Not Another City States Mod

[Iceco]

As far as I know, it should work when you make a new color in Civ5Colors.xml, use it for a new playerColor in Civ5PlayerColors.xml and then add it as the DefaultPlayerColor inCiv5MinorCivilizations.xml, but it doesn't, for whatever reason. I've tried it 5 times and no success. I'm pretty confident it's not because of bad code, I stared at it long enough. Editing the value of minor_icon (=the black) colour to something else works though, so it certainly checks for that value and doesn't just go for black regardless. Maybe it checks just once for the primary colour of CSes and uses that one throughout the game and regardless of CS.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Maybe it checks just once for the primary colour of CSes and uses that one throughout the game and regardless of CS.

Code driven to differentiate all CS' territories from Majors - indeed.

 

[Oohforf]

This looks great! But its kinda hard for me to choose between this great mod, or the City States Leader mod D;

Is this mod compatible with the YnAEMP?

 

[Iceco]

@Oohof I'll try to make your choice easier, at least in the future. (Read on.)
And sorry, no YnAEMP compatibility as of yet. It's something I'd like to do, but as of yet haven't found the time for.

@All
Ok, I didn't release the version with the flag icon, because of some code problems with the better version.
The (probable) solution involved reworking all artwork again, so instead of doing all that work and then doing it again for the next version featuring some sort of leader heads (like the City State Leader mod), I figured I'd skip that step and get straight to the design with leader heads.

So without further ado, here is the design of the new top:

​

And a mockup:

Spoiler Mockup :

*No, this is not Daniel O'Connell, nor Dublin. It's King Albert II of Belgium.
*The tip of the 'pages' of the old top is shown, obviously, when implemented, that should not be the case.
*You'll also notice the leader and flags appear 'brighter' than in the previous image, that will remain.

Feedback
I haven't done the other 19(?) yet and obviously, that can take a while, so should I maybe release the 'worse' flag-only version? 'Worse' means that this feature will be incompatible with other mods changing the city-state diplo popup. (The version also has some other nice changes.)
I'm also contemplating on renaming "The Pygmy/Basque/... Nation" on the maps, therefore I do need to know if the Spain DLC uses Bilbao, in which case I'll either have to make them mutually exclusive or name it 'Bilbo' (the Basque name).

 

[Iceco]

Ok then

Version 6 (flag waving update)

• 'Capital' city-states now have their country's flag show up in the Greeting and Diplo popups.
• Added Combatibility.sql, which checks for the presence of the Polynesia DLC, in which case Hawaii, Fiji and Rapa Nui are not available as city-states.
• Ragusa now refers to the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) instead of the Sicilian city. (No longer a 'Capital' city-state and Civilopedia entry edited.)
• South Korea (Seoul) is changed to Korea (Seoul).
• Addition of updated Readme.

+ published Readme.html online.

 

[Oohforf]

Oh wow! This is NAISEE! Do you have a list of leaders you plan to use? Like Leopold II for belgium or Gwanggaeto the Great for Korea?

Downloading this now.

 

[Iceco]

I will use the list of leaders mihaifx did for his City State Leaders mod as the starting point and see from there. If you have leaders you'd want included, just name them and I'll take a look.
Depending on how lazy I am, I'll do Leopold II, or stick with the current Albert II avatar (seen above). For Korea, I planned to go with an emperor from the Joseon dynasty (which had Seoul as capital), but I have not yet decided.

 

[Oohforf]

I will use the list of leaders mihaifx did for his City State Leaders mod as the starting point and see from there. If you have leaders you'd want included, just name them and I'll take a look.
Depending on how lazy I am, I'll do Leopold II, or stick with the current Albert II avatar (seen above). For Korea, I planned to go with an emperor from the Joseon dynasty (which had Seoul as capital), but I have not yet decided.

Probably add Taejo then. I'll list the cities later

 

[Jinzor]

Keep working on this, I can't wait to have some proper diplomacy with City States.

 

[Omega124]

Suggestion for city state.

Ulm
Militaristic
Irrational

 

[Oohforf]

Suggestion for city state.

Ulm
Militaristic
Irrational

Isn't Ulm a German city?

 

[Iceco]

@Oohforf Taejo (the founder of the dynasty, right?) seems like a worthy pick. However, I did come across Sejong the Great. I don't know how to correctly assess the situation, but since he got the title of 'the Great', he seems like an important fellow.
@Jinzor Sure will, but I do hope you're a very patient man.
@Omega124 Thank you for the suggestion, but I don't think it will be included. Europe is already well represented when it comes to city-states and frankly Ulm lacks the recognisability/importance to make the cut.

