[tab]This article will focus on the design aspects of making a mod, not the technical challenges. The goal is that readers will gain some insight into common pitfalls, how to avoid them and that our mods will be improved by it.

[tab]Let me start by saying that there is no perfect way to make a mod. Understanding that I am unqualified to write this article I enlisted the aid of some of my fellow mod makers (and my favorite designer) so that readers could get a wide range of opinions. Each of the Danger sections are concluded by a question that has been asked to the designers about how they deal with the challenges of development. Their responses are the heart of this article and offer very practical advice for all mod makers.

[tab]I would like to thank the following people for responding to the interview questions and providing input to this article:

[tab]Soren Johnson- Civilization 4 Lead Designer
[tab]Sevo- Designer of Sevomod 3, Sevo’s Civilopedia and Sevo’s Faces of God
[tab]Thamis- Designer of the Ancient Mediterranean mod (Civ4) and the Ancient Mediterranean mod (Civ3)
[tab]Rhye- Designer of Rhye’s Catapult and Rhye’s of Civilization


Build the Game You Want to Play:

[tab]The first rule: you are the only person who has to like what you have created. Don’t make the mod you think other people will want, don’t change a design based on outside feedback unless you agree with it. It is better to have an unpopular mod you enjoy than a popular one you don’t. That goes for all of the advice in this article, if you don’t like it, don’t use it. This is the advantage of modding, Firaxis has to worry about making sales and mass appeal, but we don’t.

[tab]The truth is, if you stick to what you like in time you will find others that are looking for the same thing, so it will work out anyway.


1.0[tab]Avoiding the Design Pitfalls:

1.1[tab]The Danger of More:

[tab]“Perfection is not achieved when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” -- Antoine de St. Exupery

[tab]Every new object has a cost, not just in what it takes to create, test and manage, but the player has to keep track of it as well. In general we should only add items because they offer a significant improvement to some aspect of the game, and not just to have more units, more resources, etc.

[tab]It sounds good to be able to offer a long list of new objects. That was much of the appeal of the very popular Civ3 Double your Pleasure (DyP) mod. But the success of DyP wasn’t because of all the new objects, but because each one had a distinct functional purpose. Adding buildings is easy, making them truly worthwhile is the hard part.

[tab]Is it needed? Would it be missed if it was taken out? Is it functionaly unique? If the answer to these is no, it should be considered for removal.

Q: There always seems to be one more building or unit that would be perfect to have in the game, how do you decide what to include and what to keep out?

Look at other successful games as an example of the number of units/buildings/choices to include. For example, Blizzard RTS's stick to a very rigid limit of 12-15 units per faction. That's a reasonable number of choices. We tried to have about 8-10 unit choices per era in Civ4, with the understanding that there would be some overlap. This is one area where there really might be a "magic formula" for how many choices are just right for fun gameplay.

You need to be careful about adding every new unit that pops up or you can think of--at some point you'll lose focus. I prefer a slower staged approach: add a unit or two and play out a game; see how the new units work in the overall schema. Actually, that's a point I should have made earlier: if you're in any way responsible for the overall direction and management of a mod, you ought to be playing it pretty regularly during "upgrading". It's the single best way to learn how your mod is functioning and what the problems are.

I will only add buildings or units if they have a gameplay value. In terms of units, this means that the CIV4 concept of one unit being better against another requires a counterpart. I will create that counterpart unit, but only if it also makes sense historically or thematically. If not, I will change the first unit to something that would work.

In TAM [The Ancient Mediterranean mod], we changed the boni for units and added buildings according to feedback we got on what is overpowered and what building is necessary. An example would be that many players complained that there was too much health. Thus, we reduced overall health, and gave health penalties to buildings. We then noticed that in the early game, there wasn't enough health for some civilizations. So we added the well and the cemetary, which are early health buildings.

Statistically, I decline 80% or more of the proposals I receive from users, for different reasons. One is the design schema: often they don't fit it. Another reason is the lack of graphics: I don't add anything that hasn't an adequate representation. Another reason is complexity / feasibility: often what they propose can't be done or is too hard: but in most cases the idea is good and a simpler variant would be fine.

And a final aspect, one always has to ask himself: will the AI know how to use this change?

1.2[tab]The Danger of Flavor:

[tab]Why do games based on movies and movies based on books always seem to be bad? There are exceptions, but we are usually disappointed with the results of these conversions. The reason is that the design of the new game or movie is based so strongly on the flavor of its source that its own functional design suffers.

[tab]At some point you should look at your mod as just a functional process, a board game without any stylized components, an exercise in mathematics. A game must be enjoyable at this layer to be fun. Some games are so well designed they only exist at this layer and are still amazing to play (chess, othello, tetris, etc). But a game that has incredible flavor but no meaningful functional elements will always be a bad game.

[tab]If you fall in love with a concept that seems like a great idea, but doesn’t have any functional value, the temptation will be to come up with a functional need. There isn’t anything wrong with this, some ideas come from flavor, and some come from function. Different people are more apt to think from one end or the other. But, be aware of the danger that designing from flavor presents. If you aren’t able to come up with an elegant functional need you are best off to remove or change the flavor rather than let the functional design suffer for it.

[tab]This danger is even more prevelant when you are basing your mod on a known source. It is nice to already have all that flavor developed for you, but it can be as constraining as it is helpful. You will either have to let your design suffer (to what level is up to your own ability to find creative elegant solutions) or be willing to step outside the bounds of the source material and develop new elements, or exclude elements despite their existence in the source when the material doesn’t improve the game play of your mod.

Q: How do you balance between Function and Flavor? What do you do when you have a functional need for an element but aren’t excited about the flavor ideas you have? How do you deal with a good flavor concept that has no functional need?

It's easy to think that Function (gameplay) should beat Flavor, but really the Flavor is the whole reason people decide to play a game in the first place. They come for the Flavor; they stay for the Function. You've got to have both elements, so if you have a nice Flavor bit without a matching Function, either work harder to find the Function or cut it out entirely.

This is probably the most important question to answer in creation of a modpack, in my opinion. This game is so open to creation and modification and there are so many interesting ideas floating around that one tends to want to throw it ALL together and it's easy to get carried away. I think what you leave OUT of a mod is as important as what you put in.

To that end, when I'm working on my mod, I tend to focus first on function and second on Flavor, because if it's beautiful and it's unique but it's totally unplayable because of balance issues or gameplay, then no one will play it. That's really the trick, I suppose, to making a great mod: creating the flavor and style you picture without losing the function.

As to the need for a functional element without flavor and vice-versa: this is where the ingenuity and creativity of modding comes into play. You will find things that are imbalanced, or pieces you need, or things that must be adjusted: you as a modder can implement them any way you can imagine, and your charge is to keep the feel of your mod while you do it. On the other hand, sometimes you have a flavor, an idea that you really love, but the function is poor. You have two choices: find a way to MAKE it function, or drop it despite its flavor.

For example, the settler religion mod: At one point I included this in Sevomod, but it completely unbalanced gameplay since ALL new cities started with a religion. I really like the idea, but it doesn't work in the mod, so I had to lose it. It hurts, but if you can't find a way to keep it functional, then it's better to leave it out. I've tried and dropped dozens of ideas/units/etc because they just didn't fit.

Flavour is the most important thing for a MOD, as it is what makes it different from the normal game. Flavour graphics, maps, and sounds are the most important thing in my opinion, as they are very easy to implement and they do not alter the gameplay fundamentally.

As soon as a flavour element starts to change gameplay, I ask myself: "Does this really improve gameplay, or does it complicate it?" More is not always better.

I always tend to add only things that have both function and flavour. I mean that if I have a cool unit designed by somebody else to add, but nowhere to put it without unbalancing the game, I won't bother. And if I feel a gap should be filled by a unit, but I don't have an adequate graphical representation, I won't add it as well.

If we speak about maps, then the function is more important than the flavour. See how many giga maps are being / have been developed: they're pointless, because nobody has a computer strong enough to play them.

1.3[tab]The Danger of Patterns:

[tab]Starcraft was a big eye-opener for me, an RTS that offered 3 different forces that were balanced but completely unlike each other. It’s so much easier to balance a game by making the options mirror each other but it’s more enjoyable for the player to have a variety of options that are dissimilar.

[tab]We could be talking about any feature of the game. For example we could have a series of Civics that gave +3 research at the first level, then you could upgrade to one that gave +9 research when you learned the appropriate tech and up to +15 with the final tech. Or you could have a series of civics, one of which gave +3 research, another gave +3 gold and one that game +3 hammers. In either case the result may be balanced but uncreative, and dull for the player.

[tab]The obvious response to this is that if we don’t stick to patterns then invariably some options will be better than others. Better or unbalanced options are the same as no options. But I think we have some flexibility here. This is the challenge of design, presenting the player with multiple options with different risks and rewards for each, and having each viable for different reasons or in different situations.

Q: It seems easier to build on a tested design, and have new elements be functionally similar concepts to existing ones but with a new power level or different range of effect. How do you determine when this isn’t innovative enough? Or is that even a concern for a strategy game?

Innovation should not be a primary goal - fun gameplay should be the goal. Innovation is the process of both improving old systems as well as creating new ones out of thin air. However, it is always best to understand what your game's aesthetics are so that your new systems aren't a mis-match. For example, Civ's aesthetics are tiles, turns, and boxes-filling-up-with-stuff.

This is a harder question to answer, and I think it falls into the domain of "what makes a good mod". It is certainly easier to simply change combat values or movement or whatnot; to actually innovate an entirely new system is difficult.

Sometimes a new system works very well: for example the new Civilopedia I started with was well received because, I think, it was a marked improvement over the old system. On the other hand, I tried a new system for religions in "Faces of God" and while I spent hours and hours putting together the units, python, etc for that mod, in the end the system didn't lend itself to great gameplay; at least not as it stood and I haven't had time to go back and re-examine it. So there's a bit of trial and error involved, certainly, but hitting on a successful new idea is worth the losses you'll encounter.

The question is whether we are designing MODs or whether we are designing new games. Of course it would be possible to build a new game with the CIV4 SDK, but unless it is totally different from the original gameplay, people will not expect significant changes to how the game plays in a MOD.

There is no rule to balance novelty and familiarity. I like to stick to Soren's design principle (which I learned while doing development testing for Firaxis), which is to keep some of the old (so much that the game is accessible to players of the previous game) and add in something new (to make it more interesting).

I think that this is a concern. That makes the difference between a mod for personal use and for sharing. For instance, if I just want to boost some units stats, I will not post it. Usually I'd eventually find out another mod better than mine, that does the boost I wanted, plus something else.

I'll share it if I have a unique idea instead, something that hasn't been done before by anybody.

1.4[tab]The Danger of Complexity:

[tab]Overly complex designs are the easiest mistake for a designer to make. A designer should differentiate between systems that are fun to design, and those that are fun to play, they are rarely the same.

[tab]Personally I am fighting this issue all of the time. I find myself designing the system the way I imagine, setting it down and coming back to it with a clear head to take a look at what I made. Most of the time I can cut a lot of the design without losing its functional purpose or flavor, or I find that the mod is better without it at all.

[tab]As in all things there is a balance here. Every new feature brings in some additional complexity, just as every new object adds to the amount of information the player needs to track as we discussed in the Danger of More section. Having the idea is only the start.

[tab]I was considering a manufacturing process for a mod. If you have access to dyes and cotton you can build a tailor shop that produces a “Cloth” resource. If you have access to fur you can build a leatherworker that produces a “Leather” resource. If you have cloth and leather in a city then all units produced in that city get leather breastplates that improve their combat ability. And on and on it went, it was a lot of fun to design, huge complex systems with interdependencies everywhere. It would have been a disaster to play for most players. That’s not to say that some people wouldn’t have enjoyed it, some people love complexity. Just keep in mind that what sounds reasonably simple in the design stages, when added together with everything else and in the hands of a player that hasn’t spent the hours considering and tinkering with the mod as you have, can be a substantial roadblock.

Q: How do you balance between complex ideas that bring new elements to the game and the difficulty they cause casual players?

The best place to introduce complex ideas are at the fringes, in places where the player doesn't have to understand the complexities if they he or she doesn't want to. For example, many Civ4 players probably didn't realize how Great People probabilities are calculated - but not knowing the details didn't necessarily stop them from progressing and enjoying the occasional Great Person that they got naturally.

I don't worry too much about adding new ideas to gameplay, but my mod is primarily an expansion of gameplay so most users I think follow pretty readily. Even when I change stuff I find that gamers by nature are quick to pick up new functions, if they aren't too mysterious or complicated.

My approach is always "keep it sound and simple" (aka the KISS principle). I also agree with Soren Johnson's and Sid Meier's design principle of reducing the elements in the game to a minimum while allowing "interesting choices" (to quote Sid) to come to a maximum.

I would never add a feature just because it is cool or new. Features need to fit in with the theme or historical era that the MOD is about, they need to give additional features, not cause gameplay to slow down, and they may not confuse the player. A feature that is only available with a certain key combination (like the buildings razing mod) cannot find a place in my MOD.

