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.'"

Comments

Sweet! For Firaxis, that is

[Dachannien]

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.

And I, for one, am glad...

[wowbagger]

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?

Re:I don't like it...

[jericho4.0]

I agree. My version of Civ IV would look something like a cross between WorldWind and Civ II, with games that last for 6 months realtime. Games where geography/terrain really matters, weather patterns, etc. Dachanniens comment above about Firaxis not having to do testing is dead on, adn the best thing that could happen. To really deliver a perfectly balanced Civ game that plays for months takes a huge amount of playtime and tweaking, resources that no software company has.

Spore is looking very interesting right now. Procedural generation will hopefully generate the kind of epic scale I'm looking for.

Re:Sweet! For Firaxis, that is

[Sanfamite]

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?"

Re:It should be team based.

[KDR_11k]

Sounds almost like Archon.

Smartening up but dumbing down

[Haeleth]

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?

Re:Smartening up but dumbing down

[mnmn]

Yeah thats game theory. Something that causes the player to decide between two different paths each of which apparently has equal chances of success. Thats what makes chess so complex.

I'd like the decision to use a unit to be difficult... cost vs attack and defence stats vs speed vs speed of manufacturing etc. The samurai in civ III if youre janapese, were too strong compared to other units, so you just make hundereds of samurai and youve won the game.

Real life is more complex and you have to balance many other variables. The most successful armies have a large diversity of units to succeed, and that should be reflected in civ.

Theres another thing that I've been wanting in the civ series for a while. You can make 'armies' in civiii but thats limited. You should be able to group units like in tiberian sun, make military units, and movement formations like in kohan, and do much more with a group of units than just select each and give them a destination.

Alexander's army was successful because of their direct attacks into enemy units with a blitz. But Genghis was successful because he would attack, and withdraw, pulling enemy units out of their formation and stretching and confusing them. All these should be doable.

Another thing I would suggest in civ is the diplomatic alliance. The alliances should allow cold-war type superpowers to indirectly control other civilizations and get them to fight each other. And to implement embargoes against other civs to kill their economies and science.

Maybe someone can do all this with some fancy python scripting. Why didnt they use perl anyway?

Re:Smartening up but dumbing down

[stonecypher]

Yeah thats game theory.

No. Game theory is the branch of economics devoted to agent behavior and best-course actions (minmax trees, ply trees, risk minimization, saddlepoint grids, quanta, that sort of stuff.) This is game design and game balance.

The samurai in civ III if youre janapese, were too strong compared to other units, so you just make hundereds of samurai and youve won the game.

You need more skillful opponents. The samurai is too expensive to overweight the game. If you're able to flood them with samurai, they're spending no time on their military at all, don't have any ranged units, don't know how to make chaff units, et cetera.

Real life is more complex and you have to balance many other variables. The most successful armies have a large diversity of units to succeed, and that should be reflected in civ.

Yes and no. Whereas you do want some modicum of challenge and differentiation, just how much one wants is debatable. Sit down with some miniatures gamers some time and play one of their world war two games. Their units have sometimes upwards of 20 combat statistics.

It is my opinion - and many people will disagree with me on this - that one wants the minimum count of rules which allow for a game with significant long-term variability. Many stats have been dropped from the units over the years. Others have been added in their place. Experience, hit points, leader base rate, distance from home city, maintenance effects, range, they've all been missing from one Civ or another.

Theres another thing that I've been wanting in the civ series for a while. You can make 'armies' in civiii but thats limited. You should be able to group units like in tiberian sun, make military units, and movement formations like in kohan, and do much more with a group of units than just select each and give them a destination.

The problem is, Civ is pretty clearly a strategy game, and those are mechanics for a tactical game. Yes, that sort of thing can work out well; one of the best examples IMO is Mission Risk. Still, I don't think it would really change the average outcome of wars much, excepting in the case of a novice versus an expert (when you don't want for it to,) and as such it doesn't seem to add to this particular game much. I suspect it would just be chaff.

Consider by comparison the trade scheme in Civ1/2, with caravans. Yes, they mimic the real world relatively accurately, and can be used to model a significant facet of the game. Yes, you can even get them into combat situations. That said, they had almost no long-term impact on the game other than to slow one down; they shouldn't really have been in the game. Civ3 is better for not having them.

Alexander's army was successful because of their direct attacks into enemy units with a blitz.

You can blitz in every civilization game. Blitzing is effectively just moving more troops into a region than the region can scale up to fight back against at once. The primary mechanic of blitzing is overwhelming someone during the time that they're trying to get started up to resist. If anything, Civ's turn-based nature makes blitzing much easier than in a realtime game. All you do is move a gigantic stack; when it gets to a city, the city has time to make one, maybe two units if it's lucky. If the stack is large enough, that's blitz material.

The real effective mechanic of Hitler's Blitzes was political - that he managed to convince neighboring nations not to step up to war until he had already invaded. Blitz is just about taking advantage of someone's not being prepared.

For what it's worth, Alexander almost never did directed charges. He was much more fond of surrounding maneuvers, splitting maneuvers and flanking maneuvers, presumably due to his time as a cavalry officer (remember, he frequently rode into battle personally.) Alexander can be argued to have been largely ignorant of the Blitz. The only two militar

Re:Sweet! For Firaxis, that is

[Dachannien]

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.

pipe dreams, eh? ;)

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:FreeCiv

[91degrees]

Of course, the FreeCiv develpers didn't have to spend time devloping basic rules, or balancing the game. They had a slight leg up there by copying wholesale from Civ2.