civIV Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (RFRE)

[Gunner]

But if the possibilities are so endless, why is the vanilla game so unflavourful?! What were they thinking?

I personally think that Civ4 is a pretty big upgrade from Civ3 in just about every way. I know that some people feel the exact opposite, but I really don’t have any of that feeling at all. And the endless possibilities are in relation to modding, namely that we aren’t constrained as much like in Civ3.

Oh, and I remember that old thread Pink, boy that was a long time ago

Now, if there are no limits, it seems we will have to think hard on how to safeguard playability and fun from too many historical events (hard to do!)...

I think that will be one of the keys for this mod to be great.


I like the idea of creating a smaller map to play on, but I’m skeptical as to whether it would actually result in less development effort than just starting with the big one from the get-go.

How about 3 difficulty levels?
praetor = only Spartacus, Boudica, and Caesar vs Pompey (1 of each type?)
consular = everything except the 3rd century Gaul rebellion, and something else
dictactor = everything

The objective should be to recreate the experience. Revolts and fighting civil wars are part of that. I will guess that once the code is figured out it will be trivial to add more, and difficulty level can be used to select how many the player wants to endure (Blitz would want them all!). But yes, some lists should be published so they can be discussed.

That’s an interesting idea to tie the number of enemy historical events to the difficulty level, I like it. You could also tie in production and commerce bonuses in like for the regular game.

Playing the Rebellion mod is what finally pushed me over the edge. And then seeing how Rhye uses it, wow!

Rhye’s mod actually uses a different system than the Revolution mod, at least they were developed independently. But I agree that concepts from both of them would be great for RFRE.

But is dicrete artillary the right approach? I would think most was integral with the legion, and so is better represented through the city raider promotions than seperate units. How then how does one reduce city defenses? Maybe there should be code which reduces city defenses to 0% following a sucessful attack by a unit with city raider I (ie they attacked with a battering ram and broke the gate/wall)? Opinions???

I think it’s a good idea in theory to integrate artillery with the legions, but in practice I think it would take away some of the complexity and fun from the combat engine of Civ4. It’s simply not as interesting to just run around with a huge army of just one type of unit and completely dominate.

 

[primordial stew]

I like the idea of creating a smaller map to play on, but I’m skeptical as to whether it would actually result in less development effort than just starting with the big one from the get-go.

I was looking into maps last night. It's just a text file Looks like I'll be able to write a perl script to make the desired cut out. All edits go into the main map, and then the cutter script is run to get the phase1 map.

That’s an interesting idea to tie the number of enemy historical events to the difficulty level, I like it. You could also tie in production and commerce bonuses in like for the regular game.

The civIII version has 25% more enemies in normal difficulty than in easy. I figure that sort of thing will be determined largely during play test, which seems incredibly far off at this point.. I'll be more than happy to get a rudimentary mod to load complete with a reasonable map! Hopefully by mid-September.

I think it’s a good idea in theory to integrate artillery with the legions, but in practice I think it would take away some of the complexity and fun from the combat engine of Civ4. It’s simply not as interesting to just run around with a huge army of just one type of unit and completely dominate.

Both then. The legions will just have the smaller versions, which is responsible for the city raider promos, but there will be discrete units which represent the bigger machines. These will bombard city defenses, but won't be of much use during actual combat (big machine = slow ROF, few of them vs a 100 small ballistas firing bolts en mass).

is there going to be a soundtrack with this?

Someday!

Hopefully we can get some static image wonder "movies".

As for unit graphics, there will be a need for:
4 legion flavors (eg http://dbaol.com/armies/army_59_figure_1.htm) to represent the early, marius, imperial, and post-imperial legios. Hopefully throwning a pilum, and formed into lines. Unfortunatly all of the civIV and Warlords Legio art consists of just the single unit
Velites could be a re-skinned skirmisher.
Ballista + Onager.
Funditor (from Warlords?)
Miles Auxillary, various cavalry, etc... civIII RFRE had tons of unit graphics!!!

Lots of other graphics will be needed as well.. civIII RFRE was quite a large mod.

 

[Gunner]

I was looking into maps last night. It's just a text file Looks like I'll be able to write a perl script to make the desired cut out. All edits go into the main map, and then the cutter script is run to get the phase1 map.

Oh I knew that it was definitely possible to make the smaller map and all, I'm fairly well aquainted with Civ4 modding. What I was questioning was if it would be more productive for us to just focus on the main map the entire time. For instance, changing between the two maps would require the rewritting of some events to represent the correct tiles and such. Seems like it would just be creating extra work without much of a benefit.

