Civ6 lacking modding appeal? Also proposed changes

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

I remember all previous Civ games having a very active modding base as well as active forums in those areas. Seems Civ6 just doesn't have the drawing power that Five, Four or Three had to me.

Is it the organization of the forums? They aren't put together like previous civ games. For one thing, "New Civilizations" isn't its own section, but a sub-section within completed mods.

"Graphics modpacks" and "Unit Graphics" are both combined in a sub section.

I think all these changes compared to previous ways the board was organized with Civ3, 4 and 5 makes it harder for people as well.

 

[Gedemon]

for reference:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...n-of-the-creation-customization-forum.601358/ (can merge later and/or pin it again if required, but I'm fine with a new discussion to gain attention first)

I feel there are 2 other reasons for the current situation, but I'm not sure that I can order them by importance.
- modders moving to discords
- lack of gameplay modding capabilities compared to civ4 and civ5 (not enough methods open to Lua, no access to the source code)

There is another that may be personal, not sure if some other modders feel the same, but there is also a lack of interest for me in the base gameplay (similar to my feelings toward civ5 gameplay), and as I can't mod it (unlike civ5), I've absolutely no interest to look at the modding parts where civ6 is maybe superior to both civ5/civ4 (graphic modding and the artdef system for the assets)

Anyway, I'm open to changes about the organization of this section (as long as the admins have no issue to implement it)

Looking at the assets section for example, with the need to "cook" them before release there will never be an "unit" section filled like the civ5 and civ4 sections, unless some parts of the art modding process is streamlined.

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

Your probably right if the game itself isn't as moddable the interest is not going to be there.

Is there a great exodus from these forums to discords? Across the various games(3, 4, 5 etc)

 

[LeeS]

A lot of modders who moved to Civ6 from Civ5 have moved back to Civ5, but nearly all of them "hang out" on discord servers far more than they do on CFC

Quite a few modders who pump out Civ6 mods on a regular basis are not members of CFC or spend little of their time here. They spend it on discord servers.

JNR as an example is active quite a bit on both discord servers and reddit, but doesn't much post here. oPokhiel is also very active making mods, but he does not spend much of his time here, while he is usually available on at least two discord servers I know of and am a member of.

I am not a member on or even probably aware of the vast majority of discord servers dedicated to Civ6 modding. But I do know there are more discord servers out there than I am a member of because people who are members of the ones I am active on refer on occasion to these other servers.

While total modding activity across all venues and "sites" for Civ6 at the moment seems less than it was in the heyday of Civ5, I do not think this is so much a reflection of there being anything "gone awry" with modding Civ6, but rather that CFC for whatever reason is simply not the hub of Civ6 modding knowledge and activity as it was for Civ5. The Civ5 CFC forum is not close to the activity-hub it once was -- its Golden Age has passed, and the majority of the activity has moved on to discord servers.

 

[Gedemon]

I am not a member on or even probably aware of the vast majority of discord servers dedicated to Civ6 modding. But I do know there are more discord servers out there than I am a member of because people who are members of the ones I am active on refer on occasion to these other servers.

Maybe I should really have a closer look at discord as a development tool, but isn't that an issue ? how is knowledge archived/shared if there are multiple servers ?

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

That is a good question. What this site provided was one central location for modders. Having modders all over the place seems counterproductive to having a modding community and sharing creations as a whole.

 

[LeeS]

Maybe I should really have a closer look at discord as a development tool, but isn't that an issue ? how is knowledge archived/shared if there are multiple servers ?

That is a good question. What this site provided was one central location for modders. Having modders all over the place seems counterproductive to having a modding community and sharing creations as a whole.

Multiple discord servers all serving the same basic function but for differing groups of people does somewhat cause a fractured overall community. But I think most of the people who have moved away from CFC-type websites to "chat" type environments have done so primarily because of the looser and less restrictive feel of such platforms. Reference data seems to be pretty much housed in google docs or file-sharing pages like dropbox. The links for ReferenceA seem to get shared around pretty effectively between diverging discord groups. In many cases the references are still being posted here on CFC or GitHub and the people who live on discord servers rather than places like CFC seem to use those references and post new ones to sites like ours when and only if they need a public place to reposit their info.

Since discord sites can have multiple threads, there is usually a thread for reference links and another for current "code-questions". But tbh every server is organized differently.

