs. (Amateurs have provided replacements, but the Microprose/Atari/Firaxis/whoever core game has always remained the core dominant.)
Firaxis in their various forms have always taken the balance of their core games very seriously.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Epic with Data's AI.
/. doesn't care about all the times I used enter twice to divide this into paragraphs, so blame /. if it's irritating to read.
One thing that I wish is that they would go back to some of the things from Call to Power II:
Resources represented in the tens, hundreds, and even thousands (produced per city per turn) as opposed to basically ones and tens. This allows the game to be more fair, in my opinion. Also, resources are gathered equally from all available squares in each "band" around your city (your city can end up taking squares up to five tiles away).
Being able to feed and pay your citizens less, and work them more, while reducing their happiness. Building tile improvements with public works (I would set it at 30% (maybe this is too much against humans; I don't know), except at the beginning, where it would be at 0%) instead of workers.
More units. A big tech tree that goes hundreds of years into the future (Welcome to sensorium). I think the future was the most fun part of the whole game, with advanced units, buildings, technologies, and governments to create/research/enact. And looking up the history of these future things was always fun and usually dystopian (I love the information for Corporate Republic (the way America will soon be completely), Technocracy (the next step after Corporate Republic), and Ecotopia
(an ecoterrorist government)). Too bad they don't really go into the future anymore (sticks tongue out).
One thing I don't want at all is ruins. They're very imbalancing, especially when you get free techs or settlers, and to a lesser extent units (how can a tribe have Fusion Tanks?).
I did dumb some of what I wrote down, as I don't want to spend forever, so be nice to me. Also, it seems that
e2 | LJ
I made over a dozen scenarios for Civ2 and not a single one for Civ3. Needless to say when Civ3 shipped I was very disappointed with the lack of both solid mod support and multiplayer.
Good to see they're shipping with much more solid support.
You know, just because you can spew 3 insults per paragraph, build straw-men, name drop ("Peter Molyneaux cried when I told him what his career meant to me last E3"), and use vague appeals to authority ("For example, my mother is a clinical psychologist who's trying to track down the genetic cause of schizoaffective disorder."), you still don't impress me. I've seen worse fanboy fits.
If you think you have a point, actually argue that point, don't just throw insults around and pretend your point is right just because you say so.
"I find this sort of malarky offensive. Yes, a lot of companies ship crap." And two paragraphs later, "Oh, shut up. Almost nobody's being sloppy."
You know, it's very very sad when you can't even keep the same idea for more than a paragraph.
"Peter Molyneaux cried when I told him what his career meant to me last E3"
Ah, yes, classic fanboy. I don't doubt that it filled your life with "meaning" to have the opportunity to sit, beg and wag your tail at the master. I swear some people should have been born a dog, the way they need to sit and beg at a master.
Not that there was any doubt, given the whole "Holy Defender Of The Throne" tone of the rest of the message. Your kind disgusts me, fanboy.
"If you're that good a game designer, design a goddamned game, or shut up."
Ah, more of the standard canned fanboy drivel. Your kind isn't very imaginative, unfortunately, so I've read that before.
Here's an idea, fanboy: it's not _my_ job to do their design. I'm the consumer. I pay for that stuff. It's _their_ job to catter to me, not my job to catter to them.
Repeat after me, fanboy: I don't have to be a watch maker, to say a brand of watch doesn't keep the time right. I don't have to be a portable console maker to say that the PSP has dead pixels. I don't have to be a cordless optical mouse vendor to say that Brand X has too high latency for games. Etc.
The fanboy idiocy that goes basically "design a better one or join in acting all grateful" is just that: fanboy idiocy. Never was the way any other industry works.
"If you think two quickly corrected crashing bugs on obscure platforms aren't reasonable for a project of that size, my dear boy, you don't know software development."
First and foremost: it's a straw man anyway, since we were talking design problem, not crashing bugs. So address the point being discussed, please, or spare us all the fanboy fits.
Second, while you think you're oh-so-great just for being some celebrity's fanboy, I actually work as a programmer. So, heh, go preach how smart you are about software development to someone who cares. Me, I'll keep on calling a bug just that: a bug.
"Er. It was, dumbass. The game has worked that way for almost 20 years. Frankly, that's how it should work - there are examples of that sort of thing happening in real life, and it happens in game very rarely."
No, "dumbass", it never happened in reality, and never will. 200 men with spears winning against 20,000 men with tanks, assault rifles, machineguns, howitzers and helicopters, never won, never will.
If you actually know at least _one_ historical example, _then_ I'll be willing to take your point. Otherwise spare me the childish "It's so because I SAID SO, GODDAMMIT" tantrums. Here's a lollypop, go back to your mommy.
"Do you have any idea how ridiculously and non-productively difficult setting up an interface for large-scale user replacement would be? (No, of course you don't.)"
My dear fanboy, I've actually _coded_ more interfaces than you can even count to without taking your shoes off.
And, no, it is actually very easy to allow even interface changes if you have a modular design. It's even been done before. Most modern FPS engines for example have an API and allow you to write DLLs for almost anything you can think of.
Have a look at some UT or HL mods and you might be surprised. Some
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Catch mod. If you'll scroll down a bit, you may notice:
2. modify or modification.
This abbreviation is very common - in fact the full terms are
considered formal. "Mods" is used especially with reference
to bug fixes or minor design changes in hardware or software,
most especially with respect to patch sets or a diff.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Game theory may be more accurately described as a branch of mathematics, which has applications in many areas, including economics... and military theory.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.