Simulacrum

PiTiFUL

Warlord
Joined
Nov 4, 2005
Messages
136
Location
Canada
Simulacrum

A Beyond the Sword 3.19 (3.17) MOD​

Welcome to my MOD thread. There are many very well made MODs out there, but they either do too much or too little or I just didnt like their direction, so I made one the way I wanted it. This was done strictly for my personal use but I figure I may as well release it so others may enjoy it too. This is primarly a graphics MOD with minimal gameplay changes, any gameplay changes are really just a little tweaking here and there. I started with avains Varietas Delectat 6.0 basic as my foundation and went to town from there. There are no new civs, leaders, wonders, techs(well a little tweak to one) yada yada. This is strictly an XML only MOD, no custom Python, DLL SDK stuff. Well enough spin, onto the guts of this thing.​


Graphical Changes eye candy stuff

Regiments and Formations, totally redone and includes different formations for, Sentry, Fortify, Idle and Combat.
Unit numbers as high as 10 in the early years and works its way down to 6 by the time you are building Infantry.
Single units with planes, vehicles and late game ships.

Spoiler :


Unique unit sets for all civs, over a hundred million new units :) Basically VD plus another 20 or so I added,
also I have almost completely rearranged all of the modern units to where I think they should be civ wise.
I have also gone thru and rescaled all the units, including in the view box.

Spoiler :


Spoiler :


I have also gone and rescaled all the improvements, farms, windmills,
forts, sawmills, fishing boats ect ect ect. I have also done some extensive
work on GeoModders Ethnic Citystyles. Reassigned the forts, removed the
skyscraper forest from forming in modern towns, removed some of his
unique fishing boats and a few other minor changes.

Spoiler :

Spoiler :


King Kongs Flags, added, and as per usual modified. Added some
different flags from other flag MODs and redid the civs color schems.

Spoiler :


GamePlay Changes

City minimum distance increased by 1. Trust me its way better

Nukes building damage increased to 90%. You will be blown into the stone age!

Global warming decreased to 2%. Global warming just plain sucks, IRL too

Stealth Destroyer is gone. Its so stealthy you'll never see it

Ditto on the Stealth Bomber. Its history.. I mean future... I mean gone

New Promotions, Arctic 1,2,3 Desert 1,2,3 - just like woodsman.

Navigation 1, added Combat 1 as an optional pre-req

Spaceship components production req increased - bigtime, idea is
to make it not about who builds it first but who can build it before
time runs out.

Stealth Tech has been changed to Modular Shipbuilding Tech.

Other minor Tech tree changes... Some Techs will have added pre-reqs,
Increased late game techs research requirement by 25%
Canon and Galleon moved to gunpowder
Super Carriers and Missile Cruisers moved to Modular Shipbuilding
Strategic Bombers(ex stealth) moved to Advanced Flight

New and or Modified units

Recon - new unit, modern scout, explorers can upgrade. Has 3 moves does
not come with bonus promotions.

Super Carrier - new unit, req uranium, can carry 4 fighters, defend only.

Carrier - req oil or coal, can only carry 2 fighters, defend only, strength lowered.

Missile Cruiser - req oil or uranium, 75% intercept chance, bonus promotion sentry, bombard 0%.

Battleship - req oil or coal, bombard 25%, 50% attack vs Destroyers
Missile Cruisers, Ironclad, 5% intercept, cannot upgrade to MC.

Destroyer - req oil or coal, bombard 5%, 100% attack vs both submarines,
50% defense vs both submarines, 5% intercept.

Submarine - req oil, switched stats with attack sub, now carries people,
100% attack vs battleships, ironclads, transports, carriers.

Attack Submarine - req uranium, now carry 4 missiles, 100% attack vs
battleships, ironclads, transports, carriers.

IronClads - increased power to 24, they are now pre-dreadnoughts, req coal.

Strategic Bombers - replace stealth bombers, same stats

Biplane - replace airship, same stats

Transport - defend only, strength 10

AT Infantry - cannot intercept aircraft, -25% vs gun.

SAM infantry -25% vs gun.

System Info and Download Link

Minimum System Req - Dunno, I ran this with Blue Marble Gold, Perfectpy2, huge
world, 18 civs and had no problems, and no late game graphic glitches either :)
(one issue, huge world 16 civs, cannot reload games after halfway point, you have
to quit and restart civ to load save games)
My specs - Duo-Core, 8800GT, 2 gigs RAM, SATA2 RAID 0 config.

UPDATE: Well Looks like PerfectPY2 huge maps are too much. I was winning my games
pre-2000 so didnt have an issue, but my last game went well into the 21st century
and I found myself running out of system memory. I imagine if you are running Vista
with over 2gigs of RAM youll be ok, otherwise stick to large maps when using that map
generator.


Download Link (going with Mediafire for now)

http://www.mediafire.com/file/znmrtz5gmht/Simulacrum.zip

Version 2 download link below! check next post for changelog, also to be safe either rename or delete old version before adding new version, copying over old one may not work

http://www.mediafire.com/?octr6o9bxq7yuc5

Please feel free to let me know if there are any issues, of particular interest to me are incorrect unit buttons
and improper scaling of the unit view box (in the bottom left corner) I'm pretty sure I got them all.
With regard to my upgraded navy stats, seems balanced, just want to make sure no single unit dominates.
Also would like feedback on how the spacerace is working now with my changes.

