COL Gold development thread

Update 25 Sept 2009 - added screencaps for next release

I have been puttering on this project as my pet project for the past week,
learning the skills for modding as I go. Now I am at a point where I understand
the more basic aspects of adding units and buildings, modular civs, and adding
things like new resources -- although I am not quite up to adding new resources
quite yet.

The basic idea is to create a CIV Gold style super mod with a crap-load of new
natives and as many colonial civs as the game will support. Honestly, it
started small and just kept growing, so now I am getting to the point where it
is looking like a thing requiring group effort or needs to be down-scaled to a
point that one guy can manage it (that would be me).

The native civs I have so far added or partially developed are (by region):

Africa:

Asia

Austraila & Oceania

Central America

North America (east)

North America (west)

South America

The colonial side is kind of vanilla, I have only recycled existing modular civs:


EDIT: Random King Bug resolved with KJ Jansson's help

If I can resolve the bug that assigns randomn leaderheads as the king, I'll
add New belgium, New Scotland, New Brandenburg/Prussia, and New Germany.
Definitely, I want to add a viking colonial civ, but that's a bit of trouble since
they really fall outside the timeline of the game and what would you name it?
New Iceland or New Greenland is better than "New Viking Land" any day...
And the overlap between the Danes and the Vikings is fairly large, so the
vikings may need to wait for another mod geared for them alone.

I want to add others, but I ran into bugs with the Europe screen after adding
six. I've already run out of 3D leader heads, so I don't think I could add much
more, but I am always open to suggestions.

Any way, so far this has been a hoot learning all the bits and bobs of modding
and it's addictive as crack cocaine.

Resources I would like to add -- but most likely won't -- are:

Turquoise, gems, jade, spices, opium, hemp, tea, rice

If I can ever figure out how to use Nifskope to any degree, I'd like to convert
the sloop from Pirates! and add unique units for each colonial and native civ.

I'm still looking at the code for city styles, but i think I have that figured out.

If I ever get this completed, I may end up doing a COL Fantasy mod using the
great fantasy stuff made for Civ IV. >_<

IMPORTANT! requires 1.01f patch - Don't have it? get it here!

Download the (very) alpha (v 0.1.4) here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1BPU5K8Z
ColGold_0_1_4.rar - 400 MB (420,438,094 bytes)

You definitely need the Polynesians.

Dale, I am thinking about making the Polynesians a colonial civ, since they did a fair lot of colonisation long before the white folks knew there was a way to steer over deep water.

link for alpha version added to first post

Very interesting. However, how fast the game with such number of civilizations on the end game stage?

KJ Jansson, it does get laggy after about 200 turns on a huge map with 18 civs, but no worse than Civ IV. It's not my intention to suggest anyone play with ALL of the civs at one time, but to allow players to play regions with a degree of historical verisimiltude.

Are all civs the same just diffrent name or do we have some uniqe units to each?

Are you going to add the option of playing like in Civ 4 were you begin on the stoneage and work yourway forward? (for example by using time and not research?)

cant get the game to start whit this mod. "to many siblings" error in a XML file

too many siblings? This is a new one to me. I have tested the mod on three 32-bit Windows XP systems and it runs on them, even my dinky netbook ran it

Viscos, what operating system are you using?

I am making it only as more cultures and unique units, to do it any other way would require recompiling the core DLL and this is beyond me at the present time.

Viscos: like this? (you can follow the link for the actual message).

-Crash when loading CIV4LeaderHeadInfos, see here. Side effect of not having Col patch 1.01f installed

Click to expand...

This error occurs when you are running a mod for patched Colonization without the patch, or vice versa. Download the 1.01f patch here.

Thanks TC01, I hadn't thought of that. I will make a change in the first post saying it requires the 1.01f patch.

So this is what I have done with my time this weekend:

ColGold 0.1.4:

The Colonists:
- Belgium/Congo Free State
- China/New China
- Courland/New Courland
- Denmark/New Denmark
- England/New England
- Germany/German East Africa Company *to be done*
- Italy(Republic of Florence)/New Italy
- Iceland(Vikings)/Vinland *to be done*
- Portugal/New Portugal
- Prussia/New Prussia
- Russia/New Russia
- Scotland/New Scotland
- Sweden/New Sweden
- Vatican/Society of Jesus (Jesuits) *to be done*
- United Kingdom/East India Company

Thanks to KJ Jansson for help resolving the random King bug

The Natives:

OK, before we start, you may well ask why some of these are here since
they are anachronisms. Whereas it may be true that governments collapse
and empires crumble, the underlaying culture doesn't disappear quite so
fast. Cultures and traditions persist long after the umbrella nation
dissolves into dust; indeed nations are created by and representative of
cultures, not vice versa.

