[WARLORDS MOD + SCENARIO] Legends of Ancient Arabia

VetMichael said:

Ustaz Gordon: I was happily surprised (though I suppose I should not have been) that al-Tabari was one of the chroniclers of Civilizations in the game - excellent detail!

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Hey VM, I'm glad you caught that! I'm particularly proud of the fact that I use Arab historians to report the Greatest Lists! You're the first person to comment on it. Thanks!

A couple of points I'd like to bring up:
1) the game is incredibly awesome, very detailed, and wonderfully executed. Thank you.

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My pleasure. I'm glad you're enjoying it.

2) With Early Machinery (I think that's what it's called), one is supposed to be able to construct windmills, but I have not been able to do that on ANY hillside, whether desert or grassland hills. I thought you should know.

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I need to check this out. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

3) I played around with the speed of the game (I tend to like long, drawn out games) and on Marathon speed on the Warlord (default) difficulty, I noticed the barbarian attackers had Eastern Roman Imperial Horsebowmen (strength 10)fairly early on (about 500 BCE) BUT on Quick speed, the barbarians remained Desert Warriors with the occasional Desert Horseman. I surmise this is unintentional, but thought you and others would like to know about the quirk. Is the scenario intended to be played on a certain setting/speed other than the default?

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Well I totally did NOT balance for different speeds. I ran it on normal and quick myself. As far as difficulty, in my experience it plays best on Noble.

4) this is the sixth time I've played through;

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Wow!!

the scenario demands different responses depending on your location and neighbors - A most wonderful surprise, thanks!

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Yeah, I put a lot of thought into that. I'm glad you picked up on it!! And I'm delighted you're getting so much fun out of it.

Much thanks for all your input, VetMichael, it is deeply appreciated!

One more thing;

Distance seems to have little affect on the reward for Arab Merchant missions. I have played every tribe and it seems that 200 - 250 is the limit of the reward for caravan missions. As a result, it is far more efficient to send quick missions to nearby neighbors than to organize long-distance to, say, the Eastern Roman Empire.


Still, excellent job - I'm still enjoying it!

Yeah, I fooled around with that, VM, but I couldn't get any better results. Of course, the Arab Merchant units are also good for exploring enemy territory.

Hello I am arab too!

Love themod!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!!

I gave it a try last night
very good surprise
congratulations

Gordon Farrell said:

Yeah, I fooled around with that, VM, but I couldn't get any better results. Of course, the Arab Merchant units are also good for exploring enemy territory.

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No problem, I'm not having any financial difficulty in the least - well, as long as I have Camel Grazing - and have financially dominated the game several times. My new goal is conquest. It's slow going, but the Beduin Horsemen are PERFECT for countering those pesky Imperial Horse Archers

That's odd. It isn't working for me. I followed your instructions and dropped the folder into the Warlords Mods folder, but once I go to the 'PLAY A SCENARIO' screen it's not even appearing. What should I do?

Crazy Civ: I don't know what to tell you. Make sure you're using the Warlords CD P), and make sure you've updated to the latest patch.

alireza and Opuhara: Welcome aboard! I'd love to hear how your playthroughs go -- what civs you play, and how your interaction with the other groups plays out! Keep me posted!

how to describe this mod... simply incredible! I am out of words to explain how well done this mod was. Just from playing you can tell that the research and dedication you put into the time period is simply amazing. Through this, i too have acquired quite an interest in the pre-islam Arabia. A masterpiece of a mod, good job.

Hey ewu.7waker -- Thanks for your warm words! Keep me posted on your progress as you plat the game... I'd love to hear how it's going for you!

A bit of related news:

I just discovered that the Arabian-themed game I worked on for BreakAway Games was finally released in the Middle East. I've got this link for those of you who might want to check it out:

http://www.arabianlords.com/Public/main_public_master.aspx

Pretty cool looking, huh?

This sounds like an amazing scenario. Is anyone willing to convert this to work with Beyond the Sword?

Farsight said:

This sounds like an amazing scenario. Is anyone willing to convert this to work with Beyond the Sword?

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Ohh, I also read through the thread after embryodead mentioned it in SoI
Didn't want to bump it myself, as I don't see much chance to be upgraded to BtS.
But I very much agree, this is a great looking mod! DLed it and will try in a few days

Apologies for resurrecting an ancient thread, but this looks to be a really good mod and I don't want to see it completely forgotten. I just bought Civ4 a month ago so all this old stuff is still brand new and shiny to me.

Personally, I'm not sure what benefit making this available for the BtS expansion would have (Update: A BtS update might solve the game's endgame slowdown problems); I'm pretty sure anyone with BtS who cares enough about the game to download and play mods will also have Warlords.

One thing that really impresses me about this mod is that it's possible to play map script generated maps with this mod, including third party map scripts. If you want the sense of exploring an unknown exotic land, it's possible with this mod.

Update The mod works fine with randomly generated maps, and the default map works when playing "Play a scenario", but breaks when "custom scenario" is used. Be sure not to select "custom scenario" to play this mod's default map.

Thanks for digging this up, must have missed this mod back then. I hope its playable with the last Warlords patch. Would you not be 'the' person to make a desert map script for it

Btw your avatar map looks really really good. Its created by the Totestra script i assume?

