S3rgeus's Wheel of Time Mod

whew! finally. can't quite tell when they come out though...

Australian summer (in the real world) ends on Tuesday apparently, so hopefully next week!

Also, Australia? Seems like a cool place, but not really a civ....

I dunno, it seems like a good one to me. Australia is always one of the first civs to be modded into a given civ game. They've gone with a modern one, but there's a fair amount of ancient history stuff to dig into as well.

sure, they can unlock whenever. They'll be mainly mid-game use units, though, right? It makes this significantly less applicable to the LB, unless they power up at that point or something...

sure.

It seems to me, flavor aside, that the mechanical path suggests we not do a war declaration. To me, this seems like the consolation, right - you can't get more Sisters, ever, and you lose a bunch of them, but at least you aren't enemies.

Yep, I'm fine with that. The Tower doesn't declare war on Neutral civs.

Right, I suppose there are circumstances when you'd end up with a net 0 increase of sisters. Maybe that's ok. Or maybe we adjust said bonuses so that doesn't happen

Yeah, I'd say that's ok if the effects of other bonuses happen to make that turn out that way.

I see, so the # of sisters might be the same or higher than a neutered civ has, but the quota would the lower. good. So is the quota % fixed, or does that too scale based on Turning objectives?

Exactly. I'd say let's make all of the quota losses flat %s, determined purely by which side you picked vs which side the Tower picked.

yes, I've only now really begun to separate them in my mind. Perhaps we're dealing with something like:

Light tower:
Light Civs:
- small to moderate Sister loss (up to 25%, based on turning objectives)
- no quota loss
Neutral civs:
- 50% quota and sister loss (technically quota is irrelevant)
Shadow civs:
- significant sister loss (based on turning objectives), ranging from 25% to 67%
- significant quota loss - flat rate? 33%? 50%?

Shadow Tower:
Light Civs:
- significant sister loss - 50%
- 50% quota loss?
Neutral civs:
- 50% quota and sister loss
Shadow civs:
- no sister loss
- no quota loss?

Yes! Just to finalize some numbers that have question marks here, I think these work well:

Light tower:
Light Civs:
- small to moderate Sister loss (up to 25%, based on turning objectives)
- no quota loss
Neutral civs:
- 50% quota and sister loss
Shadow civs:
- significant sister loss (based on turning objectives), ranging from 25% to 67%
- 50% quota loss

Shadow Tower:
Light Civs:
- significant sister loss - 50%
- 50% quota loss
Neutral civs:
- 50% quota and sister loss
Shadow civs:
- no sister loss
- no quota loss

Is there a difference between light and neutral civs with a shadow tower? The neutral civs maintain tower relations, but the light civs can faith buy. is that it?

Yeah, the war declaration (and therefore relations) and the Faith buy are differences. I think that's it. Overall we're punishing Light players more for a Shadow Tower than we are Shadow players for a Light Tower, which I think is correct, since the Turning is stacked against the Shadow players.

thoughts?

Man, we've just about finished this topic!

Yeah, we seem to be done! I've updated the Tower summary with the info above. I can start us off on the next pass at the Unity tree tomorrow.
 
I dunno, it seems like a good one to me. Australia is always one of the first civs to be modded into a given civ game. They've gone with a modern one, but there's a fair amount of ancient history stuff to dig into as well.
ok, right, so if there's tons of aboriginal stuff, that's awesome.

virtually no quote blocks that need to be preserved here!

Yes! Just to finalize some numbers that have question marks here, I think these work well:

Light tower:
Light Civs:
- small to moderate Sister loss (up to 25%, based on turning objectives)
- no quota loss
Neutral civs:
- 50% quota and sister loss
Shadow civs:
- significant sister loss (based on turning objectives), ranging from 25% to 67%
- 50% quota loss

Shadow Tower:
Light Civs:
- significant sister loss - 50%
- 50% quota loss
Neutral civs:
- 50% quota and sister loss
Shadow civs:
- no sister loss
- no quota loss
I think these are all fine! At least as a starting point

Yeah, the war declaration (and therefore relations) and the Faith buy are differences. I think that's it. Overall we're punishing Light players more for a Shadow Tower than we are Shadow players for a Light Tower, which I think is correct, since the Turning is stacked against the Shadow players.
right, and can be re-balanced later if need be.

Yeah, we seem to be done! I've updated the Tower summary with the info above. I can start us off on the next pass at the Unity tree tomorrow.
cool!
 
A quick sidebar before Unity seems to be in order! Even more big news! We have the Civ6 modding SDK! This means so many things.

I've taken a quick look at it and from a cursory glance, I'm liking Civ6 long term as having better modding potential than Civ5. Particularly art wise, Firaxis seem to have learned a ton from how difficult art assets were to deal with in Civ5. Civ6 provides loads of examples (27GB worth) and seemingly a suite of tools for importing industry-standard formats into Civ6. (These were completely absent in Civ5 and we only ever got anywhere close thanks to Deliverator's work on NexusBuddy, but even that was super finicky.) This will make an enormous difference to making new custom artwork and units and the like, which we're going to need a lot of.

There's also some great stuff about modding audio with Wwise, which is games-industry-standard audio middleware.

Flexibility wise, I like what I've seen of how they've done some of the database stuff, it seems more moddable by pure nature of its structure but I can't say for sure without having worked on it a bit. This is pretty much a wash though, with Civ5's DLL source already released, I can change the Civ5 database to store whatever we want it to.

Unfortunately, we don't have DLL source in this release of the Civ6 SDK. This was called out in the release notes: "These tools do not include DLL source for Civilization VI at this time." I really like that they called this out, rather than just omitting it, because that phrasing says to me that full source is coming. However, WoTMod is only really possible with DLL source access, so we wouldn't be able to develop this mod for Civ6 at this time.

This presents us with an interesting dilemma. I think WoTMod for Civ6 will be a better mod longer term. We'll get the DLL source eventually and it's looking like artwork will be much more doable, which we're going to want loads of. Some of the known limitations of Civ5 are going to bite us (lack of support for new particle effects, inability to change terrain mid-game) and we know they're not going away. Civ6 will also have limitations, and we don't know what they are yet.

This would seem to suggest we could shift our design work to Civ6 (which will create a fair amount of design reworking for us to do) under the assumption that Firaxis will release the DLL source at some point before we finish all of that new rework. For Civ5, the DLL source release took 1.5 years (from first release). We don't know if Civ6 will be faster or slower. That timeline would be problematic, because I'd imagine we have a good 6 months or so of rework on Civ6 before we get to a similar stage to what we're at now with Civ5. Though factoring in a fair amount of play time might be a good idea as well - I'd want to play several games of Civ6 before we start designing systems for it and still haven't finished one! Still, it makes this mod quite far off.

It's the art stuff that really pushes me toward Civ6. I think we'll struggle to get the mod looking good even if it plays like we want it to with Civ5, because of how hard it is to get new art content into the game. And as a fantasy total conversion, looks are really important. If this release had included the DLL source for Civ6, I would be 100% for switching over.

