BAT Mod for Mac

[iamliberal]

is there a way to rename units in-game? REading "Swordsman 1 (infantry)" is awful long. All of my upgraded units keep the original plus the new in parenthese, and it confuses me.

 

[s.bernbaum]

is there a way to rename units in-game? REading "Swordsman 1 (infantry)" is awful long. All of my upgraded units keep the original plus the new in parenthese, and it confuses me.

Enter the option screen for BUG, (Command-Option-O), which is the mod doing this. Click the tab for the units. If memory serves correctly that is something along the line of "Plot List". There is an option there for naming the units. If you turn it off, you will only get the standard BTS names. If you do this mid game, any units that already have the long names will retain them. You can get rid of those by clicking on the name field in the lower left of the screen when the unit is selected and then deleting everything in the pop up. If you want to rename a unit to something else, type it into the box after you delete what is there. You can also just edit what is there if you prefer. Also, if you are not using BUG, or using BUG with the naming option off, you can use this method to name units whatever you like.

 

[Lachlan]

VD has many many button/icon issues, one of the many reasons I'm rewriting it. As for the Heavy Footman thing, that is indeed possible but the necessary file is not included in BAT and will need to be copied over from one's Civ4 install and edited. I don't know which file exactly but it will be in /Assets/XML/Text somewhere. I'll make this change (and Horse Archer -> Horseman) in the next version.

What are the news of your mod ?

I decided to not use pm for this...

 

[Xyth]

What are the news of your mod ?

I decided to not use pm for this...

Coming along slowly but surely. I still plan to put out a beta version at the end of the month for people to try out and test. Mostly what I'm doing at the moment is hunting for missing units and sorting which features are complete/stable enough to be released and temporarily removing those that aren't. Then I need to do some more testing to catch any obvious crashes and errors. Tentative feature list for initial beta version:

• BUG
• Blue Marble
• Cultural Citystyles
• Cultural Units for every civ, handpicked with all xml completely written from scratch. Ships are not done yet though I hope to get them done before release. Modern ships and vehicles do not and probably won't have cultural variation in an effort to reduce slowdown in the late game.
• New Civilizations: Iroquois and Sioux (to replace Native Americans), Nubia, Siam, Vietnam, Polynesia. I'm also working on Assyria, Israel, Phoenicia, Tibet, and have plans for others but they probably won't be ready for initial release.
• New Leaders: I'll have 20-30 new leaders ready to go for the initial release. Most of these have custom personalities and diplomacy text. I plan to have several new leader traits available and assigned but these definitely won't be ready for first release.
• New Religions: 11 of these, all with matching missionary and building graphics.
• New Units: Skirmisher and Horseman. These are going to need lots of testing for balance.

I'll stress again that it will be a *beta* version, and is very likely to lack polish in places such as Civilopedia text. I'll endeavour to test thoroughly but I can unfortunately guarantee there will be errors, glitches, small balance issues and maybe even crashes that slip by me. I spend much more time modding than playing atm. I've really appreciated the bug reporting that I've received for MAC BAT and I hope that a few of you will be interested in trying out this new mod and help get it running smoothly. I currently have no plans to release this outside of the CFC Mac forums and I'd be more than happy to try implement people's ideas and suggestions as the mod develops and matures.

Something else I'll mention is that I'm designing this mod to be as 'modular' as possible, meaning that I can release updates to individual components (a specific civ, religions, etc) without everyone having to download and reinstall the entire thing all the time.

Anyways, back to it

 

[Lachlan]

Thanks for your answer

I will be happy to beta-test this and surtout have a mod to play

 

[OscarWildebeest]

Xyth, if you ever want children, I'm your man.

 

[Lachlan]

Is Oscar Wilde Said this ?

"Je résiste à tout sauf à la tentation"
"I resist to all but the temptation"

 

[OscarWildebeest]

Sounds familiar; I think the original reads, "I can resist anything except temptation." I'll Google it.

[EDIT: It's "I can resist anything but temptation", and it's from Lady Windemere's Fan.]

 

[Lachlan]

@ OscarWildebeest : Ok, i didn't knew the english quoting

@ Xyth : we are the end of this month, when do you release the first public beta of your mod ?

Your mod works well ?

 

[Xyth]

@ Xyth : we are the end of this month, when do you release the first public beta of your mod ?

Your mod works well ?

Unfortunately I didn't get as much time to work on it this last week as I wanted. My job was unexpectedly busier than usual and my 7 month old son has a cold - meaning a drastic reduction in sleep for all around here.

