Extra Ancient Civs for AND.

I wanted a few more ancient civilisations within my game, to flesh out some of the less commonly used religions, so I've gotten to rummaging about in Civ Gold, and figuring out how to adapt them so that they run without errors and generally work properly. It's not actually super-hard, as it turns out, after rather a lot of trial and error.

These are just the Civ Gold civs, Nubia and Minoa, adapted for use with A New Dawn.

Simply copy the Arkenor folder to your Rise of Mankind/Assets/ Modules folder.

Also in that folder you will find a file called MLF_CIV4ModularLoadingControls.xml You'll need to make sure that the Arkenor folder is mentioned within that, and marked to be loaded, like so:


<Module>
<Directory>Arkenor</Directory>
<bLoad>1</bLoad>
</Module>


I've just tried to get them to the point where they work properly within AND. I've updated their special units and buildings to the best of my ability, but they're unlikely to really be within the current design orthodoxy of RoM+AND, but they'll probably not do terrible harm either in the hands of an AI. I've just done this to add a little variety to the emerging barbarians within my game, and thought I might as well share the result. Almost certainly they're probably missing some AND specific gubbins that I know nothing about, but they're functional.

The Nubians favour Kemetism, and the Minoans are Hellenestic. I've converted a few other civs, but they're favouring religions from Dancing Hoskuld's extra religion pack so would probably break most installs (or at least squeal a bit during loading). I'll polish and package them up too if there's a demand.

UPDATE: After some advice further down the thread, I'm now packaging these in their own folder rather than using the pre-existing "Custom Civilisation" one, which can apparently cause trouble. You'll want to remove the old Nubia and Minoan folders from in there, if you installed the first one (all two of you).

Thus the Minoan and Nubian file has been updated. I also finally figured out how to get it to include the ranged changes that AND uses, so the Nubian archer has been tweaked to fit.

I've also added a Goths + Huns pack. This one is designed to be used with Aaranda and Dancing Hoskuld's religion pack, but I've included alternate files for if you're not using that.

The Huns favour Tengriism, and the Goths favour Asatru.

Cool stuff. I'm curious to see what your Minoan UU is considering how shrouded in mystery their entire civilization was, but either way =)

zeppelin17 said:

Cool stuff. I'm curious to see what your Minoan UU is considering how shrouded in mystery their entire civilization was, but either way =)

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As I said, I just converted it from Civ Gold. I didn't choose what UU anyone got, though I did try to bring them into line with RoM+AND power levels and techs. They get Minoan Trireme with a cargo hold, a bit earlier than other Civs get their cargoholdless Trireme, giving them a brief window of opportunity to rule the shallow waters.

Their building is a castle variant that gives you a free engineer. I changed that from a free priest, as it is supposed to represent the Minoan labyrinth, which of course was built by Daedalus, the ultimate engineer. And I usually have far more free priests than I ever wanted already by that point.

Ah, makes sense (haven't played Civ Gold, so I wouldn't know). I've always loved early dominance in whatever category, Land or Sea.

About civs...

My greatest dream since I first played Civilization 4 (never played any version before that ) is this:
Merge strongly related civs into one civ. It always annoyed me that Holy Roman Empire and Germany aren't the same civ. Plus Bablyonia and Arabia. Then when you add in CIV Gold, it annoys me greatly that they split many civs into ancient and modern civs. In my opnion, "what if..." can only go so far.

So in my opnion, Greece should still have all Minoan and Mycenaean details in its civ pack. We want civs in our game to be historically EMPIRE-BUILDING civs.

The above comments were completely my opinions. Feel free to add any civs but remember the 1.75 version will have the default size of over 1 GB .

os79 said:

About civs...

My greatest dream since I first played Civilization 4 (never played any version before that ) is this:
Merge strongly related civs into one civ. It always annoyed me that Holy Roman Empire and Germany aren't the same civ. Plus Bablyonia and Arabia. Then when you add in CIV Gold, it annoys me greatly that they split many civs into ancient and modern civs. In my opnion, "what if..." can only go so far.

