Playable natives (The units, the economy, etc)

As I was crawling through the code, it struck me that if I was serious about making playable natives -- which I think I am -- there was something that I hadn't considered: Native meshes for the various trades and professions. There's a load of really great stuff for the fighters, but next to nothing for the "other guys".

I've made animations, meshes and skins for other games, but the best I've ever managed with Civ4 and Civ4Col is reworking a texture, because the NIF file structure is just too bloody esoteric for my brain.

I've tried converting Civ4 unit meshes to Col and that has not been a success story.

Yes, I've read the tutorial. Yes, I followed the steps. I still end up with things that are either a solid team color or they lock up the game. Which is sad, because there are some beautiful units for Africa, India and Asia that I want to port over to Civ4Col so that I can fill in the visual gaps on the "East Indies" and "Ein Platz an der Sonne".

I thought maybe ships might be easier to port to Civ4Col, but I was wrong. I had no better success with ships than land units. The War Junks I found in the Civ4 DLs section lock up my game or cause a crash every time.

For instance, I can't determine why a sail takes a team color on a transparent part. What works in Civ4, does not seem to consistently work in Civ4Col.

All that being said, I figure I need to team up with someone who can either explain things to me like I'm a compete moron or who is willing to do the conversions for me.

ANYWAY, here's what I think the natives need in terms of new units.

• a Farmer unit
• a Fisherman unit
• a Weaver or Leather-worker unit
• and a Smith of some sort.

And then you have the Aztec, Maya, and Inca...

They need a Stone-worker that is the equivalent of the Carpenter. And let's say that the native building for that unit consumes stone instead of wood, so that means a Stone resource and a specialist Stone-cutter unit to collect it.

And they would need a Feather-worker specialist instead of a Weaver or Leather-worker.

And keeping things simple, let's say silver represents not just silver, but all precious metals, and give them an expert Silver-miner.

Now lets say they need to move resources from one city to another, that means some sort of transport unit, whether it's a "human" porter or a llama caravan.

OK, that brought me to the native economy. They would have to have some sort of trade among one another for the resources they need. That means an overhaul of the AI.... Suddenly, I'm startled by the scale of this thing I am wanting to do. This is definitely not a one man job. In fact, it may require just as many "specialists" to achieve as it takes to run a successful colony.

SO, I say to myself, "Precious, you know there's an easier way. In fact, it's already mostly been done..."

Create a "dummy king" for the natives, make them "European", give them coast-hugging boats, give them their own Europe screen, strip out or disable the Native-eating parts of the DLL, let them use the same AI as the Europeans, give them closed borders, and give them missionaries (I'm thinking of Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim races as well as American natives).

Still, they need units.... *sigh* ...I guess I'll get back to work....

So you basically want to have playable Natives do just the same as Europeans do ?

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Have you thought in detail about how your changes will affect game balance ?

Just a few examples:

If Natives will get strong economy, why should they still be buying the same goods from the Europeans ?
But trading with Natives is a feature that makes playing Europeans a bit more interesting.

If Natives are meant to maybe even expand their Empires and build cities, how should the Europeans early on or even in midgame have any chance to withstand them ?

Or should all Natives start with one settlement only and then expand ?
This would totally destroy the balancing of Native Training for Europeans.

If Natives can still get horses only occasionally from Europeans, that is probably not fun if you play those Natives.

What about Missioning ?
If you are playing a Native Tribe, will it be ok that Europeans create Missions in your villages.
Or will there be a mechanism that prevents that ?

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I had thought about "Playable Natives" when people requested it and my conclusion was:

Simply anything that makes Natives stronger or conflicts with a feature for the Europeans is a problem ...

Everything I could think of that would be needed to make Playable Natives interesting (Units, Economy, Gameconcepts) would heavily disturb normal gameplay as European.
(That is the reason why I completely refused the concept for RaR.)

But I am not saying that it could not work for a new mod (maybe even Scenario based).

I am just wondering, how it might be possible to have both, Fun-To-Play Playable Natives and Fun-To-Play Playable Europeans within the same mod.

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By the way:

In no way do I want to critizise or discourage.
I am just very interested in your solution for those conceptional problems, since I could never solve them myself.

Historically, the natives in most of the world didn't do much trading with Europeans except in those places where the Europeans did not yet have the upper hand. As soon as the Europeans achieved a military superiority in any region, the natives were generally subjugated and their economies were crushed as the wealth was siphoned off to the advantage of Europe.

Myself, I am utterly uninterested in playing an game based on the history of the United States. I find the whole idea of replicating the "American Revolution" tedious and boring in the extreme. The outcome is predetermined by the game's architecture.