 

[primordial stew]

The Rise of Rome map from Warlords will work pretty well. I'm going to delete the bottom row, add 5 more collumns to the east (now up to 2972 plots), and play around with a copy of TAM 1.951

TAM Mediterranean Huge v1.95.Civ4WorldBuilderSave (10400 plots) minus the bottom 10 rows, and 25 X most collumns (now a mere 7425 plots) is actually a pretty good fit for RFRE. Aegyptus will be a bit smaller, not so much along the Nile. Has anyone actually played on this map??

The difference is just in scale. The RoR scaled map will lose some cities, but the TAM Huge Med map will have them all!

 

[primordial stew]

What I was questioning was if it would be more productive for us to just focus on the main map the entire time. Seems like it would just be creating extra work without much of a benefit.

Let me see if I can get a working script. If so, generating the phase1 map is just a matter of running the script. No edits will actually be done on the phase 1 map.

I'm assuming the lower left is 0,0, and if so then coordinates will be the same.
But does lower left have to be 0,0? What if it was 5,5 instead?

 

[jobiwan7]

Yes! I'm so glad someone else wants this made. I'd be happy to help out. And the ability to script the events will be so much fun.

Imagine a pop-up in the game: "Tribune of the Plebs Marcus Livius Drusus has been killed, and now our Italian allies are turning on us! Prepare for war!" At that point, about half of Italy switches to "Italia Civ."

Uprisings and invasions could be scripted, too. Now there would be no need to tinker with a cheap wonder for the barbarians to build so they would spawn troops. Hannibal could cross the Alps at the proper time, Mithridates could invade Asia at just the right time! Oh, the possibilities are endless!

I shall watch this thread with interest.

 

[primordial stew]

Yes! I'm so glad someone else wants this made. I'd be happy to help out. And the ability to script the events will be so much fun.

Great! Think about what is a robust approach to event timings, and how to make them non-repatative. Consider Spartacus. Historically he started around Capua in year XX. So the event is based on this, but we don't want the player to know exactly where or when. So maybe a popup window or log message that "slaves in Italia are growing restless!" (do give some warning!), and then the next turn Spartacus's mob is spawned. Each event should have some sort of range. Maybe for Spartacus we give it +/- 3 years. But for the Gaulish revolt during the Crisis, the range can be larger (maybe 201AD, maybe 260AD).

Maybe warnings of the event can be tied to difficulty level as well? The easy setting gives 2 turns warning, regular 1 turn, and hard there is no warning!

 

[pinktilapia]

The Rise of Rome map from Warlords will work pretty well. I'm going to delete the bottom row, add 5 more collumns to the east (now up to 2972 plots), and play around with a copy of TAM 1.951

TAM Mediterranean Huge v1.95.Civ4WorldBuilderSave (10400 plots) minus the bottom 10 rows, and 25 X most collumns (now a mere 7425 plots) is actually a pretty good fit for RFRE. Aegyptus will be a bit smaller, not so much along the Nile. Has anyone actually played on this map??

The difference is just in scale. The RoR scaled map will lose some cities, but the TAM Huge Med map will have them all!

The map used in RFRE CivIII is a modifed and cropped version of the one used in TAM CivIII It would make sense to stick to Thamis & co's great work for that. Definitively though, for the sake of playability and game speed, we need to seriously reduce the number of cities.

 

[primordial stew]

LOL, I'll work with the RoR map, possibly not this week, but definetly next week.

Woo hoo, progress!

 

[blitzkrieg80]

I think I can help out, I am very excited like you guys after hearing about the capability of nation birth being coded... you're right about my typical make the game historical and challenging attitude (thanks Stew!) =oP I will get some ideas/questions/answers out once i try out Rhyes Mod for Civ4... so far I have only played the "unflavorful" vanilla (you got that right, Pink!) and a few mods like TAM which were really raw a while ago... so I'd definitely like to see some of these advanced game concepts and implementation done with Python/XML, ect.

PS- NOOOOOOOOOOOO! Thamis has a great map but it sucks in reference to the North (we're talking about the civ4 one right? or did he make a more thorough version that I didn't play in his earlier version?) Without the North, there is no FALL!! wah!!!

 

[blitzkrieg80]

WOW, now I REALLY want to get this going, because after playing Rome on Rhyes for 100 turns (including pre-turns) I am already bored with the limits of vanilla non-flavor and anachronistic history/technology!! RFRE needs to happen =o) The hard part will be all the art that we take for granted, already beautifully drawn and collected in the Civ3 RFRE

 

[pinktilapia]

I will have to check Thamis map a little more carefully... in the north

 

[primordial stew]

PS- NOOOOOOOOOOOO! Thamis has a great map but it sucks in reference to the North (we're talking about the civ4 one right? or did he make a more thorough version that I didn't play in his earlier version?) Without the North, there is no FALL!! wah!!!

I've got 1.95 and there are more maps now. The std map does severly limit Germania, and England is only 2 plots! Oh, and no Persia either! Should be cake for the Romans to win.

