Designing a Mod : Ancient Mediterranean/Roman Empire

hannurabi

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Aug 29, 2005
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I'm planning a total conversation mod for CivDOS. I write down my idea here so that I can get comments/thoughts and I won't forget my ideas:lol:

The mod will have changed game rules and new unit graphics. It is played on specially created scenario map and the goal is to become ruler of Mediterranean by Conquest or by being declared as Pope.

List of Buildings:

Building (replaced building) [special info]
  • Granary
  • Barracks
  • Monument (Temple)
  • Temple (Colosseum)
  • Colosseum (Cathedral)
  • Marketplace
  • Coin Mint (Bank)
  • Library
  • Academy (University)
  • Courthouse
  • Aqueduct
  • City Walls [expensive to produce but no maintenance cost, very important early game against barbarians]
  • Code of Law... (Mass Transit) ["social policy" building. Social policy building is cheap to produce but expensive to maintain. Code of Law removes some Injustice* from city]
  • Palace
  • Forge (Factory)
  • Slave Market/ Slavery (Power Plant) [ High injustice* levels ]
  • Work Service (Hydro Plant) [removes some injustice* and gives extra production]
  • Civil Service (Mfg Plant) [effective but expensive to maintain "social policy"]
  • Slave Freedom Policy (Recycling Center) [removes some injustice*]

* Mod will apply the no pollution patch by DarkPanda. However the patch doesn't remove the unhappiness by pollution, so the in the mod the pollution is replaced by "injustice of slavery" which causes some unhappiness. (If I'm not mistaken.)

List of Wonders

Wonder (replaced wonder) [info]
  • Hanging Gardens
  • Oracle
  • Temple of Salomon (Bach Cathedral)
  • Flavian Amphitheatre (Michelangelo's Chapel)
  • Pyramids
  • Colossus
  • Plato's Academy (Isaac Newton's college)
  • Hanno the Navagator's voyage (Magellans)
  • Great Library
  • The Lighthouse
  • Hadrian Wall (Great Wall)
  • Archimedes' workshop (Darwin's Voyage)
  • Parthenon (Shakespeare's theatre)
  • Apostolic Palace (Apollo Program)
  • Pax Romana (United Nations)
  • Common Citizenship (Women's suffrage)
  • Common Work Service (Hoover Dam)
  • Temple of Artemis (Cure for Cancer)

List of Units:
Unit (replaced unit) A-D-M [info]
  • Militia 1-1-1 [cheap unit for emergencies]
  • Phalanx 4-4-1 [defencive unit that can also wipe out attacking units]
  • Nomad Raider (Cavalry) 3-1-3 [barbarian horsemen are very fast and dangerous during early game]
  • Axemen (Legion) 4-2-1 [unit produced in barbarian cities, dangerous during early game]
  • Chariot 3-1-2 [early offensive unit]
  • Archer (Catapult) 1-2-1 [ main defence unit]
  • Horse Archers (Knights) 6-3-3 [ attila the hun will arrive with lot of these near end game]
  • Elephant 8-4-1 [unique unit for carthge. This unit cannot be researched but at start of the scenario few carthagean cities are set to produce these units. Human player may decide to keep producing these units and never change the production of those cities. Expensive but strong unit]
  • Legion (Riflemen) 6-4-1 [ Strong and relative cheap unit]
  • Catapult (Bomber) 8-0-1 [Ignores walls when attacks city, no defence]
  • Ballista (Artillery) 6-0-1 [Ignores walls when attacks city, no defence]
  • Light Cavalry (4-1-3) [Fast attacking unit]
  • Heavy Cavalry (7-4-2) [ Strong and expensive unit that becomes available near the end of the tech tree]
  • Swordmen (Musketeers) 5-1-1 [good early attacking unit]
  • Carvel (Trireme) [early ship, may sink at open sea]
  • Penteconter (Sail)
  • Bireme (Frigade)
  • Trireme (Ironclad)
  • Quadireme (Cruiser)
  • Merchantman (Transport) [good for transporting units]
  • Greek Fire (Submarine) [slow unit, strong attack, poor defence, can only attack other ships]

Some game concepts:

Hun army:
In the eastern europe there will be a special terrain called steppe. Steppe has very high movement cost and it will take hundreds of turns to get across. But once the Huns (dozens of horse archers) have come out of Steppes, you better have you defense lines well prepared. I haven't yet tested if this concept works, maybe the AI will delete units or gets lost in steppes.