What I prefer is to move the clock backwards to a time when the outcomes were less certain. Such as when France and England were still contesting control of North America (i.e., the so-called French and Indian Wars) or when the various European powers were fighting one another in the East Indies. Or even when the Vikings spread across the Atlantic to North America or when Kievan Rus and Novgorod and the Teutonic Knights clashed and took over the "pagan" areas of eastern Europe. All of them had missionaries at work in the areas they conquered.

In the case of the East Indies, the Mughal Empire would be the playable native civ of choice, sending missionaries to the Hindu and Buddhist villages. In the Asia, there were a number of strong native people that survived without ever becoming colonial possessions of a European power... Thailand, Afghanistan.

Or an even more specific moment in history, such as the rise of the Mexica to form the Aztec Empire, or the city states of the Maya, or the Inca. They all had active colonization efforts and economies, and I would say they were all on the verge of becoming something greater just as the Europeans and European diseases rolled over them.

These ideas are what fill my mind when I think of playable natives. Not "Europeans go to North America and create the United States." I had twelve years of that in school. Now, I am ready for something more.

As for making things complicated for the Europeans, anything would be better than the "cake walk" they face in the vanilla game. And history, real American history, is full of bloody wars and mass slaughters of Europeans by natives. I don't want the myth, I want the reality. Or at least something closer to reality than the sugary myth in the vanilla game

I was looking at the natives in the vanilla game and this confuses me:



But then right before this is:


Which, I think contradicts the setting.

All of the native civs are set this way.

Either this is a stupid "copy & paste" mistake by the developers, or the native civs were playable in some early stage of development. Which means it was a stupid mistake to not correct the setting before final release.

This makes me very curious to know what is laying hidden and unused in the unseen part of the game.

@Ray: you would have to work very hard to discourage me. My communication skills are not the best. I often write less than half of what I am thinking, then discover too late that I have made myself look/sound like an idiot. If I wrote German as well as you write English, I would count myself a genius. But I am barely capable of writing and speaking in English after twenty-five years of teaching college freshmen in America.

Answering your question about making both natives and Europeans "fun", that is a matter of personality and preference. I have a very cosmopolitan view of matters inside a game environment. I don't want things as predictable or certain as they are in Civ4Col. I think I have played 200 games at the hardest setting and in those 200 time only failed to achieve Independence 3 times. Very often, my colony has been independent before 1650.

I began looking at the natives very early and tried several simple changes trying to make them more "life-like" or "historical", but the vanilla core works against all such changes. I am mindful of King Philip's War in New England that nearly caused the abandonment of the colony. So many Europeans died in the slaughter that it is believed that there were less than 500 colonists left in all New England. There were several such moments in American history, where, were it not for gunpowder, germs, and steel, the Europeans would have been forced to remain in Europe.

So I see playing the natives as a more difficult challenge. I see playing the natives as a sort of struggle to survive against all odds. Some native civs did well against the Europeans. But often by playing politics, using one European power against the other. I do not know that I can achieve that with Civ4Col.

As for missionaries, I do not think in terms of "religion" so much as mechanic it represents, stealing a citizen. I see sending a missionary to the "white man's city" as a way to seduce specialists away from the European colonies. I am uncertain how I would go about coding that. I am thinking to pull a citizen from the European settlement's population pool, but I think a random specialist might be easier to code.

I would like to see native civs have the same sort of cultural influence as European civs. So that the only way a near-by European settlement can survive is to eliminate the native village/city. This would of course require war in some instances. That I think is what Civ4Col ultimately is about, a war of cultures. Which, sadly, is very poorly handled in the execution of the play.

When you look at history, there were fads of orientalism in Europe from the 1500s until the present day. That is an expression of the cultures of the Middle East and Far East having influence outside of their territory. Today, in this small West Virginia college town, there are two Indian restaurants, seven Chinese restaurants and a dozen Mexican restaurants. I cannot properly express how strange that is. Thirty years ago in this same town there were a total of five Asians and no Mexicans at all.

So, playing natives seems to me as natural as playing Europeans. The Europeans have gunpowder, germs, and steel. Unless I were to play very, very wisely, they will win every time.

Also, I see the problem of playing a native as "playing catch up" -- how this would be handled, I can't exactly say. A tech tree has been talked about, and I think that would be the solution for moving the natives from stone-age to iron age, but not all natives in colonial history were without gunpowder, germs, and steel. The Mughal Empire had all three, Imperial China had them, but Europeans won for a while. Now they seem to be moving ahead of the Europeans and Americans. I'm not sure I would want to have the game play into the modern era. The history of 19th and 20th century European colonialism in African is just too depressing to make into a game, but 16th century Africa is blurry enough in our minds that we can romanticize it just enough to make it a fun scenario.

