Is there any interest in an Elder Scrolls based Mod?

[Gojira54]

Towards the end of last year I had some modding down time while my hard drives were being recovered, so I played a lot of Skyrim on XBox, when reawakened my old passion for everything Elder Scrolls. In January I got real sick for about a month, and decided to spec out what it would take to turn it into a Civ3 Mod. I ended up with something fairly similar to Tom2050's excellent Conquests of Might and Magic mod (especially the tech trees in the eras - there would be a Mage, Warrior, Thief, and Other Era, all with tech trees geared towards the Era type.)

I haven't done much with this since, as I eventually got my data back and resumed work on Modzilla and DR, but I would love to see this mod come about. I've but most of the concepts out into an Excel spreadsheet (Civ profiles for 30 civs, 80% of the tech tree), and gathered a few really good maps that can be easily made into a Civ3 Map. I have quite a few ideas in my head not documented too.

Tech trees would be loosely based on Skyrim perks.

If anyone has a serious interest in this, let me know. I can open up a subforum for it in the Modzilla SOC forums. I won't be able to dedicate serious time to it, but would love to consult and help in other minorish ways.

 

[Quinzy]

Interesting project, certainly.
I would have been more inclined towards an Elder Scrolls sort of epic.
However, your approach is something I never considered. I'll be looking at this with interest, and I'll try to contribute if I can.

 

[Gojira54]

This thread is to gauge interest and compile ideas, so if you had something different in mind Quinzy please do speak up I am hoping someone will take this up as their mod, as I cannot give it the time it needs.

Personally I think the wealth of lore available surrounding Elder Scrolls coupled with the huge amount of modding concepts and artwork on this site (esp. Tom2050's work and the Warhammer mods) really lend themselves to a potentially fantastic ES mod. ES is right up there with Fallout in best RPG series category, and both offer many possibilities here.

If your concern is with mapped vs. unmapped, it wouldn't be a lot of work to make both happen.

I am more than happy to go into more detail, if there is an interest.

 

[Quinzy]

The direction I was thinking of was more in the lines of a 'historical' epic, mapped or unmapped, more like the WH mod, although without sticking to the table-top unit progression quite so strictly.

I think the M&M mod does allow for a different play-style that I wouldn't be adverse to playing either.

 

[Gojira54]

I see what you mean. Yes, I intentionally went in a different direction with the tech trees, as most mods out there stick to a historical progression, and I wanted to preserve the feel of developing your character that I think embodies the Elder Scroll series, only developing your Civ instead of just your character.

That doesn't mean I would be adverse to a historical progression, as the ES lore certainly has enough info for that, too.

I didn't quite finish fleshing out that tech tree. Not only do they affect the units built and generated, but also improvements, abilities, diplomacy, resources, etc. All Civs would start off (and stay) in and have bonuses in either the Warrior, Mage, or Thief eras. The Other era would host no civs but would contain a handful of techs that would allow some historical type of progression of Civ3 abilities that are not addressed by or applicable to the other 3 eras (farming, advanced farming, pathmaking, stone roads, etc)

Warrior Civs would have the best direct offense and/or defense. The Archery path allows for exactly that. The Smithing path allows for mining and a considerable amount of industrial resources. Note most paths specialize in attack or defense, not both. Dual Wielding produces units with double the attack but half the defense.

Mage Civs would borrow from CoMM and use "Magic Missiles" as their primary weaponry. Conjuration allows you to either summon creatures or "enslave" your defeated as reanimated undead. Illusion and Restoration can increase your HP. Restoration will also lead to things like healing in enemy territory. Enchanting increases basic stats if you have access to the right resources. Alteration has a wide range of effects, including Transmute, which is the only tech that allows Wealth.

Thief Civs would specialize in Stealth, Hidden Nationality, and Invisible units, and have vastly superior spies and diplomacy options as well as economic bonuses.

