Announcing Dom Pedro II's Civilization 4: Test of Time

Well, after who even knows how long, I'm finally on the verge of releasing my own mod. It includes a lot of new game features that I've been cooking up for quite some time now. It will also feature a number of mods and modcomps from other modders here on the forums.

The name is a nod to Civilization games long pass and an acknowledgement of the the fact that two years on from the release of the last expansion pack, Civ4 still has many admirers... I only hope that in this Civ4's waning days, I can provide the die hard fans with a few more well-wasted hours.

Enclosed is a guide laying out all the changes and additions made to date. It's not the final draft. Not even close.

Please, read it and give me your thoughts.

Your humble servant,

DPII

 

This really looks interesting. I'm looking forward to trying it.

 

You might want to incorporate this into it: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=335041. Is this mod supposed to be an ezpansion pack or a mod? If it's an expansion pack you should add more units, civs, leaders, UU, and UB to the game.
It took me a good long time to read your preview readme. I have to say you've done good at adding in all the best of the different versions of civ. I can't wait till you realease it. I just say you might still want to add a few things to just fill it out a little more. This seems to me to be a mod that adds in functions instead of units, civs, leaders, etc.

 

Wow, lots of graet, great ideas in here. Hope you can implement them!

 

One thing that I've been toying with is the idea of biological units being upgradable but mechanical ones being fixed. For instance, you get the appropriate tech, and you can train your Horse Archer into a Knight, but if you want a Cannon and you only have Catapults, you need to build it from scratch.

I love many of your ideas, and I liked them a lot when they showed up under the Conqueror's Delight map. It was really sad to see that thread disappear, and I sincerely hope that this one ends more spectacularly with one of the greatest mods that the community has ever seen. Thank you for continuing work on this.

P.S. - Some of us were musing about the possibility of succession games where a option can be triggered to change leaders according to era. There appears to be a basic way to code this, but it runs the risk of breaking AI strategy and resetting all international relations (plus all espionage points) each time. With your ample programming mojo, perhaps you could find a way to make this feature viable. It would make it very easy to create some amazing historic scenarios.

P.P.S. - Not to pester, but because somebody will inevitably ask, how far along do you think you are on implementing and releasing this realistically?

 

Wow, this looks really great. There are quite a few good mods coming out. First Dynamic City Development, now this.

Any chance of having your old "puppet state" feature from your old mod?

 

Wow, just looking through your guide makes me want to play this right away. I'm incredibly excited to try out the tile control - that's something that always bugged me and I'm glad someone has gone through the trouble to implement.

If you figure out a way to change graphics based on equipment, I'd be more than happy to try and make some graphics for you!

-Smitty

 

Puppet States would be awesome .

 

Will the AI understand tile control?

 

Yeah, I didn't really say it in my opening post, but one of the reasons I called it this is because I took all the great stuff that I really liked from Civ2 and Civ3 and incorporated it into this mod.

Is this an expansion pack or a mod? Well, since I can't afford a lawyer to respond to a Firaxis lawsuit, I'm going to call it a mod

And yes, I didn't incorporate a lot of new units, civs, leaders, UU's and UB's, etc. I do plan to include at least two new civs, but in some ways, this mod is a response to the "kitchen sink" mods where the answer to everything seems to be more units, more buildings, and more techs.

I will look into this suggested modcomp.

I have to confess that the AI doesn't (yet) use the Transport Helicopter, but it correctly uses the new features that have the biggest potential to upset the balance... Caravans and Advanced Training.

Everything in the PDF is stuff that's already in the mod and functioning.

Admittedly, I am prone to distraction... I do apologize for not following through on that. Honestly, it's more fun to keep plowing forward making the new stuff than fixing the old stuff that doesn't work. The good news is that virtually everything from Conqueror's Delight is or soon will be in this mod, and it will work. The last few months have been largely dedicated to running trial game after trial game after trial game trying to find all the little bugs and doing the kind of stuff that I really didn't even know how to do to get CD running right.

While it hasn't been folded into the main mod yet, there's an internal politics portion to this mod that is fairly far along in development. It will, in many ways, change the player from a sort of omnipotent collective national force to a government leader having to deal with potential usurpers and try to keep various interest groups and factions happy. Something like what you're talking about could factor into that.