In the case of the Viking/Kievan Rus era, I think that could be a great deal of fun, because the technology gap between the natives and the "Europeans" was not as great as it was between the American natives and the "Europeans". Here, I would simply strip away some of the advantages from the Vikings and Kievan Rus, rather than build up the natives.

And there is the "domino effect" of gunpowder, germs and steel to consider. Europeans give/sell the natives closest to them guns. The Europeans expand, where do the natives go? The take their guns and go shoot their way into new lands in the same direction as the Europeans, always just a step ahead of the Europeans. All the while, playing "catch up" on the tech tree. In the Discovery Era, there was very little technological innovation in weaponry, and what innovation there was, was kept on the battlefields of Europe, with last year's model sent to the colonies. So the colonists were often using guns 100+ years old. My grandfather had a musket that had been his great great great great grandfather's. It wasn't even a "flintlock", it used a fuse. So it was at least 300 years old. To quote my grandfather, "it was the first gunpowder weapon to cross the Appalachian mountains." The state it was in, I believe it.

Frontier settlers vary from coastal settlers in a number of very important ways. Firstly, they have to be on very friendly terms with the natives or they get killed. So they need to achieve a middle position between European and Native cultures. Sometimes, European frontiersmen sided with the natives and arranged to get them sophisticated (for the time) weaponry. Often a lone man went into the wilderness and ended up with a native wife. This leads to a cultural melange that simply is not expressed in Civ4Col. My family history goes back to a situation like that over and over. I am probably 25% some kind of native, enough to qualify as a "Native American" in the US Census, but I am as "white" as a white man can be. Still, I have a degree of sympathy for the natives that keeps pushing me to make them less "nerfed" if nothing else.

Also, I think playing as a native civ, one would have to create new victory conditions. Certainly "Independence" and "European" don't reflect a native victory at all. I think Thailand is the best example of native survival I can draw from my memory. Tibet did pretty well until China decided Tibet's mineral wealth was just too valuable to be wasted on the Tibetans.

I think India is another example of a native civ that made it through the colonial era largely intact. I believe it's true that the Europeans changed India, but not as much as India changed the Europeans. From my experience, curry is the national food of England. Which is a vast improvement over the wet filth they used to eat in England...

drjest2000 said:

I was looking at the natives in the vanilla game and this confuses me.

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Well, that's probably cause the code will often times use a units default profession and I bet natives units have a distinct default profession instead of PROFESSION_COLONIST(not at home atm to verify this).

What is a "native"? In the sense of the Americas it means the people who was originally there. If Europeans would have landed on the shores and the so called natives had already invented gun powder history would have turned out different. Who knows what direction the natives would have went if left alone. Europe during the Dark Ages had very little change for hundreds of years. If the roles were reversed and the American Indians had landed on European soil first welding guns and canyons (that's what my little six year old calls them and I love it) we'd all be wearing buffalo briefs. When the Vikings started their invasions the Europeans were the natives. If the Vikings had superior weapons again history would have been different.

In my medieval mod the Natives (I call them Barbarians in the mod) are being developed to be more like Minor Civs. They are not really playable but are part of the game environment much like Goody Huts and Terrain.

If you are looking to make a Historical Natives playable then you'll have to give them different objectives as you mentioned. In Colonization there is only what, three types of military units.. cannons, cavalry, and infantry. The Natives should be able to acquire equivalent to these as far as fire power. The Natives in America held their own for a while in plenty of wars but our numbers out grew theirs not to mention we had easier access to the better weapons.

If you are wanting to diverge from history and have the Natives with the potential to be much like Europeans then you could set it up that Natives have a "tech tree" of some sorts where they gain new professions and units to where they can build ships and cross the ocean to trade with foreign ports. Historically or not their goal could be to drive the Europeans from their coasts. Natives could work together to form alliances to aid in this as well as make pacts with the Kings during Revolutions. Just some thoughts...

Some more thoughts on native missionaries...

Let us say the Native missionary effect is effectively the same as a European missionary for the purposes of stealing a citizen. From the European side of play, you get a free slave. From the Native side, you get a technology boost. If the player gains a Carpenter, he could then build a Carpenter's Hut. But he would need a Carpenter Unit or a Free Colonist Unit to work it.

If he gained a Weaver, then he would be able to build a Weaver's House, but need a Weaver Unit or Free Colonist Unit to work in it.

