20 Culture groups! (but way less techs)

nick0515 · Aug 3, 2009

tom2050 and I have been discussing this idea in another thread and he suggested I start a thread on it to see if it is useful to others and to see if others have already used it and how it worked for them. Tom and I independently came up with this for our own scenarios.

We all know, and hate, that five culture groups is the maximum as hardcoded by Firaxis programmers. However, there is a work around that allows you to have up to twenty culture groups. There is a large sacrifice in order to achieve this though, namely a vast reduction in the space available for the tech tree, and up to four different or clone tech tress having to be built.

Here's how to do it. For twenty culture groups edit the tech tree so that each era is a complete tech tree. Different civs start off in one of the four eras and cannot progress past that era or research techs from previous eras. Then give different improvement, citizen, city etc graphics to all of the hardcoded five culture groups for each era (eg European culture group: First era graphics look like Roman, Second Era Graphics look like Japanese, Third Era look like African, Fourth era look like Indian). Doing this means that each of the five culture groups can be split into four different culture groups. But at the cost of a much smaller tech tree crammed entirely into one era.

Alternatively you can have only ten culture groups but a tech tree spread over two eras.

I haven't actually tested this yet, but tom tells me it works. We are both wondering if this has been done before, and if so how did it work? Was it successful? Are there any downsides I haven't foreseen?

This will be most useful for scenarios which cover a short period of time and thus don't require a full four era tech tree. Hope it's useful to others and that we can get some discussion going about it.

Cheers

Nick

Diviner · Aug 3, 2009

Interesting, refreshing idea, requires some trade-off, but well, the whole editor is like that

However, restricting each civilizations' development to one era only.. well that in my opinion is not enough. If the two-length unit lines (maybe three at the extreme) are enough or if the whole tech-tree would be of secondary importance in the scenario i would say ok, but I don't really see myself go with it (of course thats just me

). Add to this the hard-coded limit of buildings which pretty much take away the fun, because you need many-many redundant buildings for each civilizations. Well I imagine the work to create such scenario would be much higher than normally (personally I would be really confused to keep everything in mind). Maybe 10 different cultures and 2-era development would be some kind of fair trade-off.

The good thing is that you can create culture groups and even metaculture groups (those that shares the same era could share some little advancements, like governments and wonders). Implementing religions this way would be awesome!

So, you would basically make an era equivalent of a metaculture group, but this way you would still have diverse cities and such things which works against this 'metaculture' (it would be little weird to have the vikings, the saxons, the alemanns, the burgundians and the franks have really different city-structure and buildings). It all comes down to your priorities which would serve you better. Much less tech-tree versus diversity, metacultures etc., but you have to keep in mind that the 5 CG limit is still there (you could of course ignore it and focus on other aspects of the game which could really make a player's experience different with each civ).

I'm an epic modder. I need every single space in the tech tree

. So I will not be the one to do it. But it would be certainly interesting to play such mod.

nick0515 · Aug 3, 2009

Diviner said:
Interesting, refreshing idea, requires some trade-off, but well, the whole editor is like that

However, restricting each civilizations' development to one era only.. well that in my opinion is not enough. If the two-length unit lines (maybe three at the extreme) are enough or if the whole tech-tree would be of secondary importance in the scenario i would say ok, but I don't really see myself go with it (of course thats just me ). Add to this the hard-coded limit of buildings which pretty much take away the fun, because you need many-many redundant buildings for each civilizations. Well I imagine the work to create such scenario would be much higher than normally (personally I would be really confused to keep everything in mind). Maybe 10 different cultures and 2-era development would be some kind of fair trade-off.

The good thing is that you can create culture groups and even metaculture groups (those that shares the same era could share some little advancements, like governments and wonders). Implementing religions this way would be awesome!

So, you would basically make an era equivalent of a metaculture group, but this way you would still have diverse cities and such things which works against this 'metaculture' (it would be little weird to have the vikings, the saxons, the alemanns, the burgundians and the franks have really different city-structure and buildings). It all comes down to your priorities which would serve you better. Much less tech-tree versus diversity, metacultures etc., but you have to keep in mind that the 5 CG limit is still there (you could of course ignore it and focus on other aspects of the game which could really make a player's experience different with each civ).

I'm an epic modder. I need every single space in the tech tree . So I will not be the one to do it. But it would be certainly interesting to play such mod.

Yeah it's not really workable for Epic games, except perhaps with two eras per group giving 10 culture groups. But even then you'd have to sacrifice quite a bit probably. I'm the opposite to you, I like making very specific scenarios that require very little tech tree compared with an Epic game.

Your also right to point out that it could mean you have to make tons of copies of the same buildings thus eating up the improvements limit a lot faster. I thought of the idea for a fanatsy scenario I'm making where each civ is supposed to be as unique as possible, included completely different improvments, so I have to make of different improvements anyway.

