davidtylr
Chieftain
I think there should be another english leader like Henry VIII, Henry II, William the conquerer.
History Rewritten (Original Thread)
- Thread starter Xyth
- Start date
Answering all of this sequentially so I might repeat myself a bit.
I'm not very familiar with the history/culture of Japan, I'll look that up when I'm done with these traits.
Despite the new leader slots I'll be adding new civs fairly cautiously as each one added quickly increases the memory usage of the mod. As always, the civs I end up adding will depend primarily on the art available. A few of those leader slots I'd like to give to existing civs too.
I'm currently using Alhambra as the Berber's UW. Plato's Academy is represented by the Academy National Wonder.
Flavian Amphitheatre will definitely be added, though I'll call it the Colosseum. I know that there is art available for the Sydney Opera House, the Porcelain tower, and Neuschwanstein, so they're potential candidates. Other candidates on my list are the Nazca Lines, Leaning Tower, Hubble Space Telescope, and the Large Hadron Collider.
The others I don't know whether art is available or not. As always I don't want to add wonders for the sake of adding wonders, there needs to be a defined role and space for it. I'd also like to increase the diversity of world wonders, Europe and America are represented much more than other parts of the world. Anyway, wonders are on the list for 0.9.5, we can discuss it more then.
The Minoans I have a soft spot for having studied them as part of my degree. I'd love to include them but it would be tricky to flesh them out into a full featured civilization. The Etruscans would be even harder. I feel that Romania can be incorporated into Byzantium.
Ghana is part of the Mande Empire in HR. The Kongo is probably the one major African region/culture HR doesn't cover. There's very little quality African art I haven't used already though.
Gran Colombia was very short lived and is a post-Medieval colonial civilization like America. I prefer to leave such civilizations out of HR, though the one exception I intend to make is for Brazil - South America needs another civ and its very easy and appropriate to incorporate the region's pre-colonial history.
The Urartians/Armenians are a fascinating civilization, I'd add them if there was enough art. That part of the world is already very well represented though.
If I add another Native North American civ it would be the Anasazi/Hopi. I don't think there's enough art for any more. I also don't want to get too carried away on adding civilizations that didn't actually build cities.
Feel free to write any that interest you. There are a lot of leaders that could really use some quality pedia entries.
From the first page of the thread, adapted and included in the pedia:
"Civilization IV: History Rewritten includes well-known world religions but also several ancient religions, philosophies and mythologies that might have survived longer and/or spread further had history been a bit different."
Basically religion is a very broad term. It's just as easy to make a case against Confucianism or Olympianism as it is for Asatru.
I haven't changed this from standard BTS. I presume it's to represent that rice farming requires considerably more water to produce than other cereals.
Yup but they weren't able to be extracted in any significant quantity til around then, nor was there need for them in large quantities. I don't have a firm opinion on when these should be revealed though, opinions welcomed.
At the moment it's positioned where it is to fill a gap in the tech tree. That may change in time if needed or suitable.
Most of the inquisition stuff was included as-is from another mod. It needs reviewing but it's not a high priority at the moment. Note that despite it's current form ultimately I don't intend the Holy Office to specifically represent the infamous Spanish one. That quote is much better though, I'll put it in.
The rise of organized religion as a political force beyond it's original areas of influence.
Placeholder bonus until that era is better developed.
Do people think that Flight is the best tech to unlock the Carrier? If so, I'm happy to change the model. If not, let me know which tech/model works better.
Hehe. I'd like to improve/replace a lot of BTS' pedia texts but they've been fairly low priority compared to game mechanics and such. Feel free to rewrite that one and I'll include it.
I'm not adverse to a bit of extremity being added so long as it results from a similar level of extreme incompetence
Ecology would be a bit odd as a prerequisite for Feminism, though Welfare as a prerequisite for Ecology is also a bit strange. Note that I don't intend Ecology to represent environmentalism - that's what Sustainability is for. Ecology instead is meant to include industrial advances in botany, horticulture, evolution, etc.
Nope I think I placed them there with the intention to move them later and never got around to it. I reckon either Pneumatics or Automation could work, thoughts?
I've made Tanks and Armour require Total War in 0.9.4. Let me know if you have any other suggestions. Apologies if I've missed any already made, this thread moves pretty fast at times ><
Oops, yes.
Well the Waka's final form won't be decided until 0.9.5 when I look at options to better balance Archipelago and other maps. I'll lower it's cost for now and we'll re-examine it later. Along with the Jaguar Warrior.
Hmm that's strange. I wonder if the game is interpreting it as requires a river OR coast? I'm not sure I can do much about that if that's true, it'll be a bug in the DLL. Anyway, I'll leave it for a UB review.
Yeah I'll leave it for a proper UB review.
It's all good. Versions 0.1 to 0.9 were all about adding new stuff, I want the 0.9.x series to be less about new stuff (though there'll still be some) and more about improving and balancing everything already in.
There is conceptual room in Bengal, Bangladesh and/or Burma. Art is very hard to come by for this region though. One of the most prominent unit makers is/was working on a large set of Indian units so I'll have to see how many 'leftovers' there are from that. Many of those will be used for the Tamil though, who currently share all their unit art with India.
I'd actually like to eventually change the Zulu to a Zimbabwean/Bantu civilization to more properly represent the history of that part of Africa. As mentioned earlier, I changed Mali to be the Mande and thus incorporate Ghana, Mali, Songhay and the other major West African centres. If I can add the Kongo I will, I think that is the best contender for an entirely new African civilization.
I don't imagine the final number of civilizations going beyond the low 50s. At this stage the only definite is Brazil/Tupi/Amazonia but I haven't done any work on that at all yet. I don't imagine any new civs will be added until 0.9.6 or even later though, there's a lot of more important things to review first.
The more pressing issue to me is what to replace the Hippodrome UB with. Also, the Greco-Roman world is already extremely well represented by wonders and I'm not sure the Hippodrome of Constantinople was 'wondrous' enough to warrant adding it as yet another.
On the other hand I think the Colosseum is iconic enough to warrant adding and there is good art available for it.
As mentioned earlier, I don't want to get carried away on adding non-urbanized civilizations. The Anasazi/Hopi are the best candidate for North America. The Mississipian culture would be the next best option but I highly doubt I could scrape enough quality art together for two such civilizations, I don't even know if there's enough for one.
There's actually a surprising amount of art available for the Australian aborigines so it's a possibility. However some of that art would also work well for a Kongo civ so it might be a case of one or the other. Also, you cannot merge Aboriginal Australia with post-colonial Australia like you can with Brazil.
Exactly. Religion comes in many varieties and what we know as 'world religions' are just one form of many.
At Chemistry, so in the Renaissance.
That was the rough idea I was going for though I'm fully aware that the bonus isn't any use at that stage of the game. It's just a placeholder. That tech and indeed much of modern era still needs some serious work.
Something like that. Probably won't get to it for a while though.
Do think Flight is an appropriate tech for the Carrier to become available, comparing it to other units?
Interesting thread, I've bookmarked it to read through more thoroughly when I've got more time. Nice to see that I've already included many/most of the top suggestions.
I'm not going to add any colonial civilizations*, to be honest I'm very tempted at times to remove America. It feels reasonable and fun to me to create 'what-if' Renaissance to Modern eras for civs that never made it that far. But creating 'what-if' Ancient - Medieval eras for colonial civs just feels ridiculous. These colonial countries already have such history - France and the various native American tribes.
I'd rather leave colonialism to the game itself. What if the French colonized the Inca instead? What if the Aztecs colonized France? Adding something like Quebec just feels too deterministic for my liking. I'd rather add France's new world colonies to France itself.
*As already mentioned I'll make an exception for Brazil. Ethnic and cultural mixing happened very quickly and extensively there and allows a much more continuous history and identity compared to most other colonial regions.
The Inuit would be fascinating to add. There is one well-made Inuit leader model available but sadly almost nothing else at all in terms of art.