@All
Just managed to remove Bilbao as a Spanish city (when you have Spain, of course), so I can use that name as the city of the Basques. This also means I can snatch Strasbourg from under Napoleon's claws and make it a city-state!
I also have 5 extra 'capital' city states queued up to balance the amount of , and 'capital' CSes there are. They are Taiwan(Taipei) (currently a normal CS), Byzantium(Constantinople), Portugal(Lisbon), Spain(Madrid) and Holland(Amsterdam), the latter 3 being much-requested city-states. Of course, they'll also be provided with checks for major civs of the same name, to provide compatibility.

Question
I want to add a simple SQL command that goes through all CSes and checks for the presence of Civs by the same name and deletes the CSes if there's a match, something like (this is pseudo-code):

FOR elements OF Civilizations
   local Name = TRIM("Civilizations.Type" - "CIVILIZATION_")
   FOR elements OF MinorCivilizations
      IF element == MERGE("MINOR_CIV_" + Name)
         DELETE that minor civ;
      END

 

[Iceco]

Version 7 is out, here is the Readme.html. To hell with modesty, the leaders look awesome.
Some images:

Spoiler Other, bigger image :

Whatever feedback appreciated.

Questions

• Daniel O'Connell doesn't seem like the best fit for the leader of Ireland. Suggestions.
  Likewise I'm considering changing the Vietnamese leader to Ho Chi Minh.
• Currently my mod is more than 80 files big. Would it increase the mod's loading time a lot if I merged all the individual CS xml files into one?
  The trade-off would be strongly diminished user-friendliness of deleting CSes, so I won't do it if the impact is minimal.

-----
Version 7 (CS leader update)

• 6 new city-states:
  the 'Capital' city-states of Byzantium(Constantinople), Holland(Amsterdam), Portugal(Lisbon) and Spain(Madrid)
  and the normal city-states of La Isabela and Strasbourg.
• 'Capital' city-states now have a leader representing them in the Greeting and Diplo popups.
• The Pygmy and Basque Nations' cities now go by the names of Ituri Forest and Bilbao respectively. However they are not 'Capital' city-states.
• Combatibility.sql is extended:
  Amsterdam: CS removed if Holland/Dutch/Netherlands civ present
  Bilbao: Spanish city of the same name removed if Spain civ and Bilbao CS present
  Constantinople: CS removed if Byzantine/Byzantium civ present
  Lisbon: CS removed if Portugal civ present
  Madrid: CS removed if Spain civ present
  Strasbourg: French city of the same name removed if France civ and Strasbourg CS present

 

[markusbeutel]

[*]Currently my mod is more than 80 files big. Would it increase the mod's loading time a lot if I merged all the individual CS xml files into one?
The trade-off would be strongly diminished user-friendliness of deleting CSes, so I won't do it if the impact is minimal.[/list]

Nice leader image quality - looks like they belong in the base game and not a mod.

I've found in my mod that combining XML's doesn't really make a difference for load times. What does have an impact is .dds files. I've had some success in limiting load times by combing .dds files and adjusting their position on screen, although this process is fairly tedious and requires a lot of trial and error.
Having the game reload unit/landmark systems also adds a looonnngggg time to game loads.

Have you been tweaking the flavors of these new Minor Civ's? From quickly browsing the XML's it seems you can adjust things like if they focus on building Wonders or Nukes or even Expanding, (along with other flavors like Military Training, Defense, etc). What would be really interesting is if you tweaked these values to the extreme. You could, for instance, max out Belgrade's offense rating and military training rating, then adjust the <Language_en_US> XML's from Militaristic, or whatever trait it was, to a custom worded trait that reflects these new flavors. Even if you don't alter the XML for the trait, you could enhance an already Militaristic Minor Civ with maxed Nuke/Offense/Military Training capabilities and call it "anarchistic," as an example. It would be interesting to run across Minor Civ's, all with their "own" unique trait that you've molded a certain way. To make things really interesting, you could play around with the UI and list these flavor ratings, (not by writing flavors, specifically), but by calling them specific government ideologies similar to how Social Policies reflect certain ideals.

If it's impossible to adjust the UI for the <Language_en_US> Trait titles, you could just add a line underneath the main Trait title, alter the color of the letters, and have this as a sort of sub-trait that further expounds on what level of "Militaristic" that specific Minor Civ really is.

Whatever you end up doing, good luck. It's a nice mod you've got going.