And so on down the list.

In order for the native player to transform his Brave Units into specialists, he would need a Schoolhouse. For this, I suggest a new Specialist Unit, the Headmaster Unit or School Marm Unit or something like that. The unit is a dummy unit that serves no other purpose than to create a schoolhouse for the natives or changes the settings for the native player allowing him to build a schoolhouse, then the pedagogue unit self-deletes.

The Native Schoolhouse would then only allow the native player to train Brave Units into whatever European units he has in that village.

To make it balanced, let us say that building a Native Missionary Unit requires something like 200

As an alternative, let us also say the native player could attack a European settlement and -- like a European attacking the same settlement -- gain all the free colonists and specialist units in that settlement, then use them to further his technology advances.

Since so much of this rides on the Carpenter's Hut to build in a timely fashion, I would think making the Carpenter Unit easier or harder to gain. It would have to be tested in game to see which rate of occurrence upsets the balance the least. Certainly a smaller % would seem to do the least damage to the European players. So I would say no more than 25% chance of getting the Carpenter on the first "pull" - then decrease the chance on subsequent "pulls". Never completely removing the chance to get a Carpenter, but making it less likely with each successive "pull" off that settlement.

Thus, forcing a Native player to create several Native Missionary Units and send each to a different European settlement to insure success.

An alternative course would be to have the specialist unit self-delete after switching the building availability to "true". Or to have the unit lose it's specialist skills and convert to a Free Colonist Unit.

Making the Native Missionary cost a high number of hammers may need to be moderated somewhat. I don't recall the exact figure, but the native villages only produce 1 or 2 hammers each turn. If a Native Missionary were to cost too much in terms of hammers. the Native player could "rush" the completion by being forced to trade with the Europeans or other Natives. The cost in Gold Coins to rush completion of the Native Missionary Unit should not be too high or too low.

Again, this would have to be tested in game to see what upsets the balance the least.

Adding a tech tree would be another route. This already exists in some mods.

A civics element might be added to allow for a kind of focus during different stages of the game. Something like this already exists in RaR for European players.

The civics system and tech tree are built into the Civ 4 core, so it shouldn't be difficult to implement both for the playable native civs.

With careful design, the Natives would achieve tech status equality with the European player no sooner than the late stage of the game. About the time most players might be approaching the fight with the REF. This is a crucial point in the game wherein the Native player might side with whichever offers the best terms. Or fight both. Or side with one, then betray that ally in the end game. As Highlander says, "there can be only one."

@Kailric - in the CivInfos (just above the city names) you'll see this entry for the natives:

<DefaultProfession>PROFESSION_BRAVE</DefaultProfession>

When I changed all the Native free unit settings from PROFESSION_COLONIST to PROFESSION_BRAVE, the game did not puke and die, so I assume this setting is either ignored by the DLL or is over-ridden by the <DefaultProfession> setting.

drjest2000 said:

@Ray: you would have to work very hard to discourage me.

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As I said, that is not what I intended.
I am just interested in your conceptional approach.

I am just wondering, how it might be possible to have both, Fun-To-Play Playable Natives and Fun-To-Play Playable Europeans within the same mod.

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Well, several people have at least told me that they played both the "native" and Colonial powers in 2071 and enjoyed them, and even finished the game I'd still like them to be a lot better, but it is possible! After trying it I'm interested in any general feedback or suggestions people might have for improving playable natives experience, so give it a try & post any ideas!

I was looking at the natives in the vanilla game and this confuses me:
Which, I think contradicts the setting.
All of the native civs are set this way.
Either this is a stupid "copy & paste" mistake by the developers, or the native civs were playable in some early stage of development. Which means it was a stupid mistake to not correct the setting before final release.
This makes me very curious to know what is laying hidden and unused in the unseen part of the game.

Click to expand...

I think this has to do with the fact that the native version of "Free Colonist" UNITCLASS_COLONIST is set as UNIT_NATIVE in Civilizationinfos.xml which has default profession BRAVE. So whenever they get "Free Colonist" units, for them these become UNIT_NATIVE with PROFESSION_BRAVE.

I don't know if it's possible to make some form of functional Native Missionary in european colonies, it would likely require plenty of DLL changes. The easiest way to let natives earn a few of the standard specialists is to allow a small amount of recruitment/immigration using the standard "Europe screen" mechanisms while getting a penalty in this compared to Colonial powers; however that's not ideal for historical natives if they don't have any access to "Sail to Europe" at least initially. Using the Emigration mechanism from Medieval Conquest would seem ideal for this; you can allow some units to gradually emigrate to your nation without requiring a specific "sail to europe". Fits well with the concept of having a small trickle of frontier settlers who have "gone native".

