Phungus is missing for a long time already, I remember when I downloaded this for the first time and the community was still alive. I remember updating to lor 0.9.9b and losing Cleopatra, Kim Jong Il, Hitler and the Polish Nation. It's sad he didn't continue this project.
The LoR Balance Tweaks tried to make it alive again but it seems it stopped too. I wasn't really interested in LoR tweaks as I didn't agree with most changes made to the game, but eventually with some healthy discussions we could agree enough for me to try it.
My dream is to start modding on LoR, but I'm still a moron on programming stuff, and my time is depleted trying to focus on college. At least I'm learning how to program on college, so I
AM going to mod LoR eventually (and don't take me as a stupid guy who doesn't care for anyone, but I really don't care if the community will be alive again or not, I play this game every week since before LoR 0.9.9b, and I will make it better for me and my friends who play with me). Actually I think this uncaringness will be better in the first stages of modding, as our community is reduced to long standing Imp. Knoedel, and some players who pop here and there eventually.
As of now the only thing I already edited was the Random Events files, and I may upload them here if anyone wants.
The idea behind editing the Random Events was the total mess the creators made when doing this stuff. But before explaining why, I'll give a brief explanation to the exactly thing they messed with.
Random Events, for now on REs, as explained in here
Random Events List, have two important numbers related to the chances they'll happen in game. The first is the Active number, and the second is the Weight number.
Active number is a percentage number (so ranging from 0 to 100) that will be thrown at the beginning of the game to check if this specific RE will be part of the possible REs to happen in this game. It's only checked once in the beginning of every game. It seems this is to randomize more the REs, so some events will occur only in certain games and not in all of them.
Weight number is any number between -1 and infinite. The weight is checked when a RE occurs. Imagine I'm on turn 200 and the check to see if I'll have a RE this turn returns positive, then the game will sum all possible events' weights and throw a dice (between 0 and the total) to see which one will happen, the bigger the weight the more chances this RE will occur instead of the others. -1 means it's going to happen any time the conditions are met (even if you shouldn't get a RE this turn). It's mostly used for quests being completed.
So the idea is that Active randomize the world and Weight gives a proper distribution to possible events. The mess comes exactly when the Active and Weight are so random that it makes false scenarios to the games:
- Similar events doesn't have the same weight;
- Rarely you have 100% active events, so there are games which won't have burning forests, mine collapses and partisans on burned cities;
- Some events have a so reduced Active number that you may never see them (the Noble Knights Quest have 15%)
But these are not the only things that are messed, there are events which only happen in Single Player, and most events only happen a single time for the whole world (and normally these are the good ones, as most of the bad ones can happen multiple times). So it actually favors the tech leader, as he unlocks the possibilities of good REs earlier, and when they happen, they can't happen anymore to anyone. And imagine now you don't have good REs available (and in the beginning this is common), so when a RE triggers this turn, it'll choose between road wash, forest fire or mine collapsing.
I remember a game I played with a friend where the Aztec started on a big island not connected to the rest of the Old World and it shared the archipelago with the Indians. Both discovered all the religions, and then the Aztec conquered the indians and got all religions. So it's obvious he became the tech leader for the rest of the game, and we only started seeing good events on the middle of the game, and they were mostly restricted to getting a small amount of gold (there are a lot of these). The aztec OTOH had unbeatable units, because he got all quests and good events.
Of course this is less unfair when you play an easy difficulty for your playing skills, on smaller maps and with a fast or normal gameplay speed, but as I stated before I like playing on Huge and Marathon, and I'm already playing on Deity for a long time.
My idea of modding is to make the game more realistic focusing on Huge, Marathon and the Totestra mapgen (a better mapgen based on Perfect World, which creates the closest to a real situation, with tectonics, air currents, different altitudes and mountain ranges).
So if anyone wants my modified REs I may post them here, and it's really easy to put them on your game, you just have to put the two files on the Events folder of LoR/Assets/XML, and preferably save a backup of the original ones if something wrong happens. These are the CIV4EventInfos.xml and CIV4EventTriggerInfos.xml. And I have a changelog to show everything I changed from the original to the modified one.
I hope we may make this project alive again. But my most desired change is to make the Trade Routes spreading faster, so we may play on bigger then Huge maps with lots of civs without the lag, but for this I have to change the DLL, so this will take time to understand.