I base myself on feedback. If I see that a complex change is welcome and understood anyway, it's okay. Anyway documentation (including a site, a faq, and quick answers on the forum thread) can be important. But even more important than this, is the difficulty that it will cause me. When I add something to my schedule, I have already asked myself if it's possible to do that, and how.

Two examples of what NOT to do:

- compile a list of features and advertise it with no idea about how to do it, and
- work without a deadline, keeping postponing your work for months and months. it's true, you work for free, but if you don't finish your work you'll have really wasted your time.


2.0[tab]Writing your Design Document:

[tab]It’s not fun, everyone wants to get right into making changes and seeing those changes in the game. But your first step is to get a design document written. It can be a forum post you update, a Word document or just notes on paper. Without it your mod design won’t have focus and it will be difficult to make the best use of your time without a clear idea of what needs to be done. It will also be difficult for team members to help you if they don’t have access to the full design list.

[tab]I have a hard time being creative in front of a computer so I grab a notepad and pen when I want to do serious design work. Sitting in a comfortable chair I jot down ideas and think about things I want to improve. Different people have different methods, the important part is to find one that works for you.


3.0[tab]Economics = Choice under Scarcity:

[tab]A game is an entertainment activity that gives us options and rewards us for selecting them skillfully. The quality of those options, the amount of appropriate risk and reward we get from each, the variety of options (without being overwhelming) and the successful merger of function with a matching flavor determines if the game is a good one.

[tab]To make choices we need to have some cost, something we give up to gain the advantage the option offers. This could be paid in some other resource like gold or production time, or it could be in something less definable. One of the classic early game options is, do you build the infrastructure of your cities or build defenders? If you build the infrastructure you will have better cities by the mid-game, if you last that long. But the price you pay for it is in increased risk of attack and losing the game.

[tab]That is beautiful game design (God bless you Sid Meier!). To have options we need to have limits, we can’t do it all so some things need to be sacrificed to gain others. That doesn’t mean that all of the options need to have a direct disadvantage, it may be enough to just have the sacrifice be that you have given up taking other paths, it is economics.

[tab]I’m particularly fond of Civ4’s civic design. Personally I like having civics that have a direct disadvantage along with whatever advantages it offers, but from a straight design perspective I have a deep appreciation for what Firaxis did. The civic’s don’t need disadvantages, their disadvantage is that if you pick a civic you can’t pick any of the other ones in that category.

[tab]Another truism of scarcity is that we must have good and bad elements for it to work, the Desert dilemma. From a players perspective deserts seem useless, they have a few functions but are generally the least useful of the terrains. So you may wonder why they can’t be removed and replaced with something that does more. Their design function is that they aren’t useful, and therefore by comparison other terrains are. The difference between the two makes the players strategic options more interesting.

[tab]There was an RTS game (I don’t recall which one) that marketed the fact that if you moved your land units through water tiles they automatically turned into boats and crossed. You no longer had to worry about making transports and moving the units across yourself. Although it sounded like a good idea the end result was that water didn’t matter anymore. It was just land you couldn’t put cities on. The cost that water travel imposed was gone, and with it the function of the water itself.


4.0[tab]When in Doubt, Trust Firaxis:

[tab]The old saying is if there is a fence in the woods you should know who built it and why it was built before you tear it down. That was never more true than when making mods. I will admit, I love changing things more than I love reading about the way things work so the trap I sometimes get caught in is designing something without a good appreciation for the way its associated systems work.

[tab]My advice is before you make a significant change you review the way a similar system works in detail. If you want to make a new unitcombat, look at the ones that are already developed. Do a search in the python, xml and the SDK for matches against a similar unitcombat and see where it has been used and what it has been used for. When you understand how the data is used you will be better prepared to make your own.

[tab]The same goes for balancing. Firaxis has done more work, and has had more man hours invested in “Vanilla Civ” then we can hope to with any one mod. Don’t let all of the testing and feedback go to waste. Look at the iCombat increases between upgraded units that Civ4 applied when you consider your own. Base your new specialists effects on those that already exist.


5.0[tab]Prioritizing and Saying No:

[tab]The sad fact is that we all have limited time. As much as we may love to mod there are only so many hours in the day and most of us have jobs and families that also demand our time (sorry honey, I mean that we want to spend time with).

[tab]We have to be careful about our ambition. If our only goal is to mod for fun, to play around, change our game and learn a little bit in the process then this isn’t a big concern. If we are working with others and they have helped by devoting time and effort to your mod this becomes more important. In those situations there is some responsibility to produce a working mod.

[tab]So we have to realistically decide what will and won’t be done, at least for the short term. If you aren’t familiar with python or C++ then starting a mod that requires programming changes is probably going to be too much. But you could focus on xml modding only.

[tab]Once you have your idea you will need to prioritize them. I am always on the lookout for “Drool Factor”, those features or additions that will make people want to download and play the mod. No one ever downloaded a mod because it had 17 different kinds of infantry or a ice cream truck unit that played music when it drove around (well, maybe I would download that mod just to try it out) so as interesting as those ideas may be they don’t have any “Drool Factor”.

[tab]You are all players and have read countless marketing releases talking about one game or another. What features did you read about that excited you? Those are the kinds of things that should be at the top of the priority list. I hate to spend time working on a feature that players aren’t going to be excited about.

[tab]And some changes shouldn’t be made at all. This is more difficult when you are working with a team that is as excited and working as hard on the mod as you are. But the mod owner has to be the one to say what is going to go in and what isn’t. Remember its easier to say no and then change your mind and add it later than it is to do all the work to make something only to remove it later on.


6.0[tab]Building a Team:

[tab]There is no magic trick to building a team. Assume from the beginning that you will need to do all of the work yourself, then start working. If people join you along the way to help out, so much the better, but don’t expect it.

[tab]In most cases an idea, no matter how appealing, won’t draw a team by itself. Instead the mod owner will have to show the work he has done to start getting help. The reason is that there are new ideas for mods posted every day asking for help. Naturally people don’t want to spend time working on a mod idea that won’t ever be released. If they see that you have put a lot of effort into it yourself the risk that their work will go wasted is lessened and they will be more apt to join.

[tab]It is my opinion that the mod owner for a complex mod should be a programmer. He doesn’t need to be the best programmer on the team (I’m certainly not on my team) but he does need to understand the programming aspects. This is because the mod owner has to be the one to decide what is and isn’t going to go into the mod, he won’t be able to make these decisions well if he doesn’t have a decent appreciation for what has to happen “under the covers” to make it work. Also the mod owner always has to be prepared to do it alone if need be. If you leave the programming aspects to someone else without an ability to pick up if they leave you may risk losing your mod if they go on to other things.

[tab]One more point about teams. This is an open, fun, collaborative process. Don’t expect deadlines and arbitrary goals to be met unless you are willing to pay your team. It’s the mod owners responsibility to get the work that needs to be done listed and the team members can work on different aspects as they desire. Anything more than that isn’t fun for anyone. Invariably you will be working on some component and want a piece from a team member to finish it, or team members will come and go as their real lives dictate, but that is the nature of collaborative modding.


7.0[tab]When to Release:

[tab]A mod is never perfect, there is always some new feature, art or object you would love to get added before you release. The danger of that is that you may never get it out.

[tab]Momentum is important for a mod, both for you (hearing from players that enjoy your mod will give you the energy to keep going) and especially for your team (who want to see their contributions out and available). Other mod makers may have different ways of doing this but I like to set hard release dates and then work back from them instead of working from feature lists. If I commit to release a new version on the first Friday of each month then you and your team know when they have to have new stuff in by to have it included.

[tab]Releasing after certain features are in creates a pressure to get work done that may aggravate your team if they feel like they are holding up the release. Better to just tell them the dates and let them manage their part as they prefer.

8.0[tab]Further Reading:

The linked articles were all written by Mark Rosewater, Lead Designer for Magic the Gathering. Although Mr Rosewater is specifically talking about Magic I believe the following articles are just as applicable to Mod design.


Finding a Good Mechanic:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/mr4

When Cards go Bad:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/mr5

Timmy, Johnny and Spike:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/mr11

The Write Stuff:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/mr12

Keeping It Simple:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/mr21

Bursting with Flavor:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/mr60

Rules of the Game:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/mr66

Design 101:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/mr68

The Value of Pie:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/mr85

Design 102:
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/mr132


Soren Johnson has a Blog called Designer notes where he talks about game design issues and is worth checking out. I would especially recommend the following:

Seven Deadly Sins for Strategy Games (http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=106)

Fantastic Job Kael. You do so many things for the Modmakers. A truly good Samaritan (Did I spell that right?) I'll definetly follow most of these tips as they come from better modmakers than me. But one thing I disagree on. That conversions from Movies and Book tend to be bad. I agree that you cannot stick to the source but basing something on a movie like I did isn't bad. You yourself based FFH from a D&D game that you made. It was loose, yet see how well FFH did. If I may be so Unmodest, The Star Wars Mod hasn't been that bad.

Very nice article/interview you put together Kael. You keep doing more and more for the community: Thanks :)

Its not a problem. I was as interested to read the responces from Soren, Sevo, Thamis and Rhye as you guys are.

Amazing article, Love the wizards links

GO MARK ROSEWATER...

Fantastic Job Kael. You do so many things for the Modmakers. A truly good Samaritan (Did I spell that right?) I'll definetly follow most of these tips as they come from better modmakers than me. But one thing I disagree on. That conversions from Movies and Book tend to be bad. I agree that you cannot stick to the source but basing something on a movie like I did isn't bad. You yourself based FFH from a D&D game that you made. It was loose, yet see how well FFH did. If I may be so Unmodest, The Star Wars Mod hasn't been that bad.

It easnt my intent to say that basing your mod on movies or books (or D&D games) is bad. Just that mod makers should be more aware of the danger of designing from flavor in that case.

I suspect that at some point you will will have to decide if you are going to stay true to your source or make the best mod possible. You do everything you can to stay close (to match the flavor of your source with the functional aspects of Civ4), but those decisions will come. When they do I would recommend you not be afraid to do whats best for the game play of the mod and not allow it to suffer for authenticity.

Thanks for this fantastic article Kael! I have only just begun working on a mod and since I'm completely new to mapmaking, python and xml I get stuck from time to time wich can be ever so frustrating, but it's useful information like this that gives me the energy to keep trying and eventually make it work.

And that icecream-truck sounds kind of interesting too... ;)

A brilliant revelation of the minds of great mod makers.

I'm just going to rip through this commenting on a few things I feel like commenting on!

The first rule: you are the only person who has to like what you have created. Don’t make the mod you think other people will want, don’t change a design based on outside feedback unless you agree with it. It is better to have an unpopular mod you enjoy than a popular one you don’t. That goes for all of the advice in this article, if you don’t like it, don’t use it.I agree 100%. I had great fun making the 40k units for Civ 3. They weren't very good, and not very many people used them, but they were great fun to make!

It sounds good to be able to offer a long list of new objects. That was much of the appeal of the very popular Civ3 Double your Pleasure (DyP) mod. But the success of DyP wasn’t because of all the new objects, but because each one had a distinct functional purpose. Adding buildings is easy, making them truly worthwhile is the hard part.To be honest I couldn't stand DyP. Far too much stuff in it.

This danger is even more prevelant when you are basing your mod on a known source. It is nice to already have all that flavor developed for you, but it can be as constraining as it is helpful. You will either have to let your design suffer (to what level is up to your own ability to find creative elegant solutions) or be willing to step outside the bounds of the source material and develop new elements, or exclude elements despite their existence in the source when the material doesn’t improve the game play of your mod.Personally I'm fearing quite some troubles with this myself. The mod I'm making doesn't have much room to manouver backstory-wise. I've already taken quite a few liberties with the plot to make it work for Civ, and I've a feeling I might have to do a few more. I don't like doing it, as it takes away some of the connection to the universe it is based off, but if I was true to that universe then I probably wouldn't be able to even have a tech tree...


Starcraft was a big eye-opener for me, an RTS that offered 3 different forces that were balanced but completely unlike each other. It’s so much easier to balance a game by making the options mirror each other but it’s more enjoyable for the player to have a variety of options that are dissimilar.While it may not be extremely relavent, I'm going to hark on about 40k again (although not my mod). This "Starcraft factor" has been attempted quite recently in the 40k game "Dawn of War". It has 5 completely different races which work completely differently, but still manage to be fairly balanced - in fact, Warhammer & 40k tabletop games are the same. While it is alot harder to balance things this way, as the best way of balancing is to put alot of playtime in, it makes for a much better game.

There was an RTS game (I don’t recall which one) that marketed the fact that if you moved your land units through water tiles they automatically turned into boats and crossed. I'm pretty sure you're referring to Rise of Nations. The key was that the units couldn't fight when on the water, so could be easily killed by naval units.

I'm not disagreeing with your point though ;)

The old saying is if there is a fence in the woods you should know who built it and why it was built before you tear it down. That was never more true than when making mods. I will admit, I love changing things more than I love reading about the way things work so the trap I sometimes get caught in is designing something without a good appreciation for the way its associated systems work.This is a good point, but sometimes the best way to understand something is to tear it down, and see what happens when you tear it down. More likely than not you will then see quite quickly why it was there, and, to use your fence analogy, why it was so high (to stop the dinosaurs), and quickly rebuild it (before you get eaten).

