Difficulty of making new civilizations?

[Chapatis]

I'm just getting into modding now and am really interested. I have drawn up several civilizations that I'd like to create, none of which have incredibly game-changing abilities. Assuming that these civs are relatively simple, how much time should I expect each to require?

(I want to make icons and maps, but creating new designs and animations for UUs sounds difficult and time consuming, so I don't think I'll do that.)

Thanks a ton for any help

 

[trystero49]

It depends on how fast of a learner you are, and what experience you have with programming.

You can make a crude icon/map in minutes with Photoshop/GIMP. Making a high quality one is something I know nothing about, because I cannot make high quality maps.

If you want to make a new civilization, you should find someone else's civilization mod and look at it as well as looking at the game code for civilizations. It'll help you understand how to structure your own code.

Also, most importantly, go into the Tutorial Subforum and look at Kael's modder guide. It should be a sticky. It has everything you need to know about making a basic civilization mod, although some of it is no longer correct (i.e. out of date).

You can make a crude civ mod with placeholder art pretty quickly. Don't forget to go to your config.ini and set LoggingEnabled to 1 and then look at your logs when something goes wrong. Chances are, Database.log has all the info you need.