Customisable Civs

[Black Mage]

I looked over the 'Current Topics' sticky, so hopefully I'm not wasting your time here...

I'd love it if a player was able to customise their Civ so that you could select a flag and anthem, too, maybe from uploading a JPEG file into the game, and an MP3 for the anthem.

Any other things you can think of to tweak?

 

[searcheagle]

Nice feature, don't think I'd ever use it but it would be nice if it didn't detract from the real development of of the game- cause it would prolly take time away from that.

 

[judgement]

One of my favorite things to do in Civ 1 and 2 was to play a custom civ. You could, very simply, type in a name for your civ and a leader name, instead of using one of the existing civs. In Civ 2, you could even type in your own "titles" under each of the forms of governments, so that, if you wanted, you could be "Archduke Judgement" instead of "King Judgement" under Monarchy, or "Big-Cheese Judgement" instead of "President Judgement" under Democracy (and so on). This was a cool feature.

Assuming Civ 4 keeps the civ traits and unique units that Civ 3 added, then there would need to be a means to choose traits and a UU if you picked a custom name for your civ. You could either have complete freedom to directly pick traits and any one of the existing UUs, or, alternatively, you could pick a civ that your custom civ would be similar to. IIRC, in the original game, when you clicked "custom" you then wound up with the color and city-name-list of whichever civ had previously been selected.

While they're at it, a nice feature would be a simple way to import a text file as a list of city names (and maybe a list of great leader names as welll). Even when playing one of the default civs, I sometimes disagree with some of the names in the list. Its easy enough to just retype the names when I found new cities, but it'd be cool to have the suggestion that pops up be from my own list.

 

[socralynnek]

Hmmm, in Civ 3 the UU are sometimes there to balance the Civs s.t. Civs with stronger traits have weaker UUs (doesn't fit every time), so you could just select your uber-civ (how about Agr-Ind with Sipahi....), so I think this would unbalance the game, but for names, flags, city lists and so on, it would surely be nice!

 

[Commander Bello]

I like the idea of having the chance to mod / change almost everything.
If this would lead to the human player having a uber-nation, so what? It's still a single player game, isn't it?
And for mp games, this will happen just once or twice and then the players involved will find a common understanding as to what is allowed and what isn't.

 

[judgement]

I like the idea of having the chance to mod / change almost everything.
If this would lead to the human player having a uber-nation, so what? It's still a single player game, isn't it?
And for mp games, this will happen just once or twice and then the players involved will find a common understanding as to what is allowed and what isn't.

Except I wasn't talking about modding here, I was talking about the default game. In Civ 1/2, the default game allowed you to customise the name of your civ (and leader name, plus titles in Civ 2).

I'm all for letting people do whatever they want in the editor. But the default game needs to be well balanced... I'd prefer that the creation of an uber-nation requires opening up the editor. That's why I sort of agree with Socralynnek's concern, and think that the better way might be to allow you to pick from one of the existing civs (and thus get that particular combination of traits, UU, city name list, leader name list, etc.) and then, if you want, change the name of the civ (as the corresponding adjective, and the leader name). So if I wanted to play as the Spartans, I'd probably select Greece, then change the civ name from Greece to Sparta, change the adjective from Greek to Spartan, and change the leader from Alexander to someone Spartan (Leonidas, maybe).

Unlike freely allowing me to pick any traits and UU, the above suggestion would not affect gameplay in any way... as far as the game was concerned, it would be just like I was playing Greece. No need to worry about affecting balance at all, just a nice feature to let me rename my civ so I'm not limited to one of the default civ names.