Something I forgot to mention. Means you can have four different fortress/barricade graphics instead of the usual one for everyone.

I guess it is diversity vs. tech tree. And I think for me, diversity is what I need for this fantasy scenario as I'm trying to create more of an RPg kinda feel to it, so five culture groups just doesn't cut it. The scenario never was going to have a large tech tree though as I want it to be primarily about warfare and exploration. It's not supposed to be a progression in history like epic civ.

Thanks for comments.

tom2050 · Aug 3, 2009

I'm glad you made this thread nick0515!

Here's an image showing more than 5 city types (7 city types, 2 more will be added once I complete the graphics)... I believe you should be able to do this in an Epic game, as long as certain civ's start out higher up in the tech era tree. Of course doing this usually requires that the modder makes use of flavors.

I'm not sure how the AI judges other civ's that are lower on the tech tree though, if they think you are backwards... or if it makes them more likely to declare war. If someone used this, and the message from the tech advisor constantly says they think you are backwards, it would probably be a good idea to change that text message to something a little different.

Since I actually only have 9 different cities graphics I need to use, the other 11 can probably be used for Creature Structures... Also, since I can control what size a city is on a preplaced scenario (and to keep that size with correctly placed terrain values), I could possibly expand the 11 to 33 different creature structure graphics on the map.. each allowing a specific creature to be autoproduced (which is what happens in Heroes Might Magic 3). And since it is a fantasy scenario, air and sea bombardment of massive scales won't really happen to that extent to knock city sizes down (which would change the city graphic! :lol:

) Since HOMM doesn't have a huge tech tree to research down anyways, in this type of scenario, more is gained than lost. Now I can have the dreaded Dragon Utopia in my maps, for players to try to conquer (which will contain valuable gold producing buildings not buildable elsewhere).

Of course, the limitations for most aspects of Civ are not worth it, but in certain types of scenarios, using this method is invaluable.

Tom

Virote_Considon · Aug 3, 2009

In the very early stages of my ancient Greek scenario, I was doing something similar. Back then, each civ group only existed in one era, too. However, the idea was scrapped when I expanded the tech tree.

Remember, if you're also going to use unique citizens, you can get some weird results. For example, in my Greek scenario, Sparta and Ethiopia had the same culture group, but in different eras. Argos had the same era as Ethiopia, and whenever Argos captured a Spartan city, the citizens would look Ethiopian...

Huayna Capac357 · Aug 3, 2009

This sounds cool, but how would you have, say, 20 city types? I don't understand.

Virote_Considon · Aug 3, 2009

Huayna Capac357 said:
This sounds cool, but how would you have, say, 20 city types? I don't understand.

Because each of the five culture groups have 4 different graphics, one for each era. So, if each civ has 1 era and 1 culture group, then putting them together you potentially get 20 different graphics (5 groups * 4 eras)

Madeira · Aug 3, 2009

Guess this could be useful for single or even dual-era scenarios, but not for epic scenarios that use the 4 eras to represent evolution from the ancient to the modern age.

wolf_brother · Aug 3, 2009

This could be very usual for 'modern day' scenarios and the ilk.

Midnight-Blue766 · Aug 3, 2009

Say I want to add 2 new culture roups: Africa and South Asia. How many eras will I need?

tom2050 · Aug 3, 2009

Farsight said:
Say I want to add 2 new culture roups: Africa and South Asia. How many eras will I need?

If you added 2 more, then you could have 2 tech eras. So if you modify the city graphics for say, Asian and Mediterranean culture groups to include new city graphics for Africa and South Asia (for industrial, modern age e.g.) and then keep the originals as well (for ancient, medieval), the Asian and Med culture groups would be limited to 2 tech eras each. Other civs though, using American, European and Far East, would still be able to go through all 4 tech eras (since their city graphics are unchanged).

Tom

tom2050 · Aug 3, 2009

Just as a thought, for some scenarios.. you can add up to 20 additional city graphics in addition to the 20 already discussed above. By removing the ability for some culture groups to be able to build walled cities (I believe by simply removing the bombard defense from Walls, cities will not show the walled graphics), you can use the Walled City pics to show various other city graphics if need be. The current mod I am working on had a need for more independent city graphics for a variety of unique structures that need to be available on the map, and this will work great for a situation as such.

Tom

nick0515 · Aug 3, 2009

Just as a thought, for some scenarios.. you can add up to 20 additional city graphics in addition to the 20 already discussed above. By removing the ability for some culture groups to be able to build walled cities (I believe by simply removing the bombard defense from Walls, cities will not show the walled graphics), you can use the Walled City pics to show various other city graphics if need be. The current mod I am working on had a need for more independent city graphics for a variety of unique structures that need to be available on the map, and this will work great for a situation as such.

