Carthage 1.0

[Jecrell]

Hannibal by CivArmy

I'm sure every now and then we look back on history's legends. The ancient civilizations that stood the test of time. We often think of Rome, Greece and Egypt. Yet along with those civilizations, there are others that left a mark on history so that they would never be forgotten. One of these fabled Civilizations was Carthage. Which was once, perhaps, the richest civilization in history, and now lies in ruins.

This module was built with a simple idea in mind. To bring Carthage back!

Module Features

• Adds the Carthaginians as a Civilization
• Adds Hannibal artwork/diplomacy as the leader of the Carthaginian civ
• Includes Carthaginian War Elephant custom unit (Custom skin, custom button)
• Includes custom flag design/Civ button (Tunis)
• Includes Civilopedia entries for Hannibal and Carthage

Carthaginian Civilization

Starting Techs
- Fishing
- The Wheel

Leader
Hannibal

- Aggressive
- Organized
- Favors Representation Civic

Unique Unit
Carthaginian War Elephant

- Power: 8
- Cost: 60 shields
- +50% Against Mounted Units
- +25% Against Melee Units
- Recieves No Defensive Bonuses
- Requires: Construction Tech

Screenshots



Download (1.3) Here!
Mirrior 1 (Civ Fanatics). http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads10/Carthage_Mod_1.3.zip

Installation

To install the module.

1) Download and install WinZip at http://www.WinZip.com/

2) Extract and run the installation file and enjoy!

Now you can load the mod from the main menu (Advanced -> Load a Mod).
The Carthage mod can also be used to play as Carthage in
any regular Civilization IV map. Feel free to take them
out for a test drive in "Play Now" mode.

Known Issues

• If you put this mod in your My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Mods\ directory your saves may not work!!
• This module currently is only in English, so if you are running on a platform with a different language only the names have been translated. The Civliopedia entries are not. But if you can read English you'll do just fine.

If you find more, contact me at jecrell@gmail.com immediately.

Changelog
v1.3
- Replaced Civilization 3 leaderhead for Hannibal with CivArmy's Hannibal
- Removed UU's Ivory requirement and lowered its power from 9 to 8.
------------------------------------------------------------------

v1.2
- Fixed custom dialog through CIV4DiplomacyInfos.xml
- Changed Teamcolor from brown to maroon
- Changed Carthaginian War Elephant graphics, formation to 3, and statistics to...
[indent]9 pwr, 60 shields, +50% vs. mounted, +25% vs. melee[/indent]
- Modified Carthage icons
[indent]Carthaginian War Elephant (now reflects new War Elephant)
Carthage Icon (now resembles the other icons)
Carthage Flag (included gradient effect for better visual)[/indent]

------------------------------------------------------------------

v1.0
- Added the Empire of Carthage to the game.
- Included Hannibal graphics/diplomacy text from the "Greek World" scenario
- Added the Carthagian War Elephant custom unit (Custom skin, custom button)
- Includes custom flag design/Civ button (Tunis)
- Includes Civilopedia entries for Hannibal and Carthage

Questions? Comments?
I'd love some feedback right about now.

 

[woodelf]

Are you positive you're are supposed to overwrite anything in main Civ 4 directory? I'd be leery of doing that personally.

The graphics look good and Carthage definitely deserves to be in the game, but the overwriting might be a no-no. Might.

 

[Jecrell]

Are you positive you're are supposed to overwrite anything in main Civ 4 directory? I'd be leery of doing that personally.

The graphics look good and Carthage definitely deserves to be in the game, but the overwriting might be a no-no. Might.

Glad you caught that one. I used the wrong Readme.txt file for that. Fixing it as we speak.

[Edit] I accidently used the TXT for LeHawk's map which should include this module soon.

 

[woodelf]

Glad to be of help.

So when you load a new Civilization Mod you play it like a custom game but the new civ is included? Are any of the original civs excluded?

 

[Jecrell]

Glad to be of help.

So when you load a new Civilization Mod you play it like a custom game but the new civ is included? Are any of the original civs excluded?

Nothing was replaced so much as certain files modified to include Carthage as an additional civilization. All of the old Civilizations are still there and in-tact.

Technically when the module is loaded, any new game you start will have Carthage as an optional civilization. Now, I don't rightly know if they are randomly included in maps if you don't select Carthage, but I don't see any reason why they wouldn't be.

