Tigris of Gaul
Warlord
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2009
- Messages
- 158
The unit Wasteland ATV has bombard but with a range of zero.
Well I've been playing the version where you have guild buildings and can build settlers with Heavy Industry science so maybe not all biqs were up to date?
The settings are correct - just gameplaywise it is not really fun to play on maps larger than standard size. Perhaps increasing paradrop range might be an option.
Regarding balancing the aliens:
Genestealers are too strong and as soon as the are built the Aliens start snowballing. ( High stats, high hp, 2 movement + blitz, and enslavement of new genestealers)
Xenomorphs could take the place of genestealers and genestealers could come in the third era. Alternatively genestealers could enslave eggs which have to be upgraded in the next city to new genestealers. This would delay snowballing at least a bit.
I had this error: Art\Units\Genestealer\GenestealerAttackÑ.flc
Thank you for a fabulous mod! I have had lots of fun! (And plan to have more.)
Having played lots of Fallout lately, this was the right mod for my taste. The terrain graphics are impressive and immersive. Especially the water graphics are beautiful. I played with settler factories, and the half-empty world was very fitting for the theme. Unique factions with unique units, and almost everything completely documented within the Civilopedia - no small feat, very appreciated!
There are a small number of problems with the mod, though. Three of them were actually quite severe. I will address these now in order, including some more minor issues:
(For reference, I played on a semi-random normal sized warm 4 billion years old pangea map, i.e. a random map at which I added a pensinsula with 12 city locations with a 1-tile bottleneck to the rest of the continent for easy experimentation. I use the same map to experiment with other mods as well, with rerolled resources, of course. I chose the Equals. I played with all 12 civs. I rerolled resources until I got both resources ammo and guns on the peninsula which I found out beforehand were necessary to get competetive units early on.)
1. Severe item.In an early playthrough I found out that my cities on rivers could not build sewers in order to grow beyond population 12. That was puzzling because on your screenshots there are larger cities next to rivers. Well, going to the editor and removing the flag "Allows City Size Level 2" for sewers solved that. Unfortunately that meant restarting. [edit: There is another building called Kolhoz that allows cities to grow beyond size 12. It requires Timber which I did not have, and I did not notice this building in the tech screen. Mystery solved! Requiring a resource to build this essential building is not ideal, though. Compare items 5 and 6.]
2. Severe item. I got an error message "FILE NOT FOUND Art\Units\Genestealer\GenestealerAttackÑ.flc" followed by a CTD. This was also mentioned by Samez and by Tigris of Gaul. I actually had installed the additional Genestealer.zip. Close inspection revealed that in my install in the directory Art\Units\Genestealer there were files named GenestealerAttackA.flc to ...C.flc and even a GenestealerAttackæ.flc, but in the Genestealer.INI was a reference to GenestealerAttackÑ.flc. When I changed the filename of GenestealerAttackÑ.flc to GenestealerAttackX.flc and ALSO changed the reference within the .ini to that same name, the problem went away. Note that samez said words to the same effect. I could even continue playing my at that point rather advanced game.
3. Severe item. The spaceship victory does not work. Probably because you simply forgot to include a small wonder that enables building spaceship components (in the standard game it's the Apollo Program).[edited: see post below] That was sad for me, because that was the victory I was looking forward to, especially because with disabled domination victory condition I could stay completely relaxed while the Aliens gobbled up almost everyone else. I was advanced and powerful enough that I decided after having researched everything available and having built my 12th city (I got 6 through leaders) that I had gained an honorary victory. It was a fun game.
4. Minor item. This was already mentioned by Stew Pid. The resources are very important, and you have only few cities to hook them up securely and have to use colonies for the rest. And the latter are easily overrun by barbarians early on, when you need the resources to build strong uits to combat said barbarians... So it would be very good to see resources much much earlier than you actually need them. This way you could plan better ahead where to place your cities. I think a lot of the resources could be visible right from the start and the rest still much earlier than you need them.
5. Minor item. The limited number of cities necessiates it to hook up resources with colonies. However, as far as I know the AI never hooks up any resource via colony that is further away than 2 tiles from any civlization borders - it doesn't need to be their own border. That means the AI is severly disadvantaged in gaining resources in comparison to the human player. That cannot be changed, but the effect could perhaps be lessened by always having at least one passable (defensive) unit that does not need resources per tech level and civilization. That simply means reducing the resource demands for some units. In my game most of the time the best unit I saw was a 20.20 one, when I had already units much better than that.