So in my opnion, Greece should still have all Minoan and Mycenaean details in its civ pack. We want civs in our game to be historically EMPIRE-BUILDING civs.

The above comments were completely my opinions. Feel free to add any civs but remember the 1.75 version will have the default size of over 1 GB .

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For me Civ is about What if. We've only had one play through in the real world, and deciding who the winners are based on that seems the wrong way around.

That's why I prefer ancient civs to later ones.

As your Sig says "The best [mod/modcomp] releases are things you did for yourself, as then you are less upset if it appears that nobody else is using it at all.". I wanted these for myself, and thought I might as well share them.

Arkenor said:

For me Civ is about What if. We've only had one play through in the real world, and deciding who the winners are based on that seems the wrong way around.

That's why I prefer ancient civs to later ones.

As your Sig says "The best [mod/modcomp] releases are things you did for yourself, as then you are less upset if it appears that nobody else is using it at all.". I wanted these for myself, and thought I might as well share them.

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Touché .

The problem is that Minoans and Greeks and Macedonians and Thracians etc etc were not the same people. Similar yes, same? No. 100% agree with Ark on this one, the joy I get from Civ is taking over Madrid as the Aztecs, not repeating history. That's not fun, its silly and a waste of time. Hopefully for Civ 16 or something it will be 100% dynamic, in that you don't have a static tech tree. You don't have specific units, you can't just start a game as the mongols and rush horseback riding and rape everyone.

I love what Afforess did with RoM, and I love Rhye's for what it did to the game in general (I remember how excited i was for Rhye's Civ 3...). What I ultimately want is for example, If you civ starts in the middle of a jungle, maybe jungle camps produce +1 food. Maybe if there isn't any iron around, you're forced to develop better bronze weapons, giving you shock 1 or +1 strength. The random events in AND come the closest to that, but it's not all the way there (and I don't think it's really even possible yet).

The Egyptians (if I remember correctly) get a bonus in producing wonders. This was because of their productivity in Ancient times. How about if you build a couple wonders (not the Stonehenge, but something perhaps similar) you get a 5% percent production bonus, maybe with a few more it upgrades to 10%.

Plus I always thought it was silly to live for 6000+ years as the same leader...

I always imagined the LHs as a god of their civ.

You're right about civ just being arbitrary on players' preferences. I am just saying that there are way too many civs when we have more than empire building civs . But that is beside the point now.

Personally, I wish that tech tree is highly dynamic and invisible to a player from start and go. Like the world is under the black fog until you explore it. As you research a technology, few branching techs may pop up for you to research from. Then tiny percentage of techs can be dependent on whether you have certain resources or whatnot first. And then have other tiny percentage of techs be unavailable to you for some selected reasons. Many, many ideas we have here but extremely hard to implement with present Civ4 engine. Maybe Civ5 engine will make for more fertile ground for more ideas. Then maybe hopefully if Firaxis just quit it, that enough years pass by that copyright is no longer a concern that we hardcore fans investigate the whole programming source and revise it with the future know-how and technology (imagine how programming will be like in ten years ). Then we would not have to depend on commercially produced Civilization game anymore because the new programmers will not be that much concerned about pleasing everyone like Firaxis is doing now.

Its funny this thread came up. I am working on converting many of the Mega Civ Pack civs to current versions (as requested by Afforess), as well as trying to make as many as possible Revolutions friendly (i.e. two leaderheads). Since my progress is currently 5% done with civs and 100% done with existing civ LHs (planning on adding a few more), I feel like it would have been inappropriate to start a thread.

I am also planning on having separate Ancient Egypt and Modern Egypt civs.

@Arkenor: Any more civs you feel like converting would make my work easier. I have not looked over your work quite yet, but I would just ask that added civs contain: at least two LHs, only one UB, only one UU, and keep with other RoM civs in minor details. Also, you should make a "Custom_Civilizations" folder due to BULL; any spaces within the filepath for building buttons will cause graphics errors.

generalstaff said:

Its funny this thread came up. I am working on converting many of the Mega Civ Pack civs to current versions (as requested by Afforess), as well as trying to make as many as possible Revolutions friendly (i.e. two leaderheads). Since my progress is currently 5% done with civs and 100% done with existing civ LHs (planning on adding a few more), I feel like it would have been inappropriate to start a thread.