The Haida are probably the best choice for a Northwest American civilization. As mentioned previously though, I prefer to add the Anasazi/Hopi if it's possible to add another North American civ.
I chose not to include Austria in HR as they're politically distinctive rather than culturally or ethnically distinctive from Germany. I realize that the same argument could be made for the Dutch but that was a case of not removing a civ rather than not adding one. Europe is already extremely well represented and I don't feel Austria is different enough to warrant increasing the continent's representation further.
Well, Vienna and Prague were founded before Berlin and Konigsberg. It makes sense for all the other German leaders besides Bismarck. It's a pity we can't attach citylists to leaders rather than civs. (I may have to investigate that possibiity at some point...)
I think there is a much stronger case for Bulgaria. I don't know what the art availability is like for them. Incidentally, something I want to do at some point is revise Byzantium to better represent areas like Romania.
I agree about the Etruscans, Rome quickly swallows up their cities and culture . I know a ton about the Minoans having studied them and the Mycenaean Greeks extensively as part of my degree. I even spent a couple months on Crete and the Peloponnese on an archaeological field trip. I'd like to add them and I'm pretty sure I could scrape together enough art to make it possible. But we can probably only afford to add another 3-6 civs maximum it may be that they get shunted off the priority list. We shall see.
Phew, that was a long post!
I'm not very familiar with the history/culture of Japan, I'll look that up when I'm done with these traits.
Despite the new leader slots I'll be adding new civs fairly cautiously as each one added quickly increases the memory usage of the mod. As always, the civs I end up adding will depend primarily on the art available. A few of those leader slots I'd like to give to existing civs too.
I'm currently using Alhambra as the Berber's UW. Plato's Academy is represented by the Academy National Wonder.
Flavian Amphitheatre will definitely be added, though I'll call it the Colosseum. I know that there is art available for the Sydney Opera House, the Porcelain tower, and Neuschwanstein, so they're potential candidates. Other candidates on my list are the Nazca Lines, Leaning Tower, Hubble Space Telescope, and the Large Hadron Collider.
The others I don't know whether art is available or not. As always I don't want to add wonders for the sake of adding wonders, there needs to be a defined role and space for it. I'd also like to increase the diversity of world wonders, Europe and America are represented much more than other parts of the world. Anyway, wonders are on the list for 0.9.5, we can discuss it more then.
The Minoans I have a soft spot for having studied them as part of my degree. I'd love to include them but it would be tricky to flesh them out into a full featured civilization. The Etruscans would be even harder. I feel that Romania can be incorporated into Byzantium.
Ghana is part of the Mande Empire in HR. The Kongo is probably the one major African region/culture HR doesn't cover. There's very little quality African art I haven't used already though.
Gran Colombia was very short lived and is a post-Medieval colonial civilization like America. I prefer to leave such civilizations out of HR, though the one exception I intend to make is for Brazil - South America needs another civ and its very easy and appropriate to incorporate the region's pre-colonial history.
The Urartians/Armenians are a fascinating civilization, I'd add them if there was enough art. That part of the world is already very well represented though.
If I add another Native North American civ it would be the Anasazi/Hopi. I don't think there's enough art for any more. I also don't want to get too carried away on adding civilizations that didn't actually build cities.
Feel free to write any that interest you. There are a lot of leaders that could really use some quality pedia entries.
From the first page of the thread, adapted and included in the pedia:
"Civilization IV: History Rewritten includes well-known world religions but also several ancient religions, philosophies and mythologies that might have survived longer and/or spread further had history been a bit different."
Basically religion is a very broad term. It's just as easy to make a case against Confucianism or Olympianism as it is for Asatru.
I haven't changed this from standard BTS. I presume it's to represent that rice farming requires considerably more water to produce than other cereals.
Yup but they weren't able to be extracted in any significant quantity til around then, nor was there need for them in large quantities. I don't have a firm opinion on when these should be revealed though, opinions welcomed.
At the moment it's positioned where it is to fill a gap in the tech tree. That may change in time if needed or suitable.
Most of the inquisition stuff was included as-is from another mod. It needs reviewing but it's not a high priority at the moment. Note that despite it's current form ultimately I don't intend the Holy Office to specifically represent the infamous Spanish one. That quote is much better though, I'll put it in.
The rise of organized religion as a political force beyond it's original areas of influence.
Placeholder bonus until that era is better developed.
Do people think that Flight is the best tech to unlock the Carrier? If so, I'm happy to change the model. If not, let me know which tech/model works better.
Please change Radio's blurb, reading "...Marconi's invention of the radio in 1896..." makes my head hurt
Hehe. I'd like to improve/replace a lot of BTS' pedia texts but they've been fairly low priority compared to game mechanics and such. Feel free to rewrite that one and I'll include it.
Call it punitive, psychic, sick, I like this kind of "extremeness" (and certainly not because "extreme" is always good
). It conveys a sense of personal handwriting. There's always a place for an amount of idiosyncrasies in a mod. I think, a mod is coming alive more from individual vision rather than democratic mediation. (Well, both…
I'm not adverse to a bit of extremity being added so long as it results from a similar level of extreme incompetence
Ecology would be a bit odd as a prerequisite for Feminism, though Welfare as a prerequisite for Ecology is also a bit strange. Note that I don't intend Ecology to represent environmentalism - that's what Sustainability is for. Ecology instead is meant to include industrial advances in botany, horticulture, evolution, etc.
Nope I think I placed them there with the intention to move them later and never got around to it. I reckon either Pneumatics or Automation could work, thoughts?
I've made Tanks and Armour require Total War in 0.9.4. Let me know if you have any other suggestions. Apologies if I've missed any already made, this thread moves pretty fast at times ><
Oops, yes.
Well the Waka's final form won't be decided until 0.9.5 when I look at options to better balance Archipelago and other maps. I'll lower it's cost for now and we'll re-examine it later. Along with the Jaguar Warrior.
Hmm that's strange. I wonder if the game is interpreting it as requires a river OR coast? I'm not sure I can do much about that if that's true, it'll be a bug in the DLL. Anyway, I'll leave it for a UB review.
Yeah I'll leave it for a proper UB review.
It's all good. Versions 0.1 to 0.9 were all about adding new stuff, I want the 0.9.x series to be less about new stuff (though there'll still be some) and more about improving and balancing everything already in.
There is conceptual room in Bengal, Bangladesh and/or Burma. Art is very hard to come by for this region though. One of the most prominent unit makers is/was working on a large set of Indian units so I'll have to see how many 'leftovers' there are from that. Many of those will be used for the Tamil though, who currently share all their unit art with India.
I'd actually like to eventually change the Zulu to a Zimbabwean/Bantu civilization to more properly represent the history of that part of Africa. As mentioned earlier, I changed Mali to be the Mande and thus incorporate Ghana, Mali, Songhay and the other major West African centres. If I can add the Kongo I will, I think that is the best contender for an entirely new African civilization.
I don't imagine the final number of civilizations going beyond the low 50s. At this stage the only definite is Brazil/Tupi/Amazonia but I haven't done any work on that at all yet. I don't imagine any new civs will be added until 0.9.6 or even later though, there's a lot of more important things to review first.
The more pressing issue to me is what to replace the Hippodrome UB with. Also, the Greco-Roman world is already extremely well represented by wonders and I'm not sure the Hippodrome of Constantinople was 'wondrous' enough to warrant adding it as yet another.
On the other hand I think the Colosseum is iconic enough to warrant adding and there is good art available for it.
As mentioned earlier, I don't want to get carried away on adding non-urbanized civilizations. The Anasazi/Hopi are the best candidate for North America. The Mississipian culture would be the next best option but I highly doubt I could scrape enough quality art together for two such civilizations, I don't even know if there's enough for one.
There's actually a surprising amount of art available for the Australian aborigines so it's a possibility. However some of that art would also work well for a Kongo civ so it might be a case of one or the other. Also, you cannot merge Aboriginal Australia with post-colonial Australia like you can with Brazil.
