Dev.Concept: Civilisation -After Gensoukyou-

[Zurocha]

Hello to all of ye!
I am currently refining a touhou mod concept for Civilisation. I have not yet decided whether it shall be for CIVBTS, CIVBNW, or CIVBE, but as it seems most likely that I will make this mod for CIVBNW, I will post this here.

I have downloaded a while back a mod for CIV4 called Touhou Jojishi. I was overjoyed; I am a fan of both Civilisation and of Touhou, and a merging of the two was a gift from heaven.
However, after a few matches, I started to tire of the inconsistencies in the mod, particularly in the art; the leaderheads were done in a variety of conflicting artstyles. Murasa's leaderhead, for example, contrasts with that of Utsuho; the former was done in a chibi style and had a plain white background while the latter was high-detail and a near-painting with a bright background.
And so I modified Jojishi. I downloaded images that I found would look good as leaderheads, and one by one replaced the leaderheads. After that I modified the icons. Then I evened out the stats.
As I was editing Jojishi, I started thinking of creating my own civ-touhou mod. I stopped editing Jojishi after a short while, and I focused my time on refining my own concept.

Now I was conflicted; I found CIV4 boring in comparison to CIV5. The world editor (a built-in cheat engine in my opinion) aside, I find CIV5 much more interesting than CIV4.
Take the no-stacking policy of CIV5, for example. Many players rebel against it, but I myself think that it makes the game more challenging because I have to consider what units to assign to this hex and that.
However, CIV4 runs much faster than CIV5 on my PC because my graphics card happens to be quite old, and the world editor makes testing much easier.

Then I messed around with CIV5 and familiarised myself with some of its workings. I decided then that I would make this mod for CIV5.

Anyways, I have seen a few touhou mods for CIV5 scattered across the nets, but most of these focus on individual civilisations and I have yet to see a pack that provides a full set of civilisations like Touhou Jojishi. I plan on filling up this vacuum.

I forgot to bring my word document for this mod with me, but this should be the basic outline:

The premise of the mod is that there was a Youkai Rebellion backed by the Moriya that overthrew the Hakurei Maiden. After a few days of Gensokyo being under Moriya control, the Moriya decide to satisfy the youkai they supported by creating an opening in the Hakurei Barrier for them to pass through into the outside world. The opening of the hole wakens Yukari Yakumo from her slumber, and once she realised what happened, she was so enraged that she personally tore down the barrier (which was already degenerating due to incompatibilities between the Hakurei Border and the Moriya Deities' powers) and scattered everything within it into a world far away from Earth. The rebel youkai were thrown into a rage, and much knowledge was lost when they razed every little thing they could find. In the end, much of the knowledge gensokyo's inhabitants had were lost, and its population was scattered across the planet, isolated from each other by miles upon miles of unknown territory and raging feral youkai. So they create their first settlement and eventually end up with supergiant empires so powerful that the sun itself shivered in fear. And yeah.

So, yeah. It's sort of BE-ish, now that I think about it. (lol)

There are 11 (or 12) factions (civilisations) with up to 4 leaders each:
1. Chireiden (Satori, Koishi, Yuugi, Utsuho)
2. Eientei (Eirin, Kaguya, Tewi, Reisen)
3. Hakugyokurou (Yuyuko, Youmu, Yukari, Ran)
4. Hakurei (Reimu, Suika, Mima, Marisa)
5. Koumakan (Remilia, Flandre, Sakuya, Patchouli)
6. Kagetsuki (Yuuko)
7. Ningen ga Sato (Akyuu, Mokou, Keine, Minoriko & Shizuha)
8. Makai (Shinki, Yumeko, Elis,Yuuka)
9. Myourenji (Byakuren, Murasa, Shou, Nazrin)
10. Senkai (Miko, Tojiko, Seiga, Yoshika)
11. Youkai ga Yama (Aya, Kanako, Suwako, Sanae)
[12. Luna (Yorihime, Toyohime)]

Every faction has a unique ability, a unique palace, and three unique buildings-- these are shared by its leaders. The leaders also have their own unique ability, which means that the player starts the game with two unique abilities.

