Multiple Derivative Civs + Special Colonies

Requested yesterday by GeneralMatt for his British Empire mod (not to mention numerous other people in the past), this simple C++/XML change finally lets you have multiple derivative civs. It includes two main features, 6 new <DerivativeCiv> slots for a total of 7 possible colonies per civ, and a new tag named <bColony>, which I explain below.

Extended description:


The order of derivative civs
The spawning function is weighted toward the top of the colony list, which means that order matters. If you put France, England, and Germany as the first three derivative civs of the Celts, for instance, they will always spawn in that order. The exception is when a target civ is already in the game. Then the list defaults to the next entry. Any subsequent blank tags ("NONE") will result in a random colony.


The bColony tag
This is used in conjunction with <bPlayable> or <bAIPlayable> when you want to limit where and how a civ can spawn. I play a lot of mods, and I always thought it was strange to meet civs like Australia or California in 2000 B.C. only to watch them declare war on England or America. With this nifty tag, you can prevent a civ from being chosen randomly at the start of the game but still keep it available to emerge later as a colony.

Let's say you have created a New Zealand civ, which is a derivative of England. You want to keep it open for human players, but don't want it randomly chosen by the AI at startup. You'd just set bPlayable to 1, bAIPlayable to 0, and bColony to 1 in XML. Now the only way New Zealand can appear in your games is if you or another human picks it, or if you release it as a colony. Similarly, if you wanted a civ that never appeared in the game except as a colony, you'd set both bPlayable and bAIPlayable to 0 and bColony to 1. This has a lot of potential for big mods with many new civs, because you can squeeze in more variety without overloading the player with dozens of options.

Note that this system places no restrictions on possible mother countries; if, say, Germany runs through all its own derivative civs, it could conceivably release New Zealand as well. However, as long as you keep the number of non-random colonies fairly high across the board, this scenario is unlikely.


Additional notes for programmers



How to use this in Civ 4



If there are any bugs, please report them in this thread.


Download link

Sounds cool, like a component no mod should be without, very basic, sound idea, I like it, will definitely try it out and report any bugs I may find.

Is there a way to make the civs spawn randomly, so that either America, Canada or Australia comes out when you found a colony?

TheLadiesOgre said:

Sounds cool, like a component no mod should be without, very basic, sound idea, I like it, will definitely try it out and report any bugs I may find.

Click to expand...

Thanks, I appreciate the interest.

MadmanOfALeader said:

Is there a way to make the civs spawn randomly, so that either America, Canada or Australia comes out when you found a colony?

Click to expand...

There is, but you will have to tweak the code a bit. Setting all the iValue bonuses in CvPlayer::splitEmpire to give equal weight no matter where a civ is in the list should do it.

TheLadiesOgre said:

Sounds cool, like a component no mod should be without, very basic, sound idea, I like it, will definitely try it out and report any bugs I may find.

Click to expand...

I would say, "nearly every mod", but i do totally agree with the rest .

Very good, thank you.

The_J said:

I would say, "nearly every mod", but i do totally agree with the rest .

Click to expand...

With all of the mods that have DLL's set up for dozens of civs, it just makes sense to me that there should be something like this included.

Now, the key question. If I use this with RevDCM, will it still work? Will the revolutions spawn the correct derivative civs, or will they remain random?

I'm not familiar with the way RevDCM handles revolution events. If they changed the splitempire function considerably, it may not work well. I glanced through the source files from an older version and didn't see anything problematic, though.

If this has a dll, shouldn't the [BtS] be changed to [SDK]??

Well it's a BtS SDK... and C++ and XML... but tag changed.

Has anyone added this to revolutions?

I do have an existing Core DLL file. How would I be able to merge these SDK components with the existing one I have?

Only if you know C++ programming :/.

Okay. Could you still tell me? There are more DLL files I want to merge.

Can I decompile a Civilization 4 DLL file?

Decompiling? No, not possible, but the source code should be supplied together with the .dll, then you could merge these and compile a new .dll.

Is there a base C++ file I have to work with? (basically a normal/unmodded file(s))

The full C++ files come directly with a game, in the folder CvGameCoreDll.
Normally the mods distribute the changed files, with comments in them to find the changes.
You'd have to merge these changes into the original files (make the changes in a copy), and then you should be able to compile it (tutorial for compiling).

Would would this work with Revolutions?