This can put you in a good position to see what was wrong with it (if anything) - maybe the fence should have been electric so that it more effectively prevented dinorsaurs from crossing it (excepting a huge storm).

Also, on a slightly different note, when you understand something it's usually a good idea to document it so that you can re-understand it if you forget at a later date. For example, the fence in the forest should have really had a warning sign saying "Dinosaurs are on the other side of this fence".

Once you have your idea you will need to prioritize them. I am always on the lookout for “Drool Factor”, those features or additions that will make people want to download and play the mod. No one ever downloaded a mod because it had 17 different kinds of infantry or a ice cream truck unit that played music when it drove around (well, maybe I would download that mod just to try it out) so as interesting as those ideas may be they don’t have any “Drool Factor”.
Somebody is going to have to make that ice cream truck unit...

I think this is probably most important when a mod is starting off. Once people have downloaded it they will quickly get past the "Drool Factor" and see the mod what it is really for, however this "Drool Factor" will ensure that people try it in the first place. The further a mod goes without a "Drool Factor" the less chance that a later incorperation of one will cause poeple to download it. With my 40k mod I'm going for a new interface - mainly because it is very obvious in screenshots.

Momentum is important for a mod, both for you (hearing from players that enjoy your mod will give you the energy to keep going) and especially for your team (who want to see their contributions out and available). Other mod makers may have different ways of doing this but I like to set hard release dates and then work back from them instead of working from feature lists. If I commit to release a new version on the first Friday of each month then you and your team know when they have to have new stuff in by to have it included.We're already 2 weeks late with the first release of the CCP, although I supose first releases are slightly different because there is no point releasing something which doesn't actaually do anything! *TGA starts planning a schedule*

I think that I now uderstand why my mods fail. They lack flavour. I don't mind as I still find them fun but I do wish that more people would play them.

Must go off and design a 'drool unit'. I guess that a few new nukes will do that to people.

Incredible article. :goodjob:


There was an RTS game (I don’t recall which one) that marketed the fact that if you moved your land units through water tiles they automatically turned into boats and crossed.

That was Rise of Nations.

Awesome read! :) Even for s.o. like me that only enjoys your hard work and lacks the skills to do some modding himself. Now somebody tell me again modders aren't Pro's in their own way!

Good read. I will try and absorb as much as I can of that into the Untitled Space mod..............................if it is even possible....:(.

Still, V. good read. Taught me a lot. :)

I missed this for a week, but I'm glad that you finally got it jotted down so everyone can benefit from FfH's successes (and pitfalls). ;)

I missed this for a week, but I'm glad that you finally got it jotted down so everyone can benefit from FfH's successes (and pitfalls). ;)

The article is definitly more than just what we learned from FfH. The input from the Soren and the other designers is fantastic and I learned a lot from reading their responces.

Thank you Kael. This article is great and I'm am definately going to have to re-read this one when I start my second version of my mod. Thanks again for giving to the community.

I've designed my share of small games and mods, I also helped Thamis on The Ancient Mediterranean for civ3 and civ4 to various degree and this is my piece of advices.

Being a game designer is hard. Period.

Whether you do a mod or a full game, we're talking about a set of specific skills. Everyone can be a game designer, but not everyone can be a GOOD game designer. Heck, even many commercial games are not very good/fun in the design department because they lack innovation, fun or gameplay. It's not just about creating stuff and adding things, it's about creating a product, creating an experience. There are no recipies, and it's a bit more complicated than just sticking to things that works and adding flavor.

Also, the biggest challenge is that players are usually NOT good game designers. They always want features X, Y and Z, without thinking about the overall game, the whole experience. They don't understand the game system like you do. They always think they can do better or want to add a cool feature. Remember, designing a game/mod is HARD. This means that users/players/customers are usually wrong.

However, players ARE your customers, so if you do not please them, they won't buy/play your game, which is a pretty big problem. You must ALWAYS listen to your players, be polite and do not alienate them. You're not GOD because you've created a mod.

I've learn that at work: you must always keep your ears open. You are there to take the pulse of your players and build a better game. Do not presume that your mod if perfect. You MUST pinpoint the problem/cause of the users requests: why does he want that feature? why isn't he pleased? how can I improve the game so that those problems are gone? You usually never end up adding the exact feature that a player requested; sometimes you tweaked some values, rebalanced some areas, or maybe even ended up adding totally new gameplay elements.

For example, a player is saying that he's researching tech too fast and suggest to add more tech to make up for it. He even has a list of wicked cool techs to add. Wow, those would be great right? Wrong.

What must you do instead? Well, you check to see why he's researching too fast: is it because of a civic that is too powerful? too much science buildings? too fast growth? when is he starting to go ahead of the tech curve?

In the end, you probably won't add any new techs, but you'll have to fix this problem one way or another. You do that by looking at the actual system and finding out what's wrong.

Also, it's important to build systems. Systems are more important than single features. Usually players only see features, but you must think in terms of systems. A game is a series of simple, interrelated systems. Complex is not always better, simplicity and depth is usually what makes a good game. Just look at Civ4. Sure it's not a complex tactical simulation, but it's pretty damn fun and addictive. You must think globally and know your systems intuitively and fully. I repeat, you must understand the systems fully. When we're talking about a mod, it's even more important to know and understand fully how the game works. In civ4 there are lots of systems (research, growth, combat, etc.) and they are ALL related together. Maybe you find that some ARE flawed, but in the end, all of their interactions makes a fully playable and enjoyable game. If you want to design a mod, you must understand that.

So, if you are not pleased with the combat system, before changing it, please understand exactly how it works. Then you see if you can tweak it to do what you want. THEN you build a new combat system if you still need additional features that do not fit in.

For example, when designing the units in TAM Civ4, we designed a 'new' system by just playing a bit with unit classes, promotions and bonus. We didn't code a completely new system because it wasn't needed, everything was there to create the necessary experience and balance we wanted. No need to rewrite Civ4. However, this introduced new gameplay elements, new balance and new ways to approach combat.

Finally: playtest, playtest, playtest. Features and systems are theorical, they are in your head. Play them to see if they work. The better you understand the system, and the better you become, the better you will get. However, you must still playtest. Then playtest more. Do not let everyone test either, players are not usually good testers anyway. Have a couple of people that really want to playtest.

And the most important advice I can give: it's still just a game/mod. Unless you make your living out of it, just have fun and don't worry if you're mod isn't popular. I usually make mods for myself first and foremost, and so should you. If you like it and find it fun, there are probably others too, just don't expect everyone to like it. Hell, check out commercial games: not all of them are hits like Civ4 or World of Warcraft, so it's not an easy task.

Thanks Karhgath, thats exactly the kind of conversation I was hoping this thread would generate. I would love to hear from others about what you found out works and doesn't work for you when designing mods.

As someone who's more an aspiring modmaker than one who's succeeded, I have little to add except some outside observations.

First, regarding complexity: A strong case has been made (for example, A Theory of Fun for Game Design (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932111972/102-8161946-3046551?v=glance&n=283155)) that games are essentially learning activities. One of the most difficult things I've seen as a player of games is designing the right level of complexity scaling. Complexity should keep ramping up as the player masters an old element, and ideally old elements recombine to create new elements so that new complexity isn't just introduced for the sake of complexity, but rather as continued variations on a theme that you've mastered, but has just mutated to become more challenging.

Consider the learning curve of Civ4 itself: you basically need to figure out how to feed people and build stuff in the beginning. Not until you "succeed" at this does stuff like unhealthiness/unhappiness rear its ugly head. In some ways, a built-in learning curve.

One of the dangers of a franchise is that each game becomes more complex than a previous one (because each game builds off the learning curve of the previous) such that they stop becoming accessible to new audiences. As a Civ "insider," I can't say whether Civ4 is more or less hard to learn than, say, Civ2. I do think some of the mods I see presume the learning curve is already under your belt from Civ4 -- and since we are all Civ4 players, this is not a bad assumption!


I always tend to add only things that have both function and flavour. I mean that if I have a cool unit designed by somebody else to add, but nowhere to put it without unbalancing the game, I won't bother. And if I feel a gap should be filled by a unit, but I don't have an adequate graphical representation, I won't add it as well.

There's a great story (don't know if apocryphal) about George Lucas's first screening of "Star Wars" to his backers, at which he hadn't yet finished the Death Star battle scenes, so instead he substituted movie footage of WWII fighter planes. This totally confused and freaked out his backers, and could have cost him the release of the movie.

Personally, I have thought it would be easy for me to put arbitrary units on the board and say, "This Warrior is really a Spaceship." But (a) it turns out my own imagination does not allow me to do this for very long, or perhaps it's the case that I like playing with graphics, but anyway... (b) if you are looking to build a team and get support, most people will probably react like the first viewers of the pre-FX Star Wars. This may not be a bad thing if you want to attract people who are attracted to the fundamental gameplay rather than nifty graphics. And sometimes I find myself wasting hours finding the "right" model rather than just getting on with fixing the broken game mechanics. But it's important to recognize what makes yourself and others motivated -- what Kael called the "drool factor."

I find a lot of people have a great imagination, and can usually come up with something that sounds cool enough that they'd get at least a FEW other people saying "hell yeah! I want that too!"

But adding something can have a real danger. There seems to be two main problems when it comes to adding stuff:

1) OVERCOMPLEXITY: people add something that's much like a game in of itself. They imagine a whole new system with dozens of buttons, and complex interacting rules, with another dozen exceptions where the rules don't apply. This might be fun and it might even work, but it's so brutally complex that you'll never make it. Or if you do, you'll end up with something that only the most hardcore of players will have the patience to learn and thus enjoy.

2) FUNCTIONLESS FLUFF: Sometimes people add a feature that really does nothing to the actual *game*. Let's say someone adds a 'crime' element to the game, with a random 'criminal' unit popping up that you need to kill from time to time. What's one criminal unit going to do? Maybe pillage a tile before the player takes care of it. This doesn't add a new strategy or choice to the game. It adds fluff in the name of realism.

One of the most insightful things I heard about Civ 4 is that it's a series of extremely simple systems that interact to create a complex game. In this new SDK era of modding, I think people have to keep that in mind. You should be able to explain the basic system in but one or two sentences: Religion spreads from city to city via trade routes and missionaries. The owner of the Holy City gets more gold the more that the religion spreads. Or Specialists and Wonders generate Great People Points. When a threshold of GPP is reached, a Great Person pops out capable of researching a tech or giving some other special bonus. If it's easy to explain, then it's probably easy to implement, balance, and understand.

2) FUNCTIONLESS FLUFF: Sometimes people add a feature that really does nothing to the actual *game*. Let's say someone adds a 'crime' element to the game, with a random 'criminal' unit popping up that you need to kill from time to time. What's one criminal unit going to do? Maybe pillage a tile before the player takes care of it. This doesn't add a new strategy or choice to the game. It adds fluff in the name of realism.

Thats a really good insight, I couldn't put my finger on what I didnt like about some (usually very creative) ideas until you said that. I agree 100%.

We have a lot of people saying that one of your goals should be to keep your design as simple as possible. Is there anyone who disagrees with this? Does anyone think that the game is to simple and adding complexity makes it better?

I've never taken any programming classes, but I've softcoded on mushes and muds for about 6 years, creating various systems from character creation to weather and I've found that first you need a generic concept that can be stated in a sentance or three that gives the basic idea of the mod.
"DnD Mod is a small mod that limits civs to 12 hero units and one city and pits them against each other and the wandering barbarian monsters."

Once you have that you need to determine what areas need to be modded. By the above DnD example, need new unit graphics and decide if unit limiting can be done in xml or python.

When you have these two things my advice is to jump in and start messing with the code. Afterall the worst that can happen is a game crash, just remember to keep back up copies or some sort of record of what you change so you know where to look for errors.


Originally Posted by dh_epic
2) FUNCTIONLESS FLUFF: Sometimes people add a feature that really does nothing to the actual *game*. Let's say someone adds a 'crime' element to the game, with a random 'criminal' unit popping up that you need to kill from time to time. What's one criminal unit going to do? Maybe pillage a tile before the player takes care of it. This doesn't add a new strategy or choice to the game. It adds fluff in the name of realism.

This is a good point. The example pilliaging criminal is empty and almost just annoying because it has no real effect. It needs to have some sort of impact on a game. The player needs to interact with it in some way. Even if the effect is "bad" and it makes the player "angry" that is better then indifferense and bordem and its often that angering aspect that keeps you playing for hours and hours. Like, how bout if your city had X unhappy people for Y turns, then Z population would leave your city as Riot units and begin pillaging the squares around the city and any that are killed won't return to the city after N turns of rioting. This then has function, if you don't keep your city happy or policed then it will be negatively effected, and also fluff, instead of numbers being changed behind the scenes there are onscreen actions that can be seen. On top of that it has a way for direct player actions to effect the outcome, ie they can attack the Riot units and destory them or just gaurd specific resourses limiting or even nulifing the pillage effect.