Church Council:
The spaceship is replaced by the Church Council. Instead of spaceship parts you build Cardinals and Priests so you can launch the Council. Once the Council is finished to select you as the Pope, you win the game.

List of Civilizations:
  • Rome
  • Carthage
  • Egypt
  • Babylon
  • Greeks
  • Minor nations (Huns,Spartans,Celts)
  • Macedonians or Hittites
  • Barbarians [ Germanic tribes, Thracians, Numidians, Armenians, etc

---

Now I only have to create the mod (graphics, map,texts,hex editing... lot of work):)
 
Good luck! remember that Roman Legions were building roads so good if Legions could build road also :)
Hehehe I assume the computer AI will fortify a lot of Swordmen as for them it is a Muskeeters :)

Good luck!
 
It's possible to change the AI role of the unit.
As for legions to build roads, it might be more difficult change to make.
 
I'm impressed by the amount of thought you have put in there already! :) since the moment I extracted my first PIC, I have had an idea for a total conversion mod of my own, but it is really still in the boxes, too early to mention anything right now...
Anyway, a huge amount of work coming your way! I'll try to support you as possible, and good luck!
 
The Tech Tree is the backbone of the mod design. Here is the very first version of the mod's tech tree. It might have mistakes and I might have forgotten something, but it does give some insight how the mod will be.

I will probably create some small changes to it while I progress creating the mod.

Some notes:
-I'm planning the Christianity to be a game changing tech that cancels many wonders, but allows a path to Church Council victory.
-I tried to create different tech paths, for different strategies.
 

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List of Terrains: ( Food-Production-Trade) (Irrigation Food+,Mine Prod.+,Road Trade+)(Bonus/Effect) (Special Info)
  • Plains (1-1-0) (1,1,1) (Horse/Production)
  • Fertile Soil (2-0-0) (3,1,1) (Wine/Trade)
  • Grassland (2-0/1-0) (2,1,1) (None)
  • Forest (1-2-0) (Grassland,-,0) (Game/Food)
  • Hills (1-1-0) (1,3,0) (Iron/Production)
  • Mountain (0-1-0) (-,1,0) (Gold/Trade) (Impassable, extremely high movement cost)
  • Dry Hills (0-2-0) (-,3,0) (Copper/Production)
  • Desert (0-1-0) (1,1,0) (Oasis/Food)
  • Light Forest (2-1-0) (Fertile Soil,-,0) (Olive oil/Trade)
  • Heavy Forest (0-3-0) (Plains,-,0) (Prime Timber /Production)
  • Ocean (1-0-2) (-,-,-) (Fish/Food)
  • River (2-0/1-1) (2,-,0) (None)
 
perhaps instead of Babylon you could put Parthians who were a pain in the behind for the romans

how about with irrigation: Heavy forest-->forest-->light forest-->grassland/plains ?

You have a good concept, keep it up!
 
Actually I think I'll create 14 Civilizations to pick to play on the Europe/Mediterranean map ("Play the Earth" option in the main menu).

Possible list of Civs:
  1. Romans
  2. Carthage /Phoenicians
  3. Greeks
  4. Egypt
  5. Babylon
  6. Persians / Parthians
  7. Hittites
  8. Celts
  9. Macedonians
  10. Etruscans
  11. Huns
  12. Iberians
  13. Armenians
  14. Hebrews

Addition to this there will be various save game scenarios with above mentioned hun invasion event and some preset cities.

---

how about with irrigation: Heavy forest-->forest-->light forest-->grassland/plains ?

Nice thinking. My idea was that Heavy forests represents northern forests, and light forest are present in warm mediterranean climate zone etc. I think I'll keep it that way, but who knows how it will end up.
 