Exactly. Religion comes in many varieties and what we know as 'world religions' are just one form of many.
At Chemistry, so in the Renaissance.
That was the rough idea I was going for though I'm fully aware that the bonus isn't any use at that stage of the game. It's just a placeholder. That tech and indeed much of modern era still needs some serious work.
Something like that. Probably won't get to it for a while though.
Oooh. Interesting. Although... I don't know. It would look out of place in a 'end of Modern' navy dominated by missile cruisers and attack submarines. So would the Cruiser (Pallada!
Do think Flight is an appropriate tech for the Carrier to become available, comparing it to other units?
Interesting thread, I've bookmarked it to read through more thoroughly when I've got more time. Nice to see that I've already included many/most of the top suggestions.
I'm not going to add any colonial civilizations*, to be honest I'm very tempted at times to remove America. It feels reasonable and fun to me to create 'what-if' Renaissance to Modern eras for civs that never made it that far. But creating 'what-if' Ancient - Medieval eras for colonial civs just feels ridiculous. These colonial countries already have such history - France and the various native American tribes.
I'd rather leave colonialism to the game itself. What if the French colonized the Inca instead? What if the Aztecs colonized France? Adding something like Quebec just feels too deterministic for my liking. I'd rather add France's new world colonies to France itself.
*As already mentioned I'll make an exception for Brazil. Ethnic and cultural mixing happened very quickly and extensively there and allows a much more continuous history and identity compared to most other colonial regions.
The Inuit would be fascinating to add. There is one well-made Inuit leader model available but sadly almost nothing else at all in terms of art.
The Haida are probably the best choice for a Northwest American civilization. As mentioned previously though, I prefer to add the Anasazi/Hopi if it's possible to add another North American civ.
I chose not to include Austria in HR as they're politically distinctive rather than culturally or ethnically distinctive from Germany. I realize that the same argument could be made for the Dutch but that was a case of not removing a civ rather than not adding one. Europe is already extremely well represented and I don't feel Austria is different enough to warrant increasing the continent's representation further.
Well, Vienna and Prague were founded before Berlin and Konigsberg. It makes sense for all the other German leaders besides Bismarck. It's a pity we can't attach citylists to leaders rather than civs. (I may have to investigate that possibiity at some point...)
I think there is a much stronger case for Bulgaria. I don't know what the art availability is like for them. Incidentally, something I want to do at some point is revise Byzantium to better represent areas like Romania.
I agree about the Etruscans, Rome quickly swallows up their cities and culture . I know a ton about the Minoans having studied them and the Mycenaean Greeks extensively as part of my degree. I even spent a couple months on Crete and the Peloponnese on an archaeological field trip. I'd like to add them and I'm pretty sure I could scrape together enough art to make it possible. But we can probably only afford to add another 3-6 civs maximum it may be that they get shunted off the priority list. We shall see.
Phew, that was a long post!
New Civilizations, continued.
Africa
Top Pick: Kongo The most prominent of a number of independent kingdoms in the Congo Basin, Kongo often held sway over its neighbours and fought a number of bitter wars against the Portuguese. Founded in the fifteenth century, and finally conquered on the eve of World War I, Kongo grew rich trading ivory, copperware, and cloth. As PlayCiv said, it is not represented by any of the other sub Saharan civilizations: the west African Mande, the east African Swahili, or the south African Zulu. There are several candidates for Kongolese leaders: Alfonso I of the House of Kilukeni, who converted Kongo to a Catholic country even as he pushed back against the Portuguese slave trade; and Pedro II, of the House of Nsundi, an honourable king respected by the Jesuits, who arranged for an alliance between Kongo and the Netherlands against Portugal.
Alternate: Ashanti Modern day Ghana, formerly the Ashanti Empire is another distinct sub-Saharan civilization. Founded in the eighteenth century, the Ashanti Empire developed a sophisticated bureaucracy in the capital Kumasi, a theocratic legal system, and routine elections of tribal leaders by a council of elders. Osei Tutu I founded the empire by convincing the Ashanti city-states to pledge allegiance to Kumasi; and Prempeh I was the last independent Asantehene, who lost to the British in the War of the Golden Stool in 1893.
Runners Up: the Kanembu The people of the Kanem-Bornu Empire are yet another distinct African civilization, hailing from modern-day Chad, Niger, and Cameroon. It is simply not the case that Africa was a land of "Neolithic villages" before the arrival of Europeans. Many African kingdoms were at least as advanced as the Byzantine empire, and they were eventually defeated not with muskets but with rifles and cannon.
Asia-Pacific
Top Pick: Bengal In choosing Bengal, I refer to the great empires of antiquity that governed from Bengal, notably the Hindu Gupta Empire and the Buddhist Pala Empire, rather than modern-day Bangladesh or West Bengal. (Contra civ King, I find South Asia to be among the least represented regions in HR: it hardly seems fair to lump most South Asian nations under 'India' while at the same time distinguishing between Sumer, Amorite, Assyria, Hittites, and Persia.) My choice for Bengali leaders include Samudragupta, a brilliant military strategist who forged an empire which lasted far longer than that of Asoka; and the conqueror and patron of Buddhism Dharmapala. As for the later eras, Bengal remained relevant as the first conquest of the British East India company; and the birthplace of Rabindranath Tagore, Asia's first Nobel laureate, as well as Subhash Chandra Bose, the leader of a rebel army funded by the Japanese in World War II.
Alternate: the Timurids The Timurids are admittedly more a dynasty than a civilization but they were the most prominent empire of Central Asia, (Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan), north India, and Iran in the centuries after the rise of Islam. Their chief cities would include Samarqand, Kabul, Herat, Teheran, Shiraz, and Tabriz; their leaders would be borrowed from the Mongolians (Timur) and Indians (Akbar). This civilization will never be a top priority but there is space between the Mongolian khanates in China and the Indian kingdoms of old for a West Asian Islamic civilization.
Runners Up: the Maori They could be introduced as the first Australian civilization but are technically covered by the Polynesians.
(Xyth has already commented on some of these choices but I thought I'd present all my suggestions as originally planned.)
Africa
Top Pick: Kongo The most prominent of a number of independent kingdoms in the Congo Basin, Kongo often held sway over its neighbours and fought a number of bitter wars against the Portuguese. Founded in the fifteenth century, and finally conquered on the eve of World War I, Kongo grew rich trading ivory, copperware, and cloth. As PlayCiv said, it is not represented by any of the other sub Saharan civilizations: the west African Mande, the east African Swahili, or the south African Zulu. There are several candidates for Kongolese leaders: Alfonso I of the House of Kilukeni, who converted Kongo to a Catholic country even as he pushed back against the Portuguese slave trade; and Pedro II, of the House of Nsundi, an honourable king respected by the Jesuits, who arranged for an alliance between Kongo and the Netherlands against Portugal.
Alternate: Ashanti Modern day Ghana, formerly the Ashanti Empire is another distinct sub-Saharan civilization. Founded in the eighteenth century, the Ashanti Empire developed a sophisticated bureaucracy in the capital Kumasi, a theocratic legal system, and routine elections of tribal leaders by a council of elders. Osei Tutu I founded the empire by convincing the Ashanti city-states to pledge allegiance to Kumasi; and Prempeh I was the last independent Asantehene, who lost to the British in the War of the Golden Stool in 1893.
Runners Up: the Kanembu The people of the Kanem-Bornu Empire are yet another distinct African civilization, hailing from modern-day Chad, Niger, and Cameroon. It is simply not the case that Africa was a land of "Neolithic villages" before the arrival of Europeans. Many African kingdoms were at least as advanced as the Byzantine empire, and they were eventually defeated not with muskets but with rifles and cannon.
