Modding Difficulty Levels

[Pantastic]

Where are all of the difficulty level handicaps kept? I want to mod my game to have my empire's economy be at something like monarch level, but give the AIs emperor or deity production/commerce bonuses. (I don't mind the AIs having tons of stuff, but it just gets annoying to me when my empire feels crippled for growth).

Also, what would I need to modify to add a new difficulty level label and option to the menu so that I could keep the originals around? Not sure if that's reasonable to do, but I'd like not to have to remember 'oh, this game was real emperor and this one was the modified one'.

 

[Gerikes]

Where are all of the difficulty level handicaps kept? I want to mod my game to have my empire's economy be at something like monarch level, but give the AIs emperor or deity production/commerce bonuses. (I don't mind the AIs having tons of stuff, but it just gets annoying to me when my empire feels crippled for growth).

Also, what would I need to modify to add a new difficulty level label and option to the menu so that I could keep the originals around? Not sure if that's reasonable to do, but I'd like not to have to remember 'oh, this game was real emperor and this one was the modified one'.

Check out inside the directory "assets/XML/GameInfo" for a file called "Civ4HandicapInfo.xml". You're best off copying this file to the proper directory in Custom Assets and modifying it there.

What I would start out with is taking an existing difficulty level closest to what you want and copy everything from where it starts to where it finishes (you can tell by the indentation).

<HandicapInfo>
	<Type>HANDICAP_SETTLER</Type>
	<Description>TXT_KEY_HANDICAP_SETTLER</Description>
...lots more stuff...
</HandicapInfo>

Everything inbetween and including the <HandicapInfo> and </HandicapInfo> represents one difficulty level. Copy all that and paste it after the last one, then change this copies values to what you want.

 

[Pantastic]

Haha, that's easy. I thought I'd have to mess around with python to add a new option to the menu, thanks.

 

[Pantastic]

OK, one more quick thing: I'm running Warlords, and I'd like to change the text that goes with the difficulty level to reflect my changes, but I can't find TXT_KEY_HANDICAP_EMPEROR or TXT_KEY_HANDICAP_EMPEROR_HELP to make new ones for my new difficulty level. I did a search on all of the files in Civ4
Warlords\Assets\XML\Text and couldn't find those tags, any idea where they're hiding?

 

[Gerikes]

OK, one more quick thing: I'm running Warlords, and I'd like to change the text that goes with the difficulty level to reflect my changes, but I can't find TXT_KEY_HANDICAP_EMPEROR or TXT_KEY_HANDICAP_EMPEROR_HELP to make new ones for my new difficulty level. I did a search on all of the files in Civ4
Warlords\Assets\XML\Text and couldn't find those tags, any idea where they're hiding?

Not having warlords, I have no idea. The vanilla handicap txt_key's are located in Civ4GameText_Help.txt and Civ4GameTextInfos_Objects.xml.

However, I do know that you don't necessarily NEED to place the txt_key's alongside each other, nor even in the same files. In fact, you can just make a new file in the Text directory (I'm not sure about if it has to have any certain name, but I just try to make it close to the others just to be on the safe side). Besides not having a long file to look for your changes with, this cuts down on your mod's download size (since including your 2KB text change into a 603 KB file means you're putting 603 KB into your mod that everyone already has on their computer).

 

[Rabbit, White]

Just wanted to point out that if you can't find some file in warlords' assets folder (like the one with the difficulty level names) that means it wasn't modified and so it's still using the vanilla one, i.e. you copy that one if you want to modify it, but yeah, I don't know the details but for text it looks like you could just put it in a whole new files, just don't forget to put the propers XML "header" tags.