It goes back to what has been said about System vs. Feature, a feture generally have a very liner cause => effect stucture(unhappyness => criminal unit => tile or two pillaged), where as a system tends to have multiple causes, effects, and sideeffects(unhappyness and unhealthyness taken into acount for spawning, decisions given to player, outcomes variety and interactable).

We have a lot of people saying that one of your goals should be to keep your design as simple as possible. Is there anyone who disagrees with this? Does anyone think that the game is to simple and adding complexity makes it better?

I both agree and disagree with complexity in mods. Take FfH, or any of the other mods that rewrite the game, these are very complex and intricate endevors and many many people take on the learning curve above and beyond the basic Civ4 for one because it is well done and exicuted. Its basic premise required alot of complexity, that complexity required alot of time, and the production team put that time into it. If these points are met then complex mods are fine.

On the flip side many complex mods don't require the complexity or the modders didn't put in the need time and in these situations it doesn't work out well. These leads back to designing before modding, laying out what needs to be done and what doesn't and how that translates into code.

Now it is good advise to start simple(whatever simple is for your current coding profishensy) and build upon that. But the complexity of the final outcome is usually more dependint on coding knowledge, the desired result of the mod, the time put into it, level of realism, ect.

I would say, Start simple and keep it effecient. ;)

As to the greater question of a simple game vs a complex one, I personally like the middle ground, I enjoy a good amount of micromanagement, but it has to build around an acual game. I don't mind doing some math when it relates to my future actions, but I don't like having to micromanage current actions(like figuring combat odds when I'm battling units).
I like how Masters of Orion 2 was set up, but three went to far with regions and buildings and different sizes and all the screens you had to click through just to do stuff. They got way to complex with the UI and the game mechanics.
Civ4, I think came out with a nice balance in the vanilla, less micromanagment, more gameplay, but I could stand for some more micromanagment, I miss acual rioting cities from unhappyness, gave a reason to go into the city screen.
This really is a preference and modders are going to find a market for mods from the most simple ot the most complex if it is done right and has a half decent premise, so all you future modders keep at it and sick with the number one rule always

Make a mod that you enjoy playing.

If you do this then you always win. :D

One thing that I don't hear mentioned enough with respect to game design (warning, this doesn't apply quite so much to Civ4 mods specifically as it does to design in general):

Player rewards.

What is a player reward, you ask? Simple; a player reward is any reaction by the computer that gives a player positive feedback about actions they have taken.

OK, that's a nice textbook definition. So what, exactly, does that mean? Basically, player rewards are what keep the player wanting the play the game. A great example from a recent game: in Heroes of Might and Magic 5, whenever one of your units completely destroys a stack of enemy units, your entire army gives a visible and audible cheer. This gives the player a sense of accomplishment and shows them, without any annoying messages, that he just did something that he was supposed to.

Player rewards can take almost any form. They can be visible - particle effects, victory dances, a character pumping his arm. They can be audible - cheers, a fanfare, "DING!". They can even be tactile in console games with rumble controllers. Points are player rewards; so are powerups dropped from defeated enemies, experience levels, cutscenes, and so on.

The important thing to remember with player rewards is that it is very difficult to use too many and very easy to not use enough. You want the player to have a constant sense of accomplishment and pride/pleasure while they are playing; the more rewards you can feasibly fit in, the more likely they are to enjoy playing your game. The best rewards take multifaceted forms. For example, take Diablo 2: killing an enemy gives you a satisfying death animation, a death sound, increases your experience, usually yields money and items, and can result in cut scenes and additional audio rewards. Clearly, killing enemies is what the designers want you to do, and equally clearly killing enemies is what people enjoy doing. The correlation comes from the rewards the player gets for doing the action.



So, how does all this apply to mod-making in Civ 4? Not usually directly. Most of the player rewards are already handled by the engine - things like tech completion popups, unit acknowledgements, experience from winning fights, cities growing, and the like. What we, as mod designers, can do is to minimize the things that players do that do not yield rewards. Try not to add too many spreadsheet-like screens. Try to avoid adding new features unless you also add new rewards for using those features. Do your best to consider, as you design, what things you can include that will make the player want to keep doing whatever it is you're designing.

Always keep in mind that player rewards will not make a bad game design into a good game; however, lack of player rewards will always ruin a good game design and make it a game that is, at best, not fun to play long-term.

Great point Zurai and something I haven't considered. I will be thinking about that as I work on my mods. :D

We have a lot of people saying that one of your goals should be to keep your design as simple as possible. Is there anyone who disagrees with this? Does anyone think that the game is to simple and adding complexity makes it better?
Yes, Sir, here!

There have been several posters in this thread stating that one should avoid complexity. I have to disagree with those statements.

Please let me explain.
Complexity and being complicated - at least in German language - are different terms - "Komplexitaet" (complexity) and Kompliziertheit (being complicated). Complexity is nothing bad per se, as long as it is not too complicated to understand. I think, this is a very crucial point.

Let me give you an example. Many people really miss quantitative ressources. The idea behing it is that those ressources would allow for a more "realistic" economic system, would allow for a solution of the old problem of "industrial" centers somewhere in the middle of a hill region and so on. No need to go too much into details.
Anyway, personally I think, that this system could easily be implemented (spoken from a very general point of view of course) because it is not complicated to understand - it just displays something all of us know from our day-to-day live. To make it work, would nevertheless require very complex algorithms, but this is just, what computers have been designed for - the numbercrunching.
As long as you can explain such a system by some sentences: "You have some deposits of a ressource, which will give you x, y and z amounts of that ressource per turn. The total of it will be distributed between your cities automatically. If you want to build something in a given city A and that city has a shortage due to this ressource missing, you will be notified and can chose from a list of cities which will redirect that ressource to the city A. The downside is that the redirecting city will have to postpone the completion of its current building task".
Not very difficult to understand. (I admit that this example has been drastically simplified to fit into this posting, but the explanation in principle would stay the same)

How the automatic distribution works, would nevertheless require some complex rules. But these are things the players doesn't have to know necessarily (of course, if he would be interested into the understanding, it should be possible for him to determine those rules).

Well, not to make this one become too long: Complexity is neitehr good nor bad by itself.
As long as it is easy to understand and to cope with, AND if it adds the feeling of more realism and / or more fun, I would go for it.

Ah, I just read Zurai's great posting. I couldn't agree more with what he explained about the rewards. Especially, as Civ4 doesn't offer the rewards he mentioned (or not many of them).

Where have they left the palace or throne room, you could slowly build up?
Where is the reward to create and add more and more of the spaceship parts? I want to have a little animation, showing how the cabin fits to the main storage rooms, I want to listen to some electrical sound "zzzzzt" ...."bssss", I want to see the spaceship sailing in the orbit, with the moon in the background. I want to see a shuttle docking to it.....
Where are the funny advisors from Civ2? "Give me more soldiers, Sir!"

Nothing of those things adds directly to the gameplay, but they add much to the experience.
From time to time it is just fun and relaxing to lean back, have a proud look at your spaceship being half part completed, or waiting for this last piece of the tower of your palace. You discovered a tech as first? No need to have a free tech all the time - a nice addition to the palace perfectly serves the same purpose - the player gets a feeling of satisfaction, of really having achieved something.

Complexity and being complicated - at least in German language - are different terms - "Komplexitaet" (complexity) and Kompliziertheit (being complicated). Complexity is nothing bad per se, as long as it is not too complicated to understand. I think, this is a very crucial point.


I agree. ANNO 1503 is a very good example: The multiple chains of production are highly complex but easy to understand bc they followed a very natural logic.

The multiple chains of production are highly complex but easy to understand bc they followed a very natural logic.

At least in terms of a Civ4, I feel "complex" and "more is not better" and "the economy of choice" are all tightly bound together.

"To have options we need to have limits, we can’t do it all so some things need to be sacrificed to gain others."

This can apply to units, buildings, tech research, even what squares you choose to improve, or how.

For example, for your Crusades Mod, you might decide that the player might like to have the choice of a dozen different mounted cavalries (same gameplay statistics) in varied Templar skins, and I have to admit, the option does sound quite appealing, but you have to ask yourself "Why should the player choose one over the other ?" If you cannot answer that yourself, then the player most definately wont be able to, and the units are probably redundant.

But what does it hurt to have a selection of different sprites ?

The economy of choice. By dilluting the field with redundant choices, you are obscuring the direct choice that a player has to make, and in effect reducing the enjoyment they can gain from making a successful choice.

To use an example people are likely familiar with (many intimately so), FfH1 and 2.

I enjoyed the mods immensely. I thought the flavor was well done. The art, music, and quotes all served to further the immersion. Each unit and system was easy to understand, and contributed something to the end goal.

So everything should have been like roses and onions, right ? Wrong.

Although the buildings, units, and heros all contributed something to the mod, the role they played was not unique. For instance, a common choice in Civ is "OK, I need to build a unit.", and I gazed at a list of a dozen or so units. To narrow it down, I decide "I want the unit to defend my town.", but I'm still looking at 6 different choices. Unfortunately, I cannot determine what difference, if any, there is between the choices (at least not in a timely manner), let alone answer the question of why I should select one over the others.

Choice is not always a good thing, especially if the consequences of the choice are not apparent to the player. (or worse yet, contradictary).

Yeah, oddly enough sometimes the best thing that can be done to improve a mod is the removal of components instead of the addition of them. A difficult process because as designers we are often in love with the minutia of our mods.

As to Commander Bello's point Im glad someone spoke up for complexity. His comments about the number of resources reminded me of the "Sliding Scale" that usually marks the limit between simple and complex in my mind. The Sliding Scale means that instead of being on or off there are multiple stages for whatever mechanic you are discussing. For Commander Bello it was resources, you wouldnt simply either have or not have Oil, but you would have various degrees of having it, each with different effects (I hope Im not paraphrasing to badly).

We recently came across this in regards to alignments in our mod. Right now you are either Good, Neutral or Evil. There is no real sliding scale. It wouldn't be to difficult to add a players alignment as an integer value and modify it based on actions, and then determine which of the three major alignments you belong to based on your placement on that scale. But what did that complexity give you? Now you have a system to manage, something the players will need to understand, but does that change make the mod better?

Sliding scales aren't bad in and of themselves. They are everywhere. Units hit poitns are a sliding scale (they arent simply alive or dead), production is a sliding scale (it would be simpliar to allow a city to create a building each turn). There are to many to mention.

But in my opinion they should be avioded unless they give a very tangible benifit to the player. To Commander Bello's point about the amount of resources. That could be a really cool function for a mod if it is fully developed. I think that merely putting in resource numbers in would add complexity without much benifit, but if it is the part of a larger, more interesting econmic model it could be a great feature.

Unfortunately, I cannot determine what difference, if any, there is between the choices (at least not in a timely manner), let alone answer the question of why I should select one over the others.


The problem you describe here is not a matter of how many choices there are but a lack of proper documentation and the absence of a self-explanatory quality.

[...] I think that merely putting in resource numbers in would add complexity without much benifit, but if it is the part of a larger, more interesting econmic model it could be a great feature.
About just having some numbers more, I absolutely agree with you, Kael.
My idea goes further in my mind and I agree that it has to fit into a complete economics model (with all attention put to keep it simple and understandable).
On such a model I am currently working and putting my thoughts together.
I have to admit that I am not finalized with it yet, therefore I stayed that general as above.
As soon as I have put it onto paper, I will offer it as a proposal for the RaR4Civ-mod, and you may feel free to use it wherever you want.

But this will last for some time, so I won't go into any details which may very well change.

When talking about complexity we are talking about the functional complexity of the system. Maybe an idea looks really complex behind the scene, but can be understood logically with simple rules. There are no catches, or tricky exceptions, or gray-areas.

For example, let's take the following example. We want to add the idea of supply in civ4:


Units have supply that depletes when they are outside of your borders and when out of supply, units start losing HP. They can resupply when they can reach your trade network and the resupply amount comes from a supply treasury. Forts extends the resupply range of your trade network.


This is straightforward. If you take out the functional system of the above idea, here's what it would look like:


Each units have X supply.
They have a bar indicating the amount of supply they have, like HP.
Explorers and special units have usually more supply.
When moving in own territory, they do not use supply.
When moving in friendly territory, they use 0.5*X amount of supply.
When moving in neutral territory, they use X amount of supply.
When moving in ennemy territory, they use 2*X amount of supply.
When a unit reaches 0 supply, they start losing HP at the same rate as supply.
You have a supply treasury.
Each turn X supply is added to your supply treasury following the formula ABC.
Roads connected to your trade network, or that can reach your trade network, unencumbered by ennemy units and cities, can resupply units that are idle on that road for X amount. This amount is taken from your supply treasury.
Forts, if controlled by the player, and connected to a road that can ressuply, increases the range of the resupply to 3 tiles around the fort.
An indicator on each units indicates if a unit can be resupplied.
An indicator on Forts indicates if they could be used to resupply or not, whether you control the fort or not.


