Tweaked Out Civ III mod completed

DJ Bonebraker

a.k.a Laura
Joined
Mar 10, 2004
Messages
5,644
Location
Eorzea, Hydaelyn
Well, I've been working on this mod for the past several weeks (before I happened to discover this wonderful place), and I've finally reached a point where I'm satisfied with how everything looks and works. Before I begin discussion of the changes/features, I'd like to thank the people whose work made this mod possible:

Pesoloco for his badazz blimp

Snoopy for his "oh so much better than Firaxis' lameazz terrain" terrain:D

Papajohns for his Ticonderoga Class Aegis cruiser replacement.

Drift for his Geothermal plant

Ukas for the Radio Station GFX

Rufus T. Firefly for the National Mass Media Wonder Splash

Niessuh for his soft mines

*Update*
In version 2.0, I'd like to thank the following persons:

Ukas, for the coffee shop graphics

Whoever did the Minuteman unit

Nieussuh for the extended Irrigations

CornsMaster for the cool border graphics:goodjob:

Pounder for those really cool railroads

and anyone else I forgot to mention (PM me, and I'll add you to the list)

Okay, now that that's out of the way, there are four zip files listed. You will need all of them to play this mod. Create a folder in your C3C Scenarios directory called Tweaked, and create a folder inside of that called "Art" Extract the contents of the .zip files (with the exception of the Text folder and the Tweaked.biq) into the Tweaked/Art folder. Extract the Tweaked.biq file into the Conquests/Scenarios/ folder, and the Text dir into the Tweaked folder.

Here's a short list of the changes I made:

5 new resources:

Cocoa, luxury found in hills, floodplains, and rain forests
Coffee, luxury, found in mountains and rain forests

Hot Springs, stategic, found in mountains and volcanos, required for building Hot Springs Resort and Geothermal plant
Silver, strategic, found in mountains, hills, and volcanos, required for building silver mine and training Mercenaries

Seals, bonus resource, found in Sea, Coastal and Tundra, +1f,+2p,+1c
Tea, bonus resource, changed name of tobacco (because I F--king HATE the tobacco industry), and benefits are +1f and +1C instead of just +1c

4 new units:

Mercenary, available with the research of economics, had the abilities Hidden Nationality, treat all terrain as roads, and stealth attack. Requires silver.

Airship, airborne version of transport, but with a bombard attack. extremely vulnerable to fighters, but a great way to transport 6 foot units deep into enemy territory. Available with Combustion, and requires Oil

Engineer, uses modern worker gfx, upgrade of worker and settler, requires only one population to build, and can perform all worker actions at +50% rate, has a movement of 2, and can build cities. Available with Physics.

Maccabee Israeli UU, uses the Enkidu Warrior GFX, and is available with Iron working. Has 2 att, 2 def, 1 movement, and treats all terr as roads. Replaces swordsman for Israel, and requires Iron

Changed GFX for Aegis Cruiser so that it looks like a REAL Aegis cruiser :D

Terrain Changes:

Jungle renamed Rain Forest, now has 1F,1P and 1C, can be mined for +1P, worker action is clear forest (so it doesn't take as long, and you get some of that fine tropical hardwood for your city's production;) )

Marsh renamed Wetland, now has 1F and 1C, Irrigating increases food yield to 3 (based on RL, where some of the most productive regions, food wise are wetlands that have been converted to mass aquaculture. I wanted to add an aquaculture tech that did the same thing, but the editor wouldn't let me. :( )

It is now possible to build roads and mines in volcanos (increasing prod to 4 and commerce to 1), as well as find the following resources: Hot Springs, Gems, and Silver

Color corrected version of Firaxis' marsh graphics used, so it a) doesn't look like crap, and b) fits in with snoopy's terrain.

New City Improvements:

Incenerator, reduces pollution from city improvements, available with combustion. Bonus cumulative with Recycling Plant, req 1 maint.

Hot Springs Resort, makes two unhappy people content, and boosts tax revenue by 50% (this is based on my experience with hot springs resorts in Japan, which were extremely popular tourist destinations) and requires 1 maint. available with Currency, requires Hot Springs in city radius.