Freakwave said:

Thanks for digging this up, must have missed this mod back then. I hope its playable with the last Warlords patch. Would you not be 'the' person to make a desert map script for it

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It's something I'm thinking about, but I'm not about to commit to anything yet. I would like to play the mod out a few times first to get a sense of its feel before making a random map script for it.

Probably, looking at the starts, we probably want to create a large desert area with a few isolated islands of resources where the desert tribes start, as well as possibly a couple of areas near the edge of the map for the Egyptians and the Persians. We need to have some water on the map for spear fishing and what not, as well as some desert resources for the tribes to use.

If I were to do this with plate tectonics, I would create an entire huge world with plate tectonics, then zoom in on a single continent, which I would then make mostly desert. The problem with a plate tectonic approach is that while it's very Earthlike, it's quite random and hard to control; forcing a tectonic map to have roughly the same dynamics between the desert tribes and the Egyptians/Persians/Turks seems to be difficult.

In the meantime, Totestra with a large or huge map, fewer islands, Arid climate, low sea level, allow Pangaeas, and everyone starting on the same landmass (I don't think this mod has ocean travel techs) should work pretty well.

Btw your avatar map looks really really good. Its created by the Totestra script i assume?

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Thank you. It's a typical landform created by PerfectWorld/Totestra and it, as you can see, looks remarkably Earthlike.

As an aside, this mod was never made for a custom map, so the pull-down list of civilizations includes includes a number of civilizations which only the AI plays in the official Arabian scenario; the list also doesn't include all of the desert tribes. I'm not sure how I would fix that with a map script.

Doing some more research, when playing a random map, the game will not work very well if one just chooses random players for all of the starts. Each player has to be chosen, and there are only seven total playable civs who are in the official scenario map. Here are the five players which are suitable for human starts:

• Amir Jafna (Russian)
• Empress Zenobia (Palmyran)
• Queen Bilqis (Spanish)
• King Yada'il (Russian)
• Ragnar (Viking/Scandinavian; this is actually an AI-only player in the scenario's official map)

Other AI-only players in the official map are also available for starts in the random map:

• Emperor Ashurbanipal
• Tuthmosis III

These players have a different tech tree which is certainly not balanced when playing a random map.

Other players either will lost upon game start, or are incomplete (such as being a "barbarian" civ whose diplomacy leaderhead is Sid Meier). The Amir Imru, Queen Makeda, Amir Julands, Shayk Abd, and Kind Ma'in players are not available on a random map.

This in mind, yes, the game works with a random map, but for only up to five players.

Testing random maps generated for LoAA, I discovered some issues which I have now fixed. I have cleaned up CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml so that only the same nine tribes playable by the human are available in random maps, with the same tech tree that the scenario has.

Attached is the file. To use:

• Get 7 zip at http://7-zip.org
• Make a backup of the CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml file
• Exact the .7z file here in the "Warlords/Mods/Ancient Arabia/Assets/XML/Civilizations/" folder. Make sure not to create a CIV4CivilizationInfos sub-directory; the file CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml needs to be replaced.

This will overwrite CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml with a version that will correctly generate starts for all nine desert tribes with random maps, and make no other starts. If a given random map has more than nine players, some tribes will be played more than once. Best to keep the number of players to nine or less.

Here's how I would play a random map with it:

• Use an arid map. Totestra (link in my sig) has expanded Perfect world to support the "arid" climate setting.
• Have everyone start on the same land mass. While LoAA does allow Sinbad to sail the seven oceans, all of the tribes start on the same land mass in the scenario's official map; Totestra has a setting to have everyone start on the same landmass.
• Have a map with a lot of land. LoAA may not be a mod for naval playing. Totestra has a setting for lowering the sea level
• I would use the following Totestra settings: fewer islands, Arid climate, low sea level, allow Pangaeas, resources evenly spread (or "lots of resources"), and everyone starting on the same landmass.

(Yeah, I know this is a shameless plug, but I don't know of anyone else who has made Perfect World playable with a mod for mostly land-based civs on arid land)

I have no idea if this CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml file breaks the preset scenario map. I don't think so; map settings should override bPlayable and bAIPlayable in the XML, but this has not been tested.

Next: Let Gordon Farrell know what I have done DONE He now works for Alternate Worlds: http://alternate-worlds.com/

- Sam

P.S. I have verified the "no windmills with early machinery" bug reported earlier in this thread. Also, random maps don't have three LoAA-specific resources on them (game can still be won) and, most annoyingly, the endgame is really slow between turns.

Talking to myself again, but I have fixed the windmill bug in LoAA; workers now build windmills after getting the "early machinery" tech.

The file LoAA-patch1.zip fixes two issues with LoAA:

• Random maps are fixed. With the file, all nine tribes playable by the human are available in random maps, with the same tech tree that the scenario has.
• Workers can now build windmills

To use:

• Make a backup of the Ancient Arabia directory tree
• Extract the .zip file in the "Warlords/Mods/" folder, where the "Ancient Arabia" directory is located. Make sure to overwrite files in this directory.

Nice!
Do you think about upgrading this to BtS?