And oh! There are new victories and world wonders are removed from gameplay. There are only two possible wonders, both of them victory flags. The first, the Dimensional Gate, is the trigger for the Homecoming victory. The second, the Monument to Gensokyo, is the trigger for the Remembrance victory. The three require varying conditions to be met--- something I have yet to clearly define yet.

Great persons would also be either nerfed, or heavily reduced in power.

The victories are Supremacy (destroy all rival factions), New Gensokyo (be elected as world leader), Homecoming (return to Earth; create the Dimensional Gate), Remembrance (build the Monument to Gensokyo wonder, which requires that you have three Chronicle buildings built (can be built once four social policy branches have been completed) and five social policy branches unlocked.), Escape (create the Seeder Vessel spaceship), Culture (be culturally influential over all factions)

The tech tree will also be rebuilt somewhat.

That should be what I can recall off the top of my head. I will try to bring my word document next time.

That aside, I have some questions I need to ask.
Is it possible to make a building provide X yield in X in the capital city per X population in current city? (For example, 1 yield science per 6 pop in every city with structure clinic)
Is it possible to add to the GPT a _% of the current gold in the treasury? (Say, for example, having 2000 gold in the treasury would produce 20 GPT)
(And a broader form of this question-- is it possible to provide yield/turn to _ equal to _% of yield/turn or stock qty of _?)
Is it possible for units to have hidden nationality, like in CIV4?
Is it possible for a faction/civilisation to be able to build another faction/civilisation's unique building when there is a declaration of friendship between the two factions?
Is it possible to spawn a new unit when a certain unit successfully kills an enemy? (Ie, 25% chance to spawn unit ZOMBIE when unit LICH succeeds in killing opponent)
It is possible to make naval units have a chance to capture enemy vessels. Can that ability extend to land units as well?
Is it possible for a unit to have a _% chance per turn to transfer control of an adjacent unit to the unit owner's control?
Is it possible to make hostile units suffer _ damage per turn within a player's borders?
Is it possible to create a building that provides 2 possible trade routes for the city it is built in, like in CIVBE, or is the system in CIVBNW restricted to using a global pool?
Is it possible to make specialists produce happiness?
Is it possible to make a building that will make the city a source of fresh water?
Is it possible to port the outpost feature of CIVBE to BNW?

How do I make the game achieve such effects? Is it possible to do so with XML alone, or do I have to use LUA? (Because if so, I'll have to learn LUA ^_^")

What I have posted here is sort of rough. Many features may change as I polish the concept.

And oh, every faction has its own name-schemes.
Hakurei settlements, for example, are usually references to the hakurei clan, its deity, and its significant holdings in Gensokyo, or adjectives or adjective+noun using older -si/-ki forms, while Moriya settlements are references to the tengu, the moriya trinity's deities, their aspects and holdings, and adjective+noun using the more modern -i forms.

So, you'll see settlements named Fakurei, Atarashi (Atarashii), Kireshi (Kirei), Ryuujin, Yokifana (Ii hana), Sabukimizu (Samuimizu) belonging to the Hakurei, and settlements named Moriya, Samuikaze, Mizukan, Kazenokami, Takaiyama belonging to the Moriya.

Ah, thanks for reading.
I'm planning this mod for personal enjoyment, but it would be much better if someone could tell me what can be done and what can't be done, and maybe look through the code before I make it publicly available.

I apologise if this post is messy. That happens when I have too much to say and too little time to organise my thoughts. I'll try to clean it up in the future.

 

[bouncymischa]

Anyways, I have seen a few touhou mods for CIV5 scattered across the nets, but most of these focus on individual civilisations and I have yet to see a pack that provides a full set of civilisations like Touhou Jojishi. I plan on filling up this vacuum.

So, what, my Touhou mods aren't good enough?? *sob sobs*

Just kidding! Welcome to the forums, Zurocha! It definitely sounds like you're undertaking an ambitious project, so good luck with it!

As for your questions, I think most of what you want to attempt is doable in Lua, but very little can be done in XML, so Lua is probably going to be necessary. Fortunately, I've found Lua gets easier to use once you've got the hang of it, so it's just getting past that initial hurdle that's the problem.

