Adding palace upgrades to Civ4

Mattastic

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Jan 4, 2006
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One of the things I loved most about the original Civilization was upgrading your palace, even though I never got to do enough of it and I frequently ended up making them lopsided. I remember I really looked forward to the upgraded version of this when Civ2 came out ... and it didn't. And the Civ3 version was rubbish and now by Civ4 we still don't seem to have that. In fact, even the palace model that we do have looks laughably cheap.

Well, I've been doing some thinking about it, and I wanted some thoughts...

First off, if someone's already been doing this, let me know now so I can shut up quickyl.

At the moment, my idea is pretty simple: that the palace model automatically changes when you hit a particular score. The architectural style of the palace would be based on your choice of civilization.

(In theory, you could make the choice each turn that you upgrade in, but there are a few problems there: first all, it will replace the existing model, not add to it; also, the only thing differentiating the styles of some civilizations is the textures, so if you were able to choose freely you'd need a set of textures for each architectural style per civilization. With the number of styles I have reckoned for, that would incrase the number of required textures from 24 to 168!)

In my basic outline calls for seven architectural styles: African, Ancient European, European (castles), Greco-Roman, Mezo-American, Middle Eastern and Oriental. In very broad terms, these just about cover all the current civs. Here's the list of what goes with who:

Spoiler :
American Empire: Greco-Roman
Arabian Empire: Middle Eastern
Aztec Empire: Mezo-American
Carthagian Empire: Greco-Roman
Celtic Empire: Ancient European
Chinese Empire: Oriental
Egyptian Empire: Greco-Roman
English Empire: European
French Empire: European
German Empire: European
Greek Empire: Greco-Roman
Incan Empire: Mezo-American
Indian Empire: Middle Eastern
Japanese Empire: Oriental
Korean Empire: Oriental
Malinese Empire: African
Mongolian Empire: Oriental
Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern
Persian Empire: Middle Eastern
Roman Empire: Greco-Roman
Russian Empire: Middle Eastern
Spanish Empire: European
Viking Empire: Ancient European
Zulu Empire: African


A lot of what would identify them as unique would be textures (as said above). For instance, Egypt is labelled as Greco-Roman, but all it borrows are the collumns, basic shape and so forth; the textures would show it as limestone with colourful pillars. Russia is down as Middle Eastern, but that's mostly just for the domes, and it might look something more like the Kremlin.

Does this sound okay, or a bit of a waste of time?
 
Lord Olleus said:
I think that they are working on this at firaxis, only its going to be a throne room (a la civ 2) instead of a palace. It would also be an insane amount of work.

What do you mean? What does Firaxis have planned?
 
Are you talking about a palace screen, or the palace model that you see in the world view?

A palace screen would be doable with 2D graphics. While I hesitate to say that it would be easy, I'm not sure it'd be very hard.
 
the palace screen and the advisors that actually gave you advice (I loved how they'd sometimes snipe at each other) are two things that I adored about Civ2 that are sorely missing from Civ4.
 
The Great Apple said:
Are you talking about a palace screen, or the palace model that you see in the world view?

A palace screen would be doable with 2D graphics. While I hesitate to say that it would be easy, I'm not sure it'd be very hard.
I was thinking about changing the palace model, although I presume I could do a palace screen. It's just that as we can see the palace on the world map, it would have to reflect any changes on the palace screen anyway, so they'd actually be the same thing.
 
Unless the outside of the palace remained the same, but you did a 2D palace interior, ala CivII
 
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