10 races, each with 3 Civs. Each race will start off with the base Racial Base Tech (Warrior, Mage, or Thief), a Racial Tech Bonus, and a Racial Power. Racial Powers are not tradable. For instance all 3 Altmer civs will start off with Mage, Illusion, and Highborn. The fourth tech slot is dependant on which stone the player chooses to further specialize in (Warrior, Mage, or Thief), so your 3 Altmer civs would look like this (I've not named the Civs):

Warrior Altmer: Mage, Illusion, Highborn, Warrior
Mage Altmer: Mage, Illusion, Highborn, Enchanting
Thief Altmer: Mage, Illusion, Highborn, Thief

In the interest of keeping progression dynamic, all techs except Racial Power techs are researchable to all civs. You can specialize in just one area and take full advantage of it or become a more well-rounded Civ not too advanced or too far behind in any one area - much like the games themselves.

All Civs have 3 traits, 1 based Racial Base Tech. 1 based on the Stone Tech, the third based on in-game lore about that race.

Most techs would not only allow upgraded units to be built but also city improvements which generate these units. Similar to CoMM again, but the cycle of generation would be longer and the player can build them if they wish, too.

It should be noted that base units will have base stats (A\D\M) at 10, and be improved or reduced from that. Archers would be 10\10\10\10 and improve from there. For instance a dual wielding fighter will have 20 attack and 5 defense. An Expert Archer with Ranger will be 10/14/10/12, with a +1 to Range and +1 to Rate Of Fire.

 

[Quinzy]

Aha, I see. I like this idea. I'd love to give it a shot. The most I can dedicate to this would be playtesting, and maybe graphics hunting, and general ideas.

 

[Bengal Tiger]

While I certainly would be interested in a mod like this, I think it would be hard to model the politics properly. Technically the Empire controlled almost all of Tamriel, until the Altmer war, which the Empire almost lost. There's also the stormcloak rebellion in Skyrim, but apart from that, I don't know how many independent civs there are. I may be wrong, as I've only played Skyrim, but I don't know how feasible it would be to work through. I've always wanted to work on a fantasy mod if I got the time- Game of Thrones tops my list at the moment, followed by Eragon, Dragon Age, and maybe even runescape. The elder scrolls just seem much harder to work on compared to other fantasy worlds. Anyways, good luck to whoever pursues this.

 

[Quinzy]

There is the option, if using the epic format, of having the major factions from all the games represented, given the games are spread out over decades and centuries. Stormcloak, Imperial, and neutral Nords from Skyrim. Hlaalu, Telvanni, etc from Morrowind.

It would be more difficult in a M&M style game, but doable.

 

[tom2050]

The models from ES: Oblivion can be possibly used to convert to units. I tried before but I ran into some problems that I could not overcome (this was a long time ago), but since then I haven't tried converting any. It's likely that whatever the problem was, I could probably get it to work now.

I remember checking it out because someone else was talking about an ES mod. I used to play pretty extensively (ES 3 Morrowind & 4 Oblivion), but it's been years so I'm not too overly familiar with it anymore. I haven't played Skyrim though (and likely won't anytime soon), so know nothing of what is new.

Making terrain graphics, one could be pretty liberal with, since it's pretty earth-like in many regards.

The ideas you have are very interesting though.

Note, I was and am not really satisfied with using separate tech trees as I did in CoMM because it's almost impossible to make AI civs to research in a normal manner to keep a steady/equal game progression going on.

If I do help, I wouldn't have tons of time to commit. It would probably be a fairly large job to do a quality job of this.

EDIT:
I remember what it was now; I didn't understand back then how to rig the skeleton to the mesh, but I got it... this is the ES 4 oblivion imp w/ idle animation i tested. So seems not difficult to convert all the ES4 units if needed (monsters that is).

 

[Gojira54]

I thought about making it more faction oriented, having things like the Morag Tong and Thieves guild, then decided against it for this model. The factions instead would be used via resources\improvements\wonders. I hadn't plotted that out in detail, but something like a "Work with the Thieves Guild" Wonder becomes available, which increases your revenue but causes unhappiness and pollution. The same could be done with all the factions out there, either at a large (wonder) scale or smaller (improvement) scale. It could work if done this way. Sellswords are very common in this game series, and lets face it all of those factions accept contracts, yes? The plan was to borrow from the series-wide lore. I loved Morrowind, couldn't get into Oblivion for some reason, but Skyrim brought it back home for me. Kind of like the Fallout series. Still waiting for Civ to get back to Civ3 level for me...