P.P.S. - Not to pester, but because somebody will inevitably ask, how far along do you think you are on implementing and releasing this realistically?[/QUOTE]
Realistically? A week I'd say. But I have to warn that this is more of a public beta. I've run a lot of games with AI autoplay, but I haven't actually played a lot of games through myself. And I don't consider myself to be a great civ player, so I don't think I will pick up on all the possible exploits and imbalances that I'm sure such a big change will cause.

If? It's already done, my friend While I do plan to add an animation path component (that current unit makers don't really use anyway), the current system essentially redirects the game to another art def for the unit. And it works. I've seen it myself!

But any help you can give will always be welcome as you are the master of unit creation

Puppet States will definitely be in a later version of this soon. It just wasn't at the top of my priority list for merging the already massive Conqueror's Delight into this.


Also, to anybody who is interested... I could always use another set of hands!

 

The AI seems to do alright with tile control. My main concern is how the AI will handle the unload turn penalty for transports. I haven't witnessed an AI amphibious invasion in this mod myself, but my concern is that the AI will be unable to unload and will just wander around aimlessly instead.

 

Changes to the AI seem really awesome!

 

Mmm, interesting changes on the farms/cottages. A player can't really make a cottage spamcity in the middle of grassland with say two food resources in the citycross if no river is nearby.
Not to mention that a cottage strategy seems harder to achieve in the earlier era's.
Which reminds me: does a fresh water lake give the food bonus too on plots around it?
Is the axeman's no-iron requirement a typo? In the vanilla game the unit requires copper or iron, not iron alone. And medieval units don't receive the production increase when iron or copper is available?
Perhaps rename Mars Probe to Interplanetary Probe? After all, in a random terrestrial world its not sure there's a planet 'Mars' shining in the heavens.

And as last a request:
Can I persuade you to include Individual Era Unitstyles and multiple production/turn in your project? I can provide you with SDK that already does this for BtS 3.19.

 

Yes, this is especially true since all human and cavalry units require food to be built and Settlers subtract 1 population from a city when they're trained now.

I just figured that grassland really doesn't produce a lot of food in real life except when you're growing crops. Forests, by comparison, have a much higher density of available food for humans. I tried giving Forests +1 Food in my early tests, but that just made them ridiculously powerful, so I removed it. I also wanted to force players to build Farms early on. As the Farms produce more and more food later though, it'll probably be better to start switching some of them over to Cottages, which rather nicely simulates the actual development of cities and their surrounding areas.

No, but rivers can. I added the +1 Food for plots adjacent to rivers to simulate the additional food that can be had from fishing. I'm also planning to add in some code I developed a couple months ago for reintroducing the old Civ2 movement bonus for units traveling along rivers. I feel like rivers are seriously underrepresented in civ, and they need a bit of a bump IMO.

Yes, the Axeman bit is a typo. I probably just cut and pasted the text from the Swordsman and forgot to add in "or Bronze".

The Swordsman/Axeman change was done because I got frustrated playing games where, for one reason or another, I ended up with no access of either Bronze or Iron and had been penned in by other civs and thus unable to settle a city that had it. And waging war in that case is nearly impossible since you can't build Axemen and Swordsmen.

So I removed the requirements but doubled their production cost (except for the UUs that never required a metal). If you have the metals, then it doubles the production speed and you build Swords and Axes at the normal rate. And if you don't, it will take twice as long to build them. So you still suffer a penalty, but your goose is not cooked. The reason why I didn't do this for the medieval units and beyond is that I figured that if you haven't managed to conquer or settle a city with one or the other by the time you reach the medieval age, it's your own fault. Not bad starting placement.

Though with the new equipment system, there will be pieces of equipment like armor upgrades and shields for Swordsmen and Axemen that will not be available to a player without metals.

Actually, I was even contemplating going so far as to have the game randomly generate a set of planets that you could send probes and manned missions to. The problem was that I couldn't really think of what function that would serve in the game other than as something fun for those who like the late game and want little accomplishments.

Individual Era Unitstyles I would definitely be interested in. Multiple production I'd have to consider since it would have definitely in-game ramifications.

 

Multiple Production Is a game option, so, you don't have to play with it. Then it doesn't have any ramifications.

 

Well, I attached the SDK in a sort of barebones mod. It is based on Tholish' work and Maniac added and compiled multiple production/turn in it for me.

Please post when you have downloaded it. I plan to remove it from my attachment space then because of size restrictions.

 

The ramifications could be that a mixed city production list of food-requiring units (like spears and axes) and buildings/hammer-requiring units (like catapults) crashes the whole thing.

 

Downloaded. Thank you.

 

Do you have any idea when you might release this?