Any thoughts on the above? Do you want me to go into any more detail about the implications/definitions of some of the components above? (What is DLL source? Why art Civ5 art assets so hard to deal with? What are all of the known Civ5 limitations? Anything like that.) Do we want to set aside some time for me to tinker with the new SDK and get a better handle on Civ6 modding for us to make this decision? (The time I would usually do that is mostly posting here at the moment!) Some of the Civ6 upsides might turn out to not be so good. On the flipside, they might be amazing. Can't know which until we try it out!
 
A quick sidebar before Unity seems to be in order! Even more big news! We have the Civ6 modding SDK! This means so many things.

I've taken a quick look at it and from a cursory glance, I'm liking Civ6 long term as having better modding potential than Civ5. Particularly art wise, Firaxis seem to have learned a ton from how difficult art assets were to deal with in Civ5. Civ6 provides loads of examples (27GB worth) and seemingly a suite of tools for importing industry-standard formats into Civ6. (These were completely absent in Civ5 and we only ever got anywhere close thanks to Deliverator's work on NexusBuddy, but even that was super finicky.) This will make an enormous difference to making new custom artwork and units and the like, which we're going to need a lot of.

There's also some great stuff about modding audio with Wwise, which is games-industry-standard audio middleware.

Flexibility wise, I like what I've seen of how they've done some of the database stuff, it seems more moddable by pure nature of its structure but I can't say for sure without having worked on it a bit. This is pretty much a wash though, with Civ5's DLL source already released, I can change the Civ5 database to store whatever we want it to.

Unfortunately, we don't have DLL source in this release of the Civ6 SDK. This was called out in the release notes: "These tools do not include DLL source for Civilization VI at this time." I really like that they called this out, rather than just omitting it, because that phrasing says to me that full source is coming. However, WoTMod is only really possible with DLL source access, so we wouldn't be able to develop this mod for Civ6 at this time.

This presents us with an interesting dilemma. I think WoTMod for Civ6 will be a better mod longer term. We'll get the DLL source eventually and it's looking like artwork will be much more doable, which we're going to want loads of. Some of the known limitations of Civ5 are going to bite us (lack of support for new particle effects, inability to change terrain mid-game) and we know they're not going away. Civ6 will also have limitations, and we don't know what they are yet.

This would seem to suggest we could shift our design work to Civ6 (which will create a fair amount of design reworking for us to do) under the assumption that Firaxis will release the DLL source at some point before we finish all of that new rework. For Civ5, the DLL source release took 1.5 years (from first release). We don't know if Civ6 will be faster or slower. That timeline would be problematic, because I'd imagine we have a good 6 months or so of rework on Civ6 before we get to a similar stage to what we're at now with Civ5. Though factoring in a fair amount of play time might be a good idea as well - I'd want to play several games of Civ6 before we start designing systems for it and still haven't finished one! Still, it makes this mod quite far off.

It's the art stuff that really pushes me toward Civ6. I think we'll struggle to get the mod looking good even if it plays like we want it to with Civ5, because of how hard it is to get new art content into the game. And as a fantasy total conversion, looks are really important. If this release had included the DLL source for Civ6, I would be 100% for switching over.

Any thoughts on the above? Do you want me to go into any more detail about the implications/definitions of some of the components above? (What is DLL source? Why art Civ5 art assets so hard to deal with? What are all of the known Civ5 limitations? Anything like that.) Do we want to set aside some time for me to tinker with the new SDK and get a better handle on Civ6 modding for us to make this decision? (The time I would usually do that is mostly posting here at the moment!) Some of the Civ6 upsides might turn out to not be so good. On the flipside, they might be amazing. Can't know which until we try it out!
Interesting! Thanks for taking a look and the time to detail its implications here....

So.... this is tough!

As far as the detail I might need you to go in... I'd say not that much, for now. I have some idea of how this all works, but not a very good practical idea. I suppose the art aspects of CiV are a bit more self-evident. I definitely don't quite know the specific role the DLL's play in the mod... Without asking you to explain it all, I guess I'll ask these questions:

- What's the best we could do with art in CiV?
- What's the most we could do with a mod in CiVI without DLL source access?
- what kinds of mods are totally A-OK without DLL source releases?

I do see the art thing as pretty major, in terms of this thing ever having the polish it likely deserves. That said, not having an artist makes that issue lose a little of its weight.

I'm also unfortunately still kind of struck by how I don't like CiVI nearly as much as I want to right now.I'm played two complete games. I've detailed some of my problems with it. Ultimately, I don't find it as fun. We'll see if that changes. Does that affect my opinion on how to tackle this? Yes and ultimately no. "Yes, because it makes me squeamish - will it be better with expansions? will people still be playing this in two years? will i enjoy modding it? - and no because I think even counting those problems against ciVI might not be enough to make CiV the smarter option....

Because, for me, all of this is simply secondary to the "which mod will people play?" question. Previously, we'd divined that CiVI was the likely winner there. If we're talking a significant magnitude of difference, then we kind of have to go with CiVI. If it's somehow comparable or something... ugh.

Trusting you that without dLL source, we're Effed.... then I guess the discussion really goes in two directions:

- will there be a DLL source release?
- if yes, is the delay acceptable?

If no, then it sounds like we have to go with CiV. Doing a full design only to find that it is totally a waste would probably kill the mod. That would suck.

As far as the delay, then... if we got to this same point in 6 months... we'd have potentially another 6 months of downtime. That's bad. However, I doubt we'd be at this same point in six months. I'd guess closer to a year. Fundamentals will largely remain in place - especially the new systems - , but we'll need to essentially recheck everything, especially the "adapted" systems - the tech tree policies, etc. All of it would need to be redone. Not from square one, but.. square 4 or something. Think about all those civ uniques - we'd need to at least consider the changed mechanics again for each civ. The changed diplo system and religious victories and such are obviously a big change. I know you've said the reception has been largely positive, but one mixed review I found (that I agree with) pointed out how they seem to have "kitchen sinked" the game, adding tons of stuff, without all of it feeling particularly cohesive. This has the benefit of letting us keep some of the systems from CiV relatively in place, but it also offers the huge trap that a lot of this stuff is kind of wonky, and there's way more things to adapt than will be easy to predict without, say, the 1000 hours of CiV we've put in, combined.

And then there's the other scary thing about such a delay - it's likely by that point an expansion would be released... so then, back to the drawing board with all this stuff again? What if they add a diplo victory?

So what now? I say yes, dig into the SDK and get some opinions on it. Please. What about these social policies? Should we do the pass so we have something "complete", or totally table it?
 
Interesting! Thanks for taking a look and the time to detail its implications here....

So.... this is tough!

As far as the detail I might need you to go in... I'd say not that much, for now. I have some idea of how this all works, but not a very good practical idea. I suppose the art aspects of CiV are a bit more self-evident. I definitely don't quite know the specific role the DLL's play in the mod... Without asking you to explain it all, I guess I'll ask these questions:

No problem. These are very good questions! Apologies about the wall of text!

- What's the best we could do with art in CiV?

On a practical level this depends a lot on whether we find an artist. I can do the technical side of importing models and the like in CiV from some standards, but making any new models/animations is beyond me for the foreseeable future. (This can include taking models from other games, but only games that use compatible formats.)

The unit graphics subforum gives a good overview of the kinds of things people are able to get into CiV at the moment. (And even one converted by me several years ago.)

