Long time reader. First time poster. Civ4 RFCE has been the only game I've played for several years now. Was a big fan of the original, then RFCE++, and really appreciate all the hard work that Absinthe and the rest of the team continue to put into this mod.
Thanks for the post! Especially since it's after 10 years
Civ4 RFCE has been the only game I've played for several years now
Yeah, I can perfectly relate to that. I also only played/spent time with this game for quite a few years now, with some occasional EU4/Vicky II every now and then.
And this will most likely remain the case. I'm pretty sure that Civ IV will remain the prime strategy game for many of us for quite a while.
Even though BtS is 10 years old now, the modding community is still going very strong. Many modders are still thinking in years, maybe even decade(s). Which might sound ridiculous at first glance, but heck, there is a huge community for Heroes 3 with dedicated modding teams fairly active even nowadays - perfecting the experience, properly adding/perfecting new mechanics and factions, fixing original bugs (anyone familiar with HotA, as in Horn of the Abyss?). Which is for an almost 20 years old game without any real modding access, they do it by reverse-engineering the SDK!
So I'm pretty optimistic about the future of Civ IV. We have such wonderful things here, within all those superb mods... I wouldn't even know where to start describing it to a mod-virgin... With all the awesome modding possibilities, all the room where we can still expand to.
Actually I'm very commited to the Civ IV modding scene altogether, love the whole community here. Nowadays I'm even helping in some other mods too like RaR for Colonization and Master of Mana for FFH (mostly smaller coding stuff though, RFCE and Realism Invictus as full modding projects are more than enough), and will probably continue to do that for some other mods as well whenever I have some energy for it.
What this all means for RFCE: I plan at least 5-6 more full versions, probably much more. Some of the planned things already came up recently - actually a fairly big number of different topics, but hopefully most of those will be added/improved within the next couple releases. Also while 1.5 was just released, I want to have 1.6 out pretty soon. The pace of development should be more than satisfying for it, as I already mentioned somewhere I will be able to spend a fairly big amount of time on modding in the next 2 months.
Also, while I tend to have some very active modding periods, I had some bigger breaks too, which is surely not too healthy for the RFCE community.
I realized I have to (try to) change that, and avoid any longer periods where I'm not active at all. Slowing the modding pace a little bit instead of becoming way too overwhelmed with it for a while.
Surely I can't say that I will always have some time to spend on this mod, it's a hobby after all (even if it's one of my favourite ones), but everyone can count on a more continuous modding from me. Leoreth is probably a good example for this: he always has at least a couple small commits, even in his least active periods.
PS: Sry for the rant, I have no idea how I got into this topic in the end
Will reply to the main part of the post later.
PS2: Just to be clear, RFCE is absolute high priority for me, the overwhelming majority of my modding time was surely spent here even in this year.