6. Minor item. Quite a number of nice wonders and buildings have resource requirements that are very random or very hard to fulfill. For example, I so would have loved to build the Great Wasteland Harbor, but Alas!, no alcohol anywhere. Playing the Equals, I had the optional tech tree in the first age "Competitions"->"Panem et circenses"->"Entertainment". The second tech gave a rather weak fast attacker I could not build because I lacked animals, the third tech gave the very nice building "Gambling House" I could not build the entire game because I never had access to marijuana. The entire tech branch was useless to me, sadly.
7. Minor item. I found out very late that leaders in this mod are bonus settlers! Cool idea! And very welcome in my particular game, where I got most of my leaders from simply holding a colony with very advanced elite units that were attacked relentless by the enemy. But after some reflection I think this might not be the best of ideas after all, because it gives too much reward to a conquering civilization. A (successful) conqueror is already rewarded by getting additional cities through conquest. They don't need additional cities through leaders on top of that.
8. Minor item. Specialists. There are so many of them, and yet they are available only so late. It's almost a shame. Or did you do this intentionally to limit the power of them, given that the population eats only 1 food, sewers are available relatively early and thus cities can really get a lot of specialists (10 to 20) quite early?
9. Minor item. Why aren't all civs playable? I want to play Nomads! And God's Children! I mean, yeah, I can simply check the appropriate box in the editor, but I assume you have a reason to make them unplayable by the player...
10. Very Minor item. I noticed that the last units in most (all?) upgrade chains do not need resources at all. That has the satisfying effect that I can immediately build the top unit I so desperately want to build after finally having researched the tech. But it would actually be more balanced if especially the last unit had comparatively hard resource requirements. A civ that has reached that tech stage is likely not struggling. Let there be some challenge left for them!
11. Very Minor item. I think there are far too much hidden nationality units. If a civ wants to go to war, let them do it officially!
12. Very Minor item.I did not find a building that functioned as a drydock so I could upgrade my huge fleet of, well, two ships. [edit: This building does indeed exist, but it requires Timber, so I could not build it and did, again, not see it in the tech screen.]
I will not address unit balance and spelling because they have already been addressed and neither had detrimental effects on my playing experience.
All in all a very enjoyable mod, and let me stress here that none of the issues (not even the severe ones), which naturally made up the largest part of this post, significantly reduced my fun playing this mod! Thank you again for all your hard work, and thank you for sharing!
Hi @Vindsval ,
Wow this is super cool looking. May I suggest using the free 7zip on max compression settings to make a 7z file for future releases? Regular Zip stopped being the best option around 20 years ago lol but because Microsoft built it into Windows everyone still bloody uses it haha. For example I just downloaded your 1.5gig zip file and recompressed with 7zip and was able to get it down to 1.05gig shaving nearly 450 megs off the file size! Better for you (hosting wise) and better for your fans downloading haha.
Also if you want to free up space on your cloud and have a more reliable permanent hosting option elsewhere then I recommend ModDB.
You can either design a full mod page by going to the Civilization 3 section here and clicking on the + 'add mod' button which would allow you to create a full page with lots of pics, info and most importantly the files:
https://www.moddb.com/games/civilization-iii-conquests
(I Accidentally had it on Civ2 when I took this snap but you get the idea haha)
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Or if you want the easiest quickest option then don't even make a mod page and just add your mod to the general Civ2 files/downloads section here instead (add file button is in the same place as on the mod page I showed above):
https://www.moddb.com/games/civilization-iii-conquests/downloads
ModDB file uploader has an AWESOME option to mirror an existing file download url so you don't even have to upload the file again (unless you make that new recompressed 7zip version) as it supports google drive and can easily make a copy of your existing download.
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I'm happy to do all this for you as I know ModDB like the back of my hand these days (currently 11 projects on there and counting haha) but then you wouldn't have control over the download should you update the mod and would need me to update it which would suck a bit.
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Hello! Many thanks for your reply. I think I will try to post my mod on Moddb In the nearest time.
No worries mate! Let me know if you have any troubles. I check this place nearly every day and am happy to help you get it setup! Once done you'll never have to worry about large file hosting again!
Plus if you decide to make a full mod page instead of just a Civ3 download there then if you leave the community media contributions button ticked I can then come in and upload all your pictures to save you time and hassle if you want.
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However if you wanna do it all yourself then free free to check out some of my pages there to see examples of what you can do with pics, banners and thumbnails etc all using the default buttons and options (their site allows much fancier front pages but I'm not a programmer haha).
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I've asked a friend of mine to help me with ModDb. So, there is it....
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-downfall