The only let down about Carthage is when you don't have ivory near your starting location. Mmmm, that always drives me batty.

 

[woodelf]

Downloading it now. The beauty of the early mods with no custom graphics is that they are tiny. The 250-400 meg monsters in Civ3 currently are killer.

As for the no ivory start....it's easy enough to exit to main menu and try again.

 

[Cafegio]

I just have one question , why cant I play Carthage as a civ on one of the earth maps. My only problem

 

[Dracleath]

10 str doesn't particularly make sense for carthage war elephants - they were smaller forest elephants, weaker than their indian counterparts. Adding STR outright is also a bad,bad idea in general for balance, trust me. It's better to give bonuses vs unit types, as this leaves counters availible.

A better bonus might perhaps be something like:

8str
Doesn't require ivory (as carthaginians used smaller local elephants).
+50% vs mounted
+25% bonus vs melee (Carthaginians used elephants as melee shock troops rather than archers for the most part).

 

[Jecrell]

I just have one question , why cant I play Carthage as a civ on one of the earth maps. My only problem

The Earth map defines the Civs you can play, unfortunately you have to go in manually with notepad and add the Carthage civ in that scenario. I'll see if I can add them in for you. But I can't do it until this weekend. So much work to be done!

10 str doesn't particularly make sense for carthage war elephants - they were smaller forest elephants, weaker than their indian counterparts. Adding STR outright is also a bad,bad idea in general for balance, trust me. It's better to give bonuses vs unit types, as this leaves counters availible.

A better bonus might perhaps be something like:

8str
Doesn't require ivory (as carthaginians used smaller local elephants).
+50% vs mounted
+25% bonus vs melee (Carthaginians used elephants as melee shock troops rather than archers for the most part).

Thanks for the suggestion -- just what I was looking for really. I know these forums are full of good ideas. Originally I planned something along the lines of anti-melee units, but I noticed how the Roman UU was handled and went from there until I could come up with something better (+2 strength, same shield cost).

 

[vbraun]

Download Mirriors
Unfortunatley this site doesn't support files over 500KB, because my file includes some art files and the custum unit it goes over that. So, for now, I have two mirriors you can download from.

Look near the bottom of the page, and find the thing that says "Upload File". You can upload up to 3mb to there. Here is the link in case you can't find it: http://www.civfanatics.net/upload.html

 

[Jecrell]

Look near the bottom of the page, and find the thing that says "Upload File". You can upload up to 3mb to there. Here is the link in case you can't find it: http://www.civfanatics.net/upload.html

I'm sorry I guess I just panicked because it wouldn't let me upload into the post itself. Thanks a bunch vbraun, I really appreciate it.

 

[ejdacanay]

koo, howd u make the leaderhead?

 

[Jecrell]

koo, howd u make the leaderhead?

The leaderhead was already included in the game!
It's literally a super high resolution picture of Hannibal from Civilization III. It also came with all the buttons and everything for Hannibal, which was luck on my part since I would have done a fairly poor job making it myself.

You can find the leaderhead in Sid Meier's Civilization 4/Mods/Greek World/Assets/Art/Interface/leaderheads/. In that directory there are several files.

Leaderhead_Hannibal.dds (Main portrait)
Btn_LH_Hannibal.dds (button for Civilopedia/ect)
Btn_LH_Hannibal_D.dds (unselected form of the same button)​

To view and edit these I use a program called DXTBMP, which can be found here

At first it's constrained and kinda deformed, but that's just so it stretches to fit all the windows in the game. I find it odd that they didn't do this for the WW2 scenario, which has some terrible looking diplomacy images.

I had to edit the XML files once I had gotten the proper images from the Greek World into my directory. Which I did using Frontpage XML editor, but you can probably use Notepad. There is a clear pattern in how the tags are set up for the art definitions and such; I had to do a lot of messing around and comparisons to figure it out.

Also, Carthage is defined as "England" in the Greek World mod's XML files; even stranger, Hannibal takes the role of Victoria.

My mod is a bit different though, I used new custom XML references so it wouldn't replace anything. Although I think because of that I can't customize the dialog, which I believe is fairly broken. It'll use the generic stuff, which isn't pretty.

 

[Princeps]

Rename Carthage as Carthaginian Empire because "carthage empire" sounds like bronken english.

 

[Jecrell]

Rename Carthage as Carthaginian Empire because "carthage empire" sounds like bronken english.