I'm not sure why the vanilla game linked immigration so entirely with religion and the amount of churches; in reality much of immigration was for largely secular reasons. Anyway its hard to picture proselytizing native missionaries attracting adherents specifically due to the appeal of animism , but it might work well to generate immigration points/Crosses from a native profession or building that consumes Trade Goods representing their ability to provide some of the comforts of civilization to would-be emigrants. This would give a nicely balanced offset to the practice of "dumping" ostensibly useless Trade Goods on natives for an easy profit, while in compensation this slightly increases their ability to develop.

I'm not sure I remember this right, but I think when capturing a city you get a unit from that civ's <CapturedCityUnitClass> in Civilizationinfos.xml. In 2071 I used that with UNITCLASS_INDENTURED_SERVANT
so Alien invaders captured a UNIT_HUMANHYBRID and Earthling invaders captured a UNIT_ALIENHYBRID, while Aliens attacking other Aliens get an ALIENCROSSBREED But it would seem reasonable to allow natives to capture a single specialist resident after successful attack on a European settlement, or maybe the entire city. It used to be way too easy for players to capture cities in vanilla, but most recent mods have fixed that.

If you are wanting to diverge from history and have the Natives with the potential to be much like Europeans then you could set it up that Natives have a "tech tree" of some sorts where they gain new professions and units to where they can build ships and cross the ocean to trade with foreign ports. Historically or not their goal could be to drive the Europeans from their coasts. Natives could work together to form alliances to aid in this as well as make pacts with the Kings during Revolutions. Just some thoughts...

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Yeah, would be awesome to have a few native techs representing their superior knowledge of native lands and resources that the Europeans would have to strive to acquire; with Natives similarly having to strive to adapt to European technologies in time to avoid being overrun. Someone earlier (I forget who) had mentioned at the possibility of having Natives capture a special yield like Scalps on defeating European units, and being able to use this for special native techs or buildings like a Sacrificial Altar.

Someone earlier (I forget who) had mentioned at the possibility of having Natives capture a special yield like Scalps on defeating European units, and being able to use this for special native techs or buildings like a Sacrificial Altar.

Click to expand...

I've been thinking about this, specifically in terms of generating negative immigration points/crosses. I think it only reasonable to assume that the tales of blood-thirsty savages did little to benefit the appeal of getting on a leaky boat to cross a stormy ocean. Giving certain natives a sacrificial altar in their cities (e,g, Aztec, Maya) would add some historical flavor as well as provide them with a building to generate the negative points.

Also, some of the native tribes west of the Mississippi were near legendary for their cruelty. The Sioux and Apache made rather a name for themselves as masters of torture.

There is some argument in scholarly circles that scalping was something taught to the natives by Europeans. I can't argue it one way or the other, but by the 1700s it was a well established practice all over the North American region. Whites scalping natives, natives scalping whites, natives scalping other natives, sometimes turning them in at a fort for a bounty. Yes, by the post-revolutionary period, the government did subsidize this barbaric practice with an incentive/reward system. Still, the effect was highly negative and kept 90+ % of the settlers hanging close to the shore and civilization.

Prior to the victory of the English over the French in North America, the Huron and Iroquois did have diplomatic recognition in Europe and were signatories to several treaties that effected the stability and peace in Europe.

The British had treaties with the Iroquois that they generally kept (to a degree because the peace with France in the European arena hinged on it), whereas a number of prominent colonists, in the spirit of vulture capitalism, wanted the government to break those treaties and allow the whites to "take over the joint". The American Revolution was more about land grabbing than religious freedom, but that makes for poor propaganda. And as for the taxes, the truth of the matter is that the bulk of the taxes were put in place to make the colonies pay for the military protection they kept demanding. Military protection the needed largely as a consequence of pissing off the natives by grabbing Indian land.

During the American Revolution, a number of Iroquois (chiefly Mohawk as I recall) played very prominent roles in the British effort in New England. Thayendanegea (aka Joseph Brant) was a Freemason and fought - like most Mohawk warriors - on the side of the British during the Revolutionary War. He also met key players during this time such as George Washington and King George III. His role in such events as the Cherry Valley Massacre make him perfect for insertion as a Iroquois "Founding Father" -- and his sister, Konwatsi'tsiaienni (aka Molly Brant), acted as a sort of de facto diplomatic between Iroquois Nation individuals and the British.