However this week coming I have very little on and thus lots of time to devote to modding and thus it's best I delay the beta release until next weekend (Feb 5th or thereabouts). Sorry about that.

I'm also facing a design decision regarding the Holy Roman Empire, the English, the French, and the Celts. Basically the main problem is that France is really represented by the Celts in ancient eras, HRE in medieval times, and France proper in later periods. This makes for a fair bit of difficulty in selecting unit art, not to mention severe overlap in list of cities (though I haven't yet I intend to overhaul almost every city list in the future).

The option I'm debating is to merge these 4 civs into the following:

- Britain: Representing Ancient Celtic Britain through to modern Britain/England
- Gaul: Representing Ancient Celtic Gaul through to Modern France
- Frankia: The Franks, replacing HRE and parts of Medieval France and Germania

This would drastically reduce the overlap of unit art, cities and position if playing on an Earth map. Any thoughts or suggestions on this? Maybe some in-between option?

 

[Xyth]

Thought about it, mulled over the available unit art and decided that I will keep England, France and the Celts more or less as-is and just remove the HRE as an available civ. They will be merged into France and Germany.

 

[Martin79]

Will you make Charlemagne available as a France leader?

 

[Taneda Santôka]

Thought about it, mulled over the available unit art and decided that I will keep England, France and the Celts more or less as-is and just remove the HRE as an available civ. They will be merged into France and Germany.

Best choice, HRE doesn't remotely make any sense in civ, outside of specific scenarios. It never was a unified country, nor a cultural, political or ethnic entity.

 

[Xyth]

Actually it looks like I do have enough unit art to sustain all 4 after all. I still think HRE is not really suitable as civ in itself but I could make a Frankish civilization, distinct from both France and Germany. It does feel sort of strange having both the French and Franks though. Thoughts on this?

I would definitely keep Charlemagne as a leader, just not sure whether to make him Frankish (if I include them), French or German. There is also an excellent Clovis leaderhead that could be used in addition. I'd need to research to find the best option.

 

[Taneda Santôka]

You could, but then why not Goths, Vandales or Lombards ; I think none of them really warrants a full-fledged civ, so just cut the workload and keep Charlemagne. If you also have Clovis, then give Clovis to France and Carolus to Germany, everybody's happy !

 

[Xyth]

You could, but then why not Goths, Vandales or Lombards ; I think none of them really warrants a full-fledged civ, so just cut the workload and keep Charlemagne. If you also have Clovis, then give Clovis to France and Carolus to Germany, everybody's happy !

Yeah I agree, once the Franks get added then suddenly there's a case for every Germanic tribe and Western Europe is already crowded enough.

So I've decided to not include either the HRE or the Franks as their own Civilization. Clovis and a decent amount of Frankish unit art will be used as part of France's ancient and classical eras. This creates a nice strong distinction from Celtic Gaul too, and allows me to use the best unit art sets.

Charlemagne/Carolus could go indeed go into either France or Germany really. I can't decide which atm but he will definitely go into one or the other.

Now for England vs Britain. Having an Anglo-Saxon ancient/classical era just does not feel right given that Angles, Saxons, Jutes, etc all came from across the sea in medieval times. At least the Franks came from an area within and just outside of the historical French region. However, with a Celtic ancient/clasical era I'm very tempted to make England into Britain (after all, the island was Britain and the people Britons long before they became England/English), to make Boudica a British leader and *maybe* to even add a non-romanticized, historical-as-possible Arthur (assuming I can find suitable art).

This means that the actual Celt civilization would focus primarily on the continental Celts - I'll add Vercingetorix as a leader here. Any thoughts on all this?

 

[Lachlan]

Your thinking is good, but i will perhaps have new ideas while playing your future mod...

Ok, you have the luck to have a child with your wife, i'm thirty the tenth february and i have not wife not child... To be single is nice but i consider that have a woman friend should be nice also but women are so difficult today...