Would you consider that complex? I wouldn't. It's logical, and can be expressed without much complexity. There are not really any exceptions and it would be hard to find faults or gray areas.

Overall, it might include a lot of parts, and be complex to implement, but it's made of simple components and rules. It's pretty straightforward. Complexity of implementation is another topic entirely.

I'm not saying anything about the validity of the above system but it's not that complicated. When you start having to think about exceptions, special cases, interpretations, abuse, etc. you need to rethink the complexity.

Now, add resupply units to the above...


Some units can resupply others.
Any other units in a 1 tile range of the resupply unit can resupply. The amount is taken directly from the supply of the resupplying unit and not the supply treasury.
The resupplying unit acts as any other unit and, if they reach 0 supply, they start losing HP.
Resupplying units can resupply normaly like other units, but they CANNOT resupply each others (this could cause infinite supply).
If more than one resupply units are available to resupply a unit, the amount is taken from the resupply unit that currently has the most supply.
If a unit can resupply normaly without using a resupply unit, they ignore resupply units.
Etc.


You can see the complexity ramping up, it starts to have exceptions, and decisions need to be made. The idea of having resupply units is logical, but much more complex.

Would that complexity be good? Would depth be increased? I don't think so. You could easily use Workers as kind of resupply units and build forts as you advance. Allow forts to be build in ennemy territory.

If you add resupply units, they will have to constantly come back to a fort to resupply and would require a lot of micromanagement. Instead of managing your army's supply, you have to monitor your army AND your resupply units. If you give them too much supply, your whole supply system becomes useless. Heck, you could probably create an infinite train by cycling enough supply units, totally defeating your new system.

That's what you have to look for when talking about complexity: needless complexity.

Also, the more complexity a system is, the more abuse is possible. If it is functionless, it's even worst.

Well I hate to interrupt the complex discussion above... ok, not really, I'm going to anyway. :)

First, great article, even if you only read the opening statment and keep that in mind; you first, then the players. I know it sounds mean but after modding too many games to remember since Doom in the early 90's I've seen more mod projects and teams fail because they tried too hard to please people other than themselves. In the end they ended up more frustrated than anything else- why work on somethign that is more frustrating than rewarding?

One issue with mods that I haven't seen discussed here is difficulty. My most recent completed mod was a 4-year multi-player only project. For the first year the mod was only seen & played by the development team and a select number of testers. At the time of the initial public beta we all felt that it was challenging but still fun. Unfortunately, once we let the "unwashed masses" onto the server we suddenly had to deal with people who put substantial effort into exploiting any weakness in the mod and people who were serious "power gamers" who were able to easily overcome what we had felt was a good challenge. Obviously the exploits needed to be addressed since it was a multi-player game so that's not an issue. Difficulty was interesting though, we had severl members of the development team that felt insulted or threatened by the players who found something to be easy when it wasn't supposed to be. Despite the fact that this was really less than 10% of our player base it sparked off a number of changes that ended up pushing the overall difficulty of the game too high for casual players. This made development less fun for the team as a whole and the mod less fun for the majority of the players. It went from making a fun game to being a contest between the "good" players and the development team. Thankfully CIV has difficulty levels and isn't a multi-player only game but it's still possible to fall into the trap of trying to "beat" players because you feel insulted that they find your mod too easy.

Ok, back to the complex part :)

I personally thing Civ4's difficulty levels are kinda poorly done. The levels below Prince are way to easy and Deity is just impractically hard. Civ3 had some of the same problems and I tend to think it stems from the fact that difficulty is just modifiers on costs, coruption, ect.

Diffuculties can have modifiers on production and whatnot, but the main difference between them should be the amount of inteligence the AI uses to play the game. It shouldn't be how fast the ai builds a warrior, it should be whether the AI builds a warrior or waits just trys to squeze out another worker before guarding it self.

Diffuculties can have modifiers on production and whatnot, but the main difference between them should be the amount of inteligence the AI uses to play the game. It shouldn't be how fast the ai builds a warrior, it should be whether the AI builds a warrior or waits just trys to squeze out another worker before guarding it self.

The reason why this is never done is that it is a massive waste of time and resources (== money). Why develop a complex, intelligent AI only to restrict it to only the highest difficulty settings that most people will never even play on?

The reason why this is never done is that it is a massive waste of time and resources (== money). Why develop a complex, intelligent AI only to restrict it to only the highest difficulty settings that most people will never even play on?

There may be some middle ground here where the AI acts appropriatly (and that part could use a lot of tuning) and adds in some randomness. The amount of randomness could vary depending on the difficulty level so that lower difficulty opponents play more haphazardly and higher opponents are both more predictable and more efficient.

Why develop a complex, intelligent AI only to restrict it to only the highest difficulty settings that most people will never even play on?

There may be some middle ground here where the AI acts appropriatly (and that part could use a lot of tuning) and adds in some randomness. The amount of randomness could vary depending on the difficulty level so that lower difficulty opponents play more haphazardly and higher opponents are both more predictable and more efficient.

But from the fun-of-playing point of view, I think it's one of the attractions of a game to find out how the AI thinks. For that reason I'm strongly in favour of more intelligent AI over the option of changes in production advantage. One of the major upgrades in this area was that the AI in Civ3 no longer comes up with a single attacker every second turn, but that suddenly a small army is knocking on the door.
So intelligence of the AI also affects gameplay, and not necessarily is limited to the highest levels.

In addition, more intelligent AI can often be accomplished of a set of small rules added to the main rules followed. E.g. it may be wise to have an extra focus on culture to get a valuable resource within your territory.
For the same reason, more than normal defenders in an outpost of your lands that provides you with the special resource, may be a very good choice. Such intellgence is not too hard to implement.

Let's use complexity in the most value-neutral sense -- complexity is neither good nor bad. Some things are just more complex, and some things are just less complex. More stuff --> more complexity.

When do you have too much complexity? When do you have too little? It depends. There are tradeoffs.

If you make something too complex, you risk making it difficult to learn. And if it's hard to learn, you shrink your audience. Drastically. / But if you make something too simple, then the player feels limited. They run out of things to do. They get bored. They move on. Simplicity can drastically lower the 'replayability' of a game.

If you make something too complex, you can make it extremely hard to balance. That's the toughest part about creating a strategy game. And if something isn't balanced, you end up in Civ 3 territory where people quickly identify 'the best strategy' and follow that every time. This ultimately removes choice. / But obviously, if something is too simple, then you also remove choice. Imagine Civilization 4 with 12 technologies -- much fewer strategic choices. A much shorter game. Easier to get tired of.

Complexity has the added dimension of AI in Civilization 4. If you add all kinds of cool stuff, it's hard enough to learn for the player. Imagine the AI. Regardless of how much people in this community love their computers, their compuers are not HAL9000 (and maybe that's a good thing). They're dumb. Sometimes it's impossible to get them to do even the most trivial of tasks -- managing Zone of Control with any kind of efficiency is one of those things.

-----

I maintain, one of the most insightful comments I ever heard from Sid, or perhaps Soren, or another key developer was something to this effect:

The Civilization series is a bunch of simple systems that add up to a complex and deep game.

Think about it.

- Citizens work tiles, which generate food, commerce, and production.
- At a certain threshold, food grows your population.
- At a certain threshold, production completes a building or unit.
- Commerce can be converted to research, which, at a certain threshold, gets you a new technology.

These are simple mechanisms that all add up. And there's a certain unity. Civilization is about tiles and icons, and it's about "filling boxes up" until they hit a threshold. This makes the game easier to learn.

This suggests, to me, that the best way to do 'complexity' isn't to think of 'what would be the most detailed, super realistic economic model' but to think of several smaller mechanisms that add up to create the broad sense of economic realism.

For that reason I'm strongly in favour of more intelligent AI over the option of changes in production advantage.

Everyone wants a more intelligent AI---that isn't the question. The question is whether the AI should be crippled (so it plays worse than its best) at low difficulty levels. Since the AI isn't so good even at its best, it seems to me a bad idea to make it play worse than its best.

Such intellgence is not too hard to implement.

It always seems that the people who say it's easy to make better AIs have never tried.

It always seems that the people who say it's easy to make better AIs have never tried.Yes.

However, it would seem to me discussion about AIs isn't really in the right place here.

We have a lot of people saying that one of your goals should be to keep your design as simple as possible. Is there anyone who disagrees with this? Does anyone think that the game is to simple and adding complexity makes it better?

Yes, here's another person favouring complexity!

First, regarding complexity: A strong case has been made (for example, A Theory of Fun for Game Design) that games are essentially learning activities. One of the most difficult things I've seen as a player of games is designing the right level of complexity scaling. Complexity should keep ramping up as the player masters an old element, and ideally old elements recombine to create new elements so that new complexity isn't just introduced for the sake of complexity, but rather as continued variations on a theme that you've mastered, but has just mutated to become more challenging.

The way Padmewan describes it, complexity does not immediately appeal to me. Rather, I'm in favour of adding new concepts as the development of your society progresses.
Agreeing that games are essentially learning activities, it is a good approach to let the game start sober, so that you have only a limited number of concepts to learn. As the game progresses, more and new concepts should be introduced. Complexity is then especially achieved by finding out how the new concepts work together in the conceptual system as it has so far developed.
FfH II does a great job by introducing magic units only after a certain time. Especially the powerful level III upgrades cause a shift in the role that the various unit classes have. Archmages can be the magic-equivalent of artillery units in vanilla because of their ability to cast meteors. That the meteors inherit the battle upgrades from the caster is another interesting fine print.

The general lack of new ideas, but the mere increases of production, growth and development speeds, usually lead me to abort a game after a certain period of time. I hardly ever research all technos or build all units available. Simply because it does not contribute to any further 'progress'.

I like FfH II very much, and for that reason, I have in mind to implement the ideas I have for a more challenging economy. (I am currently stuck in how to implement that, though.)
The fundamental change is that resources will supply you with a certain amount of resource-units. This I have read in many other places in the forum, but I was originally inspired by Stronghold 2's stockpile.
As you go along, natural resources should be expandable, by building an improvement on the tile. The tile does NOT have to be within a city. Improvements should be consecutive, and for agricultural resources it should be possible to make them spread out to neighbouring tiles, so that more resource units can be produced.
E.g. A mine built on a hill with the iron resource could produce 2 iron per turn. Then, after the discovery of deep-mining, more shafts could be built so that up to 10 units will be supplied (depending on the amount of work done on the mine). Finally, a blast-furnace could be built, that allows a maximum supply of 25 units per turn.
Then, with the development of international trade, commodity markets should come into play, and a global economy makes its entrance into the game. This adds a new feature to the game, and makes it more complex, but at a good time! Yes, the later game will be more interesting then. Imagine how the Dutch (my own country) became a ruling power in many parts of the world due to the development of seafaring. The possibility of getting spices and china from other parts of the world made a minute country to an important power, and triggered its golden age! It would be a great idea at all for civs that have fallen behind, to have a possible catch-up from their developments in a conceptually new field.
The commodity markets open up the possibility of an international economy of supply and demand, and the market play begins!
(For the warmongers among us, it might be nice to have the economy set to vanilla instead of advanced during game setup.)

Another increase in complexity that I believe would be a great contribution to the later game is the ability to forge weaponry, as it can be done in Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic. This indeed does bring a change, because it changes the way you may engage in combat. For if you loose a hero's magic sword (that took you 1000 hammers to produce) to your enemy, he may use it against you. So far no such possibility is included in the game. (In Civ3, the army that could be produced by the military academy was a good concept, but usually not needed as you had 3 armies running around aready.)

So yes, I do believe complexity in the sense of more conceptually different contributions to the game.

Here's another point in reaction to the many ideas mentioned in this design forum. It has been asserted that more units that do the same usually do not make the game any better. I agree with that from experience. In particular, in FfH II the many upgrades with the various kinds of mana are mainly confusing. I feel that half the number of types would do. (This also reduces the need to look up the possibilities that the various promotions give -- tooltips would be handy.)
Now, one thing is just great with the promotions, viz. that you can build a unit to inspire your city or give hope to it, so that science or culture are increased. This really is an addition.

Finally, I must say thanks for the many hours of great fun I have derived from the FfH II mod. :goodjob:

It always seems that the people who say it's easy to make better AIs have never tried.

Got a vacancy? ;)

Got a vacancy? ;)

The Civ4 SDK lets you modify the AI, if you have the real desire to do so.

AI is pretty darn relevent to these discussions, especially when complexity comes up. A lot of the best features and best games fall short because they cannot be used by the AI. This is clearly an example of "bad complexity".

AI is pretty darn relevent to these discussions, especially when complexity comes up. A lot of the best features and best games fall short because they cannot be used by the AI. This is clearly an example of "bad complexity".

Yes, although that was not what the discussion started about. The initial discussion was about whether complexity would be a desirable feature at all, regardless of the question whether it would be possible to implement it or not.

I must admit, however, that when I would succeed to implement my economic model, the major challenge would lie in making the AI take advantage of it. My guess is that with the AI, you should follow the same rules that CIV IV has followed in game design: add a few simple concepts that interact (see the earlier discussion in this thread). If you choose otherwise, I guess you will be making complex what is complicated already. And I fear you'll never get it working.