In the post war years, they and many Iroquois withdrew to Canada and helped to establish the system of enfranchisement and vastly more equitable treatment of natives in Canada than that experienced by natives in "the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave." A phrase which takes on considerable irony if one remembers that America was the home of the [Indian] brave prior to the creation of the United States.

I'm not sure I remember this right, but I think when capturing a city you get a unit from that civ's <CapturedCityUnitClass> in Civilizationinfos.xml. In 2071 I used that with UNITCLASS_INDENTURED_SERVANT so Alien invaders captured a UNIT_HUMANHYBRID and Earthling invaders captured a UNIT_ALIENHYBRID, while Aliens attacking other Aliens get an ALIENCROSSBREED But it would seem reasonable to allow natives to capture a single specialist resident after successful attack on a European settlement, or maybe the entire city. It used to be way too easy for players to capture cities in vanilla, but most recent mods have fixed that.

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The natives in the east of North American had things a good deal better prior to the revolution than in the days post-revolution. Many natives found that post-revolution they were counted not as equals, sometimes to the point of being taken into slavery on American plantations. And as for slavery, the Native Americans did their fair share of that before and after the arrival of the Europeans. I am mindful of the story of a particular Shawnee (?) woman who was taken by the Iroquois and kept as a prostitute for the entertainment of colonial soldiers at a fort near Lake Erie. Similar stories of native slave women dot the history of the American west. It was a very common practice.

So, yeah, getting a UNITCLASS_INDENTURED_SERVANT from capturing a native settlement makes vastly more sense than gaining a UNITCLASS_CONVERTED_NATIVE, whether one is playing a native or a European, because generally if genocide wasn't the goal, then slavery was. Most especially in those regions under Spanish and Portuguese rule, where a system of tort and retort was well established by 1600.

In my view, the only time a UNITCLASS_CONVERTED_NATIVE would be historically correct would be as the result of a missionary effort. New England missionaries made a big deal of this sort of thing, even as late as the 1880s they were still making a big show of redeeming Polynesians to the White Man's superior ways. One wonders what became of those Hawaiian lads after they attended the Ivy League schools. They certainly didn't return to Hawaii and become doctors and lawyers. They probably died working as laborers on a sugar or pineapple plantation.

So, again, I'm all for the UNITCLASS_INDENTURED_SERVANT (or even UNITCLASS_SLAVE) as being historically more accurate than UNITCLASS_CONVERTED_NATIVE when capturing a native village.

When natives attacked a European settlement, they did so (sometimes at least) to steal technology or skilled laborers. When they weren't just after guns or other physical goods, they often would have a particular person in mind to take captive, such as a blacksmith or a school teacher. If they did grab a preacher or priest, it wasn't religion they were after, it was the ability to read and write. It goes without saying that religion was part of the package deal in those instances, but this led to a two-tiered class system within the native culture. Those tainted by White Man religion, those untainted. You can guess which ranked higher among the natives, I am sure. It's a human trait, not exclusive to native tribes. You see something similar taking place in Appalachia today, kids who go off to college are considered vaguely tainted by those who don't. Nowadays they tend to not say "citified" but they might as well.

But the same mechanic that was in effect in 1613 is in effect in 2013 and will probably still be in effect in 2413. A member of the group become changed by alien ways and therefore is believed no longer fit for certain cultural norms. So in terms of the natives, I see a native specialist not necessarily being honored or welcome unless that role is already established in some similar manner prior to encountering the Europeans. The Aztecs, Inca, Maya, Tarascans, Iroquois, and Huron were all working silver, copper and gold, maybe even casting bronze (the archaeological boys are divided and highly contentious on that point), so the step to smelting iron and blacksmithing wasn't a huge leap for those cultures. But the Apache and Sioux were definitely late stone age when they first encountered the Europeans.

So there has to be some manner of differentiating between primitive groups and semi-modern groups of natives. The natives in California were definitely not at the same level of technology as the Mexica, so I see no valid reason to have every native start at zero technology. Maybe they don't have steel, but given a reasonable exposure to the technology of iron working and they could achieve it. I will point out that some of the most renown blacksmiths in the colonial era were natives and half-natives, chiefly because they did more with less, developing more efficient tools and forced by necessity to be creative. Often they knew where iron ore was found, they used it for war paint or whatever, red ocher. The whole reason the term "Red Indian" came into being was because of the widespread use of red ocher as a body paint among a handful of New England tribes. Anyway, red ocher is a high yielding iron ore. So the natives didn't have to grub for swamp iron like the New Englanders did.