 

[Taneda Santôka]

Unlike Lachlan, I don't think your thinking is good : the CIV4 engine and moddel is not adapted to simulating real life civs, since starting in 4000BC with the USA is always possible, unless you imitate/continue/refine Rhye's work. (That's why anyway I prefer Era-specific scenarios. )
I proposed Clovis for France since he was born and died in Paris and is more a "French" king then Carolus is. Carolus is more "Germanic", being born and dead in Aachen. So even if it's a bit arbitrary, it has some sense and both nation get an old leader.
About Britain/England, all people of the island always came from the continent anyway, the Britons were Celtic, Angles and Saxons were Germanic and Normans were Vikings. So since the "English Empire" is roughly from William to Victoria and today, choosing ancient and classical artstyle is just again arbitrary and a matter of taste and diversity. Personnaly I'd go with some Saxon style, they also had funky names.
If you need some good and well done Arthurian gaming stuff, go check out the choices made by a RTW modding team for their Arthurian Total War HERE

 

[Xyth]

Unlike Lachlan, I don't think your thinking is good : the CIV4 engine and moddel is not adapted to simulating real life civs, since starting in 4000BC with the USA is always possible, unless you imitate/continue/refine Rhye's work. (That's why anyway I prefer Era-specific scenarios. )
I proposed Clovis for France since he was born and died in Paris and is more a "French" king then Carolus is. Carolus is more "Germanic", being born and dead in Aachen. So even if it's a bit arbitrary, it has some sense and both nation get an old leader.
About Britain/England, all people of the island always came from the continent anyway, the Britons were Celtic, Angles and Saxons were Germanic and Normans were Vikings. So since the "English Empire" is roughly from William to Victoria and today, choosing ancient and classical artstyle is just again arbitrary and a matter of taste and diversity. Personnaly I'd go with some Saxon style, they also had funky names.
If you need some good and well done Arthurian gaming stuff, go check out the choices made by a RTW modding team for their Arthurian Total War HERE

I don't disagree with you, Civ (excluding scenarios) is definitely not designed to accurately portray/recreate actual historical civilizations or history itself, but that's kinda the point. In my opinion, the moment one starts playing on a map that doesn't represent the actual Earth in some way the importance of historical accuracy is greatly reduced and striving to retain strict accuracy hurts the spirit of the game. Rhye's and Fall is really the only non-scenario mod I've seen that retains accuracy and remains 'fun'. I do find some of the mechanics needed to achieve that frustrating though, but that's me.

Civ really is a great big fun game of historical "what if" - what if the Mayans developed gunpowder and then invaded the continent of the Ethiopians to spread Buddhism, and so forth. History gets recreated, sometimes in quite bizarre ways. That's much of the fun! My philosophy when designing this mod is that while it cannot and should not be historically 'accurate' it should at least make reasonable historical 'sense' whenever possible.

England/Britain is one of the hardest civs to represent sensibly given the numerous waves of peoples that formed it. However I will make them have Celtic origins in this mod for 5 reasons: 1) The Britons were the first defined civilization (that we know of) on the isle, 2) in my opinion the Britons were quite distinct from the continental Celts, at least as much as the Germans-Vikings or Spain-Portugal, 3) Germanic peoples are already being well represented in Germany, the Vikings, France and later periods of Britain, 4) I have some Welsh ancestry so I'm somewhat biased, and 5) there is extremely little quality Anglo-Saxon unit art available but plenty of Celtic.

I realize that my first point somewhat contradicts what I'm doing for France but as you say, in the end it's a matter of taste and diversity. I also feel it's nice to have certain cultures represented even if they don't warrant their own civ, and 'filling in the eras' is a nice way of doing this.

You mentioned America; it is easily the most frustrating civ to work with in these sort of mods, given it's the only civ that doesn't have a pre-gunpowder era (unless one wants to consider the Native Americans as such, but I'm pretty sure that most people, including myself, would find that idea ridiculous and undesirable). Half the time I'm tempted to just omit them altogether but they've been too culturally and historically important over the last 500 odd years (3-4 eras of the game) so I don't. I won't add any other post-gunpowder Civs though.

At this point of development I'm mostly using place-holder city lists and pediatexts but when I get onto that aspect (probably my favourite part of modding!) I'll revisit a lot of this. One of my biggest gripes with Civ as designed by Firaxis is that there is way too much emphasis on Civs being the modern version (China's first cities being Beijing and Shanghai for example). I'd much rather that each Civ represent a continual evolution from ancient through to the modern and all the political, cultural or even ethnic changes on the way. This is the approach I'll eventually use for this. The goal for now though is to get a beta out, add some more features and getting it stable.

In the end it's all personal preference and that's why one of the major design goals of my mod is modularity. I hope that I'll eventually have it at the point where civs and leaders can easily be added or removed so that people can customize the mod to their heart's content or borrow parts to create their own.

I really appreciate the debate btw, especially as the history of Western Europe is not my area of expertise. It helps a lot and I hope I don't come across as too unbending Thanks for that link, I'll check it out.

 

[Lachlan]

EDITED : 8 characters