Realistic Years and Turns -- a Mod

[maxpublic]

I like the idea, however in the last 2 stages maybe make it 100 or 150 turns each, those 2 eras progressed faster then the ones before.

Actually, how many turns per era you have doesn't affect your correlation to the timeline. You can set the turns to be any length of time down to seasons and months, so you can keep the same number of turns while reducing the amount of 'time' each turn represents.

Max

 

[maxpublic]

So, with seasons its the same thing. But lets say you scale it, so it all makes sense. Now you have lost the game. All you have is constantly building workers, scouts, and wartiors, because it takes 500 turns to get Mining. Now the game is unfun, repetitive, annoying.

For you, perhaps. Some of us like a game of Civ that takes longer than a few hours to play. But don't worry; no one's going to come to your house, put a gun to your head, and force you to download a mod and play it.

Here is my suggestion if you really want timeline realsim: Go read a history book. Oh, wait, you wanted it in a game? Well, go write one yourself, but don't expect it to sell. The point of civ is "What If..." not "This happened..."

No one's talking about recreating history; they're talking about lengthening the game and charting a rough correlation between Civ eras and the ones we ourselves experienced in our own past. So that, for example, the Aztecs don't develop steam power in 500 B.C.

That doesn't stop the Aztecs from developing steam power, which they never actually did. It also doesn't stop them from conquering the world, building an interstellar spaceship with 20th century technology, or adopting Judaism.

Max

 

[Sofus]

what i would like to do is to scale time so you have 4 times as many turns. meaning that for a start you have 10 years per turn instead of 40 years and in the end 4 turns per year.
The build times i would let remain the same, but i would change research to X4, so it would match the present time scale.

Would that be possible??

i just saw this thread today and have rushed trough reading it, so dont kill me if this has already been up

hope someone can help.

 

[tonedog]

to the guy who modded his game to run at 1 turn a year hows it workin out? my biggest gripe with the game is that it does zoom through the ages to quickly. r there any mods that slow it down and if so how does it affect gamebalance etc?

 

[Sofus]

I wanted to have months in my mod as well so I changed the GlobalDefines.xml :

<Define>
		<DefineName>STANDARD_CALENDAR</DefineName>
		<DefineTextVal>CALENDAR_DEFAULT</DefineTextVal>
	</Define>

to

<Define>
		<DefineName>STANDARD_CALENDAR</DefineName>
		<DefineTextVal>CALENDAR_MONTHS</DefineTextVal>
	</Define>

This works fine but I want now make it a bit faster at the beginning. I mean 1 turn should at the beginning represent 24 months for example and later 1 turn should be 1 month. Anyone knows how to change that? The CIV4GameSpeedInfo.xml doesn't have any influence when I use CALENDAR_MONTHS.

I've been looking around.. trying diferent things... but no luck yet

 

[Instant_Cereal]

I've fixed it another way, DH.

I currently have Season turns:
4000 bc spring - summer - fall - winter
3999 bc spring - summer - fall - winter
etc.

Of course, now there's roughly 25,000 turns per game...
(some might consider that to be problematic)

Now, if I could just find someone who knows how I can
add weather...

How do you eat, sleep, or even have sex? Or do you even do those things? God save your procreations.






















































lol jk

 

[Mrdie]

I don't know why, but I laughed my ass off when reading this thread.

 

[TBox]

I love how this thread was hijacked from the very start. dh_epic proposes doing away with benchmark dates altogether, and openly scoffs -- scoffs -- at benchmarkers who insist on some sort of "reality" to the timeline.

Within three posts Nuh Uh is posting his own "solution" that insists not only that there must be benchmark dates, but that they should be accurate -- the benchmark should be real history -- and that dh_epic is trying to fill an already filled need.

Truly masterful.

I for one would love to see dh_epic's original proposal, although I'd have to insist on a turn countdown (count up, actually), even if score victory is disabled, because it helps tell me how 'long' I've been playing. ("3 hours for two turns!?! Time to move to a smaller map...")

 

[mayonaise]

id have to agree, the original poster had the idea

who cares what year it is, thats not even the calendar that was used for most of history, or by most of the world.

the "year" should never have been included, it should display turns, or "eras" (which was a great idea i hadnt though of).

as to those who are trying to lengthen the game. ITS IMPOSSIBLE. there is not enough content to fill it if you add too many turns. 25,000 turns? How bored are you going to get of building the same thing over and over and over again... building it because you cant build anything else? there arent enough buildings or units right now to even come CLOSE to filling that many turns. even if you tweak everything, its either you can build the building way to fast, or they take FOREVER to build. niether is fun. i know it sounds awesome to have a big epic game that lasts months but its just not possible unless you want to add about 1,000 buildings, units, and wonders to keep it interesting ... and just to have something to DO

 

[dh_epic]

I'm glad other people have a sense of humor

there's nothing wrong, however, with people who want to make the game longer. I think a super-epic gamespeed could be cool. but the turns CAN'T be evenly spaced. it just so happens that there's a lot more innovation in the 20th century than in the 1st century, and the pacing of the game and turn times need to reflect that.

what my mod suggestion demonstrates is how quickly you can remove the turn timer without having ANY impact on the gameplay. it really is there just for show -- and often a better way of knowing what time it is is to look at how advanced everyone is.