1 of the new maps is the huge mediteranean one. It has all of that and a bit more of Persia/Scythia. At the start it's 400M! I do want to play it for a while to see how big it gets.

The hard part will be all the art that we take for granted, already beautifully drawn and collected in the Civ3 RFRE

Looking at the map I realized this too.. where to get replacements for those islanders, celts, fedatori...? That's part of the motivation for the smaller map for phase1, a lot of that stuff doesn't need to be in there yet.

Art also makes the mod very large. There's probobly no way around it though.. but I will fight bloat while it's possible! Probobly there will be 2 zips to dl, 1 with just art (won't change too much after a while), and 1 with the other files, which will only be a few megs, but will change too often. TAM is only ~8 megs since it can most use std resources, whereas FFH is 175 megs. Ughh.. To differentiate the legions before there is art we can just add a trooper. At least when they are at full strength this will work.

I'd be happy for now if the legions would form proper lines! In TAM they have 8 troops, but they're organized in a circle. In FFH2 there is a 5 unit archer, 3 in front, and 2 in back, which seems promising. I tried comparing the xml, but couldn't make sense of it.

 

[Gunner]

Formations can be done relatively easily. Take a look at the Regiments mod to get an idea of how to modify them.

 

[blitzkrieg80]

No, Pink, it sounds like I'm the one who should be since I was thinking Thamis still only released his old map, but I guess he made newer ones on par with his old nice civ3 map

Stew, the formation code for the Legion (is there a better graphic than the Praetorian in Warlords?) sounds like it will go a long way to making things look right- good luck, code finding/tuning takes some time... I'll try to help out later when I have time with similar code issues myself although I have never used/looked at Python/XML in my life

Gunner, you mentioned Auxilary recruitment areas, which reminds me of Rome: Total Realism/Roma/EB mod for RTW and that is exciting stuff!! Citizenship + Area of Recruitment will be amazing

What we really need to do is find some amazing 3d artists and abduct them and force them to work for us

 

[pinktilapia]

What we really need to do is find some amazing 3d artists and abduct them and force them to work for us

Where is Gaias? He looked like he could handle that !

I think starting with the small map to retrace the punic wars is a good idea. Starting small and growing slowly is always wise A Punic Wars scenario would be a fun product in itself, even if the team get exhausted and never go beyond it to a full RFRE. Now, I would favorize placeholders and get a playable scenario with vanilla art (ugly but working and showing the team is serious about it) before starting to request units and other art elements. Let's focus on the map, the rules and the events. Does this make sense?

 

[Gunner]

Where is Gaias? He looked like he could handle that !

I think starting with the small map to retrace the punic wars is a good idea. Starting small and growing slowly is always wise A Punic Wars scenario would be a fun product in itself, even if the team get exhausted and never go beyond it to a full RFRE. Now, I would favorize placeholders and get a playable scenario with vanilla art (ugly but working and showing the team is serious about it) before starting to request units and other art elements. Let's focus on the map, the rules and the events. Does this make sense?

I agree about not worrying about graphics and just using placeholders. Unit makers are much more likely to make a unit for an already made mod than a theoretical one.

 

[primordial stew]

Formations can be done relatively easily. Take a look at the Regiments mod to get an idea of how to modify them.

Ok, it's just a matter of setting a position foreach unit. The 8 unit legion used in TAM will form 2 good rows using .4 X spacing, and .3 Y spacing. The Immortal will be 2 across by 4 deep (or more?) to give the impression that they are indeed fitting of thier name. It is more interesting watching 8 unit legions and hoplites battle it out

Is there an actual phalanx (very long spears) unit out there? I've only seen the hoplites posing as phalanx units.

 

[Gunner]

Is there an actual phalanx (very long spears) unit out there? I've only seen the hoplites posing as phalanx units.

I think you could do something in nifviewer to elongate the spear that the phalax uses.

 

[primordial stew]

Cool! Hopefully it won't be too long before they can be seen in action. I'm hoping to have a non-crashing phase1 within 2 weeks.

I've been plodding along putting in the tech tree/civics/units into a copy of TAM 1.951. Not much will be left of TAM, but it sure does help in getting going. CIV4TechInfos.xml is 99% different.

I still don't get how to create the map :/ I've stripped everything but the terrain out of a map, but am missing how to sucessfully edit it in worldbuilder. Seems like it should just be: make edits, then save, but the save file is just a header, no data.. Are we supposed to just add in everything with a text editor?

Something I'd like some discussion on is the seperation of govt and civics. To me it seems like slavery will be the only labor civic available to the player. For legal there will be more options since this is where a few of the civIII wonders map into (eg praetor, diotolican's reforms, trajan's forum).