Asia-Pacific
Top Pick: Bengal In choosing Bengal, I refer to the great empires of antiquity that governed from Bengal, notably the Hindu Gupta Empire and the Buddhist Pala Empire, rather than modern-day Bangladesh or West Bengal. (Contra civ King, I find South Asia to be among the least represented regions in HR: it hardly seems fair to lump most South Asian nations under 'India' while at the same time distinguishing between Sumer, Amorite, Assyria, Hittites, and Persia.) My choice for Bengali leaders include Samudragupta, a brilliant military strategist who forged an empire which lasted far longer than that of Asoka; and the conqueror and patron of Buddhism Dharmapala. As for the later eras, Bengal remained relevant as the first conquest of the British East India company; and the birthplace of Rabindranath Tagore, Asia's first Nobel laureate, as well as Subhash Chandra Bose, the leader of a rebel army funded by the Japanese in World War II.
Alternate: the Timurids The Timurids are admittedly more a dynasty than a civilization but they were the most prominent empire of Central Asia, (Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan), north India, and Iran in the centuries after the rise of Islam. Their chief cities would include Samarqand, Kabul, Herat, Teheran, Shiraz, and Tabriz; their leaders would be borrowed from the Mongolians (Timur) and Indians (Akbar). This civilization will never be a top priority but there is space between the Mongolian khanates in China and the Indian kingdoms of old for a West Asian Islamic civilization.
Runners Up: the Maori They could be introduced as the first Australian civilization but are technically covered by the Polynesians.
(Xyth has already commented on some of these choices but I thought I'd present all my suggestions as originally planned.)
architekton
Chieftain
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2009
- Messages
- 34
I think there's something amiss with part of the tech tree: researching Aesthetics triggers the addition of Oral Tradition, Writing, Divination and Philosophy onto the research queue. Yet these techs are not prerequisites for Aesthetics.
The techs that I had already researched were: up to Metal Casting, up to Construction, up to Riding, up to Record Keeping, up to Calendar, up to Astronomy, up to Navigation (reading the tree from top to bottom).
Of the unresearched techs, only Mathematics and Fortification should have been required for researching Aesthetics at that point, no?
(I thought I'd taken screen shots of the selections I made, but the second and third images were just completely black, so I can't show the sequence. Baah, bother. If I can find a suitable save I'll try again to get suitable screenshots.)
The techs that I had already researched were: up to Metal Casting, up to Construction, up to Riding, up to Record Keeping, up to Calendar, up to Astronomy, up to Navigation (reading the tree from top to bottom).
Of the unresearched techs, only Mathematics and Fortification should have been required for researching Aesthetics at that point, no?
(I thought I'd taken screen shots of the selections I made, but the second and third images were just completely black, so I can't show the sequence. Baah, bother. If I can find a suitable save I'll try again to get suitable screenshots.)
Given everything that has been said about potential civs, I'd narrow it down to five new civs... I'd say Kongo, Bengal, Bulgaria, Anasazi/Hopi, Muscogee, and Brazil. I say the Muscogee because they are descendents of the Mississippian moundbuilding culture of the Southeastern US...
Yes. I'd like to use one of the new leader slots to give England a medieval leader.
I think that the Kongo is the clear winner as far as African candidates go. They had a large kingdom with a number of important cities and they cover a region/climatic zone and ethnicity/culture not even touched on yet in HR. If I can find enough art resources I'll include Kongo at some point.
The other African civilization I'd add as a runner up would be Benin, but I doubt there's room/resources for any further African civs at this stage.
Well I've added the Tamil and the Kushan (though I've focused on their Central Asian origins more) for that very reason. I'd like to see more South Asian civs, my picks would be the Bengali, Sinhalese or Burmese. Broadening the scope a bit I'd also love to include the Indus/Harrapan civilization or even Aratta/Jiroft culture. Unfortunately South Asia is also the region least represented by available art, severely limiting what we can do here.
Actually that space is (or will be) filled partially by the Kushan but primarily by the Turks. I've changed the scope of the Ottomans to including all of the Turks - Gökturks, Seljuks, Ottoman and more. I've changed their unit art appropriately but I've yet to update their citylist or pedia entries. I need to go through the Mongol citylist at some point as well.
Timur and his dynasty are very tricky to deal with. A case could reliably be made for including them in the Mongols, the Turks or even greater Persia/Iran. There's no perfect answer but I don't feel they are worthy of their own civilization in HR. All of those cities that you list already appear in the Kushan or Persian citylist.
Australian?!? I presume you mean Australasian... (My country, New Zealand, has a lot in common with Ireland and Canada: we all have big annoying neighbours that like to take credit for our accomplishments)
Despite being a Kiwi and indeed part Maori I do feel that the Maori are best represented by Polynesia. I would sorely love to add a quality Maori leader though; if I ever find the time or talent to try my hand at leaderhead creation I would make one. Indeed I am most probably going to leave the Tactical/Traditional trait combo in reserve just in case I or someone makes Te Rauparaha or Hongi Hika.
Aesthetics has a crosslink requirement of Philosophy. These crosslinks are not shown by arrows but rather an icon in the top right corner of the tech. There are several of these scattered about the tech tree.
In standard BTS the arrows show techs that are optional (you have to have researched at least one of these techs already) while the icons in the top-right corner are compulsory. In HR all links via arrows or icons are effectively compulsory.
Basically in HR I swapped the functionality of the arrows and icons from what they were in standard BTS. Thus, technically the icon techs are optional but other than for Record Keeping (which is changing in 0.9.4) I only ever provide one option.
At this stage I'd say Brazil, Kongo and the Anasazi/Hopi are in unless there just isn't enough art (very possible). Maybe the Minoans if I feel self-indulgent. Most everything else is still open for debate. As mentioned earlier though I don't plan to add any new civs until at least 0.9.6.
I now have all the traits coded, tested and working except Organized, Judicial, Progressive and Traditional. Recently Traditional required a ton of reworking and rethinking which has slowed me down a lot. There is one last glitch with it that I need to track down and solve. The other 3 shouldn't be nearly as challenging (fingers crossed). I hope to have a final draft to show you in a couple days.
With these traits I think I've done more new coding (writing my own routines rather than using the standardly available BTS options) than I've done in the rest of the mod combined. It's been fun though, traits are one of the few places in BTS modding where you can get imaginative without needing to worry about AI implications. It requires a ton of testing and retesting though and that's why 0.9.4 is taking so long to finish.
Once these traits are done it'll probably take me a few days to tidy up some loose ends (the Well, some mapscripts, etc) but then it'll be ready. There'll be some stuff that I won't get around to doing (the Kiln for example) but that always happens with every version.
With these traits I think I've done more new coding (writing my own routines rather than using the standardly available BTS options) than I've done in the rest of the mod combined. It's been fun though, traits are one of the few places in BTS modding where you can get imaginative without needing to worry about AI implications. It requires a ton of testing and retesting though and that's why 0.9.4 is taking so long to finish.
Once these traits are done it'll probably take me a few days to tidy up some loose ends (the Well, some mapscripts, etc) but then it'll be ready. There'll be some stuff that I won't get around to doing (the Kiln for example) but that always happens with every version.
That's a circus*snip*
The one in Constantinople seems to be the obvious candidate- but how big was it, relative to other major urban sports arenas in other parts of the world? Maybe it should be a national wonder that boosts happiness in that city or something, instead.
To take another example, the Colosseum in Rome is famous, and the largest of its kind in the Roman world, but that doesn't mean it's unique in the sense that a world wonder would be.
I'm inclined to agree on some- I understand the desire to expand coverage of North America and Africa, but the sad reality is that North America was still at the level of Neolithic villages (except for the Mound Builders of the Mississippi) when Europeans arrived and more or less permanently aborted the independent development of the region.
We don't have any civilizations from Siberia or Australia either (unless you count the Polynesians as 'Australians'). There's a reason for that- the rise of civilization in those areas didn't creat a big enough history to supply us with the level of detail needed to make multiple highly distinct cultures from them that don't all have essentially the same gameplay flavor.
Probably because while the practice of Norse religion is not well understood, its mythology is, and is a major iconic ur-mythos in Europe. Much the same can be said for druidism, after all.
