Generic civilization Load screen & narration

CaptainPatch

Lifelong gamer
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Sep 6, 2007
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One of the options you have at the beginning is to name both your ruler's name and the name of your hypothetical civilization. [Which is kind of cool I think. I would sort of prefer to design my unique military unit and unique building, but I recognize creating that mechanism would require a LOT of work.]

Having created my "unique" civilization (by essentially cloning one of available pre-packaged civs provided), you then have to sit through that wonderful narration that praises -- not you and your aspiring hypothetical civilization, but rather the ruler and civilization that you cloned. Sort of undercuts the whole mood og having "created" a unique civilization.

I know that this is an incredibly trivial matter that doesn't affect gameplay one iota. Buuutttttt, would it be all that difficult to create a Load sequence that doesn't identify the civilization that you supplanted? Just some moving speech that doesn't name names -- because there's no way to smoothly integrate a speech emulator that pronounces _any_ possible name that thousands of players would have created -- but is long enough to fill up the time before the Load is complete. Something like,

"Oh, great and magnificent ruler! You who have been at the helm of this Ship of State, steering we, your people, through the trials and tribulations of surviving this unpredictable world. We owe everything we value to you, our protector and leader, yada, yada, yada." I'm sure you grasp the idea.

Anyway, I think for those players that do design their "unique" civilizations and name their rulers, this would be at least slightly more pleasant than what we have now.
 
You can do this in modding. It takes a bit of work to learn, but if you google stuff on how to mod civ, everything in here is possible. The reason it takes a while is because it is actually a lot of work. I think you can just play no speech though, and I'm guessing there's probably a way to put in a speech of your own.

At least, I hope that if I play A Mod of Ice and Fire, that I don't get the Mongol load speech for the Dothraki (never tried a mod because of mac issues, sadly). That would be kind of annoying, but I'm guessing there's a way you could record and put in your own initial speech if you wanted to.
 
Never understood the details on How To Mod 101. I understand the theories of programming, but I imagine doing coding is rather esoteric. That is, a modder would have to be competent and confident when doing programming. Neither term describes me. I'm lucky just knowing how to turn the PC and operating a mouse and keyboard simultaneously.

Anyway, I was actually just hoping someone at Firaxis picked up on the idea.
 
http://kael.civfanatics.net/files/ModdersGuide.pdf

This looks intimidating at first, but I tried it and was starting to pick it up pretty quickly before I temporarily stopped because of school. The guide is pretty well written, and if the starting part just confuses you, go straight to page 14 to start up "creating a mod" for a list of pretty clear instructions. As you go on you'll start to learn what different files in the game do and the general format of how to create stuff.

I'd seriously recommend trying it, because it really isn't that hard to learn. This guide is long, but that's because it covers basically everything you may ever want to do with Civ from what I can tell, and most of it you won't need. It's also very well organized, so you can flip to whatever chapter you want and start from there once you get the basics of the program figured out.
 
I Find XML modding to be extremly easy to grasp on, and I've created quite a few things for myself this way. ONce you know the patterns of error you can also very easily debug stuff.
 
Hm. I wonder what William Morgan Sheppard's going rate is to record one of these for you...
 
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