That's exactly my point, Griffin71. When you design a mod, complexity sounds all well and dandy, but can lead to all kinds of unintended pitfalls and side-effects.

Complexity isn't really a "yes" or "no" issue is the main point. There are advantages and disadvantages as you add more and more. I happen to think there's at least a few sweet spots, though, where you can find a good tradeoff.

Agreeing that games are essentially learning activities, it is a good approach to let the game start sober, so that you have only a limited number of concepts to learn. As the game progresses, more and new concepts should be introduced. Complexity is then especially achieved by finding out how the new concepts work together in the conceptual system as it has so far developed.
Let me reword my original post to be more in line with the actual source I'm riffing from:

One reward for many players is recognizing a PATTERN and then delighting in the expansion and mutation of that pattern. This is not exactly the same as complexity, and in fact, I think the problem is often mistaking an elegant pattern for complexity. Complexity that captures a RECOGNIZABLE pattern is something fun to learn (and thus, ramping is important); complexity for its own sake is useless.

Right now I am struggling with a "Fluff" element added to our game: exactly that spawned enemy named as Fluff (guilty as charged!). Now, this spawned enemy actually serves a purpose: to create an adversary that forces harder decisions on the player (defense becomes much more important much earlier on) and really it's just a mutation on the original Barbarian concept. However, on its own the element is just a hack, not a fun new element.

What can we do to make that element meaningful and fun?

I don't have a full answer yet, but I think it can be. For example, it could be that this enemy unit only spawns on a certain kind of feature, so removing that feature would get rid of that unit. Thus you learn through observation (Oh, enemy X only spawns on feature Y) and figure out both an immediate solution (kill X) and a long-term solution (destroy feature Y). However, this remains fluff built on top of fluff.

If, however, the very existence of feature Y turns out to be a core game mechanic (feature Y is super-high in yields, feature Y is itself your main enemy, some combination of the two), then what used to Fluff could, arguably, be a real game mechanic.

Anyway, enough about my mod. I think all I want to convey here is the idea that it's not complexity but rather patterns that potentially become complex that is one element of fun in games.

My most recent completed mod was a 4-year multi-player only project. For the first year the mod was only seen & played by the development team and a select number of testers. At the time of the initial public beta we all felt that it was challenging but still fun. Unfortunately, once we let the "unwashed masses" onto the server we suddenly had to deal with people who put substantial effort into exploiting any weakness in the mod and people who were serious "power gamers" who were able to easily overcome what we had felt was a good challenge....

I'm just returning from a game developer's conference (well, sort of (http://www.gamesforchange.org/conference/2006/index.asp)), and one idea echoed by the (few) true developers in the conference was RAPID PROTOTYPING: create a small chunk, release, respond, repeat.

This is now a concept repeated throughout product development theory. As a matter of good project management, I think that the skill of being able to "chunk down" a project into discrete pieces that people can understand and respond to is critical.

One concrete idea people had for chunking included turning a long saga into episodes and releasing them individually. Besides being a new and intriguing business model (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060418/kraft_01.shtml) for some game companies, this also allows for instant feedback and making sure "the customer is always right."

Not that we are yet practicing what we preach!

That's pretty much the oldest rule of good software design. ITERATE!

Too many people design an entire mod as they'd like it to work on paper... then implement it... then live with it. They create a blueprint, and that becomes the instruction that goes down the hierarchy of the development team.

In actuality, you need to do a snap design, a snap implementation, and then evaluate it. Then you need to redesign it, and repeat. You work on that individual piece, get it perfect, then tack on another piece... and build from the ground up.

The challenge, of course, is that sometimes it's hard to evaluate how the whole thing will work based on a single piece... and that piece isn't even implemented fully! So you do need a good combination of "Top Down" and "Bottom Up" design.

Too much top down design, and you become inflexible. You end up so committed to what you did on paper that everything is now tangled up together, and you have to live with however it turned out.

But too much bottom up design and you can end up with very bizarre and unintended results. A feature that was meant to make a big impact turns out to be nothing more than fluff, because you never bothered to think about how it would fit into the overall final vision.

With the help of a friend, I found this really valuable quote from the developers of Civ 4 (http://www.apple.com/games/articles/2006/07/civ4/):

“One of the lessons we constantly learn while developing Civilization games is that we want to put fun in the hands of the player by providing simple systems that interact to generate complex results.”

I'm almost positive that at one point they went into more detail in another interview, but the main idea stays the same. Rather than trying to design a complex system, you design several simple systems, and let the complexity emerge from those.

I'm just returning from a game developer's conference (well, sort of (http://www.gamesforchange.org/conference/2006/index.asp)), and one idea echoed by the (few) true developers in the conference was RAPID PROTOTYPING: create a small chunk, release, respond, repeat.

This is now a concept repeated throughout product development theory. As a matter of good project management, I think that the skill of being able to "chunk down" a project into discrete pieces that people can understand and respond to is critical.

One concrete idea people had for chunking included turning a long saga into episodes and releasing them individually. Besides being a new and intriguing business model (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060418/kraft_01.shtml) for some game companies, this also allows for instant feedback and making sure "the customer is always right."

Not that we are yet practicing what we preach!

It seems to me that episodes are more of a marketing/finacial strategy then a game development one. Though I realize it does break the scope of "full game" into smaller pieces they are still well beyond the workable chunks we are discussing here.

I try not to go a month without a public release just because if it gets to be longer than that to much changes and you start to get to dug in on fucntional changes to take them out if the playtest feedback is negative. Also until you get real player feedback ont he things you have added they exist in an untested limbo that may or may not work.

The speed are which you can develop a concept, get it working, to the public to test, then tuned and working in its final state (iterate as dh_epic said) will determine the productivity of your project as a whole.

It may seem like the profession gaming companies sit and work forever on their patches between releases but most of the time they are releasing and changing their patch to internal groups through the process described above. The 61 number in the civ patch wasnt just pulled out of a jar, I think there were 61 different itterations of the patch between that and the origional Civ4 release. Knowing that patch 61 was released 6 months after Civ4 thats 10 versions per month, a lot of iterations.

Wow, 10 iterations a month. That's at least 2 new versions of Civ per week. Crazy to consider.

How will Warlords impact the making of this thread? any at all or just a few minor tweaks?

How will Warlords impact the making of this thread? any at all or just a few minor tweaks?

Nothing at all. This thread isn't about the tech requirements of modmaking but the non-technical design requirements. Concepts that are true if we are talking about games of any sort.

1.1 The Danger of More:

“Perfection is not achieved when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” -- Antoine de St. Exupery

Every new object has a cost, not just in what it takes to create, test and manage, but the player has to keep track of it as well. In general we should only add items because they offer a significant improvement to some aspect of the game, and not just to have more units, more resources, etc.

It sounds good to be able to offer a long list of new objects. That was much of the appeal of the very popular Civ3 Double your Pleasure (DyP) mod. But the success of DyP wasn’t because of all the new objects, but because each one had a distinct functional purpose. Adding buildings is easy, making them truly worthwhile is the hard part.

Is it needed? Would it be missed if it was taken out? Is its function unique? If the answer to these is no, it should be considered for removal.

Q: There always seems to be one more building or unit that would be perfect to have in the game, how do you decide what to include and what to keep out?

I thinks this is what really killed my mod. In the adding of everything (culture, inquisitors, buildings, meaningful resource bonuses...) I lost sight of the goal of my mod. A large mod left abandoned because I didn't know where to go next.

I think another big thing that killed my mod was momentum. I had a lot of momentum and I worked hard on it. I had determined to make mods before, but every time (including Civ4) I hit a brick wall when I hit the limitations of the game. In Dungeon Siege 1, I wanted to make a nice, meaninful skill tree with synergies abound and all. Then I found out when they meant "moddable" they meant, you can add new dungeons to romp in. I wanted to do a similar thing with Morrowind, and later Oblivion, but I ran into the same limitations on a set-in-stone RPG system. I even had some ideas for Diablo 2, but the lack of realm-play for mods kept me from ever trying.

Civ4 was the first game that let me actually do stuff totally unintended by the game creators. It gave creators enough power to add in a random game of tetris, if they so desired. It gave me the power to play with culture, add buildings, edit how the resouces work, and even add new mechanics. I was enthralled. So my first mod was ultimately a sandbox where I played with everything and tested the limits of what I could do. I did find some of the limitations, and that's half of what stopped me, but it was also a lack of clear direction that prevented me from trying to work around those limitations.

I want to get back into the modding scene, but I have a few constraints. Most notably is time, but also there's the expansion and the SDK. Before I had the API reference that was an awesome tool in helping me mod Civ4, but I found it to be incomplete with a few functions missing. Now I need to find a similar reference tool and something to help navigate the SDK as well. I have plans for another mod. Perhaps they are too grand, but as long as I know what I want to do at the beginning before I get bogged down with details and know how to get there I should be fine. :)

Thats a blast from the past, heya Mylon! Your progress on your mod may have stopped but so much of what you did has been used and reused by the community (including me, I really studied everything you did in Mylonmod closely when I started FfH).

I think you will find that there is more and better information available than back when you were pioneering modding when Civ4 first released. Documentation still isnt perfect by a long shot, but better.

Heh, it's nice to know people haven't forgotten about me. :) It's also nice to know that I've left a lasting legacy. I've seen an improved inquisitor mod (one the AI knows how to use), and even a mod that adds discrete resouces and resource converting buildings, which I anticipate would be a great tool for one economic mod idea I have.

I still have to solidify the basic ideas for my next mod before I can start work so I don't get lost again. :) I think the time for breaking ground and playing has past, so there's time now to really get into game design.

Hey should there be a chapter or two about programming faults? I don´t mean a programming guide but telling how to get over bad programming problems that you cannot solve yourself or no-one else knows what to do about it. How to act on that situation and stuff.

Hey should there be a chapter or two about programming faults? I don´t mean a programming guide but telling how to get over bad programming problems that you cannot solve yourself or no-one else knows what to do about it. How to act on that situation and stuff.

The scope of this article was just about the non-technical aspects of designing a mod. So that probably wouldn't fit here. I did write another article on isolate crashes that you may want to check out here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=175005

Is there a set of basic instructions for newbs anywhere that explains how to put together a simple scenario?????

CIV4 has this World Builder function but it comes with no instructions whatsoever. What gives?

Okay folks. I'm getting more and more of an understanding of xml files the more I read. But the problem I'm having is actually making the changes!. For example. All I want to do, right now is give ALL of the leader traits to a single leader (say, Washington, since I like playing as America). But when I go into the xml file for leaderheads, I click my mouse where I'm supposed to (I guess) and nothing happens. It highlights in blue indicating that that text has been selected, but I'm unable to type anything. What am I doing wrong? I've downloaded the new patches, sdk, the pitboss, a few mods, etc. But how do I actually make things change?

Forgive me for sounding like an idiot. I've had this game since it was released November 2005 and have never been able to mod. I miss the simple game editor from civ3 and was disappointed to find what looked like a waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too complex way of creating a mod and making what I remember from civ3 has "simply changes".

I would also like to change the movement cost on terrain. I just don't feel it should take 40 years (in the early years of a normal game) to go from one square to another even without a road. I mean, really. How realistic is that? (smile).

One day I will have access to a book named "Civ4 Modding for Dummies"

There is no editor available for Civ4. XML files are just text files, you can edit them with notepad. But you won't be able to just click on things to make changes.

It is more powerful than anything you could do with Civ3, but also more complex. Editors make things easy, but they also limit you (having both an editor and the ability to edit things directly would be the ideal solution but I suspect due to limited resources Firaxis had to pick one way or the other).

There is no editor available for Civ4. XML files are just text files, you can edit them with notepad. But you won't be able to just click on things to make changes.

It is more powerful than anything you could do with Civ3, but also more complex. Editors make things easy, but they also limit you (having both an editor and the ability to edit things directly would be the ideal solution but I suspect due to limited resources Firaxis had to pick one way or the other).

Thanks for the info. I realize that this new way allows for more flexibility in making changes, I just didn't know HOW to make the changes. Since I posted the message I've learned about the notepad and wordpad and even found an "xml editor" on my computer (who knew..lol).

I succeeded in making my changes on wordpad (too shy to "fool" with that xml editor). Now I've run into the problem of loading my simple changes into an actual game to test them. My next step is to correct my "directory structure" as one guy called it. So wish me luck and keep the advice coming. I'm a little shy about going deep into the "tutorials" forums because things just seem so advanced but that's probably where I will find all the information I need. I just need know how to find it amongst those thousands of posts.

Anyway, thanks again.

Okay now I've created the correct "directory path" and now I'm having issues with loading the mod. Nothing is zipped. I went to "advanced" on the main menu and the "load a mod" and got a message "game must restart to load this mod". I clicked okay...the game came back up...I went again to "advanced" to load a mod and got the same message. What's wrong?

it's a pity that this thread seems to have dried out almost completely.
I have to admit though, that I had lost interest into Civ4 for months and therefore did not pay much attention to it anymore, either.

