Typhlomence's Civilizations

Yeah, CSes will only gift units that come later than the game's starting era. So you'll never see a CS gifting Jaguars, Pathfinders, or even Incubators, because they're all technically Ancient Era.
 
Well if that's the case, then there shouldn't be too much trouble giving Rosalina a dummy scout that upgrades to the Starshroom. I'll just have to add a note saying that only Scouts that she builds can upgrade - it's probably not worth it to use some Lua trickery to automatically set other scouts she receives to the dummy type (and vice-versa), unless it's really simple to do.
There are all kinds of things you could do with them. The spaceship production bonus is a neat idea, although rather late game, so not sure if you'd like them to do something else as well. They could always add science, which would be an interesting quirk. Or you could have effects like "for every 10 star bits, recon units you control get +1 vision range".
I will have a think about this since there's so many interesting possibilities as you say. :)
 
:mischief:
Yeah, when I saw it was over a month since I posted in here I realised that I'd been procrastinating on Bowser for far too long... Same thing happened with Walmington-on-Sea, too. I'm sorry about that.

I did make one change to the UA - I thought 2% increase to military unit production per foreign city was too small, so I increased it to 5%. That way Bowser doesn't have to conquer and keep as many foreign cities to get a decent increase to military production (but there's no reason to stop, either - unless you have happiness problems).

But I will say that apart from testing he's probably quite usable now, as I don't think there's really anything else gameplay-wise I need to do. Probably just a bit of tidying-up and polish to do now.

One thing I will mention, though: from Ryoga's Unique Cultural Influence mod (I'll also have support for this in my civilizations from now on) I realised that I might be able to have some unique diplomacy responses depending on who the player was playing as. Of course, for Bowser, I was mostly aiming to have some unique responses if the player was playing as Princess Peach with Nucleotyde's Mushroom Kingdom civilization.

So that's what I've been working on tonight. I've got direct text replacement working like in Ryoga's mod, but I also tried to replace the Response entries in Diplomacy_Responses as well - I thought that would be a better way to do things than replace line-by-line if I wanted a whole new set of responses for something (e.g. Bowser's first greeting to Peach). But that's not working right now. That wasn't working, but not because the function was wrong - there was a mistake in my Diplomacy_Responses XML definitions. I fixed that and both functions work fine (and I confirmed that the new greeting appears if you play as Peach).
Spoiler The old issue :
The function I have is this:
Code:
-- This function replaces a reference to a set of diplomacy responses (i.e. changing the refernences in the Diplomacy_Responses table)
function ChangeDiplomacyReference(targetReference, newReference)
	print("Currently changing " .. targetReference .. " to " .. newReference .. "...");
	-- We can't always assume that the references exist, so therefore we need to check if they do first
	local reference;
	for _ in DB.Query("SELECT Response FROM Diplomacy_Responses WHERE Response= '" .. targetReference .. "'") do reference = _.Response end
	if reference then
		print(targetReference .. " exists; now changing it to the new reference...");
		for _ in DB.Query("UPDATE Diplomacy_Responses SET Response = '" .. newReference .. "' WHERE Response='" .. targetReference .. "'") do end
		print("Reference change complete!");
	else
		print(targetReference .. " doesn't exist therefore we cannot replace it with a new reference.");
	end
end

And I call it with lines like this (I included the % since that's how it appears in the definition in Diplomacy_Responses):
Code:
ChangeDiplomacyReference("TXT_KEY_LEADER_BOWSER_FIRSTGREETING%", "TXT_KEY_LEADER_BOWSER_PEACH_FIRSTGREETING%");

However, it doesn't work and I just get a load of messages in the log saying that "[targetReference] doesn't exist"... and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong there. I might try selecting by the Response_Type rather than the Response directly tomorrow, but other than that I don't know why it's not working. Am I querying the Diplomacy_Responses table wrong, should I discard the "%", or something else?

This is definitely not an important issue so if no one knows the answer I'll simply use the other method, it'll just be a bit more tedious (for that reason anyway, I won't be having that many unique responses... I've faffed around enough with Bowser as it is).

I won't be doing a truck-load of unique responses since I want to test and release sometime soon, but I thought it would be a nice touch. :)

---------------------------------------

I will say too that I did some tidying up with the released Walmington-on-Sea civilization, as well. That includes incorporating KyteM's Dynamic Cultural Overview and compatibility with UCI, as well as some Lua optimisations. I'll probably test and release that soon.
 
