Phoenix's Suggestions & Ideas

Introduction
Ideas and suggestions for Wild Mana are in the following posts.

Hi. I'm Raederle Phoenix of Phoenix's Muse Creations. You probably couldn't care less.
My thread for suggestions & tweaks for the Wild Mana 9.0 Beta is here: http://www.epicdestiny.site90.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=100&p=582#p582


Here is some other information about me that probably doesn't matter to you:

Wildmana: Why I Love It

I love Wildmana! Vanilla Civilization has always been a part of my life, but after playing Test of Time for years, the original Civilization just lost it's excitement. As I said here http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9472478&postcount=18 :

Civilization V thoughts; The fact that we're still talking modern warfare and not talking flame elementals: ... -_-

Seriously folks; guns are loud, ugly, and useless. I love the game concept and the way Civilization works, but I get bored as soon as I get gunpowder. That's why Wild Mana has stolen my heart. Civilization V will just give us another challenge to mod into a game without loud annoying banging of guns. It's not just that the musketeers and riflemen are boring; they're ugly, loud and obnoxious. The gun, the tank, bombers, and so forth, are all personifications of modern war and how ugly and honorless war is. Perhaps men don't feel this way about it, but to me, a gun is an ugly disgusting thing, and bombs are beyond my words for explaining how deplorable they are. I dislike playing games where the main attraction is big explosions and scoping out your enemies to shoot them. I don't even like being in the room when someone is playing one of those horribly graphic games.

Hence, I love fantasy mods. It's clearly a fantasy when I'm throwing fireballs at succubus to kill them. When I'm using tanks to invade an enemy civilization, that doesn't feel like fantasy. That's a reenactment of many of the things horribly wrong with the world.

But honestly, the moral thing really is only about 20% of my issue with it. 50% is how annoying, loud and painful the sounds guns and bombs make. The sound effects ruin enjoyable game music, and give me a headache. The other 30% is that guns are just plain ugly. Swords have a sort of beauty to them, and watching someone of skill wield one is enjoyable. The sort of clothing the samurai wore is much more pleasing to the eye then modern-day military clothing. In general I find uniforms quite displeasing. I find extremely high detail graphics pointless when what they depict is something unattractive.

Being a bi-sexual woman, I love playing games where there are lots of beautiful women dressing in intricate fantasy clothing.

And seriously, boobs should always come before tanks! I mean, hard choice? Big hunk of ugly metal or beautiful women? No contest!

So to me, Civilization is best when you can play a race like the Svartalfar; a tree-hugging race that builds pretty-looking upgrades to the terrain (instead of the usual eye-sores), and where all of the units look like sexy chicks (including scouts and warriors and mages)! Now that is fun.

About Me: More Things You Couldn't Care Less About

I'm a twenty-one year old woman. Civilization I came out when I was only two years old. My parents were both gamers and bought the game. They played it a lot, and by the age of four I was moving around units. Of course, all of my cities rioted and I was usually killed off by Barbarians within a few hours of starting. When Civilization II came out my parents and I were dubious to the changes, but we then moved on to playing that.

I played Civilization II for years, and the fantasy version Test of Time for even more years. The other games I played growing up were Colonization, Caesar II, and Civilization III. My parents bought me my own computer at the age of eleven just so that we didn't have to compete for play-time for Test of Time.

I actually think based on the way Civilization shaped my young mind. I'm constantly thinking about that exponential effect of the actions I make today and how it'll effect me fifty turns – oh wait, I mean fifty months – later. I'm not just some random fan of the Civilization series. I feel that the game and I are like merged somewhere; there is no separation between me and the game.

Fall from Heaven

Since I grew tired of Test of Time, no game has made me feel as obsessed or happy... Until Wild Mana. I mean, I liked Fall from Heaven, but it was lacking in depth. For one thing, the Fall from Heaven tech tree was way too short. It's still a bit short in Wild Mana, but hopefully that will change in 9.0. And if it doesn't, then you can expect a modmod from me making the end game much more interesting.