Yet, a very good mod-compilation (unfortunately [?] from the German forum, so it does not get the attention it would have deserved) brought me back to Civ4 and even made me buy Warlords, which I wouldn't have done without that compilation.

In this compilation, we find many things which have been discussed in this thread already:
Added complexity, leading to more choices, leading to a much more interesting game.

The learning curve, as somebody has called it in one of the previous posts, for sure has become higher, maybe even more steep, but since it is a mod, players don't have to start at ground level. This makes it manageable.

Now, back to the original topic: What makes a mod a "playable" mod? ( I would like not to use the term "good" mod, as this is so much based on one's personal likings).
Speaking about a "modification", this obviously means to stay with the basic game rules, but adding things which - for whatever reason ever - have not been implemented into the core game.
These additions should fit into the path of the core game, not being contradictional to the way in which you were playing said core game.

Personally, as far as Civ4 is concerned, I think that a playable mod always should make the game "feel" more realistic, as this seems to be one of the weakest parts of the game. (Once again, just my personal opinion).
Just some points:

growth
economics
civics
combat
movements

1) Growth:
Civ4 still follows the approach which was used in Civ1 already: have good fields, grow quick, enhance your production, care about money and happiness.
Very easy to understand, but not so much fun to play for long time.
2) Economics:
Maybe the weakest part of the whole series. In principle, economics is a concept which still is not implemented. What do you do? You occasionally build a mine, then a forge and later a construction plant. Whatever you do, it always relates directly to the predefined output of the tiles in your cities' areas.
Any improvement of this concept not requiring you to run a production planning ERP system in the background would already qualify for a playable mod.
3) Civics:
Once again, a good concept on the very general level. Yet, a almost meaningless implementation, as people already have found out the three or four combinations which are meaningful for a given era. Not to mention that in this area once again the player is confronted with "unrealistic" features.
4) Combat:
Well, I don't think I have to repeat all the countless threads about this again. Just 2 or 3 remarks: siege weapons, naval and air combat. A complete desaster, and therefore one of the top candidates to be adressed by modifications.
Unfortunately, as the engine does not allow to do much about it below the level of SDK modification, only small tweaks seem to be possible. But those would - and are - highly appreciated by the community.
5) Movements:
Once again, an area where good ideas would be highly welcomed by the community. You can trade over oceans, but cannot send settlers/troops? 'nuff said.

So, what makes a mod a playable mod?

Add fun to the game.

Give it a more "realistical" approach. That does not mean that - as many people suggest - you have to have replenishments based on shell sizes for your troops. It does mean that your modification should follow the rules people know from their real life - or the life which is simulated by the modification. Once again, as far as the vanilla game is concerned, siege weapons would come to mind immediately (but, as I have said above, due to the conception of the vanilla game you would have to make use of the SDK).

Additions and comments highly appreciated.

Im all for fun. I suspect that the amount of realism from a mod will be a personal preference. Is it realistic that a group of settlers would be killed by a Lion? Isn't it more realistic that this group of settlers would be killed off by Maleria? But watching your people killed by mosquito's isn't nearly as much fun as seeing them attacked by lions, despite the realism (personally I consider animal attacks to be a generalization for all natural threats).

So I agree with you, I just would prioritize realism to highly. Fun trumps everything. In fact the only true advanatge of realism in games is that it makes the game intuitive. We don't need to explain why a tank has a higher strength than a spearman, our players can tell just by looking at the unit picture that their spearman is in trouble. As such we have made the game easier to play by compling with realism. In the worse case where we create non-intuitive systems players will be frustrated with mixed messages and annoyed that they have to remember facts about the game that are contrary to what they would expect.


Since Im posting here is a brief project stage outline I posted elsewhere:


1. Brainstorming- Where the team starts throwing out ideas for things we would like to see in the game. Technical limitations are generally ignored and even ideas that are out of scope are accepted (though usually moved into other phases later on).

At the end of brainstorming we have a high level list of features we want to implement, this is the design document.

2. Creation- This is where we start adding features as quickly as possible. Some play testing is done by the team here but the goal of that testing is to encourage new ideas, not really to balance or to offer feedback on the ideas. Most of the time the features implemented during this stage aren't fun and don't work well, but they are left in.

When the build and features begins to get fun and we find ourselves spending more and more time playing and less time designing we know we are ready for the next phase. The requirement is a beta build of the game.

3. Play testing- This is where we need you. A beta build is released to the community for people to start playing. The focus at this stage is for feedback on the new features (are they fun?) and isolating and resolving bugs. We generally aren't too concerned with cosmetic issues or balance. It doesn't do us any good to fine tune if we don't know what's staying and what's going.

At the end of this stage we should have a build that is working without errors and concensus on what features are good and need more focus, which are running fine as they are, and what isn't fun and needs to be changed or removed.

4. Iteration- This is where we get into 6-8 week versioning. The developer tweaks and makes changes, then gets it out for people to play. This is the fun stage, new ideas bounce around, new stuff gets in quickly, every version is better than the last. This is also where we focus on balance and fine tuning.

When we believe we have implemented all the features speced in the Design Document in the best way possible we are ready to move onto the polish stage.

5. Polish- We are always writing new entries and adding art. But this is where it becomes our primary focus. A list of needed assets is made and the team gets busy trying to chew through as much as we can. The community may also be asked to contribute.

When this phase is done we have a finished product, we close the phase and go on to the next one.


Although there is always going to be some overlap as you go through these stages and different teams may have other methods that work for them I think it is a helpful high level process. It helps avoid some of the common problems encountered in creating a mod, such as:

1. Endless brainstorming- At some point you have to stop giving ideas and start focusing on implementation, otherwise you will never move forward.

2. Waiting for perfection- You have to realize that your first public release will have bugs, thats okay. You won't be completly happy with your mod until the end, but you still have to go through all of the stages between. Keep releasing new versions, they don't have to be perfect, they just have to be forward progress.

3. Wasted work- The big thing this procress tries to protect against is wasted work. I hate to see a lot of effort put into creating some feature/art/etc and then have it cut later when it isnt working out. Getting early basic versions in and released allows the developer to get feedback and make those decisions without commiting large amounts of time. The even more dangerous aspect of this is keeping features that arent fun in your mod just because you spent so much time working on them.

Im all for fun. I suspect that the amount of realism from a mod will be a personal preference. Is it realistic that a group of settlers would be killed by a Lion? Isn't it more realistic that this group of settlers would be killed off by Maleria? But watching your people killed by mosquito's isn't nearly as much fun as seeing them attacked by lions, despite the realism (personally I consider animal attacks to be a generalization for all natural threats).[...]
I am very glad that you have pointed out the things above.
Of course, it is not realistical to have a group of settlers, capable of founding a complete new city, being killed by lions. And I agree, this is just the symbolization of the early dangers lurking in the woods and fields.
Therefore, it is acceptable to have this limited realistical approach for the benefit of an easy and quick to understand gameplay.

So I agree with you, I just would prioritize realism to highly. Fun trumps everything. In fact the only true advanatge of realism in games is that it makes the game intuitive. We don't need to explain why a tank has a higher strength than a spearman, our players can tell just by looking at the unit picture that their spearman is in trouble. As such we have made the game easier to play by compling with realism. In the worse case where we create non-intuitive systems players will be frustrated with mixed messages and annoyed that they have to remember facts about the game that are contrary to what they would expect.
Here I think, we have to be very careful about making use of the term "realism".

Is it realistical to have units living for millenia? No, obviously not.
Would it be fun to have to replace them every turn? No, obviously not.

So, in this area "realism" spoils the fun immediately. Therefore, you have to be "unrealistic" for the sake of the playability.

But what about the siege weapons?
Is it realistical to have catapults attacking units in the field with trumpets and waving flags, in fact being some kind of ancient field artillery? No, obviously not.
In fact, it is completely contradictional to everything somebody would expect. A catapult is a machine standing somewhere and throwing stones at almost immobile targets. That is, what the player knows from "real life experience" (in this case, from history) and that is, how he would think it should work.
Therefore, the complete design of the siege weapons manifests a misconception in the core game.
And therefore, this would be a candidate for modification. Unfortunately, as I have pointed out in the previous post, the engine does not allow for many changes to the better, unless you are willing and capable of making use of the SDK.

One other thing is about the movement of naval units. For millenia, sailing was the fastest way of moving from A to B. That is the very reason why the whole mediterranean area was full of early powers, starting with Egypt, Greece, Persia, Carthage, Phoenicia and so on.
Once again, in the game this historical experience is not portrayed. Your galley is not quicker then your warrior, if both move at the same coast. Therefore, many people immediately lose the interest in building a navy, as there is almost no visible benefit to do so.
And even the developers lost this interest, as the weak implementation of the whole naval thing proves.
In this area, at least slight improvements seem to be possible by making use of rather easy XML modifications. New features may be added by some Python coding as well, still a comparably easy task.
So, as far as I see it, this is another candidate for modding.

These shall be only two of the almost countless examples in which areas one could improve - or alter - the game.

What I want to say by this: to create a playable modification, have a look at the weaker parts of your starting base, the core game.
Think about why these weaker parts are weak. Is it just because of some misbalanced values? Is it because of a flawed concept? Is it because of a unit which has been forgotten to be put into the game?
And what can you do to improve this, as far as your personal likings are concerned?

After you have identified these issues, start with the easy improvements to keep the momentum. For most modders, this will be the tweaking of XML files and there is nothing to be said against it.
By this, you can issue a first version quickly and see, how people respond to it.
The more difficult tasks, the creation of new game behaviours by Python or SKD modifications could be (and should be, as far as I see it) left for later stages of your "project" (because, a modification in fact is nothing less than a project).

But, and I think, this is important as well, try to anticipate what might happen or what you are willing to do in the future as well. That means, if an "easy" XML tweaking would result in something which will be contradictional what you want to do in the future, you should avoid to do so. At least, as your modification "A" is concerned.
Players who like "A" in the early stages might get confused and frustrated, if "A" later on becomes completely different.
Therefore, if your increased skills, experience, maybe the forming of a development team would lead to changed behaviour later on, it might be a wise idea to create a second, third, .... ninth modification basesd on what you have learned in the past.
That way, you avoid to make people become familiar with your early settings and then, just switch to different reactions and behaviours of the game.

In general, I think we are sharing similar ideas in many cases. Thinking about what you really want to do and what you want to achieve is a crucial part. Preparing the individual steps to achieve your goals might be even more important.
And finally, as long as you are not intending to keep your modification just for your own, give the community a chance to offer their feedback.

Since Im posting here is a brief project stage outline I posted elsewhere:

You're forgetting the phase where you make the AI play good with the mod. :mischief: This should be done between 4 and 5 in your stage outline I guess.

Another design pitfall that I see frequently is having a goal that is to ambicious. To many hard working modders with great ideas burn out because they are biting of to much. It is either beyond their technical skill (at this time) or it would just take more tiem than they are able to give it. As a result their idea dies and their work is lost.

A designer should look for goals that stretch him, but are stilll reachable. Set a finite scope on what you are doing that you have an idea of how to accomplish and do that. TheLopez was the master of this, and he would get a very specific idea, implement it well, then go off to the next project. Even if your projects are all within the same mod this is the kind of focus you should be looking for.

I know the community is here to answer questions and help if your technical skills aren't up to task (I know mine weren't when I started). But the best use of the community is in getting past the small hurdles that will get in the way, not in accomplishing the mod for you.

I honestly think that those of us that started modding before the SDK was released had it easuer. We were forced to limit ourselves only to things that could be accomplished in XML and python. Starting to mod now there are no limitations, you could turn Civ4 into a game of pac-man with the SDK. And because of that I worry that a lot of modders are becoming to ambicious, getting frustrated with how difficult their idea is to implement, and giving up modding.

Start small, create realistic goals, accomplish those and then set new ones.

ok..and how do u make a mod KAEL??? i mean where is the program u need to make ur units in 3d??? and put it on civ4? ?

ok..and how do u make a mod KAEL??? i mean where is the program u need to make ur units in 3d??? and put it on civ4? ?

There are lots of good technical articles in this forum, this article just covers the non-technical aspects. For how to create and add units I would recommend checking out any of the articles White Rabbit wrote.

Greetings

Could a generous soul help me out? I need to modify religions in a mod I am working on. What are the general steps I need to take to make sure this works? (I want Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, and a few other native religions).

Many thanks! :)

Wow, thank you so much Kael!
I have been designing a strategy board game for a couple of years and I am currently stuck in some issues. Your thread really helped me, as I read it new ideas came into my head in no time!
Now the only problem I have is that I cannot stop playing Fall from Heaven and continue my work on the board game. haha

I just wanted to say "Thank you, Kael!" This thread has taken most of the fears and phobia out of modding for me.

Also, I would like to say to Commander Bello, that I agree. Realism is a needed commodity.

Thank you all for the great insight

Thats a really good insight, I couldn't put my finger on what I didnt like about some (usually very creative) ideas until you said that. I agree 100%.