I guess that goes back to the natives knowing the land better than the interloping Europeans. They knew where to find the resources, especially salt. Which has always stood out as conspicuous by its absence in the game. One of the several driving forces behind the Lewis & Clark expedition was to locate a better source of salt. The area that was to later to become West Virginia was economically important long before they started digging coal out of the hills because of a reliable salt water spring on the Kanawha that provided as much as 80% of the salt used by the early United States. Salt was vital to the colonies too, so why was it left out of the game? I guess it's not glamorous enough for them to bother with. In colonial time salt was at times worth its weight in gold, stop and thing about that for a moment. No salt = no colony. There's an economic reality where the natives really have the upper hand.

In the modern world it's hard to imagine salt being highly valuable. Nowadays we try to avoid getting too much of it, that certainly wasn't the case in 1620s America. People were literally dying from want of salt. The term "salt-starved" was in common currency back then.

If I were to add only one resource to the vanilla game it would be salt and I would have it occur as rarely or more rarely than silver, and I would bias the natives' AI to drop their villages right on top of it so the only way the Europeans could get it was through trade or violence. But that's me.

That's true.. Natives also continued to be a significant political and military force as late as the Civil War; many of the Cherokee were "advanced" enough to be significant slaveowners themselves and so supported the Confederacy under Stand Watie, although the earlier Cherokee-Scottish chieftain William Ross had opposed the Confederacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_in_the_American_Civil_War

Another good example of white settlers being assimilated into native societies rather than the other way round was Chief William Holland Thomas, an attorney and legislator who became an adopted Cherokee and was eventually elected as Principal Chief.

I've been thinking about this, specifically in terms of generating negative immigration points/crosses. I think it only reasonable to assume that the tales of blood-thirsty savages did little to benefit the appeal of getting on a leaky boat to cross a stormy ocean. Giving certain natives a sacrificial altar in their cities (e,g, Aztec, Maya) would add some historical flavor as well as provide them with a building to generate the negative points.

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I guess you mean it would generate negative immigration points for all other Europeans? That seems like a cool effect, though you could also use them as requirements for unique Native techs or units.

So there has to be some manner of differentiating between primitive groups and semi-modern groups of natives. The natives in California were definitely not at the same level of technology as the Mexica, so I see no valid reason to have every native start at zero technology. Maybe they don't have steel, but given a reasonable exposure to the technology of iron working and they could achieve it. I will point out that some of the most renown blacksmiths in the colonial era were natives and half-natives, chiefly because they did more with less, developing more efficient tools and forced by necessity to be creative. Often they knew where iron ore was found

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The M:C tech system allows different civs to start with different technologies, so that shouldn't be a problem. I particularly like the idea of natives starting with some useful survival and resource harvesting techs that the Europeans don't have initially; so both sides have some catching up to do. Many of the initial settlers were completely helpless at first and had a huge disadvantage until they gradually learned to adapt to their surroundings. Of course, you'll have the choice of trading goods/weapons/techs to your Native neighbors in exchange for some of that useful knowledge, but now you'll have to think twice before doing so knowing this will make them a little stronger

If I were to add only one resource to the vanilla game it would be salt

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IIRC there is a Salt yield in RaR if you want to use it.

I was looking at RaR earlier today and feeling a little hopeless. The changes are so far ahead of my understanding that I feel like a complete moron.

I definitely want to use the salt resource from RaR.

And I like the idea of the pylon/pyramid/sacrificial altar being a necessity for tech advances, the building might be cosmetically different for the Apache, but the effect should be the same. My housemate suggested calling it a "mana generator" - which I think he pulled from some other game. My general idea is that it "steals" crosses from all Europeans within a limited range of the building. Since most first settlements are plopped on top of the native villages, I'd give it a reasonably short range, say 5-8 grids. Using it as a "freebie" for certain native civs (e.g., Aztec, Maya) would give them the tech leg-up, those without it would have to spend time building their social equivalent.

I'd also make it cause missionaries sent to that city to fail on a high percentage. And should they succeed, the mission shuts down or destroys the building, forcing the native player to rinse repeat in another location.

One of the things I cannot ever remember seeing a native AI player do is start a new settlement. Granted, since I figured out that they're pretty much ciphers, I have not paid all that much attention to the natives in the vanilla game.

Another effect I've noticed when I set the natives to playable is that they get however many starting points, then are constrained to some specific area that the game chooses for them, usually some of the worst land on the map. Which is all of the map if you're using the Caribbean map script. The Caribbean map script has to be one of the most useless things in the vanilla game.