Is it possible to make a building provide X yield in X in the capital city per X population in current city? (For example, 1 yield science per 6 pop in every city with structure clinic)
Is it possible to add to the GPT a _% of the current gold in the treasury? (Say, for example, having 2000 gold in the treasury would produce 20 GPT)
(And a broader form of this question-- is it possible to provide yield/turn to _ equal to _% of yield/turn or stock qty of _?)

Should be fairly easy to do with Lua, although some of it may depend on manipulating the UI if you want certain effects to show. For example, adding 1% of a player's current gold balance to the treasury at the start of the turn is easy, but if you want it to appear as part of the GPT it's trickier.

Is it possible for units to have hidden nationality, like in CIV4?

This one could be possible? I thought Privateers had hidden nationality, but I could be wrong. If there isn't an XML code to hide nationality, then it may not be doable as I can't think of any way to do it in Lua off-hand.

Is it possible for a faction/civilisation to be able to build another faction/civilisation's unique building when there is a declaration of friendship between the two factions?

This one may be impossible. The Phillipines civ made by Colonial Legacies attempted it, and it caused no end of headaches and errors. They eventually scrapped the idea as being too ambitious. It may be possible somehow, but I'd say it's highly unlikely.

Is it possible to spawn a new unit when a certain unit successfully kills an enemy? (Ie, 25% chance to spawn unit ZOMBIE when unit LICH succeeds in killing opponent)

This one may be possible? I can't recall off-hand how the event fires when a unit is killed, but I know in the past there's been the issue that not all the information is provided. (i.e. only one of either the attacker or the defender is known -- I think the defender.) So you may be able to determine "ack, one of my units got killed" but not "I killed an enemy unit". Still, I think some people have played around with unit death triggers, and there may have been some recent changes, so it may be possible. I'm not fully certain.

It is possible to make naval units have a chance to capture enemy vessels. Can that ability extend to land units as well?

Possibly? I know the naval units do it through a promotion, but I can't remember if there's a similar promotion for land units. I thought there was, but I'm not sure.

Is it possible for a unit to have a _% chance per turn to transfer control of an adjacent unit to the unit owner's control?

Should be doable with Lua. I know some people are working on civs that have similar effects, turning units into Barbarians or the like. Since Barbarians are just another team, it should be possible to somehow swap teams. (This may involve respawning the units as a friendly one...)

Is it possible to make hostile units suffer _ damage per turn within a player's borders?

I believe it's possible with Lua. I know JFD's Soviet Union had such an ability at one point.

Is it possible to create a building that provides 2 possible trade routes for the city it is built in, like in CIVBE, or is the system in CIVBNW restricted to using a global pool?

I'm not certain about how trade routes work in the code so I'm not sure, but I think you're limited to a global pool.

Is it possible to make specialists produce happiness?
Is it possible to make a building that will make the city a source of fresh water?

These should be doable through Lua. Happiness doesn't work as a normal yield so you can't assign it to specialists in XML, but you can use dummy buildings to imitate it in Lua. I know some civs have done the "make a city a source of fresh water" trick through Lua, so it must be possible, although I haven't studied how they did it.

Is it possible to port the outpost feature of CIVBE to BNW?

I'm not entirely sure what elements you'd want to imitate, but it's likely possible to copy at least some of their features through Lua and UI manipulation.

Good luck with everything!

 

[LeeS]

I've given the naval units' capture capability (which is given within a promotion as <CaptureDefeatedEnemy>true</CaptureDefeatedEnemy> ) to land units and it works just fine. The only thing I haven't figured out how to fix is when you mouse-over an enemy unit the pop-up text still refers to a percentage chance of capturing the enemy unit if the enemy unit is "sunk".