It's possible to change the terrain appearances in CiV (make the grasses greener, change the deserts and such), but I've only really seen concepts of this, not too much by way of mods that make these kinds of changes. We also don't seem to really be able to affect the physical appearance of terrain much (make hills more craggy or anything like that, things that would affect the 3D positions of the textures applied to the map).

It's also worth noting that this process will be very slow. Even if an artist magicked all of the artwork we needed into existence tomorrow, it would take me a very long time to get it all into the game because that process is arduous and error prone.

New animations will be very hard to come by. Anything that doesn't map directly into the animation sets of the existing CiV units will require a significantly skilled animator doing a decent chunk of work to animate a model (even assuming we have the model to begin with). And probably working with me for quite a while to get that animation set correctly into the game.

Effects are somewhat of a problem. This is stuff like shiny particles or streams of light or anything like that. We can repurpose the CiV effects (flaming catapult and trebuchet shots seem like they would be particularly helpful), but I don't think we can add completely new ones (I need to confirm this). Deliverator shows that you can get pretty far adapting existing effects. Where we end up needing to repurpose effects like the "religion spread" like for healing and such will look very clunky since players will recognize it.

On-map UI overlays will be challenging. The stuff we talked about for visualizing T'a'r fog is a complete unknown to me. Visibility, once revealed (no longer hidden behind clouds), cannot be rolled back without reloading from a save game afterwards, for example. Having a different color arrow for targeted healing (Yellow Sister ability) may not be possible. (We seem to only be able to draw the red arrow used for ranged attacks on the map.) There are other similar limitations for anything that wants to "highlight" a hex, which we do have several abilities for. It's possible but very rigid, we pretty much only get to choose a color and it will always be a very clinical hexagon highlight.

Having Blight that spreads is very challenging, but probably possible through some hackery. Having it recede without a save reload is most likely impossible. (We avoided that mechanic due to this technical limitation.)

Terrain can't be visually changed mid-game without reloading from a saved game after changing it. (This limitation thus far seems to have persisted into Civ6.)

- What's the most we could do with a mod in CiVI without DLL source access?

Unfortunately I'd need to spend a chunk of time modding Civ6 to be able to answer this one completely. Firaxis could have made Civ6 in such a way that DLL source access is unnecessary for WoTMod. However, that would have required them making their game from the ground up with modding in mind, generalizing and componentizing every system in their game to be flexible to deal with reasonable modifications to them and provide hooks for the modder to drive their own completely bespoke mechanics as well. That's not usually how big game studios work because doing it like that is super expensive in terms of dev time.

However, I can make some educated guesses based on Civ5 and the little I've seen of Civ6 so far.

A lot of our more exotic gameplay changes become either significantly more difficult or impossible. Where it falls on that scale will vary depending on individual decisions made by individual developers at Firaxis while adding the baseline systems to Civ6. Some things will turn out to be straightforward to hook up to an existing system. Others will run into some baked in assumption in how the game works that will make them unachievable.

Anything that requires the AI to understand new concepts will be severely hampered or impossible. The severely hampered end of that scale involves a significant amount of smoke and mirrors on my part making it look like the AI is using our mechanics, when it actually it's cheating/doing something "close enough" that will tend to approximate the actions we want. We have a lot of new systems that this will affect.

I can do some vertical slices here to work out what some of the common limitations are in Civ6. The kind of progression I'd be inclined to follow is, make the following mods:

  1. Add a new unit that's a simple variant of an existing one
  2. Same as above with districts and buildings
  3. Add a new civ with a reasonably straightforward ability and some uniques
  4. Add a new unit that has a new 3D model
  5. Add a new unit with a 3D model and animations taken from another game (might be Civ5 is the easiest source)
  6. Add a more complex unit that has its own custom mission that utilizes some bespoke mechanic (including making the AI use it correctly)
  7. Create a simple scenario (smaller than Siegemod) that has a unique victory condition, some unique civs, and some unique terrain (custom resources, custom terrain, custom features, or anything like that)

That progression means we learn a lot of new stuff about Civ6's capabilities at each stage, and each one provides us with some spinning off points where we might realize that some things we want to do aren't possible yet.

Mods 4 and 5 are more about exploring the art import pipeline and how new artwork gets into the game. I'd need to have done 1-3 to have a better grasp of Civ6's basic structure before going through those, but given that one of our major potential upsides of Civ6 is artwork, I figure it's best if we evaluate that sooner than the more advanced gameplay stuff that I already have a better understand of.

It's also worth pointing out that a lot of the stuff that is possible without DLL source access will be quite "workaround"-y. The gameplay DLL determines the behavior of the game in the end, so anything we layer on top is largely going to happen without the "existing game" knowing it's there. This leads to a lot of kludges that "happen to work" and are more difficult to create in the first place.

- what kinds of mods are totally A-OK without DLL source releases?

Basic gameplay changes are the easiest - things that tweak numbers and not visuals. (Add yields to something, make a unit stronger, make a tech cost more.)

UI changes are also quite straightforward (exposing or moving information that is already available).

New units, buildings, civilizations, etc. are all very doable with DLL access. However, any uniques that have particularly unusual gameplay (aren't just "existing unit but better") can vary significantly in difficulty (ranging from quite easy to impossible, depending on what limitations we run into).

I do see the art thing as pretty major, in terms of this thing ever having the polish it likely deserves. That said, not having an artist makes that issue lose a little of its weight.

Agreed, if Civ6 has a more mature art import pipeline that makes it much more likely that we'll be able to find an artist who wants to work on this mod (since there will be more artists working on the game) and it will take less time to actually get that content into the game. I don't think our current lack of an artist counts much against this, since most mods not started by an artist only pick up artists in the later stages of their development. (Or work by getting individual contributions from artists who work on Civ5 in general.)

I'm also unfortunately still kind of struck by how I don't like CiVI nearly as much as I want to right now.I'm played two complete games. I've detailed some of my problems with it. Ultimately, I don't find it as fun. We'll see if that changes. Does that affect my opinion on how to tackle this? Yes and ultimately no. "Yes, because it makes me squeamish - will it be better with expansions? will people still be playing this in two years? will i enjoy modding it? - and no because I think even counting those problems against ciVI might not be enough to make CiV the smarter option....

This is a very good point. I think motivation wise we need to enjoy the game quite a bit to be able to keep going with a project this big. Having played Civ5 from release, I will say that Civ6 is in a much better place now - as a game - than Civ5 was. Civ5 was very bland and flavorless in the beginning and G&K changed a lot about that. BNW was the same again. So I'd be reasonably confident that Civ6 is going to be a better game long term.

Because, for me, all of this is simply secondary to the "which mod will people play?" question. Previously, we'd divined that CiVI was the likely winner there. If we're talking a significant magnitude of difference, then we kind of have to go with CiVI. If it's somehow comparable or something... ugh.

This is of course the 1 million dollar question! We want the mod to be in the hands of as many people as possible. Unfortunately it requires a crystal ball to answer. Civ5 has a massive user base, but will only really shrink from here. Civ6 has sold very well, but we don't know where it will be in a year or more. In terms of official support Civ5 is finished - Firaxis will almost certainly never patch it again, so the issues it has now it's stuck with forever. Civ6 has the chance to change some of those problems, but may have new ones.