 

[Feyd-Rautha]

wrong! it would turn out be 2209762.5 days from 4000BC to 2050 AD! did you count .25 at the end of each year.

2000 was a leap year but 1900, 1800 and 1700 were not, a more accurate figure for a year is 365.2425 making the figure more like 2209717.125

This is still by no means 100% accurate tho'

hehe

 

[jkp1187]

So has anyone actually done dh_epic's proposed calendar mod? If so, a link would be appreciated, as I like to abolish the years myself, but don't know how to do it.

 

[Agent 009]

Dunno if anyone is still interested in this thread but it was hyperlinked in Dh-Epic Sig.

I also like the idea of seasons or weather to be added to Civ 4. Not neccesarily weather in the sense that you'd see it snowing or raining... but instead if it was winter, (Dec - Mar) then the terrain and trees in the northern hemisphere from about 35 degrees north and up, would change to snow, and visa versa for the summer and southern hemisphere.

It might be possible to do this in python the only problem is it might also cause the game to take a lot longer to use a turn if it has to change just about ever tile on the map each time the season change.

As for more turns in a game, if you don't want the turn limit start a custom game and turn off the time victory.

On that note I am also in the midst of making a mod that will have 6000 turns if that option is selected. 1 year per turn. Starting in 500BC. Link is in my signature to the sneak peak topic.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Personally, I like option 1 put forward by DH_Epic in the OP. I have to say that-more than in any other iteration of Civ-I have found it fairly easy to ignore the turn counter and just focus on the 'Era' I am in. What helps me most in this regard is actually the music I am currently hearing (though a better deliniation between Medieval, Rennaissance, Baroque, Classical and Romantic Music might help even more-but I am a bit anal when it comes to musical eras ).
Anyway, though, I confess that it would be easier still to forget what year I am in if it just had number of turns, and an even greater sense of the ERA you currently find yourself in!

Aussie_Lurker.

 

[dh_epic]

I know I started out as something that was a half joke, but the more I think about it, the more I think this would be an overall improvement for the game.

It should be very possible with the SDK. And I'd argue that in 'abstracting' the actual year, you could include aspects like seasons without turning the game into something that's 25000 turns long.

 

[tonedog]

was this ever completed? if not anyone got an idea how to mod it?

 

[dh_epic]

I suggested it more as a joke, Tonedog. I actually don't care that much about what year the game says it is.

I was becoming more and more irritated with people who were saying "it doesn't take 400 years to train a warrior!" A lot of folks don't realize how the game isn't balanced for the first 100 years to be played in 100 turns. Nor are they aware of the number of people who felt Civ 3 was too long -- and how they wanted to tighten up the game for Multiplayer which STILL takes too long.

That said, there's some legitimate support for this mod... I think Rhye may have tried something like that for the early part of his mod, but I'm not sure.

 

[ophidon]

Here's an old post of mine to help those who are interested in making a moderately longer (yet era length accurate) game. Yes I understand the game clock date is 'meaningless' but it really doesn't take that much work to get it to match up pretty well even for a 2000 turn game, so why not. I'm mainly looking to get back into Civ when BTS is released, so if this method is no longer functional with Warlords, sorry.


Hey guys, I'm not sure if this has been brought up in another thread I'm not aware of, but there is a reasonably simple, if ugly, way of leaving the calendar set to years and still obtaining partial years per turn.

All you need to do is have a have a -long- set of gameturninfo's like:
<GameTurnInfo>
<iYearIncrement>0</iYearIncrement>
<iTurnsPerIncrement>1</iTurnsPerIncrement>
</GameTurnInfo>
<GameTurnInfo>
<iYearIncrement>1</iYearIncrement>
<iTurnsPerIncrement>1</iTurnsPerIncrement>
</GameTurnInfo>

(Which gives you .5 years per turn)

And, of course, you can get other fractions (on average) like .4 with
patterns like: 0100101001

Using this method I've got a speed running at 5 times the length of a "normal" game using an exact match in era length. Civ has no difficulty coping with having turns back to back that are the same year that I've run into. It's possible some of the autosaves might write over each other, but meh. Hope this was useful.