If you are worried about complex politics, Game of Thrones is by far the most political fantasy out there! You would never be able to capture all that backstabbing and... naughtiness. I thought a bit about that mod too, there are certainly some great maps out there to model off of. My thoughts there would be that the civs could be the 9 major houses, and possibly the Wildlings. One of the victory conditions would be if you took over all 7 seats of the 7 kingdoms.

Tom, nothing would honor me more than to have you assist on it, but to be honest there does not appear to be too much interest in it, and I do have kaiju obligations keeping me from doing much more on this. Good to know about the tech tree issue, might have to revisit that. Regardless of what happens on this mod, I am sure many people here, myself included, would love to see some Oblivion units by you!

 

[tom2050]

So you mean no specific factions; but instead finding resources will give you access to various types of creatures, monsters, improvements? Probably best to use the different races for the civs themselves (as was said) for visual game purposes; altmer, bretons, argonians, etc.

So, if along the tech tree you stumble upon Imp Gall resource, you would be capable of building Imps along with a normal line of units. Of course this is greatly limited by the resource bug. So perhaps this could just be done with special units. And certain ones would be available per conjuration, etc as your tech tree shows.

If you go with a tech tree that is not progressive but one can choose which era to research in; it's tough to make AI go along with this naturally... One thing I would suggest leaving out is the space race; because AI will always go there first; kinda ruins everything.

And a variety of units (with the same unit) could be made; for example I was just practicing, but in Oblivion the Imp had Flare, Snowball, Melee, and Spark attacks;
So you could have something like (flare not shown):

Lots of good units to convert!

 

[Gojira54]

So you mean no specific factions; but instead finding resources will give you access to various types of creatures, monsters, improvements? Probably best to use the different races for the civs themselves (as was said) for visual game purposes; altmer, bretons, argonians, etc.

So, if along the tech tree you stumble upon Imp Gall resource, you would be capable of building Imps along with a normal line of units. Of course this is greatly limited by the resource bug. So perhaps this could just be done with special units. And certain ones would be available per conjuration, etc as your tech tree shows.

There are 10 races and 3 stones (Mage, Warrior, Thief), so by breaking each civ down by unique combination of race and stone, you have 30 civs, 3 per race. That elusive 31st Civ could be Tamriel itself, having all the untamed wildlife (including the Skyrim dragons?) at it's disposal. It fits nicely there.

My thought was that the factions would be unlocked by a combination of resources and tech, possibly including techs based off the racially unique Racial Power techs. Some factional units would be buildable, others conjured by shrines you could build, still others like reanimated corpses can only be created through defeating your enemies with Conjuration spells.

If you go with a tech tree that is not progressive but one can choose which era to research in; it's tough to make AI go along with this naturally... One thing I would suggest leaving out is the space race; because AI will always go there first; kinda ruins everything.

Originally, I was going to go progressive, but changed my mind in favor of the CoMM method, but I see now maybe it should go back. If you look at the posted tech tree, I imply if not state there are 6 levels of Techs: Base, Novice, Apprentice, Adept, Expert, and Master. One could merge the Base and Novice into the first era Novice, leave Apprentice and Adept as the second and third eras, and merge Expert and Master into the fourth, but then the question becomes how do you ensure that only someone with Apprentice level Archery can get to Adept level Archery? I couldn't figure that one out, then I remembered what you did, and thought it was a genius solution. Too bad the AI can't handle it well

And a variety of units (with the same unit) could be made; for example I was just practicing, but in Oblivion the Imp had Flare, Snowball, Melee, and Spark attacks;
So you could have something like (flare not shown):

Lots of good units to convert!

Impressive work, as always, by the inter-game conversion master! Your reuse of units will come in very handy in the Destruction line, which has fire, ice, and electrical sublines.

 

[tom2050]

There are 10 races and 3 stones (Mage, Warrior, Thief), so by breaking each civ down by unique combination of race and stone, you have 30 civs, 3 per race. That elusive 31st Civ could be Tamriel itself, having all the untamed wildlife (including the Skyrim dragons?) at it's disposal. It fits nicely there.