Trusting you that without dLL source, we're Effed.... then I guess the discussion really goes in two directions:

- will there be a DLL source release?

Based on the phrasing of their release notes, I'd say there will be. At least one Firaxis developer has also said he wants to release the source (he said he wanted to do so at launch and obviously didn't get his wish)! These make me think they'll do it eventually at least. They have done so for Civ4 and Civ5, which also bodes well.

- if yes, is the delay acceptable?

Depends on the delay, we're already 3 months into Civ6, so if your estimate of 1 year's worth of redesign is correct and Civ6 has the same DLL source release schedule as Civ5 of 1.5 years (there are a lot of ifs in that sentence) then we have a 3 month delay tacked on. If we do end up in that situation though, there are a significant volume of things that can be done without DLL source (related to what I said above) that we can work on in that time. Artwork may be very workable in that time.

We also need to play a lot of Civ6, which takes a long time. Doing that before we do our redesign is probably a good idea and will take significant real world time.

If no, then it sounds like we have to go with CiV. Doing a full design only to find that it is totally a waste would probably kill the mod. That would suck.

Agreed, that would suck.

As far as the delay, then... if we got to this same point in 6 months... we'd have potentially another 6 months of downtime. That's bad. However, I doubt we'd be at this same point in six months. I'd guess closer to a year. Fundamentals will largely remain in place - especially the new systems - , but we'll need to essentially recheck everything, especially the "adapted" systems - the tech tree policies, etc. All of it would need to be redone. Not from square one, but.. square 4 or something. Think about all those civ uniques - we'd need to at least consider the changed mechanics again for each civ. The changed diplo system and religious victories and such are obviously a big change. I know you've said the reception has been largely positive, but one mixed review I found (that I agree with) pointed out how they seem to have "kitchen sinked" the game, adding tons of stuff, without all of it feeling particularly cohesive. This has the benefit of letting us keep some of the systems from CiV relatively in place, but it also offers the huge trap that a lot of this stuff is kind of wonky, and there's way more things to adapt than will be easy to predict without, say, the 1000 hours of CiV we've put in, combined.

Yeah, the game being "kitchen sinked" is quite a fair criticism. I think that's what always comes together with civ (all of them) in its expansions though. Civ5 vanilla was very bare, so this time they've gone wide on mechanics instead of deep, so hopefully the expansions will result in fleshing out those systems more.

And then there's the other scary thing about such a delay - it's likely by that point an expansion would be released... so then, back to the drawing board with all this stuff again? What if they add a diplo victory?

Civ6 will definitely be a moving target for a long time. That certainly has these negatives, but the positives of it are that the game will likely become more flexible over time (as has happened with Civ5). I think we would need to take a different, more iterative approach to design for this to work for us. At the moment we're designing everything up front and then going to implement it. I think we'll end up rethinking a lot of our designs even if we stick with Civ5 anyway, because the reality of the gameplay won't work like we expected it to. Some things we thought would be fun won't be and others we thought would be boring (that we decided against) will be awesome. We'd need to adapt and work more like that, putting individual pieces into Civ6 to try them out and seeing if we like them and building on upwards that way.

So what now? I say yes, dig into the SDK and get some opinions on it. Please. What about these social policies? Should we do the pass so we have something "complete", or totally table it?

There are two sides to this, I'd say. On one hand, we have a significant amount of "active" design that we're considering for Social Policies at the moment that might be forgotten if we move away from it for a while. We do have a lot written down, but we might need to reread several pages to get our heads back into place later.

On the other hand, I feel like we're both pretty stretched thin on this topic. (Probably because we know it's invalidated by Civ6.) You've mentioned it before and I do feel it now. This post has certainly been a very fun (and much faster to write, despite its length!) digression from Policies and I'm fairly enthusiastic about trying the Civ6 mod tools. (Talk to me again after a week of using them and that may not be the case, if they're a pain in the face to use!)

The mod progression I outlined above would also provide some very near term goals that I can post about and discuss what it means for WoTMod on here (or on another WoTMod topic in the Civ6 forum, which may be more appropriate).

Personally I'm leaning towards evaluating Civ6's tools at the moment!



And speaking of timing and the like, I'm going to be out for several evenings from now unfortunately! Through a series of events, I'll next have a free afternoon/evening to post on Sunday. Though I may be able to squeeze in a short post after D&D on Wednesday.
 
really brief response to not brief response!

On a practical level this depends a lot on whether we find an artist. I can do the technical side of importing models and the like in CiV from some standards, but making any new models/animations is beyond me for the foreseeable future. (This can include taking models from other games, but only games that use compatible formats.)

The unit graphics subforum gives a good overview of the kinds of things people are able to get into CiV at the moment. (And even one converted by me several years ago.)

It's possible to change the terrain appearances in CiV (make the grasses greener, change the deserts and such), but I've only really seen concepts of this, not too much by way of mods that make these kinds of changes. We also don't seem to really be able to affect the physical appearance of terrain much (make hills more craggy or anything like that, things that would affect the 3D positions of the textures applied to the map).

It's also worth noting that this process will be very slow. Even if an artist magicked all of the artwork we needed into existence tomorrow, it would take me a very long time to get it all into the game because that process is arduous and error prone.

New animations will be very hard to come by. Anything that doesn't map directly into the animation sets of the existing CiV units will require a significantly skilled animator doing a decent chunk of work to animate a model (even assuming we have the model to begin with). And probably working with me for quite a while to get that animation set correctly into the game.

Effects are somewhat of a problem. This is stuff like shiny particles or streams of light or anything like that. We can repurpose the CiV effects (flaming catapult and trebuchet shots seem like they would be particularly helpful), but I don't think we can add completely new ones (I need to confirm this). Deliverator shows that you can get pretty far adapting existing effects. Where we end up needing to repurpose effects like the "religion spread" like for healing and such will look very clunky since players will recognize it.

On-map UI overlays will be challenging. The stuff we talked about for visualizing T'a'r fog is a complete unknown to me. Visibility, once revealed (no longer hidden behind clouds), cannot be rolled back without reloading from a save game afterwards, for example. Having a different color arrow for targeted healing (Yellow Sister ability) may not be possible. (We seem to only be able to draw the red arrow used for ranged attacks on the map.) There are other similar limitations for anything that wants to "highlight" a hex, which we do have several abilities for. It's possible but very rigid, we pretty much only get to choose a color and it will always be a very clinical hexagon highlight.

Having Blight that spreads is very challenging, but probably possible through some hackery. Having it recede without a save reload is most likely impossible. (We avoided that mechanic due to this technical limitation.)

Terrain can't be visually changed mid-game without reloading from a saved game after changing it. (This limitation thus far seems to have persisted into Civ6.)
ok, shoot. I get the idea. The thing's likely to be pretty cobbled together in CiV. It seems like it'd mostly work visually, but will look kind of amateur-hour - which is lame, considering the polish we're going for here.