I haven't tried any of the recently-released lua event/hooks yet to see if there is anything new with regard to determining which unit was the killer as opposed to the die-er during combat. Previously I was not able to find a way to determine which unit was the survivor in a battle, only which unit was the unit that was killed off. The UnitKilledInCombat (I think that was the name of the lua game event) only gave information for the victorious civilization, the defeated civilization, and the unit that was defeated. I cannot recall if anything else was provided -- but I am 100% certain the info for the victorious unit was not provided. Really really stupid, and irritating. Because of this I ended up using a work-around with the capture thing for land units, and then had an lua event that fired when a particular type of unit was captured. This worked for me in the end because I was really more interested in the unit that was killed (captured) but I had originally wanted the lua to only "run" when specific-unit-A killed specific-unit-B. I had to settle for specific-unit-A captured specific-unit-B. That "capture" for purposes of lua works just like any other "unit has been created", and will cause the Events.SerialEventUnitCreated hook to fire an add-on lua function.

 

[JFD]

I've given the naval units' capture capability (which is given within a promotion as <CaptureDefeatedEnemy>true</CaptureDefeatedEnemy> ) to land units and it works just fine. The only thing I haven't figured out how to fix is when you mouse-over an enemy unit the pop-up text still refers to a percentage chance of capturing the enemy unit if the enemy unit is "sunk".

<Update>
	<Where Tag="TXT_KEY_EUPANEL_CAPTURE_CHANCE" />
	<Set Text="[COLOR_CYAN]Capture Chance if Defeated: {1_Percent}%[ENDCOLOR]" />
</Update>

The UA of my Lithuanian civ.

 

[Prairial]

I've overrided the technology tree for touhou MODs, which leads lots of bugs...
Most of your questions can be solved by dummy buidlings and lua; You can use the DVMC, which provides more lua APIs for CIV5, to capture the enemy units by GameEvents.UnitPrekill; I don't know how to make a city source of fresh water, maybe you can put a dummy fresh water feature on the plot, just like the Lake Victoria.

Great ideas! Looking forward to play your MOD!

 

[Zurocha]

Hi guys! Sorry for the long silence-- I've been somewhat busy on ROM editing and scanning a set of albums someone sent my way. ROM editing, ja? I'm making a Modmod of Touhoumon 1.8.

Oh, and another reason for my silence? I was busy searching Danbooru for suitable leader scene images and my hard drive for suitable leader music.

It's disappointing how I can't seem to find songs that work. They are either too strong or are of a completely useless genra. I am looking for music that is orchestral, yet subtle. Wave is too strong. &#29392;&#12398;&#24037;&#20316;&#23460; is too strong. Tutti Sound is too strong. &#36259;&#21619;&#24037;&#25151;&#12395;&#12435;&#12376;&#12435;&#12431;&#12356;&#12435; is too strong. &#39171;&#23376;&#23627;&#26412;&#33303; does not have the style I was looking for. TAMUSIC doesn't have that aura I was looking for. Gah!

Anyways, I've started working on making the Mod itself (as opposed to merely the concepts.) I had a lot of fun coming up with new colour schemes and making certain civilizations use those colour schemes. It was also quite fun disabling those puny civilizations one by one! Hah! So you conquered Egypt, Phoenecia, and caused the extinction of dozens of languages, Rome? Well! See this--- I just put this little line of code here and... voila! You're off the book!

...Yeah... I felt like I was going through the motions of creating a new world there.

Ah, as I said, I had quite the bit of fun doing the easy bits. By the time I was done, all of those factions that did not use Touhou colours were disabled. (DLC Civs included.)

The next bit wasn't so easy. I had plenty of failures when I disabled Japan (which used Hakurei Colours) and put in the actual Hakurei Faction itself. I spent an entire day typing code and figuring out where I went wrong. My first hurdle was making the Hakurei Civ/Faction itself appear on the listing. I forgot how I made this happen, but I went through five revisions before I said 'screw it!' and went and copied all of the Celt data from the Modder's Guide and, made it BNW-worthy, and rebuilt the Hakurei code from that base. Somehow, that worked. (Curiously, my earlier builds, which were based off Firaxis code, didn't work!)

The next bump in the road was in making the Civ listing apper correctly. That page when you click "Game Setup" with the chosen Civ above, settings below, and map to the side? Yea, when I click the Civ bar to choose from the available Civs, the bar on the side won't show up! I had to go to "Advanced Setup" and choose the Hakurei Faction there.