Geothermal Plant, available with Steam Power, increases city production by 75%, with 0 pollution. 2 maint req.

Silver mine, available with bronze working, requires Silver in city radius, increases tax revenue by 50%, 0 maint req.

Coffee shop, makes two unhappy citizens content, available with economics, requires Coffee and Cocoa to build, 1 maint. req.

Radio Station, avaiable with radio, makes 2 unhappy people content, and increases luxury trading, allows building or the National Mass Media small wonder, and requires 3 maint per turn

Small Wonders:

National Mass Media, requires 5 radio stations in cities controlled by player to build, Acts as second forbidden palace, in addition to which, all tiles in the city radius that produce commerce produce 1 extra, and 1 unhappy citizen is made content AND war weariness is reduced in all cities on the continent where it is built (needless to say this sucker has a hefty shield cost, 500 to be exact).

Tech:

Socialism, requires communism, allows Social Democracy Govt.

Govt:

Social Democracy, has communal corruption, as Communism, low War weariness (as opposed to none for communism, and high for Democracy), unit support is as Republic, draft rate as Democracy, Military Police as despotism, and hurry by payment.

I basically wanted to make Social Democracy a kind of combination of Communism and Democracy (as it is in real life), and one of the best governments in the game (as a result of living the past three years in a country goverened by a form of social democracy, I'd say that it's one of the best governments the human race has going, but that's just my opinion;) )

Since I've been PM'ed about this, I've decided to include a quick tutorial on how to add the patch to the game, and where to unzip what:

The files go into the \whatever the Civ 3 folder path is\Conquests\scenarios\. Create a sub-folder called Tweaked then create one called Art. All the Files from the TweakedUnits.zip, TweakedTerrain1.zip and TweakedTerrain2.zip go into the \whatever\Conquests\scenarios\Tweaked\Art\ path, as do all the files in TweakedTerrain31.zip with the exception of the Tweaked.biq file and the Text folder The Tweaked.biq file goes into the \whatever\Conquests\scenarios\ folder, and the Text folder goes into the \whatever\Conquests\scenarios\Tweaked\ folder.

Fortunately, the version 2.0 patch was small enough that I was able to include the full path, so you just simply extract (or if you have Windows XP like I do, copy and paste) the entire contents of the zip file into your \whatever\Conquests\scenarios\ folder and chose "yes to all" when it asks you if you want to overwrite any files.


Here are the files you need:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads6/TweakedTerrain1.zip

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads6/TweakedTerrain2.zip

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads6/TweakedTerrain31.zip

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads6/TweakedUnits.zip



Version 2.0 patch

This patch fixes all remaining bugs that were still left from v1.5

First, the Mercenary's graphics have been changed to the minuteman graphics by Kinboat (I think, correct me if I'm wrong), to reflect it's status as an Industrial-Age unit.

Also fixed a minor palette bug with the National Mass Media Small Wonder Splash.

Replaced old coffee shop graphics with Ukas' Industrial age cafe graphics.

Made pollution a bit more manageable by decreasing the cost of pollution reducing improvements, adding pollution reducing capabilities to the aqueduct, and reducing or removing pollution generated by certain city improvements.

And changes Social democracy so that the Military Police Limit is 0 (What with all the happiness improvements available, you shouldn't NEED military police :p)

All you need to do is unzip this file into your Conquests/Scenarios/ folder, if you've already installed version 1.0 (this patch already includes the fixes from v1.5), and chose "yes" when it asks if you want to overwrite a file.

Enjoy!
 
Alright, appearantly the link on the first post aint workin' :rolleyes:

So, without further aodo (or adon't :p), HERE is the preview (note the Seal near the bottom of the picture):
 
And some more screenshots:

This is from a little later in the same game, Bethlehem has a good spot on the large freshwater lake with the seals and horses.



Also from the same game, Nazareth with a good position to monopolize the Coffee production, but also right next to the Persian capitol...