We have a lot of people saying that one of your goals should be to keep your design as simple as possible. Is there anyone who disagrees with this? Does anyone think that the game is to simple and adding complexity makes it better?
-emergent complexity(creates the strategy from an amalgam of factors). A strategy game should be tough enough so that you cannot beat the entire metagame, in just one sitting...
In strategy games such as civ, this is the bread of strategy. mechanisms such as promotions-are the butter.

I'd like to raise a few discussion points on the topic of realism. I'm here to tell you that realism is not inherently good. But it's not bad either. There's a lot of personal preference, and a lot of situational stuff. A game designer first and foremost looks at the game play. Realism should be seen as a means to make a more fun game, rather than an end to pursue in of itself.

Here are three major dangers associated with realism, in my mind. (There may be more.)

What's Realistic?

Kind of like 'objectivity', the word is misused a lot, sometimes even with bias. There's an overabundance of people who look at the realism of longbow-vs-gunship, but not very many who note the failure of every world-conqueror in real life. Some realism issues are more glaring than others, and the issues people choose to look at reflect their play style.

The civics are probably the best example of this. It's hard to tackle the realism of the civics without getting into social or political debates. What are the real benefits of communism? What is the real benefit of religious freedom?

Again, there are some realism issues that are more innocent and easy to agree upon (e.g.: how livestock technically should be tied to how much you breed them rather than a fixed tile location). But make no mistake: a game that lets you conquer the world reflects an ideological and biased viewpoint, even unintentionally. Some people will disagree and say domination is totally realistic, that it just hasn't happened yet. Who's right? It doesn't matter, IMO. It depends on how fun you think conquering the world is. It comes back to game play.

Is Realism Good?

Some realism issues are obvious and unanimous, but even if they are, it doesn't necessarily justify putting them in the game.

The worst game I could imagine is "Guns, Germs, and Steel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns_germs_and_steel)" by Jared Diamond. Not because it's not a smart book. In fact I agree with a lot of it and think it's brilliant. But the premise of the book is Environmental Determinism. Basically, your climate determines your success. Imagine implementing a game like this:

The Europeans get an early game advantage from lots of different domesticated animal resources, allowing them to become highly resistant to disease. This guarantees that when they cross the ocean, their diseases destroy the other civilizations and not the other way around.

The Mesoamericans get a disadvantage because their continent is north-south oriented. It is harder to import crops from far off lands on a north-south axis because of huge climate changes. Meanwhile, all the other civilizations oriented on an east-west continuum share a lot of great resources and become dominant.

At a certain point, you have to be 'biased' towards choice. That is, even if it's untrue, it is better for game play to pretend that all civilizations have CHOSEN to succeed or fail. This is much better than a game that says civilizations are doomed or destined to fail because of geography.

Again, that's not to say you should throw realism out the window. But you should focus on areas of realism that improve game choices, rather than taking them away. Realism is a means to an end, not an end in itself. It's neither inherently good nor bad.

How Far Do You Go?

The realism question, to me, comes down to what you're willing to tackle. I think there are some places a game designer can go that are a total swamp. You will never get out.

The best example I can think of is the population model. Currently, food accumulates, resulting in growth. Growth is limited by health and happiness.

In reality, starvation and disease are grouped together with war as "miseries". Miseries limit population growth. Otherwise, population grows at a geometric rate. However, economic prosperity -- particularly associated with successful women -- tends to naturally reduce the impulse for growth. It's why the first world generally keeps the same population, while third world countries grow drastically.

Imagine implementing that for a second. First of all, food would no longer work the same way as hammers or gold. It would have to be integrated into the health system somehow.

If that doesn't make your head explode, look at what it means that growth is geometric: Jericho had a population of 20 thousand persons, while Mexico City has a population of 20 million. Civilization 4 might represent this as the difference between a size 2 city and a size 20. But then why is it that it takes 20,000 people to work 2 tiles, and 20 million to work 20? Shouldn't Mexico City be able to work 1000 times more tiles?

Finally, economics would need to affect population. What control do you give the player over their population? How do they limit it? When should they limit it? How do you model wealth and social class in the game, so that middle class families generally have smaller families than poor ones? How do you reflect that overpopulation can sometimes be a scourge and a menace?

I'm not saying that to talk you out of trying. I'm saying that to explain why nobody has tried to tackle this yet. Most mods have focused on surface realism issues because anything deeper is a swamp.

Conclusion

Some people are still willing to pursue realism in all the areas I pointed out, despite the warnings. Like I said, there IS a matter of personal preference.

But as a game designer, you should try to put game play first. The best example I could come up with for modders is the siege/artillery system for Civ 4. The system puts way too much power in artillery, making catapults the no-brainer choice. This is bad for game play, first and foremost. It's one of few big failures in Civilization 4.

It just so happens that collateral damage is also bad from a realism standpoint. This strikes me as a perfect opportunity for people who care about realism. But you have to acknowledge the pitfalls of the Civ 3 "damage without risk" system. If you don't, you have to ask around and do the research. That's your job as a designer.

To put it succinctly: identify game play problems that might be fixed with realism. Don't identify parts of the game that work well that should be strangled with realism.

Excellent writeup, I completly agree. Search for solutions to game problems, and try to solve them in realistic (I like "logical") ways. But at the end gameplay is all that matters.

I don't know where to post this question, although I've looked for almost one hour, so here it is:
How can I merge multiple mods to download them all at once?Can anybody explain step-by-step how to do it for me?
please, I'm not good in modding, but I really would like to do this.I'm very sorry to bother.Thanks in advance.

Ok Umm Could U Tell Me How To Create A Mod & Not All That Guidance Crap N The Beginning Just Tell Me Step By Step How To Make One

How can I change a civ trait? what file work with that?

Ok Umm Could U Tell Me How To Create A Mod & Not All That Guidance Crap N The Beginning Just Tell Me Step By Step How To Make One

The focus of this article is the non-technical aspects of making a mod. There are many other articles here that focus on the technical aspects, though you will probably need to be more specific in your question (as in what you want the mod to do). Unfortunatly there is no editor with Civ4 and you need to do different things.

I would recommend starting with a few of the easier things you want the mod to do and then posting in the "Civ4 - Creation & Customization" forum asking for help on how to do them.

Hehe, sentence number one of post number one in this thread:

This article will focus on the design aspects of making a mod, not the technical challenges. The goal is that readers will gain some insight into common pitfalls, how to avoid them and that our mods will be improved by it.

Where do I find "the techncal challenges" of making a mod, How can I merge multiple mods to put all of them together in just one mod?
Can anybody explain step-by-step how to do it for me?
if this is the wrong thread, I do apologise please, I'm not good in modding, but I really would like to do this.I'm very sorry to bother.Thanks in advance.

Is there any software I can see a civ4 leader with all its animation movements (settings), the whole animation file?

Probably this is fantastic. "probably" because I can't read so much big texts in english... x.x

i need someone to translate this to portuguese.

PS: How I translate something in civilization IV? I wanna translate my game to portuguese!

@porto_alegre_xp: eu acho que vai ser muito dificil conseguir tudo em portugues, meu filho tem o jogo no Brasil, mas e todo em ingles, parece que o Firaxis nao incluiu o portugues neste jogo, se vc precisar de ajuda, posso lhe ajudar, em algumas coisas. No Brasil eu era professora de ingles.
Tambem tem o site: http://www.babylon.com/affiliates/landing/index.php?id=10588&WT.srch=1&gclid=CKb4oODdqo0CFQufbgodihW81Q
eles traduzem qualquer coisa (textos e frases) em qualquer lingua e ainda dao dicionarios gratuitos para baixar em quase todos os idiomas. Espero ter ajudado vc.

I only just saw this - really interesting tutorial, especially the quotes from professional designers which are very helpful. The discussion has many valuable points too.

I made a tutorial (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=149597) some time ago on how to design scenarios for Civ 3. There's some technical stuff in there peculiar to that game, but I was also aiming to focus on the design aspect rather than just the technical how-to, so it might be of interest from a Civ 4 point of view too.

Forgive me for being such a newb, but I am extremely interested in Modding, and am slowly teaching myself a Python and XML. I would like to know what programs are recommended for creating the GameCore and the DLL. What basic programs should be used for editing the SDK and for creating animations and graphics. I like to use fireworks, and I am slowly learning 3ds Max, but I would like to know if there is more I should need. What is a good DLL editor and compiler?

Forgive me for being such a newb, but I am extremely interested in Modding, and am slowly teaching myself a Python and XML. I would like to know what programs are recommended for creating the GameCore and the DLL. What basic programs should be used for editing the SDK and for creating animations and graphics. I like to use fireworks, and I am slowly learning 3ds Max, but I would like to know if there is more I should need. What is a good DLL editor and compiler?

There is a decent guide here to setup a C++ editor for the SDK.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=166933

ok my question is with BTS now out how do i change my mod for warlords over to BTS. ive noticed they have changed the unit layout in the XML files somewhat but when i transfer an old unit into the new mod it causes all kinds of errors. even after ive gone through and tried to rearange to text lines to match the new format. im hoping i can find a way to just do a transfer rather than rewrite everingthing from scratch.

You picked the right problem for me... I'm a "veteran" gamer, I like the game not because of it's new or have cool graphics, but because it's interesting, complicated and has other attributes which I like by myself.
Some games are good enough for me, but after playing for a while I want to add something by myself or find a new content made by others.
Now it's time to talk about the civilization. Civ1,2,3,4 and SMAC were my favourite games. But the day comes when you've played with your units, techs and civics for too long time and you want something new.
The help came in the face of Warlords and BTS later. Even better, with additional mods. After that, I found this forum and a lot of work made by others. I loved the FFH2 and the TAM, and some other mods which are still in a development, but the time passes and I started to look in the game deeper.
And what do I see? The man who studied C++ in uni (well some time passed so I only remember "how to think to code", so this way I'm learning the python fast) and likes to play with modding finds that the game has the open source!
So, I already removed all the techs from the techtree and played with the custom spells in the FFH.
Now comes the question - what to do with my "clean" tech tree? The ideas are swarming, I already made some "ancient era techs" for the techtree and began to write the pedia description.
And if not for this article, I would waste a lot of time which I could spend with my wife, son and university =).
After I read your writings and followed the link to the article of the leading MAGIC designer (by the way, I love to play MTG too :)) and about restrictions which help the creativity, I began to think and understood a lot.
Thank you sincerely, Kael! :)

But now I'm like a man standing in the middle of the desert... I know that I can do a lot of things. I know some of them can be creative, and some of them can be unnoticed at all by others.
The question is what to do... Too many choices for a man who wants to make the world better.
Ancient romans said: "Non omnia omnes possunt" (Rough translation - "Even all can't do everything").

If you're going to do a large scale mod, first pick a theme, an idea that your mod is going to center around. For something relatively center, you could design your mod around an alternate history. Maybe the wheel isn't one of the first techs. Maybe man discovers medicine and drama first. Or, you could take an alternate route on Kael's mod, but using it as a base. Maybe rather than good/evil/netural, you have a map generator that spawns cities all over the map for each of the civs and you put some kind of catalyst for war that makes them all start duking it out.

Your ideas are helpful in fact that they are good ideas, but the problem is here still - I have too many things I want to do. From making leaderheads and unit models to digging the SDK. I think I'll spend some time doing "everything" just to make sure which part attracts me more than other =).
Because the interest in your own work is the main thing needed to complete the work from a scratch to the release date.

Deon, Kael will say first come the design phase.
I add that, secondly, as you are skilled with C++, you must get all your code change required by your designed mod. After that, it must be a cycle between Art, xml and python.

can anyone tell me what files i need tor work on to add 1 or a couple of ERAS to a mod?

and also to customize the the picture that shows up when u start the era

thanx

ok my current question is now that they have put out a new patch, 3.17, my mod wont work with it anymore. this is due to the change in the gamecore dll file. so what do i have to change/upgrade in my mod to make it accept the new game core file?

ok my current question is now that they have put out a new patch, 3.17, my mod wont work with it anymore. this is due to the change in the gamecore dll file. so what do i have to change/upgrade in my mod to make it accept the new game core file?

I would post this request in the main Creation & Customization forum. This thread is about the design aspects of modding, not the technical aspects.

good article. Wrong title. (love FFH btw)

This thread got me interested in trying my hand at modding again, made me think about things I did wrong before.

Ok, it's very interesting. But, I'd like to find a guide about how to make Unique Building (UB).

I found this article incredibly interesting. After I get comfortable with some other mods and the like, I plan to make my own.

Thanks Kael and the fellows! I'm too late to know it. It's very interesting. Would you mind if I translate it into Japanese and upload the translation on my website to share it among the Japanese Civ fans? This words is worth spreading out of English. Please let me know if there are any problems.

Thanks Kael and the fellows! I'm too late to know it. It's very interesting. Would you mind if I translate it into Japanese and upload the translation on my website to share it among the Japanese Civ fans? This words is worth spreading out of English. Please let me know if there are any problems.

You are welcome to share this (and welcome to CFC).

You are welcome to share this (and welcome to CFC).

Thanks, Kael! Sorry for this late reply.

Orbis doesn't follow these rules, but it's still one of the most popular mods.