Wild Mana Addiction

When my husband and I downloaded Wild Mana a few weeks ago we couldn't stop playing. We played from the moment he got off work until five in the morning day after day, and then all weekend. We did the cooking while waiting for the other to complete their turns (playing on LAN together. And I played more single player while he was at work...)

The hitch? I can't seem to play any game without wanting to change and improve it. I constantly keep coming up with ideas. I'm so damn creative it makes it hard to enjoy anything, because soon I just want to create things rather than play with things. When I wasn't making food (while waiting for him to take his turns,) I was drawing. What was I drawing?! ICONS! What the hell is wrong with me?

Oh, and I happen to be an artist. Imagine that.

My artwork portfolio here: http://phoenix-muse.darkfolio.com/

I'm a digital painter and pencil artist, and I'd love to contribute artwork to Wild Mana. If I can't actually join the team itself, then my husband and I will puzzle over how to make our own modmodmodmodmodmod – (how many ever mods of mods it is now.)

I'm particularly interested in improving end-game. The tech-tree, in my not-so-humble opinion, is still too short. And I'm also particularly interested in making it possible to colonize the sea. I'm assuming that it's possible to add sea-cities to the mod, although my husband has said it might not be, depending on how the sea terrain is scripted.

Please post your thoughts on my ideas and suggestions in this thread, as well as links to modules I may be interested in using or incorporating in a modmodmodmodmodmod in the future. And Stephi and the rest of the Wild Mana team has my full permission to use my suggestions, ideas and artwork with credit to me. Please link my deviant art anywhere that I am credited where links are appropriate: http://phoenix-muse.deviantart.com/

I'll update these posts will more ideas, tweaks and suggestions as I continue to play. Hope the team finds some of this information useful, interesting and inspiring... Or something else positive.

Let's see more spells that revolve around terrain changing, city upgrading (or city-degrading for offensive spells), and so on.

Mana Themed Mage Towers

Tower Types based on Mana Types
1.) One type of tower for each mana. Each of these towers would have a minor city benefit when they are first built, and would cost around 50 production (or something equivalent in mana with the new magic system.)

Magical Units Added To Mage Towers
2.) When a relevant magical unit is in the city (adept, mage, archmage, or whatever makes the most sense with the new magic system in 9.0) that unit has the ability to join the tower. When hovering over the option to join the tower, it would say something like; "Increases X between 5% and 50%". The percentage range would depend on the power/upgrades/affinity of the unit in question. The benefit "X" would depend on what type of Mana the Mage Tower was themed upon.

Tower Limitation
3.) Each city can have up to six towers. Each tower can only have one unit inside providing the additional benefit described in #2. The unit can be removed and replaced once. (I suggest it being able to be removed and replaced once so players don't get angry when there isn't a very good buff from that unit and destroy the building and rebuild it looking for a better result.)

National Wonders with Tower Combinations Required
4.) Various combinations of Mage Towers within a city could open the doors for national wonders that can only be built when you have certain requisite towers within that city. Because mana types are limited to what you can get from the land and from particular state wonders and great wonders, you would only be able to expect to build between one and four of the National Wonders that require certain Mage Tower combinations per game.

New Magical Victory Type
5.) If you had every type of mana, and enough cities, then you would be able to eventually build all of the State Wonders that require certain combinations of Mage Towers. If you build every one of the different State Wonders that are enabled through various combinations of Mage Towers, then a Great Wonder is enabled that grants a magical victory.

(Since this would require all types of mana and many different cities creating particular combinations of towers, and then building a large number of national wonders, I think it would make a very satisfying victory.)

Terrian Modification Spells

I'd like to see a spell that has the appearance of Ilian's territory. That would be awesome. If it turned a bunch of terrian into ice for ten turns or so with a blizzard above it. That'd be super cool looking, and a nice 'ouch' to the enemy player or AI.