My thought was that the factions would be unlocked by a combination of resources and tech, possibly including techs based off the racially unique Racial Power techs. Some factional units would be buildable, others conjured by shrines you could build, still others like reanimated corpses can only be created through defeating your enemies with Conjuration spells.

Ahh, okay; it's been a while since I've played and I have forgotten a bit on how it all worked. I remember now. 31st civ sounds like great idea, and because it has so many tough untamed wildlife, it wouldn't have all the benefits of the races necessarily.

Theres so many factions, I suppose just the big well-known ones could be included? So building a daedric faction (like an oblivion gate) would auto-produce a daedrae every now and then?

Originally, I was going to go progressive, but changed my mind in favor of the CoMM method, but I see now maybe it should go back. If you look at the posted tech tree, I imply if not state there are 6 levels of Techs: Base, Novice, Apprentice, Adept, Expert, and Master. One could merge the Base and Novice into the first era Novice, leave Apprentice and Adept as the second and third eras, and merge Expert and Master into the fourth, but then the question becomes how do you ensure that only someone with Apprentice level Archery can get to Adept level Archery? I couldn't figure that one out, then I remembered what you did, and thought it was a genius solution. Too bad the AI can't handle it well

Well, the space race, as well as things like diplomacy victories seems to have such a high value to the AI, that if they are in the tech tree, the AI will concentrate on going for those first. Because if they get there, they can win! Using flavors you can prod the AI to not go that route, but eventually they will (even if the chance is low).

Now you can control AI quite well with flavors, and they do work. You can 'force' AI to research certain techs first before any others if you want (simply by making them 100% flavor to those techs). And you can ensure Orc (Warrior, Warrior) to never research Illusion by giving them a 0% flavor to Illusion (they will only research that if there is nothing left to research).

This is one way to include Space Race and have AI ignore till everything else is researched by giving it 0% flavor; I'm pretty sure this works with no problems, I remember testing it long ago.

Takes alot of testing to get it right; but if you get it right with 1 civ; you can duplicate that with all the others (using same values but with different techs), so you don't have to keep testing everything!

------

One other way I thought of for Progessive tree, that might be a bit different is:
1) At apprentice level make a resource appear for each skill (so at the more expensive apprentice tech of Alteration; the Alteration resource becomes available)... Now the Adept, Expert, and Master buildings/creatures will require the Alteration resource to be able to be built.

These techs won't be required to advance, and flavors can make some civ's 'maybe' research them (25, 50, or 75% flav), some civ's always research certain ones (100% flav), and some civs never (0% flav).

So you can somewhat control it to a certain extent as the tech tree progresses. Down the line, a civ might research master, but can't use it until it gets the resource. That early apprentice tech would have to be fairly expensive (so down the line it can't be researched in 4 turns / make it a forced 40-turner).

But in this case, it would require about 18 resources to make it work, one for each skill. Might be too many? Would only leave 14 resources for everything else.


=====

For units, does each Skill line like Light Armor (so I understand);
Light Armor Novice provides an Agile Defender unit with 10,0,11,11 stats
and then as you get better, only the Agile Defender unit stats gain the improvements? Which means in the case of Light Armor, the Agile Defender units' upgrade path would consist of 5 units.

Same with the others, so it doesn't give bonus' to all available buildable units (otherwise it would require an enormous amount of units in the biq!)

 

[Bengal Tiger]

Hmm....Wouldn't it be better to have 10 races as 10 civs, with each race having more of an affinity to certain tech s? Ex. Orc would be focused almosr solely on a high offense, medium defense berserker warrior, while Argonians would get some invisible, sabotage/choose target in stack units, while the Altmer get relatively weak offense/ defense units with killer lethal bombard. The best part is that races can combine units at varying ratios from mage warrior and thief types.(Like the Altmer do have some warriors around Skyrim)

This way, the mod is less crowded, so there's room.for factions like the forsworn, stormcloak rebellion, and whatever side factions in previous ES games I haven't played. You also wouldn't have stealthy Orcs(a contradiction in terms) and such. It would keep The Altmer mages from fighting the warriors, which would probably never happen, and it wouldn't really make sense for say, Nordic mages to rule a group of cities in Skyrim.