Ack. I'll fix it later this week; however, I prefer Carthagian (car-THAY-jun), because Carthaginian sounds rather odd.

 

[Lehawk]

Nice mod, and it will be soon! I'm at version 2.4, so I'm getting closer .

Might want to edit your original post and direct them to unzipping it to, "(\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Mods\)".

I also agree with toning down the elephant unit to 8, but give a vs. melee bonus. I think they should still require ivory, though. Another idea is to knock a few shields off, and make them weaker than normal elephant units, but are unlocked earlier?

Anyways good job, and I have it attached soon!

 

[Jecrell]

Nice mod, and it will be soon! I'm at version 2.4, so I'm getting closer .

Might want to edit your original post and direct them to unzipping it to, "(\My Documents\My Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Mods\)".

I also agree with toning down the elephant unit to 8, but give a vs. melee bonus. I think they should still require ivory, though. Another idea is to knock a few shields off, and make them weaker than normal elephant units, but are unlocked earlier?

Anyways good job, and I have it attached soon!

They both work exactly the same I believe. Made a fair compromise out of it. I suppose the XP generation really prefers the My Documents thing to avoid clutter, so I suppose it is a better directory route -- and therefore I give it priority. But for the other folks the other way is still listed (and emphasized the difference with the Program Files\ route).

If possible I'd like to make an installation file and have it all done in a very user friendly "finds your Civ4 directory" sort of way. That would simplify installation even further. If anyone has any experience with that or suggestions I'd like to hear from you. Also, if not, I'll mess around with it myself later.

[EDIT]
I wasn't pondering removing the Ivory -- that would really make the resources pointless. The reason why they require Ivory is the same reason why most units require resources until Mustketmen come around. The main point I suppose is to war for your resources when possible if you plan to wage war... waging war for Ivory would provide the UU and a high advantage in war times.

Also I noticed that Brown is also used by the Mongols (you'd think after playing 100 hours of Civilization IV I'd know more...). I'm going to have to modify it slightly so it appears there is a difference between cultures rather than a merge~
[/EDIT]

 

[Lehawk]

They both work exactly the same I believe. Made a fair compromise out of it. I suppose the XP generation really prefers the My Documents thing to avoid clutter, so I suppose it is a better directory route -- and therefore I give it priority. But for the other folks the other way is still listed (and emphasized the difference with the Program Files\ route).

If possible I'd like to make an installation file and have it all done in a very user friendly "finds your Civ4 directory" sort of way. That would simplify installation even further. If anyone has any experience with that or suggestions I'd like to hear from you. Also, if not, I'll mess around with it myself later.

I've done professional installations packages before, and I hate them . Try "QuickInstall 2.0", it's supposed to be easier. The registry would be your best bet for finding the appropriate directory. I wouldn't add an uninstaller, or modify the registry in any way (no reason to). Keep it simple. For a mod, you may want to use the main folder, not the MyDoc folder. Chances are that if there are multiple users playing Civ4, they may share the same mods too. (Easier than finding the right MyDoc folder too)

Also I noticed that Brown is also used by the Mongols (you'd think after playing 100 hours of Civilization IV I'd know more...). I'm going to have to modify it slightly so it appears there is a difference between cultures rather than a merge~

I forgot too, doesn't help that I've focused so much on Europe the past week though...

---
Are you going to leave the mod's folder name the same? It would be nice to just send people directly to this thread to download the mod from my map's thread.

 

[Jecrell]

I've done professional installations packages before, and I hate them . Try "QuickInstall 2.0", it's supposed to be easier. The registry would be your best bet for finding the appropriate directory. I wouldn't add an uninstaller, or modify the registry in any way (no reason to). Keep it simple. For a mod, you may want to use the main folder, not the MyDoc folder. Chances are that if there are multiple users playing Civ4, they may share the same mods too. (Easier than finding the right MyDoc folder too)

I forgot too, doesn't help that I've focused so much on Europe the past week though...

---
Are you going to leave the mod's folder name the same? It would be nice to just send people directly to this thread to download the mod from my map's thread.

If you want to directly link my modification you have my full support. Also I'm not going to mess around with the installation folder any more. Both in this thread for the installation (the two optional directories) and the name of the directory (Jecrell [Carthage]).

Also I'd like any more suggestions and comments before I get to work on the next version now that I have time. I'd greatly appreciate anymore input before I start beating the kinks out of 1.0.

 

[Lehawk]

Oh, multiplayer support should be turned back on.