Unfortunately I'd need to spend a chunk of time modding Civ6 to be able to answer this one completely. Firaxis could have made Civ6 in such a way that DLL source access is unnecessary for WoTMod. However, that would have required them making their game from the ground up with modding in mind, generalizing and componentizing every system in their game to be flexible to deal with reasonable modifications to them and provide hooks for the modder to drive their own completely bespoke mechanics as well. That's not usually how big game studios work because doing it like that is super expensive in terms of dev time.
right. got it.

However, I can make some educated guesses based on Civ5 and the little I've seen of Civ6 so far.

A lot of our more exotic gameplay changes become either significantly more difficult or impossible. Where it falls on that scale will vary depending on individual decisions made by individual developers at Firaxis while adding the baseline systems to Civ6. Some things will turn out to be straightforward to hook up to an existing system. Others will run into some baked in assumption in how the game works that will make them unachievable.

Anything that requires the AI to understand new concepts will be severely hampered or impossible. The severely hampered end of that scale involves a significant amount of smoke and mirrors on my part making it look like the AI is using our mechanics, when it actually it's cheating/doing something "close enough" that will tend to approximate the actions we want. We have a lot of new systems that this will affect.
so, putting aside AI for a moment - stuff like the magic system, alignment, etc., are likely to be really hard to implement, then?

I can do some vertical slices here to work out what some of the common limitations are in Civ6. The kind of progression I'd be inclined to follow is, make the following mods:
  1. Add a new unit that's a simple variant of an existing one
  2. Same as above with districts and buildings
  3. Add a new civ with a reasonably straightforward ability and some uniques
  4. Add a new unit that has a new 3D model
  5. Add a new unit with a 3D model and animations taken from another game (might be Civ5 is the easiest source)
  6. Add a more complex unit that has its own custom mission that utilizes some bespoke mechanic (including making the AI use it correctly)
  7. Create a simple scenario (smaller than Siegemod) that has a unique victory condition, some unique civs, and some unique terrain (custom resources, custom terrain, custom features, or anything like that)
  1. dang, ok. So, a couple follow-ups to this:
1) how much time (in months, let's say), would making these mods take?
2) Would you be making "real" mods that you'd be releasing (minor as they may be), or are they just "Exercises?" And if the latter, is it possible to make stuff that might be "useful" to us later - i.e. a unit we might use, a rough version of a civ we might use? This question is more important if #1 has an answer that is a long length of time.
That progression means we learn a lot of new stuff about Civ6's capabilities at each stage, and each one provides us with some spinning off points where we might realize that some things we want to do aren't possible yet.

Mods 4 and 5 are more about exploring the art import pipeline and how new artwork gets into the game. I'd need to have done 1-3 to have a better grasp of Civ6's basic structure before going through those, but given that one of our major potential upsides of Civ6 is artwork, I figure it's best if we evaluate that sooner than the more advanced gameplay stuff that I already have a better understand of.

It's also worth pointing out that a lot of the stuff that is possible without DLL source access will be quite "workaround"-y. The gameplay DLL determines the behavior of the game in the end, so anything we layer on top is largely going to happen without the "existing game" knowing it's there. This leads to a lot of kludges that "happen to work" and are more difficult to create in the first place.
well, if we decide we're "in" on this and get to work pre-DLL release, I assume there's stuff we can do that is still relatively time-consuming that doesn't require it, right? If we decide we can do it either way - even if workaround-y - it's still best not to make you do things twice...

Basic gameplay changes are the easiest - things that tweak numbers and not visuals. (Add yields to something, make a unit stronger, make a tech cost more.)

UI changes are also quite straightforward (exposing or moving information that is already available).

New units, buildings, civilizations, etc. are all very doable with DLL access. However, any uniques that have particularly unusual gameplay (aren't just "existing unit but better") can vary significantly in difficulty (ranging from quite easy to impossible, depending on what limitations we run into).
right, this stuff then.

Agreed, if Civ6 has a more mature art import pipeline that makes it much more likely that we'll be able to find an artist who wants to work on this mod (since there will be more artists working on the game) and it will take less time to actually get that content into the game. I don't think our current lack of an artist counts much against this, since most mods not started by an artist only pick up artists in the later stages of their development. (Or work by getting individual contributions from artists who work on Civ5 in general.)
ok. understood

This is a very good point. I think motivation wise we need to enjoy the game quite a bit to be able to keep going with a project this big. Having played Civ5 from release, I will say that Civ6 is in a much better place now - as a game - than Civ5 was. Civ5 was very bland and flavorless in the beginning and G&K changed a lot about that. BNW was the same again. So I'd be reasonably confident that Civ6 is going to be a better game long term.
ok, I hope so...

This is of course the 1 million dollar question! We want the mod to be in the hands of as many people as possible. Unfortunately it requires a crystal ball to answer. Civ5 has a massive user base, but will only really shrink from here. Civ6 has sold very well, but we don't know where it will be in a year or more. In terms of official support Civ5 is finished - Firaxis will almost certainly never patch it again, so the issues it has now it's stuck with forever. Civ6 has the chance to change some of those problems, but may have new ones.
Right, it's very much a simple gample. Reward is far higher with CiVI, but the risk with CiV is, IMO, far lower. I think, in matters of frivolities like this, it may be best to go for broke...

Based on the phrasing of their release notes, I'd say there will be. At least one Firaxis developer has also said he wants to release the source (he said he wanted to do so at launch and obviously didn't get his wish)! These make me think they'll do it eventually at least. They have done so for Civ4 and Civ5, which also bodes well.
yes, a very good sign.

Depends on the delay, we're already 3 months into Civ6, so if your estimate of 1 year's worth of redesign is correct and Civ6 has the same DLL source release schedule as Civ5 of 1.5 years (there are a lot of ifs in that sentence) then we have a 3 month delay tacked on. If we do end up in that situation though, there are a significant volume of things that can be done without DLL source (related to what I said above) that we can work on in that time. Artwork may be very workable in that time.
right, I touched on this above. A plus, in the scheme of this development, 3 months is nothing...

We also need to play a lot of Civ6, which takes a long time. Doing that before we do our redesign is probably a good idea and will take significant real world time.
right. No way are we going to be able to match our CiV knowledge, though.

Yeah, the game being "kitchen sinked" is quite a fair criticism. I think that's what always comes together with civ (all of them) in its expansions though. Civ5 vanilla was very bare, so this time they've gone wide on mechanics instead of deep, so hopefully the expansions will result in fleshing out those systems more.
right, I hope so. I hope it works both ways.

Civ6 will definitely be a moving target for a long time. That certainly has these negatives, but the positives of it are that the game will likely become more flexible over time (as has happened with Civ5). I think we would need to take a different, more iterative approach to design for this to work for us. At the moment we're designing everything up front and then going to implement it. I think we'll end up rethinking a lot of our designs even if we stick with Civ5 anyway, because the reality of the gameplay won't work like we expected it to. Some things we thought would be fun won't be and others we thought would be boring (that we decided against) will be awesome. We'd need to adapt and work more like that, putting individual pieces into Civ6 to try them out and seeing if we like them and building on upwards that way.
Right, we're just going to have to be specifically careful about the systems we create that are somewhat redundant to ones they might add. The LB, for instance, is likely to have nothing to do with anything they might do in expansions, so we can design with relative freedom - extra stuff they add later can be adapted into the LB, or else never connected to it. And, looking at it from another direction, if, say, they add a system for, I dunno, postal services, we could adapt those into the game regardless of what already exists. The issues will come up on things like - most especially - diplomacy, which we'll feel we should implement, but is also likely to be implemented by them at a later time. Some other mechanics might share this risk, though much less (Governors, theoretically).