With Civ6 we as mod-users almost never suffer the "it will not download" issues we had with the Civ5 Steam Workshop, so there's much less need in Civ6 for offsite mod hosting. And since there's much less need for the hosting of a mod on multiple different venues (a dropbox, a CFC page, a reddit page, as well as the Steam page, etc.) mod-makers ease the amount of work they have to do to publish a mod by only uploading the content itself to Steam Workshop. This is of course not true in all cases, but there's much more Steam-Workshop-Only uploading in Civ6 than there ever was in Civ5.

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

Feels like a different era now. Kind of started for me when the forum started getting more social networkish features like "like" and what they used to call "walls", before most of the communication was done on forums, and not just this one, back when I started on here in the 2000s(time flies), I've seen other forums, and the activity which once was a hallmark of those has faded as well.

 

[Deliverator]

A think there are several factors combining to bring about the comatose state of Civ VI modding.

* Modding is more complex than it was in the days of Civ IV.
* Less interest in modding in general so less motivation to push through and learn.
* CFC -> Discord means that conversations about modding are more diffuse and invisible to the general population. There is a feel of the partially sighted leading the blind in the Civ VI CFC modding forums with responses sometimes being incorrect or unhelpful.
* Several modders have either moved back to Civ V or effectively retired from Civ VI modding for a variety of reasons.
* No DLL Source code after 3 years - and no guarantee it will ever come.
* Source Modbuddy projects must be shared for re-use in many cases.
* Platform diversification may make modding less of a priority for longer term revenue.

This isn't very scientific but looking at the Google Trends for "civilization" and "modding" is quite interesting (vertical scales are different in volume):

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

Seems like according to the graph Civ4 was the high point in interest and modding for Civilization, and its steadily droped until reaching its current state in 2013, which has remained relatively the same.

I really hope Firaxis isn't abandoning the modding community.

 

[Deliverator]

Seems like according to the graph Civ4 was the high point in interest and modding for Civilization, and its steadily droped until reaching its current state in 2013, which has remained relatively the same.

Civ IV was certainly the highpoint in terms of modding in many ways. The diversity and number of mods made is unlikely to be matched because everything was more accessible. Even looking at the CFC downloads section you can see that Civ V has around one quarter of the downloads that Civ IV has. Here is an article I contributed to around the release of VI that tells some of the story. The rest is pretty well summarised by the State of Modding thread about VI.

I really hope Firaxis isn't abandoning the modding community.

I don't think they'll abandon it but priorities may have shifted slightly since the release of VI. It's frustrating that they broke a few things in the Asset Editor back in September and have left them unfixed so far.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

for reference:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...n-of-the-creation-customization-forum.601358/ (can merge later and/or pin it again if required, but I'm fine with a new discussion to gain attention first)

I feel there are 2 other reasons for the current situation, but I'm not sure that I can order them by importance.
- modders moving to discords
- lack of gameplay modding capabilities compared to civ4 and civ5 (not enough methods open to Lua, no access to the source code)

There is another that may be personal, not sure if some other modders feel the same, but there is also a lack of interest for me in the base gameplay (similar to my feelings toward civ5 gameplay), and as I can't mod it (unlike civ5), I've absolutely no interest to look at the modding parts where civ6 is maybe superior to both civ5/civ4 (graphic modding and the artdef system for the assets)

Anyway, I'm open to changes about the organization of this section (as long as the admins have no issue to implement it)

Looking at the assets section for example, with the need to "cook" them before release there will never be an "unit" section filled like the civ5 and civ4 sections, unless some parts of the art modding process is streamlined.

Particularly with SDK Modbuddy being so faulty that it doesn't show human asset attachments like it should be.
Gaming concepts? yes I like it. dividing sciences and social developments with different tree is good. But what does monument has to do with culture developments?
Also rigid class system didn't appeal to me much. particularly with no' rifleman/line infantry' that is a new class that can be made by upgrading previous units of different classes.

worse still. Firaxis aldready learned to coerce players/modders to buy more than what they need.

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

If you look at other games in the strategy genre on Steam, Stardock, creators of Galactic Civilizations, totally embraced modding. I would love to see Firaxis embrace it as much as they have.

I hope they fix that asset editor. Also, in the future, I hope Firaxis not only embraces modding but brings back the ability to easily customize the graphics, at least buildings, city styles, and of coarse, units. They have forgotten the huge success of Fall from Heaven and what that did for Civ4.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

If you look at other games in the strategy genre on Steam, Stardock, creators of Galactic Civilizations, totally embraced modding. I would love to see Firaxis embrace it as much as they have.

I hope they fix that asset editor. Also, in the future, I hope Firaxis not only embraces modding but brings back the ability to easily customize the graphics, at least buildings, city styles, and of coarse, units. They have forgotten the huge success of Fall from Heaven and what that did for Civ4.

