Sengoku Jidai (Japan) Mod (in-progress with pics)

Zen Blade

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Oct 31, 2008
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UPDATE: I HAVE ATTACHED THE first version of the mod. This may be a temporary location until I can find out why the mod does not appear to upload correctly to the Civ V server (or wherever). The unzipped folder goes into the:
My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 5\MODS folder that suggest exist within your "my documents" or "documents" folder.


Hi everyone,

This post is about a mod in development that will cover the Sengoku Jidai period of Japan. The "Sengoku Jidai" was a civil war period in japan that lasted from the late 1400's to the early 1600's. It is the "Age of the Country at War" (to quote from the Nobunaga's Ambition series) or the "period of the Warring States".

This mod will closely resemble mods I made for Civ II and Civ IV (unpublished or published). The advantages in Civ V for such a mod are many. The two most important ones are the built-in modding ability of the game and the ONE unit per Hex combat system now employed.
Indeed, Civ V is built for strategy-war games much more than for traditional civilization-building games. This fact makes the main Civ V game rather boring in comparison to earlier incarnations, but ideal for making mods/scenarios that focus on conflict.

So, here are some pics: (see below)

About the pics: In the first two you can see that some of the clans have already been created as novel civilizations, including a "customized leader" for the Chosokabe. Disclaimer-- only text customization currently. I will probably not perform any graphics modifications on leaders.
There are 22 playable civs (the most allowed by the game). More than 22 = not possible/game crash in my experience. There are 28 non-playable city-states. While each playable Civ represents an "influential" clan of the Sengoku period, the city-states mostly represent smaller clans or influential clans that I decided (for now) were less interesting for the current scenario.

The next two pictures focus on eastern Japan. In this example, I chose to play as the Uesugi to highlight that they start allied to the city-state that controls Kozuke. This city-state is currently "Ragusa", but the name will be changed to the proper clan (a related Uesugi clan). You can also see Mt. Fuji, and if you look at the mini-map you can get a sense for all of Japan.

The final two pics focus on western Japan and the Capitol (Kyoto). The western island, Kyushu, is included with numerous city-states, but to the north you will see that Nagato begins as a recently-conquered puppet. This is actually done for game purposes, but there will be other puppet cities at the start of the game as a way of making life difficult for some of the larger clans.

For example, the Miyoshi (in the final pic) control much of the "Kinai" region, including Kyoto. Kyoto begins as a Miyoshi puppet (very appropriate), but the Miyoshi clan also begins with a bad happiness situation. So, if you want to take full control of the largest city on the map... you are going to need to first deal with your happiness, while also dealing with your numerous neighbors, most of whom are city-states with little real power (true of the time period).
You will notice that the selected hex in this final pic is a "grassland, flood plain". I have changed some of the terrain/resources restrictions and values to more accurately reflect what is/was valued. This includes GOLD, which is now VERY good. The GOLD mine hexes can now bring in a lot of money: ~10 gold when mined+minted.

So, that is a brief taste of what I have done so far.


What else will be included/modded?

1. Finish making the Civ name changes for the major clans.
2. Give/alter/modify the unique traits for each clan.
3. Change some buildings to represent what would be "built" or produced during that time period. Libraries weren't a big concern... but Land Surveys to increase taxes/rice production were a big deal in some provinces.
4. Change "units". I am not a graphics person, but using the base Civ V graphics, or maybe some Civ IV graphics (if compatible), I need samurai, archers, mounted samurai, Ashigaru peasants/spearmen/pikemen, warrior monks, and "Muskets" (at least two types to signify early/late).

5. Civics - I am very excited about changing civics. Half of the civics will be changed to reflect titles given to powerful individuals, and these will be based on the region each clan is in. For example, the Eastern clans will be in the "Kanto" branch, while clans on Kyushu will be in the "Kyushu branch". The benefits will be specific to the abilities needed in (or to the specialties of) that area. Some will be exclusionary. The Kanto will not be available if you are working on Kyushu, for example.