:mischief:
Yeah, when I saw it was over a month since I posted in here I realised that I'd been procrastinating on Bowser for far too long... Same thing happened with Walmington-on-Sea, too. I'm sorry about that.

No worries -- I always fall into the same trap, myself! My own civs seem to take about five or six months to complete... >__<;;

One thing I will mention, though: from Ryoga's Unique Cultural Influence mod (I'll also have support for this in my civilizations from now on) I realised that I might be able to have some unique diplomacy responses depending on who the player was playing as. Of course, for Bowser, I was mostly aiming to have some unique responses if the player was playing as Princess Peach with Nucleotyde's Mushroom Kingdom civilization.

So that's what I've been working on tonight. I've got direct text replacement working like in Ryoga's mod, but I also tried to replace the Response entries in Diplomacy_Responses as well - I thought that would be a better way to do things than replace line-by-line if I wanted a whole new set of responses for something (e.g. Bowser's first greeting to Peach). But that's not working right now. That wasn't working, but not because the function was wrong - there was a mistake in my Diplomacy_Responses XML definitions. I fixed that and both functions work fine (and I confirmed that the new greeting appears if you play as Peach).
Spoiler The old issue :
The function I have is this:
Code:
-- This function replaces a reference to a set of diplomacy responses (i.e. changing the refernences in the Diplomacy_Responses table)
function ChangeDiplomacyReference(targetReference, newReference)
	print("Currently changing " .. targetReference .. " to " .. newReference .. "...");
	-- We can't always assume that the references exist, so therefore we need to check if they do first
	local reference;
	for _ in DB.Query("SELECT Response FROM Diplomacy_Responses WHERE Response= '" .. targetReference .. "'") do reference = _.Response end
	if reference then
		print(targetReference .. " exists; now changing it to the new reference...");
		for _ in DB.Query("UPDATE Diplomacy_Responses SET Response = '" .. newReference .. "' WHERE Response='" .. targetReference .. "'") do end
		print("Reference change complete!");
	else
		print(targetReference .. " doesn't exist therefore we cannot replace it with a new reference.");
	end
end

And I call it with lines like this (I included the % since that's how it appears in the definition in Diplomacy_Responses):
Code:
ChangeDiplomacyReference("TXT_KEY_LEADER_BOWSER_FIRSTGREETING%", "TXT_KEY_LEADER_BOWSER_PEACH_FIRSTGREETING%");

However, it doesn't work and I just get a load of messages in the log saying that "[targetReference] doesn't exist"... and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong there. I might try selecting by the Response_Type rather than the Response directly tomorrow, but other than that I don't know why it's not working. Am I querying the Diplomacy_Responses table wrong, should I discard the "%", or something else?

This is definitely not an important issue so if no one knows the answer I'll simply use the other method, it'll just be a bit more tedious (for that reason anyway, I won't be having that many unique responses... I've faffed around enough with Bowser as it is).

I won't be doing a truck-load of unique responses since I want to test and release sometime soon, but I thought it would be a nice touch. :)

I don't really know enough about how the code functions to offer advice, but it is an interesting idea. I may have to experiment with doing something similar in the future, although possibly in limited cases. (In Phantasmagoria of Dimension Dream, Yumemi has a set of stock responses when she defeats opponents in the beginning of the game -- "Oh, a real witch? How wonderful!" -- so they could be interesting to incorporate as unique greetings for certain fantasy-oriented civs. :3) I'll be curious to see how it works out once you publish the civ!
 
I don't really know enough about how the code functions to offer advice, but it is an interesting idea. I may have to experiment with doing something similar in the future, although possibly in limited cases. (In Phantasmagoria of Dimension Dream, Yumemi has a set of stock responses when she defeats opponents in the beginning of the game -- "Oh, a real witch? How wonderful!" -- so they could be interesting to incorporate as unique greetings for certain fantasy-oriented civs. :3) I'll be curious to see how it works out once you publish the civ!

