jedrek.burak
Chieftain
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2009
- Messages
- 2
I have an idea for this mod, which occured to me when I played Lord of the Mods for Civ III. I really enjoyed it, but I found that once you got to around the Third Age, the game definitely lost the Middle-Earth feeling for quite a simple reason - overpopulation.
Think of the general atmosphere of the Lord of the Rings books (and films to some extent) - it feels like a very empty world, falling apart, with many remnants of once great civilizations. The kingdom of the North has vanished and only the Rangers remain, but it's not like Angmar has its cities and gets fat on them, Dwarves live only in a few places, there are almost no Elves left. Why is that? Because they mostly died in wars and from various diseases, or, in case of Elves, evacuated themselves into the West.
Then, what is Sauron's greatest power? Numbers. Orcs aren't exactly good warriors, but there's tens of thousands of them. Also the coming age is the age of men, and it seems that in the fourth age, once the wars were over, the kingdoms could flourish.
So here's my idea how to incorporate this into a mod: make population much more precious (sss...) than in the original Civ IV. This could give this Mod a truly different flavour. This could be done by one or all of the following:
- Units cost population, therefore wars are much more of a problem and you'd have to think really carefuly whether you want to start one. That could also give new meaning to war of attrition.
- Growth rate (meaning really how much food a city needs to grow in size) is different for different races, for example more or less normal for humans, faster for orcs, slow for dwarves and virtually non-existent for elves.
- To compensate for the above, units qould have to be more tailor-made, like say dwarves getting big defensive bonuses so that they are harder to kill, elves getting withdrawal bonuses, orcs being weak but in large numbers, etc.
- Also the "original races" (elves, dwarves and humans) would have to start with quite a lot of people to begin with.
- And think what fun the Plague would be.
There would of course be problems with that approach, and I don't know enough about the game mechanics to know how it would be handled:
- AI. No clue if AI could handle such a new approach to the game.
- Game balance. You'd have to spend quite a lot of extra time testing for the best balance of growth rates and stuff.
What do you think?
Think of the general atmosphere of the Lord of the Rings books (and films to some extent) - it feels like a very empty world, falling apart, with many remnants of once great civilizations. The kingdom of the North has vanished and only the Rangers remain, but it's not like Angmar has its cities and gets fat on them, Dwarves live only in a few places, there are almost no Elves left. Why is that? Because they mostly died in wars and from various diseases, or, in case of Elves, evacuated themselves into the West.
Then, what is Sauron's greatest power? Numbers. Orcs aren't exactly good warriors, but there's tens of thousands of them. Also the coming age is the age of men, and it seems that in the fourth age, once the wars were over, the kingdoms could flourish.
So here's my idea how to incorporate this into a mod: make population much more precious (sss...) than in the original Civ IV. This could give this Mod a truly different flavour. This could be done by one or all of the following:
- Units cost population, therefore wars are much more of a problem and you'd have to think really carefuly whether you want to start one. That could also give new meaning to war of attrition.
- Growth rate (meaning really how much food a city needs to grow in size) is different for different races, for example more or less normal for humans, faster for orcs, slow for dwarves and virtually non-existent for elves.
- To compensate for the above, units qould have to be more tailor-made, like say dwarves getting big defensive bonuses so that they are harder to kill, elves getting withdrawal bonuses, orcs being weak but in large numbers, etc.
- Also the "original races" (elves, dwarves and humans) would have to start with quite a lot of people to begin with.
- And think what fun the Plague would be.
There would of course be problems with that approach, and I don't know enough about the game mechanics to know how it would be handled:
- AI. No clue if AI could handle such a new approach to the game.
- Game balance. You'd have to spend quite a lot of extra time testing for the best balance of growth rates and stuff.
What do you think?
.