The other half of the civics will be more generic honor, tradition, or what not.

6. Others that have not been fully thought out.

What is needed?

Well, if you like making leaderheads,
unit graphics,
know how to code events that unlock automatically...

I would love to make some requests...

ALSO, I would like to make the map smaller by cropping the edges ~10-15 hexes off each axis. If you know how to do this, or may know how to make such a utility, it would be useful for making the map more manageable... it's very large.

Can I have the map?
If there is interest, I can post it. It is ~huge in size... although the size is custom since I imported it from Civ IV.

Let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, comments.
thanks for reading,

-Zen Blade
 

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Okay, so some "new" images.


The first image "Building" shows a couple of changes including the "Land Surveys", which is currently a series of (2-3) buildings that when completed increase food, production, and gold of the City/province. This image also shows how most wonders have been "stealthed" (their tech requirement is now STEALTH). I will be working a few wonders back in with different names, but most will be gone or already present in Japan. This image also shows the "new" knight, Mounted Samurai (STR 20 instead of 18 and requiring horses and iron, but otherwise currently identical).

The second image "Civics" highlights the 10 new categories of civics. I have been debating how to position each of the 10. Currently the bottom row contains the geographic civics (west to east, left to right). However, once I find... or if someone points out to me where the XMLs are, I would love to rearrange the images to have Secular match with the "science/optics". I would also love to match the other images such as Kinai with the noble who is sitting, etc...

I have made a couple of civic changes, but this is actually somewhat tricky. The last thing I want to do is just rearrange what each civic gives you. I would love to make the Daimyo civic (for example) give specific upgrades to the Daimyo (or more likely Hatamoto) unit. That specific unique unit would gain either promotions or combat str.

The third and fourth images just highlight the Kanto and Kinai regions. I really think the map looks quite lovely from afar.


Overall, things are coming along and I hope to have something fully playable shortly.
There are no graphic changes as of now, and I do not foresee any in the immediate future as I am mostly concerned with gameplay right now and editing graphics would require quite a bit of learning on my part until some easy-to-use guides/utilities are put out there.

In terms of gameplay, I have increased the number of hit points for units and cities, as well as the rate of healing. I found that this was important to make military units last, and to make cities relevant in combat. This also slows down advances as cities and units in allied lands heal significantly (based on %) faster than invading units.

If people are interested at giving the map a go (and giving me usable feedback) please let me know. ALSO, IF YOU LIKE TO EDIT GRAPHICS.... I have lots of good ideas and needs.

Any other thoughts/suggestions are always welcome.
 

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Are you going to have special islands appear with alien smiley faces after you conquer all the territory? XD

Sorry I kid. This looks good. Is there any chance you'll be releasing another smaller version of this map once the original gets completed? Huge will probably destroy my computer.
 
Evalis,

I am well aware of the map size issue... :(

Currently, it takes ~2 min to load the game on my computer during the initial game setup. That is part of the reason why I would like to find a utility that crops map size.

I can try to resize the map in world builder... but that is really difficult in gameplay terms. I tried once before, and what happens is that all sorts of things get moved/changed.

A map cropping could easily change the map size from the current 100x80 (8000 hexes) to 86x74 (6364 hexes) without any loss of land mass.
If I cropped the northern island (Hokkaido), which has 0.1% affect on the game, I can get the map to 76x56 (4256 hexes) without any loss of the main points of conflict.

Alternatively... if there were a way to merge a larger map onto a smaller map... losing some of the larger map... that would accomplish the same thing.
So, if I had two layers... and merged the larger map onto the smaller, I would also essentially "crop" the larger map onto the smaller canvas.

But yeah, I realize this is an issue, and it affects my computer as well. I would love to make the map smaller without any changes on gameplay. I just need to be enlightened about whether such an option exists or is possible or if someone is working on such a thing.