What really drives this, I think, is the desire to create options for religious faith in the game that aren't just the stock ones that came out of the Middle East and India that dominate the modern world. That means going to the traditional faiths of various societies, and while Asatru is a minor 'traditional faith' by the standards of global history, I don't think there's anything wrong with giving it a place there.
Good point.
Yes, but the scale of its application was such that it didn't decisively affect the world economy- ancient peoples used oil, but not on a massive scale.
Now, you might be justified, for oil, in making it 'discovered' in ancient times but making wells unavailable until the industrial era. But since coal (like uranium and aluminum) are harvested by mines, there's no way to stop a pre-modern culture from harvesting them for massive (ahistorically valuable) resource bonuses if they're visible in the early game.
Where is it again?
Witch burnings and genocidal prosecution of deviant religious minorities are a steady, running sore in population demographics? A small one, granted, but then pre-industrial smithies weren't all that bad for your health either.
Or if we wanted to get real specific, we could go for the sudden decline in the popularity of bathing that roughly coincided with the Counter-Reformation... but that might be a bit silly.
One key premise is that it frees up women for the workforce when their time was previously underutilized* increasing the 'efficiency' of civilization. The unfortunate problem is that yes, by the time the modern era rolls around in Civ you aren't building a lot more terrain improvements. Dunno what to do about that.
Maybe feminism could grant bonuses to civics? And it should probably grant them under more than one type of civic- the USSR was pretty much on the same track regarding the liberation of women as the US, if not ahead of it, even though the two societies would share no or nearly no civics if modeled in Civ terms.
*I am not entirely sure this is true, in that women in pre-modern times were very busy and I doubt their time was underutilized even if they were housewives, as someone would still have had to do all that work even if it was being shared on an eual basis. But I see the argument and it certainly grows more compelling when seen in 20th century terms.
Oooh. Interesting. Although... I don't know. It would look out of place in a 'end of Modern' navy dominated by missile cruisers and attack submarines. So would the Cruiser (Pallada!
Asatru isn't even a religion, it's a bunch of junk a guy wrote in books hundreds of years after the Norse turned Christian (relatively quickly too).
By Oil usage I'm talking about the Middle Ages in both Europe and South West Asia (Middle East).
I understand about cool, too much work for too little
In the Renaissance
Witch burnings are really a Renaissance thing. There aren't that many killings for that kind of stuff, for example in Spain during the Inquisition it averaged under 100 a year, that's a trivial amount considering the population would have been in the millions. People actually preferred inquisitors to local lords when accused of heresy because the inquisitors thought of heretics as lost sheep whereas the lords where more of in the smiting heretics school of thought.
I've never actually seen anything suggesting that bathing decreased coinciding with the Counter-Reformation.
They most definitely weren't underutilized, raising people is actually very productive economically. If we tried to make Feminism a civic it would give +50%
, -50% 
and high maintenance.Why not have two ship generations?
What we know as Asatru is a bunch of junk written by a guy centuries after the Norse became Christian.
Olypianism in my mind stands for Hellenic religion. Confucianism is debatable.
Yes rice farming does, but that is what irrigation is for.
Coal and Oil were actually used a fair bit in the Middle Ages
I wasn't talking about the Spanish Inquisition, I'm talking about the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition which is the Holy Office (well, now it is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith).
So Evangelism represents the missionary work done during colonization esp. by groups like the Society of Jesus (Jesuits)?
I'm not adverse to a bit of extremity being added so long as it results from a similar level of extreme incompetence
Aspyr? Let's stay on topic, please
! Ah! With your explanations perfectly clear. But on that note, botany, horticulture, Darwin would all justify a Tech of its own, more or less, and one additional column in the Tech Tree wouldn't hurt, since the 19th century was so full of advancements and breakthroughs in all possible fields, if you compare it to the progresses of contemporary physics or AI-research, for example. In mid 20th century the most influential theories that shaped societies and international politics were Marxism, Darwinism and Freudianism, two a true child of the 19th century, the latter heavily drawing from the "psychatric discourse" of the 19th century.
A new column between or near #12 and #13 could include: Communism, Psychology, Theory of Evolution, Imperialism (to avoid conflict with the earlier Tech called Nationalism), Archaeology, Telegraphy, Sewers. Just to throw in a bunch, that represent the 19th century in your imagination well, as you would wish in a video game.
While I'm writing this, I'm getting the idea to look into the Realism Invictus Tech Tree, which is in any regard a source of good stuff, apparently. I'm finding, they have Mass Produced Steel in, another candidate for the above suggested column.
Also worth a look: their Renaissance era Techs, like Clockwork, Double Entry Accounting, Scientific Experiment, Microscope, Sextant and many naval Techs (that could play a role in your caraval discussion).
Some modern Techs are also not missing but nice-to-have in HR: Televison, Radar, City Planning, Patent Right Have a look yourself.
Your Tech requirements are in good shape. They are all thematically related and logical. Let me explain a bit further to get my point across also to those, who haven't seen the modern era in a HR game yet. By the 20th century, time passes in yearly increments and it takes (all that varying with difficulty and speed) five or seven years to research the next Tech. If you ignore other Techs and stay in one branch of the tree and go straight for the Tech Total War, you can build tanks but will need yet another twenty years to get to submarines, for example, if no one else trades it to you. These asymmetries can be avoided, if units like tanks, artillery, destroyers, submarines, fighters required up to four or five different Techs, so your armies will look more belonging to one and the same era. That would mean to give up the content relation between Tech and unit, like, why would a tank need Pneumatics? (The only logical additional requirement based on the Tech Tree as is, would be Radio; at least it made a difference, whether tank units were equipped with radio or weren't.)
More Civs: Why don't we create a poll? I don't know how that works or whether you need a HR subforum first, but I'd be curious.
civ_king said:
I think the Roman congregation hasn't got a monopoly on that term. And doesn't deserve it
. The Spanish inquisition also had an institute called Holy Office, and I associate inquistion, torture, autodafés, and all that, more with the notorious Spanish inquisition, owing to Natalie Portman and Xavier Bardem
Aspyr? Let's stay on topic, please
lurker's comment: Maybe you are thinking of Firaxis. I don't think Aspyr had any hand in the content of this game.
architekton
Chieftain
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2009
- Messages
- 34
Xyth: thanks for the tech tree explanation. I think I understand it now.
Possibly.
Possibly.
Err, the Holy Office is the top level*snip*
I think the Roman congregation hasn't got a monopoly on that term. And doesn't deserve it
Notorious Spanish Inquisition? It killed less than 0.02% of the population a year.
I'd like to point out that Spain has consistently suffered at the hands of revisionism, such as the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment etc. Most of what you read about the Spanish Inquisition is bunk.
Top level, hm, if you like, good. But your death toll doesn't support your point, that Spain is often unjustly or exaggeratedly accused of "crimes of the inquisition." Death tolls can never measure the ethical value of a social organisation, alone. Take the East German post-war Stasi. Death toll under 0.02%, I reckon, but notorious.
Simon_Jester
Prince
- Joined
- May 13, 2011
- Messages
- 495
I don't really agree, Keinpferd. It's not desirable to force all the modern units to appear more or less simultaneously in a player's arsenal just because, historically, they were all available in WWI or WWII and not significantly before that. Allowing a little wiggle room for different strategies, such as "screw developing submarines I'm playing on a Pangaea map I want TANKS!" is perfectly logical. And arguably it improves the game as a game, if not as a history simulator, which History Rewritten was never really meant to be anyway.
Yes. To be fair, you can (should, perhaps) remove some of the existing civilizations- no obvious candidates suggest themselves, though. In the limiting case, when you have half a dozen civilizations that coexisted in medieval Europe but only one for all of India, maybe you should reexamine your allocation to reduce the Eurocentrism of the mod. In a number of places you can do this without changing the unit art.
The LHC ain't much to look at... who needs unit art for thirty kilometers of underground tunnels full of superconducting magnets?