Anyway, I'm going cross-eyes from staring at code all day. Maybe it will all start to make sense tomorrow... >_<

OK, I have no idea what I did to confuse the game this badly. All I did was add two leaderheads to The East Indies and now it gives all the native AI players Great Generals instead of Braves... I have looked through the Unit files and the Civ files and no where does it have anything that would lead to this... many more freakazoid things like this and I am ready to take up drinking....

Alright, I pared this down from a longer list, but I think the least that the natives need:

• A dock
• A hammer-hut (workshop)
• A small boat that carries 1 or 2 cargo and is limited to coastal waters
• And the AI to use these things

If I can get that to work, I'll feel confident of getting more to work.

Also, I have set natives to playable a couple of times and I have never figured out how to achieve the same effect as the AI natives do, sending a Brave as a carrier unit to move cargo (i.e., they do that to carry cargo as a gift to the settlement in the game)

Even though the Civ4UnitInfos says <iCargo>0</iCargo>, somewhere in the guts of the game the basic support for Braves as beasts of burden is there.

I'd like to create a special UNITCLASS - UNITCLASS_PORTER or UNITCLASS_BEARER with 1 cargo slot for <SpecialCargo>SPECIALUNIT_YIELD_CARGO</SpecialCargo> and have the AI not be UNITAI_WAGON

These guys existed before wagon trains and the history of Africa and South America is full of them.

drjest2000 said:

Also, I have set natives to playable a couple of times and I have never figured out how to achieve the same effect as the AI natives do, sending a Brave as a carrier unit to move cargo (i.e., they do that to carry cargo as a gift to the settlement in the game)

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When Native Units gift (or sell) goods to Europeans, the Native Units never actually carry those goods.
It is all just "simulated" in the DLL logic which in fact directly beams goods from the home village of the Native Unit that triggers the according DLL-Diplo-Event.
For the European Player it does not make a difference what actually happens behind the scenes as long as the result is correct.

There are several examples of such "behind the scenes" features.
They were simply much easier to implement because the developers did not need to care about a human actually using these features from the Native side.

Well the M:C mod already has Profession Peddler, you could use that. Or you could make some standard cargo units using XML and use graphics for either a cart or porter.

I spent some time playing M:C last night and I think I am "in lurve" with it as the base for playable natives. I like the peddler idea. I'm thinking that Firaxis should have added something like that rather than using the esoteric method they used for native gift-bearers.

I also saw where you had posted the idea of viking long-boats moving on grid each turn over land. I am totally on board with that idea. I'm not an expert or anything, but I know rather a lot about the viking traders and what they did day-to-day, especially along the route to Constantinople.

The same thing was done extensively in the American colonies by the French and English, there are a couple of places in New York that were major portage routes between the Hudson and the Great Lakes basins. The Natives had been doing the same there long before the white men came.

EDIT: And the B&O Railroad (I think) started out as a canal company that hauled boats by rail over a ridge. There are some of those sites still viewable along the northern Appalachians.

I'd say the Viking Norse and the Polynesians pretty much owned deep-sea travel long before most European civs had stopped hugging the coasts. I'm pretty sure the recent archaeological digs in northern Canada are more than ample proof that the Vikings were operating much more extensively in North America than has heretofore ever been credited. The evidence south of the tundra-zone though is pretty thin.

I guess that even if there was lots of evidence in more southern locations it would all be covered by or has been disturbed beyond any hope of scientific usefulness by the construction of the cities of the North East coast

drjest2000, great to see that you're back I very much enjoyed your ColGold mod.

Thanks, Androrc. It's good to be back. I became distracted by WoW for a while... I'm better now, the doctor's say I'm cured >_<

If you still have a copy of the ColGold beta, would you care to post it to a file sharing site?

drjest2000 said:

Thanks, Androrc. It's good to be back. I became distracted by WoW for a while... I'm better now, the doctor's say I'm cured >_<

If you still have a copy of the ColGold beta, would you care to post it to a file sharing site?

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Yeah tell me about it, wow nearly sucked all my brain cells out. Fun as heck though. I have a wow time card just siting there but I refuse to use it as I know I prolly want do anything else, besides eat, say hi to my wife and pet my kids from time to time. It's hard these days finding time to do all the things you love.

I'd say the Viking Norse and the Polynesians pretty much owned deep-sea travel long before most European civs had stopped hugging the coasts. I'm pretty sure the recent archaeological digs in northern Canada are more than ample proof that the Vikings were operating much more extensively in North America than has heretofore ever been credited. The evidence south of the tundra-zone though is pretty thin.

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Where did you read or watch or learn about this, sounds very interesting?