There are two sides to this, I'd say. On one hand, we have a significant amount of "active" design that we're considering for Social Policies at the moment that might be forgotten if we move away from it for a while. We do have a lot written down, but we might need to reread several pages to get our heads back into place later.

On the other hand, I feel like we're both pretty stretched thin on this topic. (Probably because we know it's invalidated by Civ6.) You've mentioned it before and I do feel it now. This post has certainly been a very fun (and much faster to write, despite its length!) digression from Policies and I'm fairly enthusiastic about trying the Civ6 mod tools. (Talk to me again after a week of using them and that may not be the case, if they're a pain in the face to use!)

The mod progression I outlined above would also provide some very near term goals that I can post about and discuss what it means for WoTMod on here (or on another WoTMod topic in the Civ6 forum, which may be more appropriate).

Personally I'm leaning towards evaluating Civ6's tools at the moment!
Yeah, I'm of two minds on this. I appreciate it when we reach closure on things - looking back at the half-done summaries, as we've had to recently, has illuminated what happens when we don't. So I suppose I'd prefer to "put a ribbon on it." But, we're looking at a healthy amount of work to get the second pass. This is especially true because it's "your turn" to propose the trees, which means it'll take you a ton of time (and it's you that's doing the modding tests).

[also, incidentally, I'm not convinced that the "policy" system in the CiVI version of this mod still shouldn't be pretty similar to what we've been developing - I like the duality of each tree and such. A conversation for later.]

Obviously we are stretched thin on the Ethics tree. I'd be fine in the "responder" role on the rest of the tree, but that's because you'd be doing most of the real work in this phase! Policies were always gonna be, and are, a slog.

So crap, I say you do some modding - though I do definitely want to know what the timing is like of such things. What should I be doing? I can play CiVI, but I can't play all that much of it. I'm not in a life-phase right now where I can take on anything new (that is, learn how to script) - is there anything to do besides just wait (and play)? A lot of the stuff I was supposed to be doing as we neared the programming phase in the CiV version seems like it might not be a good idea to do now...
 
ok, shoot. I get the idea. The thing's likely to be pretty cobbled together in CiV. It seems like it'd mostly work visually, but will look kind of amateur-hour - which is lame, considering the polish we're going for here.

Yeah, I think we'll struggle to truly visually differentiate ourselves from BNW, which isn't cool for the effects we're going for.

so, putting aside AI for a moment - stuff like the magic system, alignment, etc., are likely to be really hard to implement, then?

Yeah, they'll be harder and also less-AI-available when the DLL source is added. If it makes sense, we'd be layering the mechanics on top of the layer that does the gameplay logic, instead of integrating them into it.

dang, ok. So, a couple follow-ups to this:
1) how much time (in months, let's say), would making these mods take?

I'll say first that software estimates about how long something will take are notoriously inaccurate, so take my estimates with a grain of salt! They should at least provide ball parks though.

The first few of these should be very fast. Creating a new, simple-variant unit mod in Civ5 takes me about 20 minutes, for example. The objective with these is for me to become more familiar with the foundational differences between how Civ6 and Civ5 work, so I can better apply what I know already about Civ5. There are even some examples from Firaxis that do exactly what I mention in those first few, so should be very simple examples to follow.

Given Civ6 is a new, but similar platform to build on, I would expect the above to take a couple of days of me working on it. (I anticipate spending forever getting icons to work, since that's usually super finicky.)

The 3D model for a unit is a huge unknown time wise. If it's really easy, it might only take a few hours (this seems unlikely). It might take a few days of work to work out Firaxis's import tools. It might be that there's some component of their import pipeline missing that I can develop a workaround for, but that might take weeks.

The bespoke mechanic on a unit is less variable than the 3D model, since Civ6 still uses a similar system (AFAIK) for Lua hooks and the like to drive them. What abilities are possible will vary depending on the hooks Firaxis have provided, but a this stage, where I'm choosing "anything that will work" to try out the environment, that won't be much of an obstacle. (It will be something I'll be noting for how it might affect WoTMod intentions though.)

The scenario will probably take a few weeks at least. This one is about assessing bigger-picture concerns for the mod, bringing together disparate mechanics. Making systems co-operate with each other. Creating new UI. Learning how hard all of that is.

It's worth noting that all of these times are "work time", not wall clock time. Depending on how available I am (as we've seen I'm home a lot less often lately to post, this would be using the same time slots), the actual end to end time will be longer. There's of course room to not go all the way to the end of the sequence described above. I might think I know enough to make a good decision on Civ6 vs Civ5 earlier than that.

The objective with all of these is for them to be super rough around the edges and balance is 100% irrelevant. It's all about learning what Civ6's capabilities are. Which leads on to:

2) Would you be making "real" mods that you'd be releasing (minor as they may be), or are they just "Exercises?" And if the latter, is it possible to make stuff that might be "useful" to us later - i.e. a unit we might use, a rough version of a civ we might use? This question is more important if #1 has an answer that is a long length of time.

They would be exercises, I'd say. While we could work out and decide which parts of WoTMod we might want to try out, that will create a whole pile of design considerations that will considerably slow down the process of just learning about Civ6. It also makes us a lot less flexible about just doing something simple that works, since we've got an existing design for WoTMod. I'll discover new limitations and possibilities all the time while working on this, so being able to just change tack and work in a new direction at the drop of a hat will greatly improve it.

well, if we decide we're "in" on this and get to work pre-DLL release, I assume there's stuff we can do that is still relatively time-consuming that doesn't require it, right? If we decide we can do it either way - even if workaround-y - it's still best not to make you do things twice...

Yeah, there's a lot of busywork we can do in that time.

Right, it's very much a simple gample. Reward is far higher with CiVI, but the risk with CiV is, IMO, far lower. I think, in matters of frivolities like this, it may be best to go for broke...

Going for broke is sounding good to me at the moment! ;) At this stage we only want to splinter off for an evaluation though, we're not committed to Civ6 if I do these investigations now.

right, I touched on this above. A plus, in the scheme of this development, 3 months is nothing...

Man, we've been at this a long time!

right. No way are we going to be able to match our CiV knowledge, though.

Agreed, but I think we can get quite a bit closer! If I make it my mission to play more Civ6 I figure I'll play it a lot more than when I was just picking it up for a game every few months.

Right, we're just going to have to be specifically careful about the systems we create that are somewhat redundant to ones they might add. The LB, for instance, is likely to have nothing to do with anything they might do in expansions, so we can design with relative freedom - extra stuff they add later can be adapted into the LB, or else never connected to it. And, looking at it from another direction, if, say, they add a system for, I dunno, postal services, we could adapt those into the game regardless of what already exists. The issues will come up on things like - most especially - diplomacy, which we'll feel we should implement, but is also likely to be implemented by them at a later time. Some other mechanics might share this risk, though much less (Governors, theoretically).