Just my 2 cents, anyway.

 

[Gojira54]

Theres so many factions, I suppose just the big well-known ones could be included? So building a daedric faction (like an oblivion gate) would auto-produce a daedrae every now and then?

Something like that, yes. Big, important factions, preferably those that span multiple games\eras\areas.

Well, the space race, as well as things like diplomacy victories seems to have such a high value to the AI, that if they are in the tech tree, the AI will concentrate on going for those first. Because if they get there, they can win! Using flavors you can prod the AI to not go that route, but eventually they will (even if the chance is low).

Now you can control AI quite well with flavors, and they do work. You can 'force' AI to research certain techs first before any others if you want (simply by making them 100% flavor to those techs). And you can ensure Orc (Warrior, Warrior) to never research Illusion by giving them a 0% flavor to Illusion (they will only research that if there is nothing left to research).

This is one way to include Space Race and have AI ignore till everything else is researched by giving it 0% flavor; I'm pretty sure this works with no problems, I remember testing it long ago.

Takes alot of testing to get it right; but if you get it right with 1 civ; you can duplicate that with all the others (using same values but with different techs), so you don't have to keep testing everything!

Tom – this is a FANTASTIC way of approaching it. I was under the impression that flavors barely worked. I do use them in some of my mods, but sparingly and, without much testing. That will change now. It would ESPECIALLY apply here. I would start the testing with giving the Racial Stone flavor (Mage/Warrior/Thief) at 75%, all other lines at 25%, with an additional 25% for the secondary stone. So the 3 Orc civs (which have a racial Warrior Stone would look like this:
Warrior, Mage = Mage 50%, Warrior 75%, Thief 25%
Warrior, Warrior = Mage 25%, Warrior 100%, Thief 25%
Warrior, Thief = Mage 25%, Warrior 75%, Thief 50%

The use of Flavors will actually add a great element to Modzilla and Destiny Reborn.

One other way I thought of for Progessive tree, that might be a bit different is:
1) At apprentice level make a resource appear for each skill (so at the more expensive apprentice tech of Alteration; the Alteration resource becomes available)... Now the Adept, Expert, and Master buildings/creatures will require the Alteration resource to be able to be built.

These techs won't be required to advance, and flavors can make some civ's 'maybe' research them (25, 50, or 75% flav), some civ's always research certain ones (100% flav), and some civs never (0% flav).

So you can somewhat control it to a certain extent as the tech tree progresses. Down the line, a civ might research master, but can't use it until it gets the resource. That early apprentice tech would have to be fairly expensive (so down the line it can't be researched in 4 turns / make it a forced 40-turner).

But in this case, it would require about 18 resources to make it work, one for each skill. Might be too many? Would only leave 14 resources for everything else.

Another great idea, one I never really thought of, but that resource limitation I think kills it, at least for this scenario. Interesting method for others though!

For units, does each Skill line like Light Armor (so I understand);
Light Armor Novice provides an Agile Defender unit with 10,0,11,11 stats
and then as you get better, only the Agile Defender unit stats gain the improvements? Which means in the case of Light Armor, the Agile Defender units' upgrade path would consist of 5 units.

Same with the others, so it doesn't give bonus' to all available buildable units (otherwise it would require an enormous amount of units in the biq!)

There are three ways I thought of to approach this, one is just as you described – the upgrade only applies to the unit made available by the previous tech. Another is that the units just don’t upgrade and are not buildable, just generated, but that can take a lot of buildings. The third approach is a hybrid of above.

This will bring an interesting strategy to play here, in addition to the incremental upgrades. Most units Warrior units will have the best offense and defense, but will also be purely offensive or defensive, not both. Would be an interesting test to see how the AI handles this. Would probably have to make heavy use of the Requires Escort flag for your offensive units.

Hmm....Wouldn't it be better to have 10 races as 10 civs, with each race having more of an affinity to certain tech s?

Well, if use flavors as Tom and I outlined, you could control the AI affinity towards the different tech trees.