Credits

avain, Geomodder, Chugginator, bernie14, asioasioasio, Rabbit White,
sepamu92, Zerver, GarretSidzaka, C.Roland, Bakuel, AlazkanAssassin, Ploeperpengel,
seZereth, Cham, GeneralMatt, Polycrates, danrell, The_Coyote, Refar, snafusmith,
KingKongTR, KrugerPritz, Walter Hawkwood, JF00, nautil, Xenomorph, GFO_Anubis...
Apologies if I missed anyone.


Cheers and hope you enjoy it, PiTiFUL
 
New updated version 2 of Simulacrum is available for download.

ChangeLog

Modified the way siege weapons work in game. Did not want to use the 'ranged' mods available because the AI can't use them, so came up with a way too sorta have ranged combat that the AI can also use. All land bombard units (canon, arty, catapult ect) start with a 100% withdrawal chance, they can no longer gain EXP and can be captured... Also lowered strength and max amount of damage that can be done.

Removed pollution from having power in a city, only coal will generate a +2 pollution where it's built (reclycle will not remove coal pollution)

Infantry can now also be upgraded to Marines and Paratroopers.

SDI intercept (ICBMs) increased to 95% (nukes are devastating with this MOD, increased intercept to offset this... still have to watch out for those Tactical Nukes!)

Increased requirement for Cultural victory by approx 15% (example Epic is up to 90000 from 75000)

Increased the max EXP you can gain from Barbs to 10.

Extensive rework of the tech tree. No techs added, just a total rework of pre-reqs and paths. Will require more pre-reqs and\or different pre-reqs for some units. Many Techs will now require more and\or different pre-reqs. Also increased Tech cost by around 20% across the board and another 25% starting around scientific method. (the different eras regarding military are better defined, you will have more time, as an example, using WW2 era equipment before everything begins to modernize. With added cost tech discoverys are now more in line with the date, no more railroads in the 14th century or jets in the 19th century. Important to keep in mind, I play Huge maps with 15 civs on prince, tech trading but no brokering... so if you do not allow trading period, or use much smaller games with less civs you may find it difficult to research everything in the time alloted. Consequently if you allow for unrestricted tech trading you may find you are researching the whole tech tree much earlier. Last game I played with these settings [wasnt playing to win and didnt interfere with AIs push to win IE didnt sabotage production ect.] Louis won a cultural victory in 2007, next closest player was Frederick who was around 20 turns away from launching his spaceship, at this point no one else in the game [other then me] even had the required techs to finish thier spaceships.)
 
I prefer www.moddb.com or www.strategyinformer.com This is because they don't bombard users with adds, and don't find themselves on security banlists, some users just can't access filefront for instance. Of course the one problem with that is that they have to check the upload to make sure it's clean, so sometimes it takes a day before what you upload is publicly available, which is why I still use filefront at times.
 
mediafire has less ad's. and seem to be faster, megaupload too also help download stuff faster and has a small wait time, mediafire has the same too.
 
Alright, I'll go with Mediafire for now. Was using FileFront but they have been radomly dumping my files without warning... links up, MOD is downloadable.

Going away for a few weeks in a couple days so I may not be around very much until later in the month, hopefully there will be no issues for me to deal with. I have playtested it on huge maps with 16 Civs, and played mutiple games to completion making sure every Civs been in the game, so it should be good.
 
The formations look awesome :).

As does the whole graphical aspect. Nice one! :goodjob:

Thanks :D

Well back from holidays, I see no bug reports, sweet.

I am not totally satisfied with unit scaling, needs some tweaking, and I did notice some battle animations on a couple battleships are not working correctly. Going to be awile before I do some work on this... picked up a 12" newtonian telescope while I was in the city and its eating up my time ATM. I did while away play a multiplayer game with my MOD and it worked flawlessly, on a LAN game at least, so I can confirm this is multiplayer friendly.

PS A nuclear war broke out in our game and with my tweaks they are devastating, as it should be :devil:
 
This mod looks really cool but just by going thru the thread/pics I can point out two mistakes that I hope have been or will be fixed.

Firstly the use of the Union Jack for England is completely wrong. The Union Jack was the St Georges Cross and St Andrews cross united onto one flag to represent the peaceful political union of the former Kingdoms of Scotland and England into a new Kingdom of Great Britain.
Unless your changing the name of England to Britain and including Welsh, Irish, and Scottish cities then your use of that flag is erroneous and insulting to those of us in the UK that arent English.

Secondly the American flag appears to be hanging wrongly. Where the blue square and stars is on the flag in the screenies (the flag hanging top to bottom) would put the it at the bottom left hand corner of the flag when hanging properly (the flag hanging left to right).
Naturally the blue square and stars segment of the flag should be on the top left of the flag (when hanging left to right) and thus for the purposes of Civilization 4 should be on the upper right hand corner of the flag (hanging top to bottom like in Civ 4) instead of being on the top left.

Thanks.
 
New version now available for download.

Check second post for changelog and original post for download link.
 
New version now available for download.

Check second post for changelog and original post for download link.

Man, some of those graphics look really nice. Also, I noticed that this mod was last touched 3 years ago, so this is indeed quite a bit of necro. :)
 
Man, some of those graphics look really nice. Also, I noticed that this mod was last touched 3 years ago, so this is indeed quite a bit of necro. :)

Ya, I been tinkering with it since then and the fact that after every tweak I got to play a game which takes one to two weeks to complete, it takes time. Plus I much perfer to play games then MOD them and although I keep coming back to CIV, between my PS3 and Steam sales I have more games then time. Gave CIV5 a chance too but I don't like it, so this looks like my CIV for the foreseeable future. I'd really like to go through all the custom units and clean them up, but I really don't see that happening. If this build doesn't have any game breaking bugs I doubt I'll be doing any more work on it, just playing.
 
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