I am also planning on having separate Ancient Egypt and Modern Egypt civs.

@Arkenor: Any more civs you feel like converting would make my work easier. I have not looked over your work quite yet, but I would just ask that added civs contain: at least two LHs, only one UB, only one UU, and keep with other RoM civs in minor details. Also, you should make a "Custom_Civilizations" folder due to BULL; any spaces within the filepath for building buttons will cause graphics errors.

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The other ones I've done are Arawak, Goths, Nazca, and Huns. Currently they're using additional religions from Dancing Hoskulf's religion pack (and, like the two here, were specifically picked to fit particular religions that needed more adherents), but easy enough to switch for your purposes.

I'm just converting these for my own use, so I'm not really worrying about how many LH's they have. Creating new leaderheads is currently above my civ modding paygrade. I just wanted to get them working without errors or wildly anomalous power. You're welcome to do with them as you like if they're any use to you, but you'd probably just be better off converting them from scratch though, as I doubt they remotely reach official standards. The Nubians have three LH, but the Minoans and the other 4 civs I've converted just have one each right now. The obvious extra LH for the Minoans would be King Minos himself, but I don't, at this moment, have the knowledge to create such a being. I'm still overly pleased with myself for simply figuring out how to get them to use their proper greeting text.

I just used the custom civilisation folder because it already existed in the AND install, and I've not yet really looked at how to make sure things get loaded by the automatic loading thing, so using a premade one was more comfortable. I'll see about figuring out how to do it the proper way.

Update: Looks like I'd somehow managed to remove the attached file. Probably when I updated it after I noticed and fixed some errors in the Civopedia text. It's reattached properly now.

os79 said:

Maybe Civ5 engine will make for more fertile ground for more ideas. Then maybe hopefully if Firaxis just quit it, that enough years pass by that copyright is no longer a concern that we hardcore fans investigate the whole programming source and revise it with the future know-how and technology (imagine how programming will be like in ten years ). Then we would not have to depend on commercially produced Civilization game anymore because the new programmers will not be that much concerned about pleasing everyone like Firaxis is doing now.

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Yea that was my hope as well, except I trust Firaxis on this (thought I do wish Brian Reynolds would work with Sid again... After they make Alpha Centauri 2!) I think in this case, what they're doing with Civ 5 (appealing to us mainly, modders, gamers, enthusiasts etc.) is the right direction to be heading. In some cases it's a horrible idea that could be the end of a franchise or someone's career (like Spore... shudder... god that game could have had SO MUCH potential). I dunno, I'd say looking at the progress the Civ franchise has made, I'm really hopeful for Civ 5, 6, and more to be really excellent. The entire idea is and has been Sid's baby since before I can remember, I don't see him giving up any time soon, especially not after putting out something that isn't his 100% best.

Though I will say that modding Civ 4 is a lot less user friendly that Civ 3 was, though you couldn't do as much in Civ 3. I just hope they address that for Civ 5 and make it either an easy language or include SOME kind of guide to modding or something. For someone who isn't a computer science major, XML is kinda strange but managable, but Python and SDK are like...

OK, I've updated, using it's own folder now, rather than custom civilisation. Though I have no idea what BULL even is, it sounded scary enough to make the change. I hadn't seen any actual problems with icons myself.

Also added a Goths and Huns pack. That one is designed to be used with Dancing Hoskuld's religion mod, but I've included alternate files for folks not using that.

Arkenor said:

Though I have no idea what BULL even is, it sounded scary enough to make the change.

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That feature is something you use almost 80% of your time in city screen. BULL is a part of BUG/BULL that was merged into RevDCM, that was merged into RoM. BULL is hover-over Actual Effects and few others, but mostly Actual Effects.