Great Wonder Gates

How about more Great Wonders that allow more civilizations to pass through from somewhere or other. And perhaps some gates that allow AI controlled units to be unleashed that join your team.

Great Wonder Pacts

I really like the Pact of Nilhorn and think a Pact with Dragons and Pact with Unicorns and Pact with Pegasus and so on is in order.

Unicorns: The Resource

Holy Unicorns

Holy Unicorns become Demon Unicorns if hell terrain reaches their plot.

Holy Unicorns allow Good Alignment leaders to construct a national wonder that allows the production of a somewhat powerful unit that rides a Holy Unicorn within that city.

Holy Unicorn riders would have a couple of nifty Holy abilities.

Demon Unicorns

Demon Unicorns could be turned to Holy Unicorns using an ability to turn Hell terrain into a non-hell terrain.

Evil alignment leaders would be able to build a national wonder that allows the building of Demon Unicorns within that city. These would be semi-powerful units with one or two abilities that could probably be Death spells.

Neutral Alignment Civilizations

Neutral Alignment Civilizations can build either the national wonder that allows the Demon Unicorns or the Holy Unicorns if they have access to both resources.

Thread for this discussion here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=366499

Limit # Vote: 7 units per tile

I'm suggesting a limit seven units per tile (as an option to be turned on or off at the beginning of a game), because that's the maximum number of dots that are displayed to show the number of units. And, because seven is a good number.

Summons

Summons that are permanent should take up .5 of a 'slot' and temporary summons should not count.

Forts

I think forts (if we're doing it based on 7-unit-limit) should be +4 units within the tile.

Boats

I think boats need to work a little differently. The max per boat should be six units on the boat (so it's still seven units), and then a maximum of three boats in a tile (regardless of how many units each boat is carrying.)

Impassible Terrain

I love this thought because it makes it so that units that can travel through impassible terrain may actually now have some meaning!

Cities

I think cities should have a limit of of seven units like every other tile until the city reaches beyond size seven. For each population size it should get one more unit slot on the tile up to fourteen units.

Heroes Of Doom

I don't think a stack of seven heroes surrounded by adepts, ranged units and units with good retreating abilities stands a chance. I also don't think a bunch of warriors, no matter how large the stack, stands a chance against seven heroes. In conclusion, I think small-hero stack of doom doesn't change game balance at all.

Time Between Turns

Time between turns is way, way too long as it is. I think that regardless of this implementation some serious work needs to be done on getting AI to spend less time shuffling things pointlessly. If this increases that lag, I think it would be a serious detriment to it's use.

Health Fix

I think there should be a new resource; an herb found in the desert, which could have a fancy name or just simply be "desert herbs." Anyone should get a +1 health from these herbs and be able to use them, but the Malakim should have a specialized herbalist that gains +2 health from them.

Desert Economy

There is a lot of land that you can't do anything with but put a workshop on.

I propose a specialized improvement called "Desert Trading Post" that only Malakim (and any other desert-based civilization) could use.

You would be limited to building only three desert trading posts. Each one would provide 4 gold in the plot.

One of the three would provide +2 culture to the city working the plot, one of the three would provide +2 food, and the last would provide +2 health.

Light-Bringer Icon

Something that drives me nuts about playing the Malakim is that the Ecclesiastic has the same icon as the Malakim Light-bringer.

AI Expansion Overseas

I've been playing a lot of games with multiple continents and lots of islands. Game after game I notice that the AI do not seem to know how to put units and settlers on boats and go expand elsewhere. This can make it so that you have this huge advantage: go find empty islands; grow huge empire while AI stagnate; go kick ass. It seems a lame wait to just wait out the AI's stupidity.

Unnecessary AI Unit Movement

The AI moving their units around a bunch for no apparent reason really takes up a bunch of time for no reason. When playing beside a friendly nation who isn't at war with anyone they seem to think they need to move their units about constantly. I'm playing a game currently where it literally takes five minutes between turns. If I turn off the option to view friendly moves, then I just sit there with the globe turning for five minutes anyway. This is highly frustrating and somewhat game breaking.

