Absolute Noob - Help modifying existing civs!

[TheLastDays]

Heya! I hope someone around here can help me. I don't want to do much, basically I want to just take the civs as they are (leave leadervideos, banners, colours, UUs, UAs, UBs, etc...) and simply change their names, descriptions, the text they use in diplomacy, the loading screen, etc. - so basically I want to only alter the "text part" of the existing civs.

This is merely for myself as I like to create my own kinda "fantasy" world to play in and it's just a nice thing for immersion... Maybe later I am thinking of changing banners and stuff and even much later I might be thinking about the civs uniques and come up with something... unique... I am no gameplay mechanic guy though and probably it would be terribly unbalanced which is why I simply want to change the names etc. in a first step...

Again this doesn't have to adhere to any great standards as it's only for myself. Of course I'm willing to make my work accesible to anyone who would have an interest in taking these fantasy backgrounds and storys and play around with it in modding... As I said I am pretty good in imagination just the practical part about all this... eludes me ^^

So my questions are: Is this possible, esp for someone with no (zeeeero) experience with modding and could someone point me to where to learn what is necessary for just that task?

 

[TheLastDays]

bump, just once... sorry if that's not accepted here I couldn't find anything about it in the forum rules.

I'd really appreciate any help here...

 

[Gedemon]

Use a text editor that can do a search in multiple files (I'm using Notepad++) and search for (parts of) the text you want to replace in the game's XML files (note that there are in different folders for vanilla, G+K and BNW)

Of course I'd suggest to do that using a real mod, see the Tutorials section, and whoward has posted some very useful "blank" mods that can hold your simple changes without requiring you to learn how to use modbuddy.

 

[TheLastDays]

Yes I was already looking at a bunch of tutorials on how to do this as a mod (since I want to keep the originals civs intact of course) my question was more about the way to go about changing things...

so basically if I simly edited the text parts in the game's XML files, like for example the introduction speech that Shaka gives when you first meet him, it would leave everyting else intact, working the same way as before, only replace that single entity of text with what I wrote in the XML?

And you can find all these things as editable text in the XML files? (Civ names, Leader names, diplo texts, loading screen texts, etc?)

And thanks a lot for the reply