And here is a preview of the resources.pcx file, with my new resources:

Top row: Horses, Iron, Saltpeter, Coal, Oil, Rubber
Second row: Aluminum, Uranium, Wines, Furs, Dyes, Incense
Third row: Spices, Ivory, Silk, Gems, Whales, Game
Fourth row: Fish, Cattle, Wheat, Gold, Tropical Fruit, Oasis
Fifth row: Sugar, Tea, Hot Springs, Coffee, Cocoa, Seals
Last row: Silver
 
Originally posted by Hikaro Takayama
Drift for his Geothermal plant and Radio Station GFX

I haven't done a radio station. It's most probably by Ukas. :)
 
Yes, that's correct, and has been changed in the credits spiel. Other than that, what do you think (it's my first Civ III mod attempt);)
 
Hi, first post. :)

This looks great. I'll definitely try it out and tell you what I think.
 
Yeah, I didn't like how the original one from Firaxis looked, so I changed the background for the Pediaicon to magenta and re-sized it. I think it looks quite nice in the game, and goes really well with Snoopy's jungle terrain.
 
Originally posted by Hikaro Takayama
I basically wanted to make Social Democracy a kind of combination of Communism and Democracy (as it is in real life), and one of the best governments in the game (as a result of living the past three years in a country goverened by a form of social democracy, I'd say that it's one of the best governments the human race has going, but that's just my opinion;) )

Do you see soldiers patroling the streets where you live? If not, then I suggest you remove the 2 military police thingy for the social Democracy gov. BTW, Social democracy is already in the game. Its called Democracy.

Oh and about the rest of the mod.

*I think you have to many "content face producers" among the city imps. And too many luxury recources. Noone will ever be unhappy.. The luxury slider is there for a reason you know..

*Hidden nationality land units ruin the game.

*Dont you think upgrading your workers to settler-workers will cause problems? All in a sudden, you can colonize every spot you know of, for example if you play a regicide game and a civ gets his king killed and thereby free lots of space. So then you can colonize it all without additional loss of citysize.

*I suggest making hot spring a bonus recource and make the geothermal powerplant require a hot spring in city radius.

*I think the Airship can transport far too many units. You need a mighty big airship to transport entire divisions of soldiers.

*I suggest leaving the marsh and jungle at 0 commerce.

*The incinerator improvement.. Say you have an incinerator and then build a recycling plant.. Will the pollution decrease even more? Im not sure about that. The main pollution problem is population anyway.
Anyway, I think the industrial age should be a pollution-filled era like it was in reality ;), so no pollutionreducing improvements needed in the industrial ages IMHO.

Conclusion: This mod contains too many unneccessary additions.

...However, I like the idea of having another bonus production bonus recource in coast and sea. Those 1 tile islands might actually be able to produce something, heh.
 
Do you see soldiers patroling the streets where you live? If not, then I suggest you remove the 2 military police thingy for the social Democracy gov. BTW, Social democracy is already in the game. Its called Democracy.

Actually, it's 1 military police, and the reason I did that was that in most RL social democracies (France, Sweeden, and Japan), the military is more closely tied to the regular police force, and they tend to cooperated more. As a matter of fact, the Japanese military is technically a LARGE police force (the Japanese word "jieitai" means "self-defense force") And social democracy is not the same as a typical caplitolist democracy (like the in game "democracy" govt or, for that matter, the US govt.) For one thing, in a social democracy, certain key infrastructure industries are owned and operated by the government, such as railroads, power plants, health care, etc. In a normal democracy, all of these things are private industries (and cost an arm and a leg), and in communism, there is no private ownership of anything. Therefore, I stick by what I said about SD being between Communism and a capitalist democracy.

I also added the xtra content face producing improvements to reflect RL. I mean, how many times do you see massive riots in America that shut entire cities down? Now I ask the same thing about some poor, destitute African nation, such as Liberia or Somallia, and I gurantee that you'll get different answers. Why? Because the US has things like Radio stations, churches, synagogues, libraries, TV, Internet, and enough food to keep us fat, dumb and happy. Somollia, on the other hand, has barely enough food to feed the people on starvation rations and virtually no entertainment of any kind. Therefore it doesn't make sense that your super-industrialized country that controls half the world should have cities constantly rioting just because there aren't enough happiness improvements. Besides, the coffee shop requires not one, but TWO luxury resources, and I have seen only 1 or two games I've playtested out of about a dozen where these luxuries could be found on the same continent. The hot springs resort requires hot springs IN THE CITY RADIUS, so there won't be that many cities that can build it. Finally, the Radio Station is expensive to build AND maintain, not to mention it can't be built until the late industrial/early modern ages, to help counter unhappiness in those size 20 cities that you'll have at that time.