AI should be programmed in such a way that they simply stick a unit somewhere and fortify it if they seem to think it's a strategic place to have a unit, instead of moving twenty units in and out of the same square every turn. If this is supposed to be some sort of way for a civilization to 'flaunt' their power, it would be just as effective to take a few units and fortify them along their boundaries.

Hidden Nationality

Hidden Nationality should be off by default. It's really annoying to have open borders and have a 'friend' come along and kill your Hidden Nationality units in your city. It's a bit late to go around looking for any such units after the AI have wiped most of them out without you even noticing. And it's a pain to search for them.

Cultural Victory

It's too easy and unsatisfying. It should, at the very least, be modified to something like ten cities with Legendary Culture. Although, my proposal is to make it so that you reach Exalted Cultural Influence at 100,000 culture (which will expand your city influence radius one last time.) And for a Cultural Victory you should need five cities with Exalted Culture, and hold at least 50% of the total culture on the map.

Workers Toggle Yield Display Option

Whenever I'm using my workers I manually turn on the tile yield display to show the production, money and food for each square. I also do this because I can then see which tiles are being worked (because the yield size is increased) by my cities so that I know if any of these tiles need improvement. Doing this manually is a pain.

I know that not everyone would care, or want this enabled, so it should be optional.

Option Idea Summary: An option to display tile yields whenever a worker is active, just like when a settler is active. This would greatly improve the game in my opinion.

I sometimes accidentally leave the display on while moving units around or during combat, which messes with the aesthetics. So if it were automatically put on while using a worker, and then off again while I wasn't, then that would save me a lot of pressing [ctrl]+y. Seriously.

Just a reserved spot.

Overall Event Comments

To me, events are one of the most interesting and fun parts of the game. They make each game different, and separate one turn from another. They give a unique flavor to a turn, and to a game.

Wild Event Option

I'd like to see a Wild Event option where an event happens every turn. I understand this would require a lot more events. So here's a start!

Event: Bewitched Sheep

Requirements:
A city is working a tile with sheep in a pasture.

Text:
A slightly manic Mage has bewitched some sheep. They've turned different colors and begun to to sing and dance in the most bizarre fashion. What should we do?

Options:
1. Hire the Mage, he's clearly talented.
Pay 50 gold and gain a Mage with four somewhat random promotions.

2. Set up the sheep pasture as a tourist attraction.
Lose one food in the plot and gain five gold in the plot.

3. Bring the sheep back to the city's carnival.
Carnival gains +2 culture, +2 gold.
(Requires Carnival.)

4. Sell the sheep.
Gain 140 gold.

5. Eat the sheep; maybe they'll give our people divine inspiration!
Gain +1 population. Equal chance of gaining +1 sickness as getting +1 health for 10 turns. Equal chance of getting +50 culture in city (one time event) as getting +1 unhappiness for 10 turns.

6. Bring these holy creatures to to our temple. They will give our people faith.
Gain a small amount of faith per turn that is about the equivalent in value as gaining +4 culture per turn.
(Requires any temple. A pagan temple, or a religion specific temple.)

Notes:

Just in case #5 wasn't clear, here are two of the four possible outcomes of #5:

Possibility: Gain +1 population, get +1 health for 10 turns, and +1 unhappiness for 10 turns.

Also possible: Gain +1 population, get + 1 health for 10 turns, and get +50 culture added to the city's total culture.

Also, #6 is bearing in mind the changes to come in Wild Mana 9.0.



Event: Bewitched Bison

Requirements:
A city is working a tile with bison in a pasture.

Text:
An adventurous Adept has bewitched our bison! They've grown extra horns, sprouted pink and fluffy tails and make chimpanzee noises. What should we do about this?

Options:
1. Hire the Adept, he's obviously awesome.
Pay 30 gold and gain an Adept with three somewhat random promotions.