 

[Iceco]

Thank you for the kind words. Most images turned out great, though there are some things that could have been better, like the Military CS symbol.
And so putting my images in an atlas should help me squeeze off some time? I'll see if I can get that working.

Yes, I stuck with the vanilla flavoring. I believe Opera20 had different flavoring in her CS mod, but at the time I didn't do it to prevent unnecessary weird/unbalanced behaviour. It was also my first mod, so I thought I'd better keep it simple.
It's an interesting idea, but I have greater ambitions, namely all new CS types c5science:scientific, tourist/recreational, industrious, revolutionary, diplomatic or real maritime). That will probably prove to be a difficult job, so if it fails at least diversifying within the existing traits is a very good idea.

For the next version I wanted to give the citybanner another go though and see if I can chance the generic icon next to the cities to nice flags for my minor nations / 'Capital' CSes.
I'll also take a look if they can be used for diplomacy (trading, open borders), or if they're hard-coded not to be allowed to do that.

Or maybe I'll try to play a game of CiV, who knows.

 

[Iceco]

In good tradition, I first looked ahead at the release after the upcoming one (so v.9) and will tease it, instead of just working on v.8
Unless things go horribly wrong, you can expect the new city-state traits! I'm probably getting myself into a lot of trouble with this, but I think it will be worth it.
So any suggestions for how you want the new traits to work or how they should be named are welcome. Also welcome are words of advice, warning and somehow relevant working code snippets.

Now I'm off to making v.8

 

[Gedemon]

In good tradition, I first looked ahead at the release after the upcoming one (so v.9) and will tease it, instead of just working on v.8
Unless things go horribly wrong, you can expect the new city-state traits! I'm probably getting myself into a lot of trouble with this, but I think it will be worth it.
So any suggestions for how you want the new traits to work or how they should be named are welcome. Also welcome are words of advice, warning and somehow relevant working code snippets.

Now I'm off to making v.8

Good luck, I'll help if I can (and found time to), but you're probably right about the lot of trouble

I haven't looked at this part of the code, but I'm afraid the C++ SDK will be needed to create new traits.

Thinking of it, adding new trait should be doable, the problem will be to have a CS with only the new trait and none of the old.

Or maybe you can keep the existing traits as "primary" and just add "secondary" traits...

 

[Iceco]

To my own surprise, that part seems to be pretty straightforward. Religious City-States did it by just declaring a new trait in the MinorCivTraits.xml.
Then it's just a matter of giving a Trait substance and I found Player:GetMinorCivFriendschipLevelWithMajor(majorID), which will help me with that.

What I fear for is that there are a bit too many "just"s and there actually are a lot of elements (like text or the quests) that will need be hunted down.


I'll actually be looking into it now already, as what I planned for v.8 isn't working (small flags to replace the icon in the city banners).

EDIT:
Help with that^ is possible too.
Also, what will probably be the biggest worry is getting the UI to show the various new bonuses (i.e. update a city's new production, overall technology, happiness etc.)

 

[Iceco]

I made a list of all the things I need to do. I hope it will prove to be the complete list:

• Intellectual: Fleshing the new traits out (names, bonusses) and distributing them over the city-states evenly.
• Artistic: Making art assets. (An icon, the popup tops and the popup background.)
• Coding: Coding the bonuses.
• UI: Get all the texts to show up and getting the bonuses visible in the city view and/or top panel.

I think getting the bonuses to show up everywhere will be the most difficult, at least if I want to keep the mod compatible with other things.
Another big problem will be the art. I think I did a pretty good job with the leader icons, but that was all just mixing together existing resources and doing fancy stuff with the sliders.

Perhaps what everyone could most easily help with is step 1 though.
I have already pieced together what the Traits could look like, but I'm open to suggestions:

• Intellectual - global technology bonus, like the current culture
• Industrious - local production bonus, like the current food (or ideally like in Thal's Balance mod)
• Commercial - global gold bonus
• Prosperous - global happiness bonus, or only benefits related to golden ages progress towards them
• Diplomatic - slower influence loss with CSes
• Progressive - chance of receiving a GP, like the current militaristic trait

I also need to distribute these traits over the city-states. With the mod, there currently are 60 CSes and in the readme there are 20 others suggested. I'll probably be aiming for 81 city-states: 27 'Capital' ones (3 per trait) and 54 normal ones (6 per trait). I can also scratch a trait from the list, if it's not popular.

 

[Gedemon]

About suggestions, if I remember correctly, there was talks about caravans (production, food ?) given by allied CS to player in the CSD thread, that's something I would like to see in games.