Yes. Although that particular example can in some way sbe reproduced in C3C as is by using the unit-building wonder feature: time the discovery of the wonder's prerequisite for a specific date, make it cost nothing so that the civ will build it immediately and set it to have units appear every turn.
That is a good example of what SLIC cannot do because you actually need a weather feature in the game first that can then be triggered.
This might be a good idea for Civ4 but since weather changes tend to be season-based and the vanilla CIV concept operates according to years--thus no seasons--it's unlikely that CIV will ever see weather. The only way I can think of to reproduce this is by using events to change terrain and place omnipotent but finite storm units in strom-prone locations at random times within certain months of the year. (This can be done with Civ2's macro.)
Yeah, that kind of flexibility would be amazing applied to Civ3.
I've already opened a thread in the Civ4 - Ideas & Suggestions forum.
The ability to script events is the thing that gets many people into modding. The oly reason why people have ovrlooked events is because they have no friggen clue what it's all about, let alone how to use it.
If you present the average player with an interest in scenario design with BHS or SLIC or even Civ2's primitive macro for that matter, you'll scare them off!
Civ2:MGE introduced an Events Editor that made it far simper to create a working events file but even then was lacking in many ways. (Note that prefer to use text file because its faster when dealing with many events but this will never get off the ground if everyone has to do that.)
A good example of user-friendly events editor is that of Starcraft.
Picture something like that only even easier to use but with a high degree of flexibility at the same time (very diffficult), a great marketing strategy for selling the feature to players and you'll have events in Civ4. Otherwise, Civ4 will suffer the same fate as Civ3.
(It's really too bad Joe Rumsey didn't work for Microprose.
)Where Civ3 is concerned, a full-blown scripting language is impossible now but it should still be possible to add some trigger mechanisms. C3C includes timed plagues...that's an event!
How hard could it be to add a timed 'Free Tech' feature for instance?
As for spicing up the vanilla game: that's a little more difficult using just some basic triggers but I'm sure it could be beefed up a bit.
Example: not destroying Barbarian Camps soon may lead to a dramatic increase in Barbarian raiders on a random turn for a duration (i.e. the barbarian invasions...not the movie
).And that's the other problem: as stated in previous posts, events don't really apply well to the vanilla game because it is very generic and plays on random conditions.
But, Firaxis has opted for a few additions (albiet small ones) to C3C that are not used in the vanilla game--although this may have been for the purpose of designing the conquests rather than for the good of modders.