-Zen Blade
 
Sounds like you really know your sengoku period history! I'm looking forward to this if it's well-designed.

I like how Takeda is Bismarck :p
 
Ahaha yes I want shogun 2 as well :blush:

But this looks great, especially the map... Awesome work!
 
"5. Civics - I am very excited about changing civics. Half of the civics will be changed to reflect titles given to powerful individuals, and these will be based on the region each clan is in. For example, the Eastern clans will be in the "Kanto" branch, while clans on Kyushu will be in the "Kyushu branch". The benefits will be specific to the abilities needed in (or to the specialties of) that area. Some will be exclusionary. The Kanto will not be available if you are working on Kyushu, for example."


Hi! This is a great idea! However, one situation I found is that all countries are allowed to adopt any of these policies. Or in other words, Kyushu branch might be adopted by the Tekada family (which is historically wrong). Even if you set contradict policy branches, the player would still be available to switch from one branch to the other (like in core game you can still switch from freedom to autocracy). Do you have any ideas to solve this problem?
 
"5. Civics - I am very excited about changing civics. Half of the civics will be changed to reflect titles given to powerful individuals, and these will be based on the region each clan is in. For example, the Eastern clans will be in the "Kanto" branch, while clans on Kyushu will be in the "Kyushu branch". The benefits will be specific to the abilities needed in (or to the specialties of) that area. Some will be exclusionary. The Kanto will not be available if you are working on Kyushu, for example."

Hi! This is a great idea! However, one situation I found is that all countries are allowed to adopt any of these policies. Or in other words, Kyushu branch might be adopted by the Tekada family (which is historically wrong). Even if you set contradict policy branches, the player would still be available to switch from one branch to the other (like in core game you can still switch from freedom to autocracy). Do you have any ideas to solve this problem?

What I did not tell you is that all Civs will start with certain branches open...
And the opening of any new branch will give no immediate benefit (just "branch open").

For example, the Mori (western Japan) will start with 2 or 3 branches open for the west, which will prevent opening the eastern branches. Specifically, they will start with Kyushu/Western Japan (maybe Shikoku), and those branches will prohibit Kanto/Kinai. [Those are the five branches as I see it now: Kyushu, Shikoku, Western Japan, Kinai, and Kanto]

The Kinai branch may or may not prohibit opening all other regions... I am not sure how the prohibitions work if a player starts with multiple openings (via worldbuilder).

There will also be incentives (for players) to choose based on the region and having benefits that are more helpful for that region than for other regions. For example, terrain or resources benefits or benefits with city-states in regions that have a lot/few.

How the AI decides what to choose... I'll leave that for later (I have no clue).

-Zen Blade
 
Good, I see your way to solve this problem. I think it will work. Thank you for your explanaition!

But I still hope that we could find some ways to lock certain civs in some policy branches or prevent them from adopting some policy branches...Maybe changing XML is not enough to do that...
 
I take it you will have a scenario for this (not just a map). If that's the case then I would like to know if you have found a way to display the civilizations correctly on the civilization selection menu. There is a confirmed bug where it displays a question mark random civ instead of the proper icons and names.
 
Kruelgor,

Not currently. I get 22 ??? civs until the game is loaded (and I go back). Interestingly, I found that if I load an updated version of the same mod (staying in Civ V while making the slight coding changes), the new mod seems to NOT give the ??? civs.

But yeah, the ??? are going to be tough to get around.
 
Hi Zen:

After thinking of the mechanism of adopting policy. I think that I might find a solution to the problem:

We could set the pre-request policy of a certain branch-opening policy to be a policy that can't be adopted. And we hide that policy from the policy panel by setting the X=-1 Y=-1. Finally, we give those clans the according policies to allow them to adopt certain policy branches.

Haven't tried my idea yet, but I think it should work.
 
Sounds interesting - and great map! Looking forward to this mod.
 
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