Just how moddable is CivIV?

[Primogenitor]

Hiya everybody!

I'm very new when it comes to modding CivIV, but I've been modding other games for ages (mainly RPGs), and I hope I'm fairly good at it, but I just don't know what Civ IV can be made to do, hence these questions. I've played the official rules a lot, the official scenarios a bit, and a few others scenarios too, but really only dipped my toes in it, as it were.

If you can excuse me, I'll just go on a bit of a diversion about why/what I'm thinking of doing. If you just want to have a look at my questions, please skip to the bottom! Some of the best games I have ever played have been rogue-like games and their variants. Angband, Moria, NetHack, ADOM, ToME, and to a lesser extent Diablo. Rogue-like games are typically tile- and turn-based role-playing games (RPGs) with randomly generated levels filled with monsters that the character moves through gaining skills and items along the way. However, I have never found one with "modern" graphics; typically they are 2D tiles or even ASCII (text). So I want to make one.
I've been working on my version on and off for a few years as a mod of a commercial RPG, however, I'm finding many performance issues from pushing the engine too hard; particularly for randomizing stuff, or having the same amount of strategy as something turn-based. Looking around at other games, few are easily moddable, and although Civ IV may sound like a bizarre base (world-spanning strategy over eons, to single character RPG), the more I think about it, the better it sounds.

Now, here are some hopefully straight-forward yes/no answers or a 1-10 scale (1=easy, 10=impossible), any responses appreciated!

• Can terrain be changed on-the-fly?
• Can core rules (e.g combat) be changed? Or replaced entirely?
• Can one make new menu lists (such as the menu when city construction completes)?
• Can things such as cities, advisor's, score summaries, religion, civics, etc be removed?
• Would it be possible to have unit inventories and equipment? Possibly some variant of the "transport" system perhaps?
• How difficult is it to add new models? units mainly, ideally with combat animations.
• How difficult would it be to simplify the terrain? e.g to just 2 tiles in total; solid wall, and open floor.
• How difficult would it be to simplify & rewrite the AI?
• How hard would it be to build a mod up from nothing at all?
• Do you think I am a raving lunatic?

Any/all responses appreciated, even if its just to laugh at me!

 

[hamtastic]

Here are some answers:

Note that most of these things requre screwing with the SDK or Python. Personally, I don't think that's easy, but my answers are based on "if you knew how to mess with those things." All the modding I do is in XML, which is very easy.

You can change terrain in game. I don't know what "on-the-fly" means though.

Core rules can be changed. Probably difficult though.

No clue about menu lists.

You can remove everything you asked about, as far as I know.

Unit inventories would probably be very difficult. However, there is a way to do a form of item that I've seen that functions in-game as a promotion. (the Orthus Axe in the Fall from Heaven II mod).

Terrain could be simplified easily

Ai rewriting is not that difficult, I don't think.

Building a mod up from nothing would probably be difficult, and probably pointless. At that point, why are you bothering with the Civ4 game engine? Why not just write you whole own game in Python and XML?

 

[Dale]

I would suggest having a look through the tutorials forum. A lot of your questions are answered in there.

 

[Impaler[WrG]]

Yes to everything

 

[Willem]

Hiya everybody!

[*]How difficult would it be to simplify & rewrite the AI?

Check out the Better AI thread on the main forum. A guy named Blake, at least I presume he's a guy, has been doing just that, though not necessarily simplifying it. He certainly has been making it better though. Some of his changes were even incorporated into the last Warlords patch by Firaxis. It's not an easy feat though, it requires playing with the core game file which was made available for editing by Firaxis. So you'd need to have some C++ skills in order to do anything.