As for the hot springs being a luxury resource, I tried that, but the game tends to clump luxury resources on random maps, so one city would have the all the hot springs in the world in it's radius, and there wouldn't be any for anyone else. The only way I could get an even (and more realistic) distribution was to wither make it a bonus or strategic resource, and since you can't make bonus resources a prereq for buildings, my only choice was strategic.

And about the hidden nationality land units, have you played the Sengoku Conquest yet? They had Ninja and Ronin as hidden nationality land units (as a matter of fact, the only difference B/T the Conquest Ninja and my Mercenary is that the Mercenary has a higher defense, costs more shields (the same as a cavalry unit, but higher def, less att), requires silver instead of jade, can enslave units, and is visible), and I've found that it really doesn't harm game play. In fact, especially in the Sengoku campaign, having hidden nationality land units made the game more interesting, and kept me on my toes (especially with all those invisible ninjas that kept capturing my workers, until one of my own ninjas captured them back). It allows harrassing of a potential foe without actually declaring war. The real question is do the AI players employ them for such tactics? You'd better believe it. The late Middle ages can be a bit tense with the various mercenary factions wandering around, but it makes the game interesting, IMHO. Plus, if you include Mercs in your attack stack, when you're at war with someone, you have the ability (finally!) to finish off that pesky musketman who you redlined (but couldn't finish off) with one of your knights/cavalry, without fighting through the remaining gigadozen units he has in his city, allowing for a more refined attack strategy than the standard send in the "Stack o' Doom" and hope you have enough offensive units to overcome his defence.

And the reason I added the extra commerce to the Wetlands and Rain forest tiles was to represent the valuable research (especially in the way of new miracle drugs) that is gathered from the rain forests, and the commerce generated by aquaculture for the Wet lands. That's also why I made it so that wetlands gave 3 food after being irrigated. Some of the most productive (food wise) areas in the world are wetlands that are used for various kinds of aquaculture, wether it be Crayfish plantations in the southern US, fish-farming in SE Asia, or the famous Cranberry bogs in my home state of Pennsylvania (which produce at least 70% of the world's supply of cranberries).

So in conclusion, the additions are, IMNSHO quite necessary for realistic game play and balance. Although I aggree 100% about the seals. In the games I've play tested, small islands with seals nearby are actually productive enough to be used for something besides territory place-holders :cool:

But, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, so if you don't like some of the features, feel free to edit/delete them, I aint gonna stop ya :) The whole purpose of this mod was to make the game more fun, but with less micromanaging of cities, and make it somewhat easier to get a cultural victory (which is something I've NEVER gotten, and I've been playing Civ III since it first hit the stores).
 
1.Well, I happen to live in one of those countries. I can safely say the military has never struck down any revolts to keep order.
Sorry chum, modern democratic governments use POLICE and not MILITARY to keep order.

2.Oh, I suppose you dont want to touch that luxury slider by adding lots of contentfacebuildings and luxuries. Thereby removing an important strategic feature in the game and effectively made the game less fun in favor of realism..

3. Oh alrighty then.

4. Yes, i've played Sengoku and I loved every Ninja-free moment.
And I hated every moment that had to do anything with ninjas.
And about the strategic importance about the mercenary. Why not make it a stealth attack unit WITHOUT hidden nationality?
Or why not add a stealth attack without hidden nationality in addition to the hidden nationality mercenary if you want to keep it so badly.

5. Once again, realism is prioritized...


...And I won't change my mind about the conclusion mind you..
 
y be so harsh, dogmeat? hes just makin somethin that he wants to play on. hes sharing it on civfanatics so that others can use it if they want. his opinions are exactly that....his opinions. i agree with some of what ur saying but dont bite his head off! i hate the sight of blood. :p
 
Originally posted by Dogmeat
1.Well, I happen to live in one of those countries. I can safely say the military has never struck down any revolts to keep order.
Sorry chum, modern democratic governments use POLICE and not MILITARY to keep order.