Yes, I think we'd want to avoid "adding" a Diplo victory since it seems like a good assumption that they'll do that. If we end up with overlapping systems, then we can always integrate them together, taking the best parts of both. Agreed that it's best to start with our more WoT-inspired mechanics that will have less overlap.

Yeah, I'm of two minds on this. I appreciate it when we reach closure on things - looking back at the half-done summaries, as we've had to recently, has illuminated what happens when we don't. So I suppose I'd prefer to "put a ribbon on it." But, we're looking at a healthy amount of work to get the second pass. This is especially true because it's "your turn" to propose the trees, which means it'll take you a ton of time (and it's you that's doing the modding tests).

[also, incidentally, I'm not convinced that the "policy" system in the CiVI version of this mod still shouldn't be pretty similar to what we've been developing - I like the duality of each tree and such. A conversation for later.]

Obviously we are stretched thin on the Ethics tree. I'd be fine in the "responder" role on the rest of the tree, but that's because you'd be doing most of the real work in this phase! Policies were always gonna be, and are, a slog.

So crap, I say you do some modding - though I do definitely want to know what the timing is like of such things. What should I be doing? I can play CiVI, but I can't play all that much of it. I'm not in a life-phase right now where I can take on anything new (that is, learn how to script) - is there anything to do besides just wait (and play)? A lot of the stuff I was supposed to be doing as we neared the programming phase in the CiV version seems like it might not be a good idea to do now...

All right, it sounds like we've made a decision! I'm up for some Civ6 modding, to try stuff out as outlined above! I'll get started on this coming Sunday and post a thread in the Civ6 Creation & Customization forum to update status with what I'm trying out there (and link to it from here). I've already been reading up around how things work in Civ6 and am stoked to try it out!

EDIT: Woops, I totally did not answer your questions. I'd say playing Civ6 is something that'll be useful to us here. Are there any remaining pieces of our design that need a first pass? Is it worth going through the summaries and flagging places that still call out things we have decided as undecided? And find any glaring holes where we've left something ambiguous?
 
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I'll say first that software estimates about how long something will take are notoriously inaccurate, so take my estimates with a grain of salt! They should at least provide ball parks though.

The first few of these should be very fast. Creating a new, simple-variant unit mod in Civ5 takes me about 20 minutes, for example. The objective with these is for me to become more familiar with the foundational differences between how Civ6 and Civ5 work, so I can better apply what I know already about Civ5. There are even some examples from Firaxis that do exactly what I mention in those first few, so should be very simple examples to follow.

Given Civ6 is a new, but similar platform to build on, I would expect the above to take a couple of days of me working on it. (I anticipate spending forever getting icons to work, since that's usually super finicky.)

The 3D model for a unit is a huge unknown time wise. If it's really easy, it might only take a few hours (this seems unlikely). It might take a few days of work to work out Firaxis's import tools. It might be that there's some component of their import pipeline missing that I can develop a workaround for, but that might take weeks.

The bespoke mechanic on a unit is less variable than the 3D model, since Civ6 still uses a similar system (AFAIK) for Lua hooks and the like to drive them. What abilities are possible will vary depending on the hooks Firaxis have provided, but a this stage, where I'm choosing "anything that will work" to try out the environment, that won't be much of an obstacle. (It will be something I'll be noting for how it might affect WoTMod intentions though.)

The scenario will probably take a few weeks at least. This one is about assessing bigger-picture concerns for the mod, bringing together disparate mechanics. Making systems co-operate with each other. Creating new UI. Learning how hard all of that is.

It's worth noting that all of these times are "work time", not wall clock time. Depending on how available I am (as we've seen I'm home a lot less often lately to post, this would be using the same time slots), the actual end to end time will be longer. There's of course room to not go all the way to the end of the sequence described above. I might think I know enough to make a good decision on Civ6 vs Civ5 earlier than that.

The objective with all of these is for them to be super rough around the edges and balance is 100% irrelevant. It's all about learning what Civ6's capabilities are. Which leads on to:
ok... so, a few months, give or take!

They would be exercises, I'd say. While we could work out and decide which parts of WoTMod we might want to try out, that will create a whole pile of design considerations that will considerably slow down the process of just learning about Civ6. It also makes us a lot less flexible about just doing something simple that works, since we've got an existing design for WoTMod. I'll discover new limitations and possibilities all the time while working on this, so being able to just change tack and work in a new direction at the drop of a hat will greatly improve it.
ok, totally understand and agree. Now that I see we're talking about projects that are a couple of days of work (for some), it's absolutely not worth you wasting time "Designing" it beyond what will yield the most effective results for your investigations. I was thinking we were talking about large undertakings that would be "wasted" effort otherwise.

Going for broke is sounding good to me at the moment! ;) At this stage we only want to splinter off for an evaluation though, we're not committed to Civ6 if I do these investigations now.
yup

Man, we've been at this a long time!
yes, but I wouldn't say its in Development Hell! Not at all!

Agreed, but I think we can get quite a bit closer! If I make it my mission to play more Civ6 I figure I'll play it a lot more than when I was just picking it up for a game every few months.
Yeah, I'll head back to it soon. Torment: Tides of Numenera came out this week (it's the only game I've ever kickstart-contributed), but I'll wait on that I suppose!

Yes, I think we'd want to avoid "adding" a Diplo victory since it seems like a good assumption that they'll do that. If we end up with overlapping systems, then we can always integrate them together, taking the best parts of both. Agreed that it's best to start with our more WoT-inspired mechanics that will have less overlap.
I think the nice thing about this, given the kinds of civs we've already designed, is that most of the "diplo civs" were "diplo civs" because of some mechanic adjacent to diplo - gold, trade, cs stuff, etc. Very few of the uniques we developed were about the actual Compact or the diplo victory. These kinds of civs can still largely exist, with us just making sure the other uniques lead to another victory type.

All right, it sounds like we've made a decision! I'm up for some Civ6 modding, to try stuff out as outlined above! I'll get started on this coming Sunday and post a thread in the Civ6 Creation & Customization forum to update status with what I'm trying out there (and link to it from here). I've already been reading up around how things work in Civ6 and am stoked to try it out!

EDIT: Woops, I totally did not answer your questions. I'd say playing Civ6 is something that'll be useful to us here. Are there any remaining pieces of our design that need a first pass? Is it worth going through the summaries and flagging places that still call out things we have decided as undecided? And find any glaring holes where we've left something ambiguous?
cool. So, I'll sort of sit tight for now, maybe. I'm not sure if there's much super ambiguous stuff in the summaries... I can dig in over the next few days, perhaps.

As far as what's still in need of a first pass - Tenets, definitely. I don't want to do a first pass of those, though. Not without more substantial work on the Policies - there's too much potential overlap between them, and thus potential wasted time to work on them before we settle the policies more. Other than that, there's flavory stuff - coming up with unit names and such (at least inasmuch as coming up with a bunch of "horsemen" and "sword guys" and such. I can dig into that stuff if it seems like you end up down a particularly deep rabbit hole
 
New topic is up in the Civ6 Creation & Customization forum! It's been good fun so far. Seems fairly similar to CiV in the right ways. Some nice new flexibility in places.