Februray 2020 to be earliest.
I think they're actually workin' on it but not much efforts are invested. Maybe the game became considerably more expensive where steam purchase can only be done in discounting seasons.

 

[Deliverator]

I hope Firaxis not only embraces modding but brings back the ability to easily customize the graphics, at least buildings, city styles, and of coarse, units.

One issue since Civ IV is that the expectation of most players to have more cutting edge graphics and graphical modability are pulling in different directions. For example to do a unit reskin now you have to think about 5 or 6 texture maps rather than 1 or 2. Modability and ease of modding are different things. Civ VI is in my opinion much more graphically modable than Civ V but many people have found it too difficult to achieve what they want to do as the graphics system is more complex than it was, one-way street asset cooking makes it harder to re-use other people's work. Also the ArtDefs are not the easiest to understand and can't be clone/modified using SQL. It's clear that the effort vs reward equation is leading most people to conclude that it's not worth learning the art system for VI or they genuinely try their best but can't figure it out.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

Nor can I figure out how to fix gameplay coding bugs in my mod that prevents unit upgrading entirely despite all conditions are met

https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...upgrades-coding-problem.653240/#post-15628404 sorry sir.

 

[Sword_Of_Geddon]

Well I think for a game like Civ, the best graphics should never be the goal. It is a strategy game, not an RPG with an expansive world. The game can have simplier graphics and still look good as well, see Colonization, the Civ4 spinoff "expansion".

Neither does a game like Galactic Civ 3 strive for the best graphics, but for gameplay and as I've said totally embraces modders, even casually with the ship editor.

I think the idea that a game has to be cutting edge is a alittle behind the times as well, with the return of 8-bit games, 2d games etc. For awile it was about graphics, but many developers are realizing that it isn't that important except to hardcore gamers who look for graphics. I think most people who would pick up a game like Civ wouldn't be looking for Unreal engine level graphics in a strategy game.

 

[Deliverator]

Well I think for a game like Civ, the best graphics should never be the goal. It is a strategy game, not an RPG with an expansive world. The game can have simplier graphics and still look good as well, see Colonization, the Civ4 spinoff "expansion".

I agree with you but I'm still not sure that Civilization as a AAA series would retain its popularity if it didn't keep up with graphical advances. Even Civ4Col that you mention had improvements over the Civ 4 graphics engine with much nicer true reflective water. Hardcore gamers are not the core market for Civ. Gal Civ III's peak players for the latest 30 days is < 1000 whereas Civ VI's is >50k. Civilization is much more mainstream than you think.

 

[raystuttgart]

I agree with you but I'm still not sure that Civilization as a AAA series would retain its popularity if it didn't keep up with graphical advances.

But doesn't the increased quality of graphics also make it much harder for graphical modders?
Especially for 3D graphics and animated leaderheads.

It is already now quite difficult to find experienced and motivated graphical modders.

 

[LeeS]

But doesn't the increased quality of graphics also make it much harder for graphical modders?
Especially for 3D graphics and animated leaderheads.

It is already now quite difficult to find experienced and motivated graphical modders.

In general learning to mod Civ6 is a higher 'grab' than for Civ5.

• Learning to do 3d or 2d art for Civ6 is a steeper initial investment than Civ5, and especially so for 3d art -- but the payoff is far more capability than Civ5 offered in terms of map display in 3d of wonders & units & etc.
• Civ6 offers far more direct-access to basic systems through Database Modding than Civ5, but at the price of a more-complicated set of game mechanics that must be manipulated via database methods. This intensifies confusion and disappointment for the Novice Modder when they find it is not nearly so easy to change something as they expected because often a simple alteration in one part of the database requires "matching" alterations in other parts of the database. The Dynamic Modifiers and Dynamic Game Effects systems inherent in Civ6 are an incredulously powerful tool for direct SQL or XML coding (no DLL or lua experience needed !), but they are also not terribly easy to master in my opinion.

________________________

On the subject of graphics and art, I can only add to the conversation by attesting to the fact that mods posted to Steam Workshop which do not have at least some art in the thumbnail largely get ignored because of (I believe) a perception that the mod cannot be all that good if the author can't even make a decent thumbnail image for the workshop. I would therefore tend more toward the interpretation that in order to compete a studio such as Firaxis has to stay close if not on the cutting edge of the graphical technology -- even though their artstyle may be hokey (or not depending on YMMV)

People on Steam Workshop especially (in my opinion) are generally less interested in code than artwork. Some are (were for Civ5 Workshop) actually pig-ignorant of the fact that the artwork did not mean anything in terms of how the mod functioned.