I was going to mention that too Tom, but you beat me to it. Downside is the cities with the walls graphic must remain at size 1 (town), otherwise they'll change. Great for scenarios where you don't need cities to grow above size one, like your creature structures I presume. Also only works on city graphics but not citizens.

Remember, if you're also going to use unique citizens, you can get some weird results. For example, in my Greek scenario, Sparta and Ethiopia had the same culture group, but in different eras. Argos had the same era as Ethiopia, and whenever Argos captured a Spartan city, the citizens would look Ethiopian...

Thanks Virote. I hadn't thought of that. Must look rather strange.

Steph · Aug 4, 2009

That's a good idea, I already explained that a few months ago in another thread

The main problem with this is the impossibility to trade tech except from within your own culture group.

So I wouldn't use it for a whole epic game.

However, imagine a small scale scenario. Let say a Napoleonic scenario. With 20 civilizations, and a small time period (ie only one era), it could be used to give each civilization its own city graphics.

But there is still one thing I dislike in the engine. The city graphics are dependant on the civilization only, not the citizens.

And having an Egyptian city just captured by China change graphics to Asian one just look strange to me.

Blue Monkey · Aug 4, 2009

I had been thinking along these lines for one of the steampunk scenarios that's still at a conceptual stage. Era 1 - primitive tribes with no hope of advancement; Era 2 - sophisticated but bizarre civs, Era 3-4 "standard" civs.

So, for example, within the African group I could have cities/techs/units for tribes related to Skull Island & the Mokèlé-mbèmbé, for Kôr (ruled by She), and for an Abyssininan Empire to compete with the Victorians.

Madeira · Aug 4, 2009

Sounds cool BM!

Huayna Capac357 · Aug 4, 2009

Here's an idea for all y'all.

Each era has four techs for a category. These categories are military, government, science, economy, culture, and religion. The techs correspond for ages, but are unique for each culture. For example, the Euro-Mediterranean era might have 1. Polytheism 2. Christianity 3. Protestantism 4. Existentialism for its religious techs while the Asian one might have 1. Mysticism 2. Buddhism 3. Secret Societies (?) 4. Atheism as its. This would make 24 techs per era, not much more than the normal civ. I actually might take this up as a mod idea (at least for myself

) if someone would explain how to stop civs from going into another era.

EDIT: Religion rough draft

Euro:
1. Polytheism 2. Christianity 3. Protestantism 4. Existentialism

Asian:
1. Mysticism 2. Buddhism 3. Secret Societies (?) 4. Atheism

Middle East/Africa:
1. Polytheism 2. Islam 3. (?) 4. (?)

Americas:
1. Polytheism 2. Blood Cult (?) 3. Christianity 4. Evangelicalism (?)

This would oversimplify, but it would work.

Steph · Aug 4, 2009

Huayna Capac357 said:
if someone would explain how to stop civs from going into another era.

You can't. But you can create 4 non-era techs "Era_1_civ", "Era_2-civ", etc, give one of them as bonus tech to the civs that will use the era, and make it a prerequesite of all the techs for the era.

Huayna Capac357 · Aug 4, 2009

Maybe at the end of each era you could have a tech that costs like 999999999999999 shields so that it will be nearly impossible to go to the next era?

Steph · Aug 5, 2009

Huayna Capac357 said:
Maybe at the end of each era you could have a tech that costs like 999999999999999 shields so that it will be nearly impossible to go to the next era?

Don't forget the max research time... Or a bonus techs from a goody hut.
No, just make it so that Civ 1 can research only the tech from Era 1, as all the other techs will require a non era tech it won't have.
The problem is that Civ 1 will then "jump" to the last era, and so use it's graphics, and start researching future techs.

Therefore, I think you have two options.
1- You have enough techs and a short scenario, to be "sure" the civ won't have time to discover everything for this age.
2- Use only 15 culture group, differentiate the 1, 2, 3 era, but keep era 4 as a more advance states with graphics shared by the 5 groups.
For example, you could have Chinese, Indian, Japanese culture groups in era 1, 2, 3, but group them in an Asia group in era 4.
It may be tricky to set up.

Or you can send a donation to help me finish my game where this problem will be handled correctly from the start

20 Culture groups! (but way less techs)

C7 Fanatic

Prince

C7 Fanatic

Deity

The Great Dictator

Deity

The Great Dictator

Emperor

King

The filidh that cam frae Skye

Deity

Deity

C7 Fanatic

Multi Many Tasks man

Archon Without Portfolio

Emperor

Deity

Multi Many Tasks man

Deity

Multi Many Tasks man

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