Civ modding problems hopefully addressed in Civ 6

[Craig_Sutter]

Don't know if Firaxis reads this, but I wanted to start a thread specifically to point out problems with civ 5 modding that it would be nice if they were fixed in Civ 6.

 

[Craig_Sutter]

First item comes to mind is AI flexibility. In Civ 5, legions/conquistadors/samurai never used their worker/settler functions. They had melee AI and secodary worker AI was not implemented. Very frustration for modders. I would have loved to create farming fyrdmen or fighting missionaries... but the fact the AI civs would not use all the abilities stopped me.

 

[Craig_Sutter]

Another item is faith purchases. Oddly, it would have been nice to decouple them from religion. That was all hardwired though. For units, faith based units all became purchasable by any civ... they could not be linked to a specific religion... this made creating units like dervishes/Berserks or crusaders problematic. As well, you run into the AI problem with handling varying AI types within one unit as well. And why should a building necessarily be linked to a religion to be built with faith? Monasteries were fairly universal amongst the various christian churchs for instance. And except for architecture, a buddhist monastery and a christian one are not so very different.

I do not ask that this be done for the vanilla game, but it should be available to modders.

 

[Craig_Sutter]

Another problem I hope they address is the ability to mod resource placement for maps. The game used (Iforgetthename.lua) to distribute resources. This file is a nightmare to mod, apparently... especially when adding non-vanilla resources. And the crazy thing was that maps made with Worldbuilder used a different file to generate resources altogether. And even worse, the resource XML that dictated resource density and distribution was only referenced by the Worldbuilder maps and not the other resource generation file... (Iforgetthename.lua) did this internally and did not reference resource xml making resource generation all the harder to mod.

 

[racha]

Bearing in mind that I'm not a programmer or anything, I'll be happy if we get modding tools that are actually useful - modbuddy is absolutely horrible. It happily builds a mod, only for the games logs to helpfully point out that there's a syntax error near ")" or ",". As a layman, I don't understand why when I hit the build button my mods aren't checked against the game to make sure they'll actually work, and why errors aren't highlighted.

In Civ 5, there are colums in some of the database tables that aren't usable. It'd be helpful if they're removed in 6 so that it's clear what can and can't be changed.

I hope we're also able to add natural wonders through mods this time around.

Tangential note: world builder for Civ 5 is horrible, too - no copy and paste, no quickbar, no tooltips for things like promotions (even though, unlike modbuddy, it actually loads in all the info from all your mods) and do I even have to explain the nightmare of adding rivers?

 

[LDiCesare]

Another problem I hope they address is the ability to mod resource placement for maps. The game used (Iforgetthename.lua) to distribute resources. This file is a nightmare to mod, apparently... especially when adding non-vanilla resources. And the crazy thing was that maps made with Worldbuilder used a different file to generate resources altogether. And even worse, the resource XML that dictated resource density and distribution was only referenced by the Worldbuilder maps and not the other resource generation file... (Iforgetthename.lua) did this internally and did not reference resource xml making resource generation all the harder to mod.

+1.
Civ V map modding was a huge step backwardfrom Civ IV. The lack of regenerate map button coupled with a world editor inside the game itslef made it even harder to do map scripts.

 

[Nomad or What]

Don't forget how abysmally difficult it was to convert 3D models and custom animations in CiV, not to mention new effects....

 

[notque]

First item comes to mind is AI flexibility. In Civ 5, legions/conquistadors/samurai never used their worker/settler functions. They had melee AI and secodary worker AI was not implemented. Very frustration for modders. I would have loved to create farming fyrdmen or fighting missionaries... but the fact the AI civs would not use all the abilities stopped me.

I think the AI will end up being easier for people to modify in some respects. I think it's possible that some of it is removed from the DLL and exposed via the database for customization.

 

[notque]

Don't forget how abysmally difficult it was to convert 3D models and custom animations in CiV, not to mention new effects....

I think Civ will use a different format for images. I think it will be a smaller transition time than it was for Civ 4 to 5.