I solved this problem by shoving in two Building Overrides-- the Hakurei Shrine (Main) and the Hakurei Branch Shrine).

I then had once more an easy time as I tweaked the settings for the Hakurei Shrine/Palace and the Branch Shrine. The Palace's final (as of now) yield for Gold-Production-Science-Culture-Faith is 3-2-2-2-1 (Palace: 3-3-3-1-0). The Branch Shrine has a yield identical to that of the regular shrine, except that it doesn't have a maintenance cost. (I'm thinking of putting in "1" for maintenance cost and "1" for gold output--- the effect is the same until a yield modifier building comes along or your empire becomes unhappy)

Anyways, that done, I moved on to creating a new leader.
And oh, before I go on, I tried putting in a new DOM map for Reimu, but it won't load. It's not fatal, so I'll figure it out later.
Oh- alright. Leaders.
Since I was working with the Hakurei faction, I set on creating Reimu. However, it seems as though her legendary laziness is, indeed, quite lazy; she vehemently refused to work ingame and only served to make the Hakurei Faction unselectable until I replaced her with Oda Nobunaga.
I believe she was pleased with that decision. I saw her a while ago sipping tea most contentedly while I played with Oda-han's strings and used him to conquer the entire world.
But! I will persevere! I will see what the fault in her code is, and get her lovely behind off of that porch and into her throne!
Somebody give me a charm when that happens. I fear she might protest through accupuncture when that happens. Accupuncture, with her sealing needles.
I fear she will turn me into a pincushion!

But--- ahem. That's still far off in the horizon.

And I was sidetracked! Anyways, as I said, since Reimu was too lazy to work, I had Oda fill in for her. With him on the throne (and me on the helm), I did a few more tests. One of these is whether it would be possible to have more than two overrides per faction. This ended in failure, as the setup screen bugged up when I added a new temple for the Hakurei faction.

This would be /much/ easier in Civ4, but... since I already started here, and since I detest Civ4 because of its ingame worldbuilder (it should have been off-game! It's a legal cheating tool, I say!), I figure I would find a new way to have more than two overrides.

And it's not without hope. I took a peek in Colonialist Legacies' Philippine Civ and I saw a bunch of code that seems to be about overriding a set of buildings with another without making the game recognise them as overrides and therefore not causing any bugs. I'm going to do a wee bit of testing with that mod and figure out how their system works (If that would be alright?) so I can create something similar for this mod.


At the moment, my priorities are:

1. getting a new leader to work /without bugs/ ingame.
2. getting the new leader's ability to work /without bugs/ ingame.
2. putting in new leader music
3. inserting a new diplomacy scene for the new leaders (I don't want to talk to a balding guy in armour who claims to be Reimu or a definitely bald guy with nothing but white pants and a robe and a set of round spectacles on who claims to be Yuyuko! Creepy, I say!)
4. getting the DOM image to work.
5. disabling the wonder system/making wonders unbuildable.
6. downgrading the great people's actions.

After these are done, I plan on:

1. Inserting new Pedia entries.
2. Creating the other factions.
3. Getting my concepts for their UAs in the game.
4. Creating new victories.

And, once I get far enough in my Lua-self-study to be able to work in that language,

1. Create code for the more unique UAs


Oh, and I thought up of a new Game Concept.

There is a building that would be granted to a faction's cities upon their founding. This building would provide some sort of bonus to the City (faster growth, enhanced units, etc...), and it is immune to nukes and is never destroyed when the city is captured by another player.

The actual building and its respective bonus varies per faction.
I call it the city-founder bonus.

So, you see where this is going?

Say that the Hakurei Faction's city-founder bonus is that 1 unit of food is provided for every 2 citizens and that of Moriya is a free promotion that gives 1 additional movepoint to units built in their cities. A Hakurei City under Moriya control will still produce 1 unit of food for every 2 citizens but won't produce faster units, and vice versa.

This might make the player want to capture/purchase cities belonging to another faction just to enjoy their Civ Bonus if I make the Civ Bonuses worthwile. I'm even thinking of making a few factions benifit from having cities from more than one founder under the player's control.

You think this concept feasible, balance-wise? It seems to be so, code-wise.