Oni Ryuu said:
I think I know what you’re going to say but I still have to ask.
Can it be made so a bombard or a bombing run will hit a pre-determined number of enemies occupying the same tile using one move?
Can a bombard or a bombing run cause disease on a tile for a set number of turns?
Is it possible to reduce the re-base function to 3 times a unit’s operational range rather than 6?
I know I’m a pain in the ass but I want to get the most out of this game.
Unfortunately not, at least in any way I know of. Would be some interesting options though; the re-base one in particular seems like something that would have been logical for Firaxis to include tweakability of.
A little weird why only 1 was just allowed. You would think that Firaxis would of allowed the option.
Yeah I'm aware of the auto-production method, just hoped maybe it was just the limits of the interface with what was coded into the editor menus, not the code. Having buildings required for units would add so much more to civ3. I dont really like auto-production for normal units, because I like a city's production to be more of a factor, than just building the building, and watching the units come at a set time even while your city is producing something else. For certain special things it is good, but not for the majority of your army. Also, to have most of your army by auto-production means you need a good amount of other buildables that are constanty needed so your cities still have necessary production prioritization.
I think this is indicative of modding being a secondary priority of Civ3; the modding tools in Vanilla (particularly early versions of Vanilla) were pretty limited - although AFAIK even the earliest versions had rudimentary editor support, which is more than can be said for Civ6 currently (surprisingly). In other words, the priority for Civ3's development was the epic game. They probably created the initial editing tools to support what the epic game supports, and then realized, "hey, you could do a lot with this, we should make this available to the community, make a scenario-focused expansion [Conquests], and add some new abilities for that expansion's scenarios". But my suspicion is the genesis of the Firaxis editor - and the BIC/BIQ format - was making development of the epic game, and later Conquests easier, with features determined by what was needed for those.
By contrast, by the time Civ4 was underway, the modding community had shown its ingenuity, and modding support was a fundamental building block of Civ4. This makes the amount of things you can do in Civ4 almost limitless, provided you're willing to spend enough time on it (and work within the confines of the graphical engine). I suspect nearly all of the features mentioned in the past few pages could be done in Civ4, though with significantly varying degrees of difficulty. The flip side, however, was that the great power of Civ4 meant the average difficulty of creating a mod was higher. The WorldBuilder meant map creation was of a similar difficulty, but rule changes required XML editing that was less user-friendly than rule editing in Civ3's editor, and more advanced changes required Python or C++ coding, essentially making it off-limits to non-programmers.
Firaxis certainly could have been more flexible in the BIQ format without adding any significant complexity. Multiple building prerequisites, unit production requiring buildings, more than four eras, more than five world sizes, more flexible production bonuses for buildings (i.e. +15%), more than 32 civs, quite a few options that wouldn't really increase the complexity of modding at all (though building/unit prerequisites may have required some more AI work for the AI to properly take advantage of it). But it doesn't appear that "what might someone possibly want to edit?" was a major priority at the time.
@Quintillus Was wondering if it was possible to increase the width of the outlined boxes on the Unit tab like how they are on the Buildings tab?
Yes, but unfortunately it's not quick to do so. Back in the day when I first developed the editor I had a 1280x800 screen and didn't appreciate the value of a UI that scales to the display. And as I programmed it with static widths, making it flexible would require reprogramming a fair chunk of the UI logic on that tab.
I've also considered redoing the entire tab to have a more modern, truly flexible/scalable UI, as the current UI is not especially amenable to scaling (such as looking good on 4K displays). That would probably be more effort though, and I'm not sure if it would be worth it.
The BLDG tab did get the proof-of-concept for that, as it is the first tab and was of an appropriately moderate complexity.
Oni Ryuu said:
Separate to your grievance; the game limits the number of buildings a city can have. I want to add multiple suburban districts to a city to increase the population capacity and reducing general unhappiness. I love the game but it’s limitations are frustrating.
What is that limit? I was not aware of it before.
I knew while I was writing it that you'd have an answer much more detailed and pointing out all the errors in my guesses based on general understanding rather than (as you are) being elbows deep in the code. I always enjoy hearing from you how things really work. In this case your corrections give me a lot more food for thought about how the game engine handles terrain. If I could only pick one base vs. real terrain element to change it would be to allow mountains/hills/volcanoes on any base terrain. Main point still stands - there are always going to be some kind of limits & those limits are somehow related to powers of two because of the nature of computer hardware & software.