(Particle accelerator physics is what I did for a living for a while, so I've picked up interesting tidbits on it. I'm going to insist on writing the Civilopedia entry for that one
)For the modern ones, that's mostly because those are the developed countries- there's nothing preventing the LHC from having been built in China, except that China didn't have the money and scientific establishment to do the job without undue effort. It would have looked and functioned much the same, and had the Chinese been the ones to have the Industrial Revolution first they'd probably have built it first.
For ancient wonders, yeah, I think you should focus disproportionately on stuff outside of European and Greco-Roman civilization.
I know you don't like having civilizations share art, apparently, but in this case I think it's well justified if you want to improve diversity within the mod.
Hmmm. Coal should be revealed in the Middle Ages, but you shouldn't be able to get a huge hammer bonus from mining it until steam engines roll around- that's when the demand for fuel got large enough to make mass-scale coal extraction profitable.
Oil could be visible in the late Middle Ages (roughly simultaneous with the beginnings of alchemy/chemistry, probably at the same tech you'd use for a 14th century Distillery).
I'm pretty sure that can be implemented- you can discover uranium deposits with Physics in vanilla Civ, but you can't get the hammer bonus from mining it until Fission, even if it's found on a tile you can normally mine.
Hmm. I'd have to stare at the tech tree for a while to decide. I think using Flight and one other '20th century industry' tech would be justified. The first real, militarily significant aircraft carriers were converted from battlecruiser hulls after WWI- they ripped off the gun turrets and magazines and built a flight deck and aircraft hangars on. Anyone who can build dreadnought battleships could build a carrier, as long as they had the planes to put on it.
I do what I can, subject to busy-ness.
Might be best to rename the tech, then- something like, well, "Horticulture." Or "Biology," since the science of biology didn't really take off until evolution, in much the same way that the science of physics didn't really take off until Newton.
Automation is mid-20th century, right? Represents, oh, 1950s levels of electromechanical computing evolving into transistors? If so, go for it. That was one of the big breakthroughs that made offshore oil wells possible- minimizing the amount of labor needed to run the platform, and at the same time minimizing the number of things that could easily go wrong, by automating a lot of the rig's processes.
This will need some work, but let's hold off on correcting it until some of the other issues have been (temporarily) settled. We may need to do a fairly comprehensive review of that.
I agree on the Hippodrome- though it could reasonably be the Byzantine National Wonder, assuming the Hagia Sophia is still a World Wonder (I forget).
If there's only one, I'd advocate the Mississipians over the Anasazi/Hopi, as they seem to have been more on the road to the kind of riverine Neolithic/Bronze Age civilization that we recognize as a global pattern. But that's just me, and I am not an expert on the field.
Going by the historical record, again, I'd say anyone who can build both WWI battleships and airplanes should be able to build carriers. I'd have to stare rather hard at the tech tree to give you a list of logical prerequisites, but I can do it. Just... need some more time.
Agreed- and I would dispute the idea that the Dutch are culturally indistinct from Germany. While they do share a lot of history with the major German trading ports of the Hanseatic League, starting with the Protestant Reformation they took a rather different cultural direction. And unlike Germany, but like England or Portugal, they followed the 'thalassocratic' route during the gunpowder era. As a result, their role on the world stage has been quite different from that of Germany proper; the Dutch are not the Deutsche.
Make the second German city Vienna- while "Berlin" is the only logical capital for something centered in the nation we now call Germany, Vienna is the 'second city' of German civilization, if not the first.
We don't use Jamestown and Williamsburg as the first cities for the American civilization, we use Washington and New York. Using Berlin and Vienna for the Germans makes a similar amount of sense.
_________________________________________________
OK, next guy.
CK, I'd appreciate it if you could split my quote tags so that each response appears next to the thing it's actually responding to, rather than at the end. As it stands, some of your sentences don't make much sense because I can't tell exactly what they reply to, not without an undue amount of effort.
No, the building in Constantinople is a hippodrome. It is, in fact, the Hippodrome, people actually called it that, you see.That's a circus
Do you not believe that there was a polytheistic religion in Scandinavia prior to the spread of Christianity? If so, you're wasting our time, because that's about on par with denying the Moon landings.
If not, then why is this religion less valid as a choice of religious beliefs for your civilization than Druidism, or Voudun, or Native American-style shamanism, all of which are available choices? What standard, exactly, are you applying here to say whether something counts as a "real" religion?
In neither place did its use play a major economic role comparable to, say, the existence of iron ore deposits. We're fully justified in not having resource extraction of oil become economically relevant until much later.
Likewise coal, likewise uranium, likewise aluminum. All these things existed before they became important, but Napoleon III's aluminum tableware, uranium-enriched pottery glazes, and a handful of medieval coal furnaces simply aren't relevant compared to other resources that were critical at the time.
Which is completely beside the point. Given that you have a systematic effort to root out heresy and alternate belief systems in a civilization, hell yes this is going to have negative effects. Don't just think of witch burnings- think of what happened to the Cathars, if we're going to look at the context of medieval Europe. Think of the mass migrations of Jews and Muslims out of Spain during the first years of the Spanish Inquisition- that has effects on demographics too.
Building "The Holy Office" does not just represent the inquisitors themselves; it represents the civilization-wide effort to ensure purity of belief. Which has costs.
Which is why the whole thing was said tongue in cheek...
They most definitely weren't underutilized, raising people is actually very productive economically. If we tried to make Feminism a civic it would give +50%
To avoid needless clutter, and because there'd be little or no functional difference between the two carrier types. Both the 'WWII' and 'modern' carriers would have to be relatively fast-moving, expensive ships, you wouldn't be able to keep people from flying jet fighters off the WWII carriers because of the way the game works... there's really not much difference there to justify creating two units in place of one.
You could do it- say, have "Carrier" be available with Flight and, oh, some tech roughly contemporary with battleships- or perhaps Total War. Then have "Nuclear Carrier" be available with whatever we're using now for the 'nuclear power' tech, plus Jet Propulsion and maybe one other tech.
But what would be the point?
Aside from its basic mythology, we don't really know much more about the practice of Hellenic religion than we do about Norse religion- we know where some of the holy sites were, who the deities were and what they were associated with, the mythology, but we don't know details.
Confucianism is damn well something that can do the job of a religion- it's not one in the sense you acknowledge, but it fills the role quite well.
Eh, maybe that food disparity should be dropped for balance purposes anyway.
Howard Mahler
Since Civ 1
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2003
- Messages
- 619
Huge Map, Archipelago, Marathon, Emperor Difficulty.
No Tech Brokering. History Rewritten 0.9.3
Started with me and the Sumerians in contact.
Sumerians declared war on me at pleased.
After long war I wiped Sumarians out.
No trade until Compass.
In 1600, general tech level is a little of historical.
I am researching Military Science.
No Tech Brokering. History Rewritten 0.9.3
Started with me and the Sumerians in contact.
Sumerians declared war on me at pleased.
After long war I wiped Sumarians out.
No trade until Compass.
In 1600, general tech level is a little of historical.
I am researching Military Science.
I realized I'm off by a couple magnitudes, it averaged ~40 a year most of which happened in a small period of time (Torquemada)
Exactly
It's a Roman circus, I guess I'm arguing semantics
The religion of Scandinavia rolled over and died as soon as Christianity came
Those three are collections of religions and 2/3 still exist
I just want the resources to appear and offer 1
in the case of coal and 1
for oilAre you referring to the Albigensian Crusade?
You are aware that the Albigenses were a destabilizing force right?
The Spanish Inquisition only held power over baptized Christians, Jews and Muslims AFAIK are not baptized Christians.
Nuclear carriers could be faster and carry more planes
Actually we have significantly more about Hellenic religion.
Confucianism isn't really a religion, but it does indeed fill the role well, hence its inclusion in Civ IV
Yeah, it's not like India and China have small populations
Asatru
I don't have a lot to add here other than to restate (and slightly clarify) my design goal for religions in HR:
"Civilization IV: History Rewritten includes world religions that are well known today but also several ancient religions, philosophies and mythologies that might have survived longer, developed more and spread further had history been a bit different."