Oh, also, I forgot to mention an enormous potential upside of CiVI modding compared to CiV: multiplayer mods. Seems like mods are intended to be a part of multiplayer this time and as long as players have the same sets of mods enabled, several mods that have been created already work in multiplayer. (That of course will mean a whole host of multiplayer-specific bugs in WoTMod, but alas.)

ok... so, a few months, give or take!

Yeah, seems like a reasonable time frame.

ok, totally understand and agree. Now that I see we're talking about projects that are a couple of days of work (for some), it's absolutely not worth you wasting time "Designing" it beyond what will yield the most effective results for your investigations. I was thinking we were talking about large undertakings that would be "wasted" effort otherwise.

As you can see from the topic above, very rough and ready!

yes, but I wouldn't say its in Development Hell! Not at all!

Lol, I think having to go back and forth via text on the forums definitely slows us down a lot!

Yeah, I'll head back to it soon. Torment: Tides of Numenera came out this week (it's the only game I've ever kickstart-contributed), but I'll wait on that I suppose!

No worries, I'll be tinkering for a while so there's no big rush.

I think the nice thing about this, given the kinds of civs we've already designed, is that most of the "diplo civs" were "diplo civs" because of some mechanic adjacent to diplo - gold, trade, cs stuff, etc. Very few of the uniques we developed were about the actual Compact or the diplo victory. These kinds of civs can still largely exist, with us just making sure the other uniques lead to another victory type.

Yeah, that is good.

cool. So, I'll sort of sit tight for now, maybe. I'm not sure if there's much super ambiguous stuff in the summaries... I can dig in over the next few days, perhaps.

As far as what's still in need of a first pass - Tenets, definitely. I don't want to do a first pass of those, though. Not without more substantial work on the Policies - there's too much potential overlap between them, and thus potential wasted time to work on them before we settle the policies more. Other than that, there's flavory stuff - coming up with unit names and such (at least inasmuch as coming up with a bunch of "horsemen" and "sword guys" and such. I can dig into that stuff if it seems like you end up down a particularly deep rabbit hole

I think there's a fair amount of red left in the summaries that it would be good to pull together and know what we still need to define. And I'm sure there are plenty that we've decided elsewhere but a pre-existing red reference to it in an older summary has been left stale.

Yeah, agreed, on Tenets. We'd want to be done with Policies before going into those.

Flavor diving is a good call, we'll use that stuff regardless of what we choose.
 
New topic is up in the Civ6 Creation & Customization forum! It's been good fun so far. Seems fairly similar to CiV in the right ways. Some nice new flexibility in places.

Oh, also, I forgot to mention an enormous potential upside of CiVI modding compared to CiV: multiplayer mods. Seems like mods are intended to be a part of multiplayer this time and as long as players have the same sets of mods enabled, several mods that have been created already work in multiplayer. (That of course will mean a whole host of multiplayer-specific bugs in WoTMod, but alas.)
right, cool!

I think there's a fair amount of red left in the summaries that it would be good to pull together and know what we still need to define. And I'm sure there are plenty that we've decided elsewhere but a pre-existing red reference to it in an older summary has been left stale.

Yeah, agreed, on Tenets. We'd want to be done with Policies before going into those.

Flavor diving is a good call, we'll use that stuff regardless of what we choose.
Cool. I'll spend some time looking through the red in the near future, and might be able to do some flavor stuff too.
 
hey! So it looks like things are still going slowly on the "experimentation" thread. hopefully we get our answers soon....

for my part, I have done zero flavor-diving or anything like that.

That said, I have been playing a fair amount of civ. I've recently played and won as 2 civs - France and Kongo, though really, the France game was three games since it didn't go my way the first few times (there was one where I lost rather early in the game [due to culture, I think) in a way that seemed preposterous). I am finally getting the hang of this game, in terms of its mechanics. I will say that the game does a terrible job getting you to understand how most of its systems work. I now mostly understand the strategy associated with ideal district (and later, wonder) placement, but that was only after a lot of digging online. And it's still loosey-goosey, at best, in terms of broad strategy - I find I can be very targetted (with culture or something) and it'll work out well, but a "balanced" empire seems hard to do. But yes, tooltips are useless.

I also think this game has some broken aspects. Playing as Kongo, I had an absolutely sprawling empire. I took over my entire continent relatively quickly, and kept every city. Most of these cities grew quite well because of the Kongo Mbanza UD. This highlighted a few issues for me:

- there's basically no reason not to have a ton of cities. Yes, my amenities were low the whole game, but it didn't seem to matter much. This takes away a lot of strategic depth. Yes, I know some people miss the "more is more" aspects of CIV, but the district system means more is much much more. Every colony is useful if it has at least one district that you need. In some regards, this is good in that it makes mid-late game expansion viable, but when extrapolated, it became quite ridiculous.

- GP and GW stuff is all messed up. For almost the whole game, I had GA, GMu, and GW sitting around, waiting for places to drop their great works. This is with a ton of cities, and essentially all of them having a theater district with all the contemporarily-available buildings. I didn't have all the wonders or anything, but I definitely had some. I know that Kongo's UA spawns a bunch of GP, but it seems ridiculous to have 20ish cities, all focused clearly on creating placing to store these works, only to have not even close to enough spots. At one point, I had 2 GW, 3 GA, and 4 GMu sitting around my capital, waiting. Apparently you can sell these and make good money. I was too scared to try. If that's true, that only makes this worse....

- also, the theming bonuses are very difficult to understand. Wasn't ever able to figure it out, despite apparent similarity to CiV. As Catherine/France, I was trying for Culture, but failed (and won religion) because I couldn't maximize any of this.

So yeah, steam tells me i'm 84 hours into this game! (i suspect some of that is waiting around, though, and doesn't "count"). I mostly understand it now, but not completely. I enjoy it more than I did before, as it has gained in transparency to me. I sitll have serious misgivings, though, and overall find it a bit less fun than CiV... It's also made me realize that it is much less accessible to prospective non-Civ players - fans of the WoT that are interested in the mod - then a ciV version would be...
 
I won a France game with 3 cities. The trick is to focus on some of the good early wonders, then trade for amenities (luxuries). Then focus on most of the tourism wonders. Especially the Eiffel Tower, you can build so many seaside resorts.
 
I won a France game with 3 cities. The trick is to focus on some of the good early wonders, then trade for amenities (luxuries). Then focus on most of the tourism wonders. Especially the Eiffel Tower, you can build so many seaside resorts.
the wonders give you enough spots for great works?
 
the wonders give you enough spots for great works?

Build theater districts as well, but I did those later. I did those and France's custom building later in the game. A completely upgraded theater district is need more in late game. I was playing against Russia so for most of the game I wasn't getting great people for a while.
 
Got the idea to try to find a good WoT mod for CiV5 and came across this!
However, I can't seem to find where to download it. :( If someone could point me in the right direction it would be much appreciated. <3
 
Got the idea to try to find a good WoT mod for CiV5 and came across this!
However, I can't seem to find where to download it. :( If someone could point me in the right direction it would be much appreciated. <3
Sadly, nowhere! We started (got pretty far!) the development of the mod for Civ V. When Civ VI came out, we paused, intending to go to Civ V.... sadly, the full access to the source code hasn't been released for Civ VI yet, so we're waiting in limbo!
 
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