The raw version of the map. I will greatly reduce the amount of hills for the final version.



The new terrain graphics need to be redone. I wasn't too successful at first try. Also, the dry hill terrain looks wrong in game:
 

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Impressive! Although as a Frenchie, I can't help but notice the approximation of the Brittany coast... :)
I plan to release JCivED 0.0.14a tomorrow, that will feature an "map import" function that supports plain text format or pictures... this should make it easier to draw geography from arbitrary pictures or maps (if you feel like using it).

For the modded terrain issue, it looks like a palette problem. I noticed in the past that several colors cannot be used freely, as CIV will dynamically change their value, usually for animations.
 
The map is 'stolen' from the Civ4 mod called Pie's Ancient Europe. I looked for various maps and this one seemed to be most fitting.

For the palette, I had even worse results with unit graphics. Could you give me for example a mini-tutorial for how to cast the SP257 and SPRITES pics to which palettes? So that the color transparency won't get corrupted.
 

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try coloring dry hills with yellow-ish color so that they stand out more
also what is fertile soil & grassland on the map?
 
Really creative ideas, hannurabi!

Thanks. It's interesting to think how the civ1 features can be used in non conventional ways.

try coloring dry hills with yellow-ish color so that they stand out more
also what is fertile soil & grassland on the map?

I'm certainly not a graphic artist. I find this quite challenging. If anyone wants to help to create some graphics, go ahead.

This is all still heavily work in progress and I hope to manage to get better results:


Dry hills look now better, although they could be still better. Iron is ok, but wine bottle failed for some reason. It looked better in JCived. And i still have some problems with unit graphics.

Again creating graphics is quite slow, some help would be nice if anyone is that interested. If not, then I just do it all myself, but it takes little bit longer.
 

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Just a word before I start getting into the details for PIC edition: it is inherently tricky get everything right, because of the way CIV manages the mix of PIC and PAL files.

Through trial and error (when working on this), I came to the conclusion that the PAL file used for displaying the main game screen (map screen) is SP256.PAL. All PICs used for the main screen (such as TER257.PIC and SP257.PIC) will get embedded palettes replaced with SP256.PAL.

So, as a temporary solution, when you design new units with your own program and/or JCivED, the final steps should be:
  • open your art in JCivED
  • import SP256.PAL and "cast" your image on it
  • export your JCivED PIC's palette as SP256.PAL (be sure to keep a backup)
  • then export your JCivED PIC as the replacement PIC file (SP257.PIC for units, TER257.PIC for terrain)

I am not sure I will have the time to write and post a proper tutorial before next week, though... I suggest you try the above and let me know how it goes in the meantime.
 
Hun army:
In the eastern europe there will be a special terrain called steppe. Steppe has very high movement cost and it will take hundreds of turns to get across. But once the Huns (dozens of horse archers) have come out of Steppes, you better have you defense lines well prepared. I haven't yet tested if this concept works, maybe the AI will delete units or gets lost in steppes.

Tested this, and I believe it does somewhat work. AI units may have some problems finding their way out of high movement cost terrain, but they will eventually enter the 'main map'. They won't however all come at once, they come few units at time it seems, which creates interesting nomad invasion events.

Other AIs may move some units to the 'steppe' terrain, which is unwanted behavior, but I guess this concept will work well enough.
 
maybe I can help on the graphics, tell me what you want.

You can see the list of different things in this thread.

So far I have made some terrain graphics and tried to make units, but they for some reason failed to show right in the game. Unit graphics would be very helpful, since it's hard to me to draw for example good looking archer icon just with 16x16 pixels.

You can also create buildings, wonders, leader heads and tech icons. Also the church council picture is needed (SPACEST.PIC). And in the CITYPIX1.pic pictures have to look like ancient cities.
 
Today I've been mostly doing hex editing:lol: And only once I managed to corrupt the exe, but managed also to fix it :)

I created new tech tree and changed terrain,unit and building stats. There's still need to re-balance some or many values but the mod is forming a shape.

And of course lot of graphical and text changes are still not made.
 

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