Asatru (or whatever you want to call it) fits within that description just fine and thus it will stay. There are hundreds of different sources for Germanic Religion/Mythology besides the Prose Edda and just like any religion/mythology they often contradict each other. Christianity may have supplanted it in actual history (though Christianity borrowed from it, among other aspects, the conceptualization of Hell) but in History Rewritten Christianity may not even get founded.
Rice
I've given Potatoes the same food yield as Rice, one less than Corn and Wheat. Personally I think a little variation is a good thing so long as there are other good sources of food available in tropical areas to compensate (which I don't believe there are enough of yet). I don't really have any major qualms changing this if it's deemed better for balance though.
Holy Office, Inquisitions and such
This is not an area of historical expertise for me so I don't really have anything to add to the conversation other than to say that I'd be happy to improve this aspect of the mod at some point but it's pretty low priority right now. May be best to bring the topic up again at a later date.
Carrier
A second carrier type might work, so long as the upgrade is balanced and still fits a needed role. I'd make it available with Jet Propulsion (and other prerequisites if needed). Increased speed and carrying capacity makes sense but I wouldn't want to call it a Nuclear Carrier nor restrict it to nuclear power only. Let me know your ideas. It's probably a little superfluous but that late in the game I don't think it would do any harm either.
New techs/columns in the tree
I just want to say that it's very important not to add techs without a clear purpose. The tech tree controls the pacing of the game and the last thing I want to do is have sections that take a long time to get through that do not unlock meaningful additions to the game. There are already enough techs like this (Feminism being a prime example), where I added them because I felt they were important historically but in terms of game pacing and mechanics they add little or even nothing yet.
Evolution, for example, could be a tech and certainly deserves to be. But what would it unlock? What game benefit would it bring? Are we creating something for it because we have an awesome idea or just because we need something to justify its presence?
Another example is Telegraphy. I had this in the draft techtree for a very long time but in the end I removed it. Sure it was a very important technology that changed the world, but how do you represent it effectively in game mechanics? Is it desirable to have workers build telecommunication cables between cities only to have them quickly obsoleted by Radio? Maybe such a mechanic could be implemented at some point but at the time I made the tree I couldn't conceptualize one that I liked enough to warrant keeping it as a tech.
(Slightly offtopic, I have an idea for a telecommunications building that becomes available at Electricity and improves as techs like Radio, Fibre Optics, etc are discovered. Hopefully it will see the light of day in 0.9.5 or soon after)
The tech tree needs a lot of work still, especially the second half. This could involve rearranging techs, adding content to them, adding new techs, or even removing techs. But any changes need to be meaningful.
Eurocentrism
While I wish to lessen the Eurocentrism of BTS in HR my preferred option is to do so by adding more from other parts of the World to balance it rather than removing European content. The only civilization I would seriously consider removing from HR is America, and that's due to them being a purely colonial civilization rather than any desire to reduce European/American representation.
As for India, HR has 3 civilizations so far for that subcontinent (India, Tamil, Kushan), which is 2 more than BTS and most other mods.
World Wonders are one area where we could definitely improve the representation of the non-European world. When it comes time to review wonders I'll be very hesitant to add new European wonders unless they are particularly iconic. I'm sorry but I don't think the Hippodrome of Constantinople meets that standard. I could imagine it as the Byzantine UW though.
Reusing Unit Art
I already reuse a lot of unit art, particularly in the later eras. I could reuse more though, when it comes time to look at adding some new civs I'll see what's possible. It's not just about unit art though, I want each civ to have a relatively unique city list and feel different enough from every other civ. Even if there were no technical limits I still wouldn't want there to be more than about 60 civs.
And of course there is one other very challenging and important aspect to consider: it's starting to get seriously hard to come up with new distinctive colours for flags and borders!
(And in case anyone asks, I do not want to replace the bi-colour civ symbols with actual or historical flags. Flags are for countries and civilizations are not countries in HR, they are cultures.)
German Citylist
It actually begins with Aachen. I like citylists to be primarily chronological/regional with capitals and other key cities shifted up a bit but never outside their era. Civ4's standard citylists bug the hell out of me and I plan to remake all of them eventually. Germany is one that I've done but most I haven't had time to work on yet. Which is a pity because researching citylists is probably my favourite part of modding.
For the curious, here's a few of them (copied from the xml, so ignore the formatting). The stuff on the right is just comments detailing some of the other names by which the city is known (they don't aren't used in game). I usually try to use the name that the civilization itself used for a city (when known), or at least a close transliteration.
I don't have a lot to add here other than to restate (and slightly clarify) my design goal for religions in HR:
"Civilization IV: History Rewritten includes world religions that are well known today but also several ancient religions, philosophies and mythologies that might have survived longer, developed more and spread further had history been a bit different."
Asatru (or whatever you want to call it) fits within that description just fine and thus it will stay. There are hundreds of different sources for Germanic Religion/Mythology besides the Prose Edda and just like any religion/mythology they often contradict each other. Christianity may have supplanted it in actual history (though Christianity borrowed from it, among other aspects, the conceptualization of Hell) but in History Rewritten Christianity may not even get founded.
Rice
I've given Potatoes the same food yield as Rice, one less than Corn and Wheat. Personally I think a little variation is a good thing so long as there are other good sources of food available in tropical areas to compensate (which I don't believe there are enough of yet). I don't really have any major qualms changing this if it's deemed better for balance though.
Holy Office, Inquisitions and such
This is not an area of historical expertise for me so I don't really have anything to add to the conversation other than to say that I'd be happy to improve this aspect of the mod at some point but it's pretty low priority right now. May be best to bring the topic up again at a later date.
Carrier
A second carrier type might work, so long as the upgrade is balanced and still fits a needed role. I'd make it available with Jet Propulsion (and other prerequisites if needed). Increased speed and carrying capacity makes sense but I wouldn't want to call it a Nuclear Carrier nor restrict it to nuclear power only. Let me know your ideas. It's probably a little superfluous but that late in the game I don't think it would do any harm either.
New techs/columns in the tree
I just want to say that it's very important not to add techs without a clear purpose. The tech tree controls the pacing of the game and the last thing I want to do is have sections that take a long time to get through that do not unlock meaningful additions to the game. There are already enough techs like this (Feminism being a prime example), where I added them because I felt they were important historically but in terms of game pacing and mechanics they add little or even nothing yet.
Evolution, for example, could be a tech and certainly deserves to be. But what would it unlock? What game benefit would it bring? Are we creating something for it because we have an awesome idea or just because we need something to justify its presence?
Another example is Telegraphy. I had this in the draft techtree for a very long time but in the end I removed it. Sure it was a very important technology that changed the world, but how do you represent it effectively in game mechanics? Is it desirable to have workers build telecommunication cables between cities only to have them quickly obsoleted by Radio? Maybe such a mechanic could be implemented at some point but at the time I made the tree I couldn't conceptualize one that I liked enough to warrant keeping it as a tech.
(Slightly offtopic, I have an idea for a telecommunications building that becomes available at Electricity and improves as techs like Radio, Fibre Optics, etc are discovered. Hopefully it will see the light of day in 0.9.5 or soon after)
The tech tree needs a lot of work still, especially the second half. This could involve rearranging techs, adding content to them, adding new techs, or even removing techs. But any changes need to be meaningful.
Eurocentrism
While I wish to lessen the Eurocentrism of BTS in HR my preferred option is to do so by adding more from other parts of the World to balance it rather than removing European content. The only civilization I would seriously consider removing from HR is America, and that's due to them being a purely colonial civilization rather than any desire to reduce European/American representation.
As for India, HR has 3 civilizations so far for that subcontinent (India, Tamil, Kushan), which is 2 more than BTS and most other mods.