2. Set up the bison pasture as a tourist attraction.
Lose one food in the plot and gain four gold in the plot.

3. Bring the bison back to the city's carnival.
Carnival gains +2 culture, +1 gold.
(Requires Carnival.)

4. Sell the bison.
Gain 100 gold.

5. Eat the bison; maybe they'll give our people divine inspiration!
Equal chance of gaining +1 population or +2 health for twenty turns. Equal chance of gaining +1 sickness as getting +1 health for 10 turns. Equal chance of getting +45 culture in city (one time event) as getting +1 unhappiness for 10 turns.

6. Bring these holy creatures to to our temple. They will give our people faith.
Gain a small amount of faith per turn that is about the equivalent in value as gaining +3 culture per turn.
(Requires any temple. A pagan temple, or a religion specific temple.)

Notes:

I purposely made this one slightly less good as the Bewitched Sheep. Not every event can be super awesome, or it would be too nuts to have an event happen every turn, which is my ultimate agenda.

Moin,

very cool ideas, I agree with a lot of them, especially settling on see, more events, the pacts (maybe dragons are too strong, but why not drakes... or werewolves, or vampires - and I always thought that the hillgiants of pact of nilhorn are a bit too weak; a half-hero promo would be nice), hidden nationality-thing, and so on. But always keep in mind the princess-rule...
And I agree too with the sometimes very timeconsuming turn waiting because of silly AI-actions, but Wildmana is here much better than all other mods (orbis in endgame made me work out a lot while waiting for AI, so my wife says "dankeschön!") and rife is simply crashing to often...

Greez,

Tschuggi

Tschuggi said:

I agree with a lot of them, especially settling on sea, more events, the pacts (maybe dragons are too strong, but why not drakes... or werewolves, or vampires - and I always thought that the hillgiants of pact of nilhorn are a bit too weak; a half-hero promo would be nice), hidden nationality-thing, and so on. But always keep in mind the princess-rule...

Click to expand...

Pact with Drakes would be good too. And Werewolves and Vampires and Succubi. The Nilhorn Pact is kinda cheap anyway once you get your production up, so it's fine that the Hill Giants are not that great.

Pact with Dragons would have to be very late game; something you can only build after getting a late-game tech.

What's the Princess Rule?

Tschuggi said:

And I agree too with the sometimes very time-consuming turn waiting because of silly AI-actions, but Wildmana is here much better than all other mods (Orbis in endgame made me work out a lot while waiting for AI, so my wife says "dankeschön!") and rife is simply crashing to often...

Click to expand...

I work out during the AI shuffle between turns too! Although, I'm still doing that with Wild Mana.

http://fallfromheaven.wikia.com/wiki/Princess_Rule

also, I pick my nose while I wait between turns.

[to_xp]Gekko;9502862 said:

http://fallfromheaven.wikia.com/wiki/Princess_Rule

also, I pick my nose while I wait between turns.

Click to expand...

Oh wow. What a terrible, but clever, bit of lore. And here, I wanted to suggest adding lots of squishy things to the game.

Poor unicorn!!!

well you can still add squishy things. but they gotta be mean enough to squish other, less squishylooking things. see the cave of the caerbannog event

[to_xp]Gekko;9502862 said:

http://fallfromheaven.wikia.com/wiki/Princess_Rule

also, I pick my nose while I wait between turns.

Click to expand...

Oh wow. What a terrible, but clever, bit of lore. And here, I wanted to suggest adding lots of squishy things to the game.

