Achievements kill the community?

[bbbt]

Hmm, I don't care about achievements (I've never even looked to see what I have/don't have) and I've never used mods. I'm not sure what my problem is

 

[dagriggstar]

Just to add to the whole difficulty of making mods...Lets say i want to add/alter one individual unit in the game. The time taken (roughly and from memory) would be

civ 2 = 2 minutes (Although with significant limitations as to what is possible) (editing a txt file)
civ 4 = 5 minutes (Editing an xml file, can be opened with wordpad or similar)
civ 5 = 20 minutes (Having to actually create a file)

More recently, with BNW I wanted to try moding the wonders that needed you to open trees to instead require closing the trees. But I found that was hooked at the tree level instead of the policy level and so couldn't be done with XML.

Funny that was precisely what I was planning to try in one of my pet "scenario-mod" I seem to have been working on since forever...

 

[joncnunn]

civ 2 = 2 minutes (Although with significant limitations as to what is possible) (editing a txt file)
civ 4 = 5 minutes (Editing an xml file, can be opened with wordpad or similar)
civ 5 = 20 minutes (Having to actually create a file)

The 20 minutes is only if you want to make it an official mod. For things that can be done in XML, you can just edit the base xml files directly if you only play single player. And the achievement mod-detctor won't even know that you've moded the game so you still get the achievements.

Notes:

Whenever a patch touches the XML file in which you've manually changed the file will get replaced with the official version so you need to keep a backup of both your mod and the original in a folder in which steam doesn't know about. That will then allow you to use windiff (or some other file comparison tool) to both see what they've changed and also allow you to easily re-implement your changes.

This won't work for multi player games.

 

[headcase]

I can say the achievement system has kept me away from the "light touch" kind of mods. If I'm interested in a more game-changing mod, then they don't deter me.

That could be a reason, though personally I've never actually seen anyone post that. I would say the tardiness with the DLL and difficulties with graphics modding are bigger reasons for the larger Civ4 modding community.

In fact, without these issues, it would be much easier for ambitious modders to include their own internal achievement system, independent of Steam's.