I agree, you should probably keep it to limited cases (and limited lines) unless you like the tedium of coding in all the replacements you want to make! The replacements I'm doing have are one or two lines that are more likely to be seen, such as greetings and war declarations. Since I'm only planning on doing a few other Mario civilizations, Bowser will have some things to say to some non-Mario civilizations as well! For example, I don't think he'll agree when Cirno says she's the strongest... :p

With Peach though, it makes sense to have a lot of replacements (to me anyway). Before I started this attempt at unique responses I deliberately did not mention Peach at all in Bowser's diplomacy text since I would expect that Peach vs Bowser would be a common match-up, and thus it would be a bit weird of Bowser to talk about Peach when you're playing as her.

Granted, I have no idea whether the way I'm doing it is the most efficient way of doing so - I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't - but it seems to work so I'm sticking with it! You'll probably cringe when you look at it... :blush: (and I don't mind if you or anyone else does so - I had to look at someone else's code in order to implement this after all.)

One other thing I did think of trying when doing this was to have some unique dialog if you're playing as a fellow villain, such as Dr. Eggman. I actually looked around at the available mods to see what villainous civilizations were available and have it coded in... but I've changed my mind about that. I feel it might be better to just merge most of that stuff back in to the regular diplomacy text and have Bowser refer to the player as a "fellow villain" if they're in good relations or have a declaration of friendship. What I had in the text originally was something to that effect anyway, so there's not that many unique lines I can actually add in my opinion, plus I probably don't feel like watching for new releases and adding them to the list of villainous civilizations in the code all the time... :crazyeye:

If any of you are interested at all, I counted these guys in the villain code. I wasn't going to include any real life civilizations since I felt that would be in bad taste.
Spoiler :

Dr. Eggman, Gendo Ikari, One Piece's World Government, the Daleks and Cybermen, Gilgamesh, the villains from City of Heroes, Senator Armstrong and Ocelot, Dr. Evil, and the evil guys from Middle Earth.

...Many of these I didn't even plan to play with at all (and are from things I've never watched/played), but I found them while looking around the workshop. No offense meant to any of the modders who made those, of course!
 
I'm sorry again for the lack of updates, but I have been really busy with other things lately and so haven't had much time to dedicate to getting Bowser finished.

But rest assured, I'm going to put a deadline on it and make sure it's out before the end of this year. I'm going on holiday to England tonight for around a month, and even though I'm stuck with my laptop, that should be good enough to let me finish the mod and move on to Rosalina. After all, I don't need a good graphics card just to test if Bowser works (which is all that's required, as well as getting the art up to a standard that I'm happy with).

So please hang in there bouncymisha, I want to get this done as much as you want to play with it! Same goes to anyone else who is lurking and waiting for this. :)
 
So please hang in there bouncymisha, I want to get this done as much as you want to play with it! Same goes to anyone else who is lurking and waiting for this. :)

It's no problem! I'm excited to see how Bowser turns out in the end, but I certainly don't want to rush things.

In the meantime, a thought occurred to me -- it's not directly applicable to your civs, but I figured I'd get your input on it. I was reading up on the various Mario Bros. kingdoms this morning, which lead me to think back to the mushroom patch improvement I made for my Marisa civ and wonder if I could make a mushroom patch bonus resource with a corresponding improvement graphic (farm? plantation? hrm...). Although I'm not very good at Blender, a pipe graphic isn't entirely unreasonable, since I'd just need to try to build it out of cylinders. So I was starting to wonder if there were any other improvements that could help make a "mushroom kingdom" kind of feel...
 
Well, if you want ideas as to what Mario-esque things can be used as improvements... I can definitely see pipes as an improvement that, for example, allows easy unit movement by allowing a unit on a pipe to move to any other pipe (sort of like airlifting), though I suppose you might want to limit the range so that they're not overpowered. Nucleotyde's Mushroom Kingdom civilization has the warp pipe as a building, specifically an Aqueduct replacement (which at least makes sense). They could also work as an improvement, though, especially as pipes are everywhere on the Mushroom World*.

As for other things... maybe the question mark blocks? In the games they most often yield coins and mushrooms, so they could perhaps improve Gold and Truffles/Mushroom Patch resources (since truffles are fungi as well :p). Maybe some other resources as well, since the blocks also yield other items in the games. And it would be easy to make an exclamation mark block - or indeed, any other type of block - if you made a question mark block improvement, though I'm not sure what different effects they could have. Perhaps giving units stationed on them a boost depending on the improved resource - for example, a unit on a Truffles/Mushroom Patch tile improved with a question mark block could get a boost in combat strength. There's also the Fortresses that could be used as an improvement as well, I suppose (maybe as something better than a Fort but inferior to the Great General's Citadel). I'll have to have a further look tomorrow to see what other things could be used.

