ScalesMod

[Tholish]

In making my Future mod, I changed the late era look of some older units, and in the process noticed that graphical scales were bad. Specifically once you reach the modern era, I made the Frigate look like the WW2 Frigate from Road to War, and noticed how bad it looked next to a Battleship. So, I adjusted the scales of all the naval units. I halved the size of work boats and premodern units and made them fleets of 3. Modern ships I adjusted, increasing some by 50 percent or more. This came out real pretty. Then I thought, why not do this with land units? I had already replaced the settler with a wagon train that later looks like a hummer, but to make these look good as a convoy I had to reduce scale. Now, by reducing the scale of infantry, and increasing the formation size to 12, I got a really nice effect.
The infantry and wagon train and farm and mine and trees all look like they belong together.

I figure I could take the standard game and change all the scales so that there are exactly three scales in the game:
1.improvements and land units.
2.routes (about 1/3 scale of imps)
3. cities and sea units (about 1/10 scale of imps).

Is there any desire for a mod like this?

 

[Agent327]

I think there is! (MaxRiga did something like this with his mod, but it's not available as a separate mod.)

 

[Tholish]

OK, I'll do it. The relevant files are UnitInfos, BuildingInfos, UnitArtInfos, BuildingArtInfos and the Lsystem files. Oh, and GameDefines to allow better zoom. I'll copy those into a folder, start it as a mod, and use WB to make an array of all units and buildings, then save it. Then I'll go back and forth adjusting scales and seeing how they look.

 

[musicfreak]

This would be really cool, I'd definitely use it. Let me know if you need any help.

 

[Tholish]

This is what I came up with. I haven't adjusted the iscales, so some units look tiny in the civilopedia, and I haven't adjusted the size of city buildings to all match (the problem is, generic bulidings change scale from era to era, so making built buildings match them would require updates per era) Also, though I adjusted improvement sizes, they didn't take. To really make it perfect I would have to work with the LPlots some. But it's basically what I had in mind.

Also, I played with it and frankly it was hard to deal with. Though you can zoom in, you can't stay there and see the big picture, the game board so you can make moves, and its a pain to zoom in to see each unit. What would work best would be if there were a modification like this:

The default zoom shows the square of the currently selected unit, filling the middle of the screen. Any movement of the mouse wheel goes to the current map zoom (adjusted by the mouse wheel) for an overview. A hot key or movement to the next unit returns to default zoom.

An alternative is to have an enlarged individual as part of the group. This is the one you can look at to see the map. Then there are the little ones on the ground that you can zoom in to see things in proper scale.

None of these solutions is satisfactory.