AFRICA:
- Abyssinian Empire
- Ashanti (Asanteman)
- Bornu Empire
- Edo Empire
- Kongo Empire
- Maasai
- Madagascar (Malagasy)
- Sokoto (Hausa)
- Songhai Empire
- Xhosa
- Zulu

ASIA:
- Aceh
- Ainu *to be done*
- Ayutthaya
- Bengal
- Bod (Tibet)
- Brunei
- Champa
- Dai Viet *to be done*
- Goldconda
- Japan
- Khmer
- Laos
- Majapahit
- Malacca
- Mysore
- Orissa
- Pandyan
- Tagalog
- Toungoo

CENTRAL AMERICA:
- Acolhua
- Arawak
- Carib
- Aztec (additional leaders)
- Maya
- Purhepecha (Tarascan)
- Tlaxcalan
- Zapotec
- Zoque

OCEANIA:
- Aborigines
- Hawaii
- Maori
- Papua
- Rapa Nui
- Samoa

SOUTH AMERICA:
- Guarani
- Inca (additional leader)
- Jivaro *to be done*
- Moche
- Nazca
- Tupi

NORTH AMERICA - EAST
- Beothuk (Skraelings)
- Chickasaw *to be done*
- Choctaw
- Creek *to be done*
- Huron
- Mahican *to be done*
- Mohawk
- Mohegan *to be done*
- Powhatan
- Seminole
- Shawnee *to be done*

NORTH AMERICA - WEST
- Arapaho *to be done*
- Blackfoot
- Cree *to be done*
- Crow *to be done*
- Denesuline (Chipewayan)
- Haida
- Hopi
- Inuit
- Navajo
- Nez Perce *to be done*
- Paiute *to be done*
- Pawnee *to be done*
- Shoshone *to be done*
- Ute
- Yuma *to be done*
- Zuni *to be done*

CUSTOM TRAITS:
Ten new or used traits for colonists:
Aggressive, Agricultural, Ambitious, Conservationist/Protective, Devout, Expansionist, Explorer/Cartographer, Missionary/Evangelist, Pirate, Seafarer/Navigator

Ten new or used traits for natives:
Antogonistic, Cannibal, Gregarious, Guerrilla, Isolationist, Imperialist, Penurious, Sophisticated, Theocratic, Xenophobic


FILE STILL UPLOADING - PLEASE COME BACK AND TRY AGAIN LATER

Good work so far! But why don't you make a thread in the Mods and Files forum for it?

I haven't really gotten all the the things done I want to get done before I get it to the stage that it's a "beta" rather than an alpha. Once I get it hammered down a bit more and it starts to look a bit golden, then I'll bump it over to the files section. I am still hoping someone will brainstorm with me and we can get this thing all spiffed up with custom units and buildings for all the civs like in Civ GOLD >_<

I am currently trying to figure out why certain units lock up the game, they work well enough in normal Civ, so in theory they should work in Colonization... only they don't >_<

I am considering changing the treasure's minimum slots requirement to 2 but increasing it's cargo space to 2 slots. Does that sound fair? The way I see it, the 6 slot requirement is only a cheesy game trick to force you to operate at a 50% loss in early stages of the game to prevent the King from driving you bonkers with endless cash demands, since the coders at Firaxis didn't build a simple turn count function into the Kings' AI.

Tested the Zapotecs and Tlaxcalans and everything's great so far

One question though: the Tlaxcalan leader has a beard, but AFAIK native americans have no facial hair?

Androrc the "beardless" native was usually a result of a painful process of depilation (plucking hairs), some North American tribes grew beards, some didn't, and after mixing genes with whites the presences of beards became more frequent. The Haida for instance were noted for their moustaches by a number of early explorers, and there are numerous Central american gods that are always depicted as having beards, so we know that at some level beards did occur. From an anthropological and genetic point of view, there is no reason they couldn't grow beards, they are an offshoot of Asiatic genetic stock and some Asiatics can grow great, bushy beards.

Ah, I see. Thanks for explaining

By the way, I'm not sure if you are aware about this, but it might interest you: there was a German attempt at colonization in the Americas in Venezuela (Klein-Venedig). In 1528, the then Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who was also king of Spain, gave the rights to Venezuela to banking families of the city of Augsburg. The experience lasted until 1556, the year of Charles' resignation, when he divided his empire between his son (who got Spain, the Netherlands and Charles' possessions in the Americas) and his brother (who got Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and became the Holy Roman Emperor). In that yer the Germans who had the rights to Venezuela were stripped of them. You can find more information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonization_of_the_Americas

Brandenburg/Prussia (through the Brandenburgo-African Company) also did have a few small colonies in the Caribbean and Africa.

Thank you for that - I have updated the Civopedia with the new information and added Wales to my to-do list for colonial forces LOL

As a further note, I think traditional diet of many natives tribes was protein deficient which would also have played a significant role in the lack of pronounced beards. I know that pelagra (a nutritional disease and a kind of protein-deficiency) is endemic among maize monocultures (societies that are dependent on a single food crop), and protein deficiency can cause all manner of developmental oddities, including small stature, loss of or lack of typical body hair, and so on.

Some suggestions for leaders:

New France: Marquis de Vaudreuil (Militaristic, leaderhead can be found here)
New Spain: Bernardo O'Higgins (Independence leader of Chile, leaderhead can be found here)
New Spain: Agustín de Ahumada y Villalón (Disciplined, leaderhead can be found here)

EDIT: In Robert Clive's pedia entry, it says that he is "Governor-General of The Dutch East Indies", wouldn't it be "Governor-General of the British East Indies"?