*I'm not sure I want to remake it, though... While I haven't played with it yet myself, Nucleotyde at least seems to have put together a decent civilization design from what I can read from the description. I did want to update some of the art to fit with the new SMB civilizations I'm doing, and Nucleotyde did say it was "never completely finished", so I may do that. With their permission, of course.
 
Ooooh, there's some interesting ideas!

Admittedly, I wasn't thinking so much as to "what custom improvements could various Mario civs build?" so much as what sorts of models could be made to help make a map feel more "Mushroom Kingdom"-ish. There are some custom maps modelled after the various worlds in the Mario games, so it would be amusing to make a map feel more like a Mario world.

Two ideas that occurred to me -- one could replace Ancient Ruins with Question Mark Blocks, and Barbarian Camps with with the pipes. Forts and Citadels could potentially use models that look more like the forts from the Mario games. It would certainly give a Civ game a Mario feel! :D
 
Oh, I see - I misunderstood what you said a bit, sorry about that! I confess I haven't seen those maps you mentioned before, but it would be nice to make them more immersive with improvements, resources etc. based on things from SMB. :)

As I said on the first page, I'm just going to make a few Mario civilizations at the moment; it wasn't my intention to do a total conversion (or something close to one) since I don't feel I'm the right person for the job. I don't think that's what you're suggesting either but I don't mind helping out with what you want to do, as long as it's not modelling. :p
 
Oh, I see - I misunderstood what you said a bit, sorry about that! I confess I haven't seen those maps you mentioned before, but it would be nice to make them more immersive with improvements, resources etc. based on things from SMB. :)

No worries!

I once came across a SMB3 map pack here, and it seems there's a Super Mario World map here. I'm not sure how playable the maps are, but they did get me nostalgic. :p

As I said on the first page, I'm just going to make a few Mario civilizations at the moment; it wasn't my intention to do a total conversion (or something close to one) since I don't feel I'm the right person for the job. I don't think that's what you're suggesting either but I don't mind helping out with what you want to do, as long as it's not modelling. :p

I don't think I'd be up for a total conversion either -- it was more a product of thinking how unique improvements can really help accentuate the visual aspect of the game, and how littering a landscape with Mario-inspired features would make a "Mushroom Kingdom" feel, without necessarily needing to change anything else in the game. But since I'm really not familiar with any of the Mario games after SMB3, I figured you could just help me brainstorm ideas. :p

I think making a block model (with various textures), a pipe, and a fortress should be a good start, though!
 
Walmington-on-Sea has been updated. I thought it was about time I upload this. :p

Direct download Steam Workshop


  • Includes KyteM's Dynamic Cultural Overview.
  • Some slight tweaks in the diplomacy text, including compatibility for Ryoga's Unique Cultural Influence mod.
  • Some optimisations to the Lua code - Mainwaring's trait handler should only activate if he's actually in a game now.
  • Promotions for Home Guard Infantry are handled a bit differently - HGI units start with a "informative" promotion that is always present and the "ignore terrain cost" promotion is applied to the unit based upon the former's existence. This should allow both the unit to keep the "ignore terrain cost in friendly territory" promotion when it is upgraded (which will be implemented in a later update) and allow compatibility with mods that check for a UU's special promotions (I was thinking of Homura's special ability in Vice Virtuoso's PMMM pack specifically here).
  • Compatibility with Ethnic Units (will use the same units as England).
 
Sweet! I'm going to download this.
:D
 
Merry Christmas!

Unfortunately, I don't have a release for Bowser you can unwrap yet. However, I will give you something - a preview for the Dawn of Man style I decided on for the Mario civilizations.

Here's Bowser's...
Spoiler :

...and also, I had a go at one for Rosalina as well.
Spoiler :

It took me a while to do the right half in a way that I thought looked good, as I wanted the edge of the images to blend into each other. I know that part would be partially obscured by the DOM text but I still wanted to put in a showcase of the character's appearances in. :)
 
Happy New Year everyone! I should be able to sneak it in before it's the 2nd in England. :)

So, you might have remembered that I said I would have Bowser done by the end of 2014. Well... it's a bit after that now, but I can say that I feel he is done!