World Wonders are one area where we could definitely improve the representation of the non-European world. When it comes time to review wonders I'll be very hesitant to add new European wonders unless they are particularly iconic. I'm sorry but I don't think the Hippodrome of Constantinople meets that standard. I could imagine it as the Byzantine UW though.
Reusing Unit Art
I already reuse a lot of unit art, particularly in the later eras. I could reuse more though, when it comes time to look at adding some new civs I'll see what's possible. It's not just about unit art though, I want each civ to have a relatively unique city list and feel different enough from every other civ. Even if there were no technical limits I still wouldn't want there to be more than about 60 civs.
And of course there is one other very challenging and important aspect to consider: it's starting to get seriously hard to come up with new distinctive colours for flags and borders!
(And in case anyone asks, I do not want to replace the bi-colour civ symbols with actual or historical flags. Flags are for countries and civilizations are not countries in HR, they are cultures.)
German Citylist
It actually begins with Aachen. I like citylists to be primarily chronological/regional with capitals and other key cities shifted up a bit but never outside their era. Civ4's standard citylists bug the hell out of me and I plan to remake all of them eventually. Germany is one that I've done but most I haven't had time to work on yet. Which is a pity because researching citylists is probably my favourite part of modding.
For the curious, here's a few of them (copied from the xml, so ignore the formatting). The stuff on the right is just comments detailing some of the other names by which the city is known (they don't aren't used in game). I usually try to use the name that the civilization itself used for a city (when known), or at least a close transliteration.
Spoiler :
Simon_Jester
Prince
- Joined
- May 13, 2011
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- 495
Doing that in the context of this game is bloody silly.
Only in the sense that Hellenic religion did- or that Zoroastrianism (the dominant religion of a great civilization for a thousand years) "rolled over and died" with the rise of Islam.
The fact that one religion was supplanted by another is not a sign of some intrinsic inferiority, or irrelevance, in the religion that was overwhelmed. You haven't got a leg to stand on over this issue, and I don't understand why you choose to keep making a beef about it.
If that's practical, fine.I just want the resources to appear and offer 1
I don't much care. Are you here to indulge in apologetics? Please, spare us.
Organizations dedicated to ensuring religious purity have a long history of provoking both petty-scale persecution of individuals and mass-scale persecution of entire ethnic groups. For this to have a negative effect on the civilization that harbors them is quite reasonable.
No, that doesn't just mean organizations with "inquisition" in their name. It means the intellectual climate promoted by inquisitors, the attitude toward dissent and heresy, the whole nine yards. Nor is Christianity the only religion that's indulged in harsh purges of heretical views- consider Aurangzeb in India for another example.
So what?
Yes, they could. Is there any inherent reason to do this? If Xyth doesn't want to add two different carrier units, I say forget it. If he does, I'll be happy to suggest stat lines for each units.
What, about detailed religious practices and the like? Not bloody much, and what we do have, we have mostly because the Greeks built more masonry and wrote more stuff down, so we have more fragments to reconstruct their culture from. The religion is no less dead in the present day.
Actually, in game there are good reasons to make it nuclear powered.
Nuclear powered ships have the huge advantage of being able to keep up their top speed of 30 knots or more (~50 km/h) indefinitely, and of not needing to refuel every few days from vulnerable fleet tankers. They save a lot of space not needed for oil tankage, which goes into aircraft storage and the like.
Every large fleet carrier in the modern world is nuclear-powered; oil-fired carriers have been phased out more and more ever since nuclear power became available. If there is a special and objectively superior "modern" carrier, it should probably be nuclear-powered, with civilizations that lack uranium being restricted to building smaller, less capable carriers- in other words, stuck building the older type.
I can work on this, but let's mull it over, OK? I'll suggest a stat line for 0.9.5, if you don't mind too much.
Evolution, or a tech which incorporates it, plays the 19th century "Ecology" role- "Ecology" really is a bad name for that tech. But yes, I can see why you don't want to fold it in extra-effectively.
Oooh. I like that too.
Its role in the modern world is large enough that I don't think this is a good idea- the American colonies developed in a very different way than the English mother-country, and have such a large role on the world stage today. Dropping them while keeping civilizations that were, historically, to be blunt, a footnote... I don't think so.
Yes, that makes sense.
...
Oh, Xyth. One more question.
Remind me again why you moved monasteries up into the middle ages? It really makes spreading a religion around inside your national borders difficult.
Yeah I'm not planning to make any changes here in 0.9.4, we can look at it for 0.9.5.
Yeah I tried to use it as a bit of a 'catch-all' tech and it doesn't work so well. That section of the tree needs some refinement at some point anyway.
Oh I'll keep them in, I was just explaining why they'd be the first to go if I needed to drop a civ. There's no reason to do so.
I want religions to have a chance to 'do their own thing' for a while before you get too much control over them. I think it creates for more interesting diplomacy in the middle ages and it seems more historical too.
However this reminds that I was considering swapping the tech requirements of Organized Religion (currently Priesthood) and Caste System (currently Divination). This would enable Organized Religion a bit earlier and thus missionaries too. Caste System is available a bit before its truly useful anyway so harm done shifting it later.
This kind of statement is so commonly found around these forums, it reminds me of a beauty contest, when the contestants reliably wish for world peace. And now, that you are saying it, too, Simon
…The dialectics (sorry for the pompous wording) of balance-gameplay-"what-if" and amable immersive historical simulation is driving Civ and keeps us interested in this silly computer game. Until now, I would applaud, if a mod shoots for a perfect synthesis of both balance-gameplay-what-if and an amable immersive historical simulation. The more I think about it, the more I'd like to change my mind. Or I was always leaning a bit (not much off-centered but distinctly) to the simulation side. Here's why: The world is so full of contingency, nonsense and bunk
(freshly learned from civ_king here), that every trace of non-arbitrariness, recognizability and historical truth is welcome! Fun meets solace. Because a video game is escapist by nature anyway, and if it's violently shifted in the sportive, competitive direction, it doesen't rise morally or culturally, or anything. Such a shift is just as restricting as others feel the confinements of historical simulations are. To cut it short: I want Huns to burn libraries, not to built any. What-if they can't burn anything, because they're stuck on an island on an archipelago map? I'm not interested.Forget the abstract and look at the concrete year increments, that I added to the example. Concretely: submarines 30 years later than bombers or vice versa? Desirable? Bombers 30 years later than tanks? Airships a generation after bombers and tanks? I don't want to appear all units of an era at the same time in a player's arsenal. I said deliberately up to 4 or 5 Tech requirements. Not every unit should receive the same amount of downslowing. All I'm asking is, that they're orchestrated in a way, move closer to each other on the timeline, while you still have the full freedom of in what sequence the cards are played. – The same degree of differentiation as with Techs, Traits or Civics should go in a nice rhythmic structuring, of when your units come in. You still decide, which units appear in which order.
From my new point of view I have no understanding for this whatsoever
…I understand that the Holy Roman Empire had to go to make room for other Civs, but if it wasn't merged with Germany, you wouldn't have the problem with Aachen, Vienna and Berlin. Otherwise, the German city list is atmospherically well chosen. Medieval cities like Goslar, that later lost their importance are included, for example. I don't know whether that's Xyth's merit or was part of the original HRE-citylist.
One funny cityname is "Wirten", though. What's Wirten, and where is it?
Like in music, there can be Techs serving the purpose of transition, bridging, preparing and doing nothing spectacular, themselves. Not every Tech has to add an inventive new mechanic to gameplay. If a Tech unlocks a new Civ and nothing else, that's reason of existence enough. A Tech that adds two
(uhh) can be splitted in two that give one each (oh). Why not?The idea of the telecommunications building, that improves with certain Techs, is great. Improving building yields is yet another way of "justifying" Techs.
Adding an extra column entails readjusting the particular Tech costs in the surrounding area, in order to avoid a section that takes too long to get through. (And before I forget, the Tech costs in the latter part of the Tech tree as in your current version meet perfectly well with my appetite for historically right feeling
.)Finally I'm approaching the average length of a HR forum post…
