Trade Wars: Modpack idea

Imagine a game of Civilization, where you run - not a Civilization, an army, or any political unit - but a Company. Imagine a game, where you didn't have musketeers and riflemen, but Advertisers and Lawyers. Your influence over a city is not determined by the culture rate, but by the Market Share. You don't raise taxes, you raise your fees. You don't order the building of a Bank, you finance it. You don't fight military wars, you fight price wars.

But unfortunately, that is all we are left to do. Imagine. Why? Because this mod remains an idea in my head, and unfortunately, my schedual is too busy for me to learn how to mod CivIV to the exent nessesary to complete this, much less actually do it.

Which is part of the reason I signed up to these forums. I may not be able to actually participate in much of the modding - but you can. I would be willing to organize, provide ideas, change some of the xml, delegate, and even - if nessesary - finance an operation like this, if enough experienced modders are willing to work on it.

If you're at all interested in this idea, let me know. I would be more than happy to connect people, to help out, to assist in any way possible. I can do some of it; but I need you, the people who have worked on mods that Firaxis put into BTS, that have created major players, that have provided me with hours of entertainment, to help. We can do this people; I just need you.

Such a game would be awesome but Civ IV, while it is highly flexible does not lend itself to such a thing. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that I doubt it can be done well easily. The concept of cities and terrain and units is basic to how it works. You would have to heavily rewrite much of the C++ code to do anything other than basically reskin what it currently is.

One of the main things would be to separate Civilizations from Cities. You can persist as a civilization as long as you have a settler, even something that eventually upgrades to a settler (try giving Mechanized Infantry "Found" and deleting all your units but a warrior). So you could have a CEO unit ("You!") that can eventually upgrade to found a city called "[Leadername]'s retirement villa. This CEO, a "King" as it were, must be defended of course until the end of the game when you can do this because it is associated with a victory condition.

Given that you thus don't have cities but just exist among other cities (with a caravel capability, invisibility, spy capability, hidden nationality, open borders, or other device), there would have to be new ways of doing research, raising money, building units and buildnigs etc... Unless those are also going away. Maybe you could be all unit based, using something like the Mongol camp.
And how would you get cultural influence, ie own land, without cities?

Tholish said:

One of the main things would be to separate Civilizations from Cities. You can persist as a civilization as long as you have a settler, even something that eventually upgrades to a settler (try giving Mechanized Infantry "Found" and deleting all your units but a warrior). So you could have a CEO unit ("You!") that can eventually upgrade to found a city called "[Leadername]'s retirement villa. This CEO, a "King" as it were, must be defended of course until the end of the game when you can do this because it is associated with a victory condition.

Given that you thus don't have cities but just exist among other cities (with a caravel capability, invisibility, spy capability, hidden nationality, open borders, or other device), there would have to be new ways of doing research, raising money, building units and buildnigs etc... Unless those are also going away. Maybe you could be all unit based, using something like the Mongol camp.
And how would you get cultural influence, ie own land, without cities?

Click to expand...

Good ideas, but I don't know if we have to depart so far from traditional Civ models. There could (should, even) still be cities, and they could operate largely the same. The way I had imagined it was, the player would enter on a (or one of several) pre-made maps. Each Company owned some of the cities, having 100% Market Share (just renamed "culture"). This would be the equivilant of having political/military control. The main differences would be 1) no cities can be destroyed, as there would be no military, and 2) when a city has 51% or a pluarility of the market share controlled by another company, the city would change loyalty (advertisers can add market share points).
Although, the Mongol Camp - ish idea is very good. Perhaps several companies start out, and rush to control pre-existing but unowned cities. This could start the game.

This is good, this is good, we're starting a dialouge. Let's keep going!

Sounds a bit complex but nice. Have you looked at Colonization at all? Their Europe screen could represent stock trading and such.

sounds like a ton of work, but a good idea.

Mmm... like a premade map, with a set number of players each owning one city, can't found new ones or raze, and then they have to expand their culture (market share) to unowned and competitors cities via... insert stuff here.

Yeah, I can see some interesting possibilities there. Too high level and time consuming for me, I'm afraid. But good luck!