Right now I'm just making sure everything works properly, and I'll have to prepare all the images for release on the Steam Workshop*, but other that, I feel confident that he should be ready for release in the next few days. Of course, I have no idea if gameplay with him is good (and I welcome any feedback once you get your hands on him), but I'm going through an autoplay run via FireTuner right now and there don't seem to be any major errors - any Lua problems that have come up are simple typos.

Also I don't recall showing you what the diplomacy image looks like. Unfortunately, while there's plenty of excellent, high resolution images of Bowser on the Mario wiki, suitable images of Bowser's Castle were much harder to come by. I think what I chose works fine, though (It's from Mario Kart 7 if you were wondering why there's ramps :p):
Spoiler :

*Although I should say that the images I'll upload if he does release while I'm still on holiday will be placeholders. I don't think my laptop will be able to cut the mustard for screenshots of the unique units in action, and so that will have to wait until I get home.
 
Yey! Bowser is coming!
 
Yey! Bowser is coming!

Insert "winter is coming" meme reference here. :p

That said, Bowser definitely looks cool! It's going to be really fun once I can start mixing up all kinds of fantasy/fictional civs from different properties and see how weird the world gets. XD
 
Insert "winter is coming" meme reference here. :p

That said, Bowser definitely looks cool! It's going to be really fun once I can start mixing up all kinds of fantasy/fictional civs from different properties and see how weird the world gets. XD

Well, if Bowser gets his hands on some nukes, then winter of a sort may come (incidentally, I made Bowser not have a high tendency to build nukes, but he'll definitely use them if he has them). And you have the same idea as I have, bouncymisha - that's part of the reason I'm doing these fiction-based civilizations.

Speaking of Bowser... I've spent the whole of the day making sure that everything's prepared and working - I wouldn't be surprised if I did miss something, but I hope I haven't, because:

---------------------------------------

The Koopa Troop civilization, lead by Bowser Koopa - A civilization focused entirely around conquest, with an incentive to keep foreign cities under its control.
Direct download Steam Workshop


Spoiler :
UA: The Great Demon King Koopa - Resistance time is halved for conquered cities. Production +5% when constructing military units for every foreign city that the Koopa Troop has in their possession. It doesn't matter if they were obtained by war or as part of a peace/trade deal - as long as they have an original owner that is not the Koopa Troop, they will contribute to this effect.

UU1: Bowser Airship - Does not replace a regular unit under normal circumstances. A hovering unit that can travel over any terrain type, has an attack bonus against enemy armoured units, and can carry two missile units. Weak against fighters and anti-aircraft units.

UU2: Bullet Bill - Replaces the Guided Missile. It is more powerful than and available earlier than the regular unit.

This mod requries Brave New World. It also includes compatibility with Ryoga's Unique Cultural Influence mod and JFD's Piety and Prestige (hopefully!). Compatibility with Events and Decisions will come later.

Known issues:
  • Since I'm no modeller, the Bowser Airship and Bullet Bill are simply reskins of the Sky Fortress and Guided Missile, respectively. However, I did base the gasbag design on the Bowser Airship on something that appeared in a Mario game; kudos to you if you know what it is.
Thanks to:
  • SamBC and J_mie6 for their Icon Atlas templates;
  • Huitzul and cicero225 for their diplomacy texts I used to make my templates;
  • Tomatekh, whose Garamantes civilization I used as a reference for the invisible trait building;
  • Deliverator, for his unit reskin tutorial;
  • Vice Virtuoso, whose Nanoha civilization I used as a reference for this mod's options;
  • JFD, for Piety and Prestige and for the code used for compatibility with it; and
  • bouncymischa, who gave some advice for this and the forthcoming Rosalina/The Lumas civilization and who waited long enough for this one to be complete. :)
  • Oh, and I couldn't forget Nintendo for creating the Super Mario Bros. universe and the Mario Wiki for all the information and images I used for making this mod!

---------------------------------------

I do welcome you to have a look at the code for the unique diplomacy responses (don't spoil who Bowser has unique responses for, though), since it's something I'd like to see in other mods as well. I'm sure someone could do a cleaner job at it anyway. :p

And now I really should be heading to bed... I'll update the first post in the morning...
 
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