This way, the mod is less crowded, so there's room.for factions like the forsworn, stormcloak rebellion, and whatever side factions in previous ES games I haven't played. You also wouldn't have stealthy Orcs (a contradiction in terms) and such. It would keep The Altmer mages from fighting the warriors, which would probably never happen, and it wouldn't really make sense for say, Nordic mages to rule a group of cities in Skyrim.

Again using the flavors as described above, your Nordic mage would still prefer Warrior Techs over Mage techs, but they would prefer Mage techs over Thief Techs.

Personally I like mods that take full advantage of the 31 civs. I usually tend to prefer that epic feel. If you didn’t want that many civs, you can always change the parameter s at the game start to only include the civs with 100% adherence to their Stone flavor (Yum!).

I am not opposed at all to having a faction-based mod. You could flip the design I came up with on it’s head, and have the races be the resources, providing unique units to the factions at war.

My goal was to try to merge the gameplay styles of Elder Scrolls and Civ, going the faction route would be more Civ-like in gameplay – nothing wrong with that though One thing I don’t think would work is if you mixed having it broken by race and included factions as playable civs. I think to work well you would need to do one or the other.

At any rate, I am not seeing too much interest in this other than by a few people, all of whom (myself included) do not have the time to take this up, so it probably won’t happen, but hopefully some fan of both games is bored enough to take this on somewhere Makes for a nice discussion though!

 

[Supa]

I liked Morrowind a lot but I lapsed with Oblivion : I wasn't a fan of the mob auto-leveling, the dialog mini-game and the quests. In the end, I wasn't feeling a real world behind my screen as opposed to Morrowind. Nevertheless, I'll follow this thread with interest.

 

[Gojira54]

I actually did the same thing Supa, LOVED Morrowind, barely played Oblivion as it just seemed so.... lifeless. Skyrim is much better than Oblivion. Not quite as good as Morrowind, but close. It is dummed down in some ways, but has some new interesting twists.

Similar to the Fallout series. 2 was the Gold Standard, 3 was meh, but New Vegas was much better than 3, almost as good as 2.

IMHO, at least

 

[tom2050]

I would love taking this up; but I actually have had a secret project going (that will be unlike anything around, literally! muhahaha! No one would guess it in a million years).

A mod like Eld Scrls, because the game is so in-depth, could easily become over-complicated in Civ. My CoMM3 scenarios became like that, and now I don't even know what to do with them; which is why they aren't finished (and may not be for a long time).

I think unique ideas are great, but sometimes a bit simpler can be beneficial, as well as more enjoyable.

Actually, I played Morrowind and Oblivion both quite a bit. I like them both, but Oblivion didn't hold my interest quite as long as Morrowind did. I think the previous captured my imagination a bit more for some reason.

I'll probably continue converting units for it over time, since they are pretty cool and are likely generally useful for many things; so maybe in time, an elder scrolls / civ fan might take up the task!

 

[Takhisis]

It's been two weeks and I haven't seen this. Bloody exams.

The answer is: Need you even ask?

 

[Gojira54]

I would agree about having to be careful about complexity. Both my current projects have gotten overcomplex to the point that a redo was required a couple times now, since backing out that complexity is too prone to new problems. Now I take a very slow and steady approach, which is quite frustrating for me and I am sure the 3 or so other people interested in Modzilla, but is a method I hope will pay off huge rewords when done. The good thing about it is how much it teaches you about modding, and what the AI can handle.

Takhisis, clearly I did need to ask, as there appears to be only a few people with any interest at all.

I've got one more mini-side project to wrap up over the next 2 weeks or so, then I will be focused purely on Modzilla: The Beginning, and will go back to Destiny Reborn after that. The good thing about Modzilla is that everything is speced out and mostly tested at this point, just need to rebuild.

I can't wait to see what you have next for us Tom, I hope it is still in Civ3, and that you don't pull a Teturkhan and promise The Best Thing Ever, then evaporate

EDIT:
I should add that I may make a Tamriel map at some point in the future, but that won't be in the immediate future, as I have 3 maps in progress now (CN, M:TB, and DR) to satisfy my map-making hunger between the rest of my M:TB modding. I was considering making a Westeros map as well, but it looks like Bengal Tiger beat me to it (good for you!).