Poor unicorn!!!

quick tutorial on terrain:



this is a base texture (with grid) opened with dtx1 bitmap manipulator

i put the alpha layer, a grid bmp and a realgrid bmp in the attachment:
you should always include the alpha layer in your *.dds texture and save it as dss texture with *.dds dtx3 chosen.

how to create the base texture:
i do the following:
1) create a seamless 64*64 base texture (here is a link with a lot of seamless textures: http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/packs/terrain_volcanic_gaseous/index.htm)

2) fill the realgrid.bmp with the base texture

3) copy the alpha layer over the base texture and choose only to copy the black parts of the alpha layer

4) if you wish you can spice the base texture up by putting new stuff within those 64*64 cells but beware they still need to be seamless

how to make the grids texture:
1) just take the base texture from above and copy the white lines from the grid.bmp on it => done (not the realgrid.bmp!)

working with he detail texture:
the detail texture basically adds a relief to our base texture you can easily see that by experimenting with different detail textures



putting the texture in game with notepad++

1) open up CIV4TerrainInfos.xml and the CIV4ArtDefines_Terrain.xml

2) copy and paste an existing entry in the CIV4TerrainInfos.xml, for example grassland, it starts with <terraininfo> and ends with </terraininfo> and give it a different name.

3) do the same in the CIV4ArtDefines_Terrain.xml and copy paste the corresponding art define entry staring with <TerrainArtInfo> and ending with </TerrainArtInfo>
change the path of the grid, blend and detail texture to the new ones you made

4) go back to the CIV4TerrainInfos.xml and rename the entry between <ArtDefineTag> and </ArtDefineTag> to the one you made in 3)

5) you can now change the properties of your terrain in the CIV4TerrainInfos.xml

6) start a game open the world editor and place your terrain and check if all gone well

tesb said:

quick tutorial on terrain:

1) open up CIV4TerrainInfos.xml and the CIV4ArtDefines_Terrain.xml

2) copy and paste an existing entry in the CIV4TerrainInfos.xml, for example grassland, it starts with <terraininfo> and ends with </terraininfo> and give it a different name.

3) do the same in the CIV4ArtDefines_Terrain.xml and copy paste the corresponding art define entry staring with <TerrainArtInfo> and ending with </TerrainArtInfo>
change the path of the grid, blend and detail texture to the new ones you made

Click to expand...

Does it matter what order the terrains are in in the Civ4TerrainInfos file?

Questions about the xml in that file...

Does this signify how much food, production and money the tile makes, in that order? That seems to be the case. So I assume that the following would mean 1 and 1 .


I'm guessing that this means the terrain has +1 when on a river?


And if I'm right about the above, then would doing the following give you +1 on a hill?



All of these I don't have a guess... So what do they mean?




The sound codes are pretty self-explanatory. I'm going to leave those alone anyway. They seem like they would be more effort than it's worth to change. I'll just make sure I use the most relevant terrain when grabbing sound codes.

And also clueless about these at the end;

Does it matter what order the terrains are in in the Civ4TerrainInfos file?

Click to expand...

it has to be between <TerrainInfos> and </TerrainInfos> like all other terrains the order does not matter inside those tags.

Does this signify how much food, production and money the tile makes, in that order?

Click to expand...

yes

for the rest of your questions see here:
http://modiki.civfanatics.com/index.php/Civ4TerrainInfos


edit: the plot counter up and down and so forth are related to the armageddon counter afaik (i am not so sure about that) so unless you don't want the terrain changed with increasing armageddon counter i would not add those tags

since you guys are discussing terrain textures, I'll say it would be great if you could create hell versions of all terrains so one can know if hell has spread to it. currently lots of terrain lack that which is very annoying since there's no way to know the AC counter on a tile. tundra, snow, peaks, and water all fall into this definition, possibly others

i doubt that it is possible to make hell terrain hills or mountains since both are referenced quite often in the xml. making the textures is doable.

not sure what you mean... hell terrain hills? what determines the texture is the terrain and not the plot type so that's what matters I think? I don't want special hell terrain for hills and peaks, I just want them to look different so you know it's tainted. right now it sucks to have to guess if hell is creeping under snow for example, the only way to know is to see if sanctify is castable in the area. yellowish snow, reddish tundra, greenish water, you get the point

although I think FF already has different textures for hellish water, so those would be something to borrow