Forgive me then if I'm misinterpreting what is going on here, but from what I can gather TheChanger asked if he could take your mod and allow us to use it. I would have thought of that as a modmod of your mod... it definately isn't plagiarism as Civilisation 5 is not owned by yourself.
First of all, plagiarism doesn't require me to have commercial ownership. All of the papers I've published are owned by the journals to which I've submitted them, and the copyright for my thesis is owned by the company that published it for my university, but if someone were to copy the entirety of one of my papers into a new submission and call it their own work, it'd still be plagiarism of my work regardless of my personal financial stake in the matter. So that argument doesn't hold water at all.
As to your other argument, to me, the concept of the "modmod" is for when a large mod includes several related or compatible mods in their entirety. Thalassicus' VEM includes a variety of mods and components made by other folks, and I'm sure he had to make some adjustments to make them compatible with each other, but when you download it, there's no hiding exactly which pieces are which and who did what. That's a modmod. That's not even considering that what you're "modmodding" isn't even through its Alpha stage yet, and was only first published less than three weeks ago.
I don't have a problem with someone using parts of the mechanics I've developed in other works. If someone wants to use the Mandala code as a framework for the UI of their own 2-axis graphs, then there's nothing wrong with that, given that most of it is in itself heavily based on the Social Policy popup in the core game. If you want to use the way I handled Favor as an example of how to implement a new yield of your own, that's fine, although I think you'd find that it's far too much work to do so, as none of the standard Lua stubs work for new yields and nearly everything had to be hard-coded in one form or another.
What I have a problem with is that, given how your teammate represented the implementation in both this thread and your own, it appears that my mod would be included effectively in its entirety, barring a trivial layer of XML (and yes, it IS trivial no matter how long you spent writing up the background material) and some artwork. Again, that's not "adapting", that's outright theft.
Sure, the 7-pantheon bit could be a coincidence. I'll accept your word on that. But is the fact that you're planning to use four levels of auto-upgrading religious buildings, that your alignment axes are Law-Chaos (excuse me, Order-Chaos) and Material-Ephemeral, that you add a new "Favor" yield that is generated by Priests, Battles, Buildings, and to a lesser extent Events and Improvements, that Favor handles building auto-upgrades on a local level as well as unlocking new minor gods on a global one... are those coincidences as well?
There's no originality at all in the mechanical design as presented, which is 90% of the work required for a mod like this. If you and your collaborators can't see the difference between allowing a player to tweak Age of Mythology's pantheons to their liking, versus playing a separate mod named "Naeralith Reborn" that is still primarily comprised of my own work, then there's no way this discussion can go any further.
What I was expecting was a bit of WORK on your design, something to show that you'd actually thought about ways to make a system that would work within your specific mod's design as it stood already, as opposed to flat-out duplication of my own systems in every way. Let's say you had decided to do the following instead:
* Make the axes Law-Chaos and Good-Evil (or Light/Dark, or however you want to define it)
* Keep the first three focus sets (the elementals, the yields, the Death/Healing/Art/War set), as these are fairly generic, and replace the rest with your own Foci. So the elemental/yield stuff would be "neutral" on the Good-Evil axis, while the various sins and virtues could be the Foci on the Good/Evil axis but be generally neutral on Law-Chaos, and the remainder of what you add could form diagonal sets.
* For the Foci you keep, come up with your own sets of benefits for them. These benefits should not in any way include "myth units" or "heroes". Also, come up with your own equations for exactly which areas of the mandala should unlock each focus (which you'd have to do anyway, assuming the alignment change mentioned above).
* Don't use Favor. At all. Instead of upgrading automatically through Favor, you manually upgrade religious buildings with something like gold or food, or sacrificing units in a city, or something similar, and teach the AI how to handle whatever mechanism you add. Likewise, instead of creating Priest specialists that add Favor, have the other existing specialist types add small amounts of whatever resource you use instead.
If you ever do feel the need to add a new yield, try to come up with an original concept for what it does and how it does it.
While the coding for this sort of concept would still have begun from a baseline of my own work, that sort of design would have at least required real effort to plan, implement, and maintain. Even all of the above wouldn't really be enough, in my opinion, but it'd at least show that you had been attempting to be original.
I have been writing for my world since early 2008, regarding material that I actually DO own as it is my own original writing.
That's great, and I respect that amount of work, but that's completely inconsistent with your position above. If the fact that your own work predates the release of your mod (at which point Firaxis/2Kgames basically owns the contents of your mod, gotta love those EULAs) makes a difference, then you can't claim that duplicating MY work isn't plagiarism just because I don't own the Civilization brand. Fair Use allows for anyone to use small parts of a copyrighted source in their own works, and other intellectual property laws follow the same trend, but the scope of the inclusion is VERY important. A paragraph or two, fine. A page, usually okay. But if you copy an entire book, write new first and last pages, and slap a new cover on it, it's never okay. Attribution is essential either way, but one of the key differences is evidence that the person doing the copying added something substantial to the work.
If you still can't get your head around this, consider:
what if this situation were reversed? What if, today, I had announced (before asking you, of course) that I was redesigning this mod's XML content because I was so inspired by your setting, and was going to use all of the gods, nations, and such you'd spent the past three years writing, in my own mod? I might have to change a few names here and there, but it'd save me a ton of design work, and it'd be good for the community. Sure, this'd mean that your mod would never go anywhere, since by the time you finished it mine would already be long since established, but hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, right? I'd be sure to acknowledge you in the credits, so you should be honored.
Now, maybe you didn't realize just how much work Lua programming is and how little work XML is by comparison. And I'm sure you intend to add DLL/Lua/whatever mechanisms of your own at some point, just like I do, or add custom artwork (which does take quite a bit of effort). But understand that creating a mod while denying that the underlying mechanisms are the majority of the work is like creating a mod of any kind without acknowledging that the Civ5 engine is doing all of the real work. If I were to market my mod as a separate game, with a small "inspired by Civ5" label, and claim that it was a distinct work because I'd changed the units and tech names... well, it'd never even get close to that point because lawyers would quickly do that whole "cease and desist" thing they love, but I'm sure you get the point.
A simple "I'd rather you didn't use my mod material" would have easily sufficed.
TheChanger posted his Mandala design in your mod's thread
before asking. Then, ten minutes
after responding to my initial statement, calling me a "hypocrite" for objecting, he added an additional post over there explaining in much greater detail the system that you intend to use, all of which reinforced the fact that nothing substantial was being changed from my own work.
These are not the actions of someone who actually cared about getting permission.
And then you come in here to defend him by expressing your disappointment of my actions? So no, you're not in any position to criticize the tone of my post.