Have u forgott Ådalen -31.. ?:confused:
 
I live in another of those SD-countries, one you did not mention: Austria. I have never seen the military keeping the peace, but we rarely have any rioting and do have a small paramilitary police force.
I like some of your ideas very much:
the seals, the cocoa and tea, removing tobacco, the volcano resources.

Game-ballancewise the mega worker-settler thingie is a bit too much IMHO, but I like the idea of a unit that could build it's road and then settle the place. It should cost 2 pop, though. Could be useful in some situations, but absolutely useless in most cases.
 
Hi,

I have been play testing your mod for the past week and I have been enjoying it. It's a nice first mod, as others have mentioned the new resource items are a really good idea. Also the use of SnOOpys graphics mod is a really nice touch. However I have a couple of comments about improvement.

First I encountered a couple of bugs with the engineer unit.

1. When selecting the engineer to build, the Civ issues an error about not finding the Engineer.INI file. I renamed the 'Worker Modern Times.INI' file to Engineer.INI which fixed that problem.

2 With the new fix, Civ issues an error about not being able to find 'WorkerModernCapture.wav' so a change in Engineer.INI:

was: CAPTURE=WorkerModernCapture.wav
to : CAPTURE=WorkerModernCapture.amb

This seems to have fixed the problem.

Second the units you have added

1. The engineer unit. This should cost 2 population. The time that you introduce the engineer unit is too close to the Modern worker which has the same graphics. This makes it hard to tell the two apart.

2. The Mercenary unit. I know what your attempting to do and I like the idea of this unit, but as it currently stands it adds game imbalance. This is due to 5 att, 4 def, with no terrain movement penality. This makes it the strongest unit in the game for quite some time. In my current game if I didn't have Army's, the nearly beaten English would be taking back all it's cities. This unit also allows civs to wage wars without declaring War, and avoiding any penalties (your still friends, have trade, no war weariness etc). I am currently watching as one civ is quickly taking city after city from other civs it has ROP with, by moving strong units along with the mercenaries. This quite a serious issue imho.

If you could fix the engineer unit, and add some rebalance to the mercenary unit your mod would be much better.

cheers,
and thanks for the mod
 
First of all, I'dlike to thank those of you who took the time to play test this scenario, and come up with suggestions/bug fixes. As a result, I've now released the version 1.5 patch.

The items changed with this patch are:

Mercenaries aren't available until Nationalism is researched (so that way there are riflemen to counter them).

Engineers now cost 2 population, in addition to their normal shield costs. Some people have had concerns that they would be mistaken for moder workers since I'm using the same graphics. I already took care of that. Workers look the same regardless of age (already implemented in version 1.0, but I forgot to mention it:rolleyes: ).

Updated the borders graphics with Cornshucker's new and improved borders (so you can actually see where your territory ends and the other guy's begins).

Download the patch HERE

Again, thanks for the comments and input:goodjob:
 
Hello,

I've playtested this mod several times and I really like it. The social democracy gov is a good balance b/w communism and democracy. I DID use the luxury slider, and people were just plain happy. The only thing I'd suggest is that the merc unit look more industrial (kind of weird having a ninja running around with riflemen) and maybe be more expensive or a little less powerful. Still, though, by the time Nationalism gets in the game you've got worse units to worry about. Anyway, thanks for the mod! :king:
 
The only thing I'd suggest is that the merc unit look more industrial (kind of weird having a ninja running around with riflemen) and maybe be more expensive or a little less powerful.

Yeah, I've come accross a few minor annoyances that I'll be fixing this week. I'm also probably going to use the "minuteman" graphics or some such for the mercenary (as it is now an industrial age unit, but still, ninjas r0x0r:ninja: ). I'll post the newest patch later this week (will have all the previous patch's changes so that It won't be necesary to download a whole lot of files just to play this mod), but I'm pretty busy with stuff for my current FF mod project, among other things. Glad to hear the C&C, though.
 
Well, folks, I've finally got around to updating this mod (after a gruelling 28 hour playtesting session, that will appear in the stories and tales, sometime in the fairly near future), and I've made the patch file available in the first post. Here's a quick previes from the game:
 
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