Scions of Patria: Seeking ideas, feedback for undead civ module

Checked out some UUs, graphics and tried playing the newest one a few turns. Awesome.



It took me 30 minutes to make my first 'button' today, so I am impressed.

Now, I noticed you have some files named 'for fall further', I am working on the giant civilization. Is there something special I need to do to make sure that my mod is so broadly usable as possible?

 

I was a bit taken aback when I realized how many buttons I'd need to make. The hardest part was finding the art... well, the "hardest part" not counting all the effort put forth by the artists themselves. And the makers of Gimp... and the guy who created the Civ4 button-making utility...

The only file of special concern is usually the civ. infos file. (CIV4CivilizationInfos.xml, IIRC.)

In it each civ has a list of UUs it can build and, significantly, all the units it _can't_ build. So every civ other than the Bannor has a line specifically banning it from building the Bannor hero.

So in your civ file you need to include those bans - not a problem - but if you don't want to have to update the entry for every other civ you have to take a little care with the unit classes.

If you make up a new "unit class" - a unit that isn't a civ-only version of an existing unit - tie it to something only your civ has, like a building or a special tech. (Units can have either a building class (like "Palace") or a specific building ("Amurite Palace") as a req.)

For Fall Further you need a FF version of the civ. infos file.

You also need to have different versions of the unit file, the promotions file, and the units schema file. That's the bad news. The good news is that each unit or promo entry just needs two extra lines. A search and replace can do it easily.

At least I get errors if I don't update the files. I'm surprised I haven't gotten any bug reports for previous mods...

 

unless you make a ton of new units that arent replacement of standard units, i find you can use a few of the unit classes for special civ units, like a UU for a freak, a demagog, or a flagbearer, since they all have their own unit classes but would just be a NONE for your civilization.. so you can save yourself making a NONE for them and making a new unitclass by just making a UU for it.

though personally i think all the special units for a civ should be standardized as like UNITCLASS_CIVUNIT1 etc, would cut out some unit classes

 

The Patrian Ruins resource can only be hooked up via Fort or Town - this is intended, I assume?

I was thinking about giving their workers / awakened the ability to build quarries on flatlands, since they don't farm. I played them with Mailbox's modular improvements mod and quarries really let you max your hammers (and generate a few gold until you get haunted lands going)...

 

Good idea.

It's supposed to work with a mine and a road. I just tried it with fresh FFH2 and FF installs - I'm learning! - and it worked that way. What kind of terrain/feature is the Artifacts on? Is this a problem with more than one instance of the Artifacts?

EDIT: I may have made a mistake with the "For Fall Further" files. I'm going to start making two separate downloads to help avoid mistakes.

That makes sense... though I'm thinking they may already get too many hammers.

How have you found the Scions, so far as balance goes - esp. production and population? Here's my experience:

In my current game (Immortal dif.) I increased the cost of Awakened/Reborn by 50% (but you do start with 1 Awakened) and it's still going like my previous games: Put capital in hilly region, research Crafting, Mining, Mysticism. Mine those hills and pump out lots of Awakened. First pour them into the capital. When you get Mysticism switch to God King and make even more.

I'm considering lowering the cost of Settlers, raising the cost of Awakened quite a bit... and maybe giving many of their units (probably most/all the UUs) some ability to enslave. Or put a gold cost on adding Awakened to a city? Tying expansion to economy more tightly... sort of like with the Khzd.

The basic problem may be while cities that increase with food do so on a diminishing curve, the Awakened stay the same cost.

Fallow is also much nicer than I expected. (Now that you can build population, at least.) No worrying about cities accidentally increasing in pop and getting an Angry cit, for one thing. But all the city-laborers who would have been growing food can now devote themselves to hammers and commerce. So they, for example, can produce hordes of warriors to crush your neighbors. Once your capital is pouring forth Awakened each of your cities seems to rise to it's Happy-population limit very quickly.

That's the bad news. And maybe it isn't so bad... The intention was that they'd grow relatively slowly, but very "solidly". Good culture, good defenses. But if I can't make it work out that way I can probably make it work another way.

I guess spreading quickly fits well with the emphasis on culture. Err... and with a generally defensive posture for the military. Overall city size could, if necessary, be checked easily via a Palace happiness penalty, I think... So maybe my intention was just mistaken.

What do you guys think?

I've also fixed/tweaked some other things. Ghostwalkers were nerfed a bit (they weren't supposed to be better than Rangers) and several units were being built with food, to name a couple.

 

Given the problems with Vista and modular loading, is there any way to play this under Vista, or are Vista users just SOL?

-- ACS

 

After some some cut-and-pasting you can play it.

You can insert the module's entries to the corresponding files in FFH2 or FF. Skip any files with "Schema" in the file name. Then delete the module's .xml files, including the Schema. There are about 20 files you'd need to work with.

So, for example, the module's SOP_CIV4BuildingInfos.xml would be be added to the base mod's CIV4BuildingInfos.xml.

You couldn't add the whole file, though... you'd leave out the inital sets of tags.

The module's BuildingInfos starts:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- Created with the FfH editor by Kael -->
<!-- Sid Meier's Civilization 4 -->
<!-- Copyright Firaxis Games 2005 -->
<!-- -->
<!-- Building Infos -->
<Civ4BuildingInfos xmlns="x-schema:SOP_CIV4BuildingsSchema.xml">
    <BuildingInfos>
        <BuildingInfo>
            <BuildingClass>BUILDINGCLASS_BREWERY</BuildingClass>
            <Type>BUILDING_RAPTURE_MILL</Type>
            <SpecialBuildingType>NONE</SpecialBuildingType>
            <Description>TXT_KEY_BUILDING_RAPTURE_MILL</Description>
            <Civilopedia>TXT_KEY_BUILDING_RAPTURE_MILL_PEDIA</Civilopedia>
            <Strategy></Strategy>
            <Help></Help>
etc. etc.

You'd leave off everything before <BuildingInfo>

The file ends

Code:

        </BuildingInfo>
    </BuildingInfos>
</Civ4BuildingInfos>

You'd leave off everything after </BuildingInfo>. Or remove those lines from the base mod's file.

All the files have a similar structure. Except SOP_CIV4GameText.xml - for it grab everything between the inital <TEXT> and the final </TEXT> and insert it.

Another exception is the SOP_CIV4Promotions.xml. It already contains all the base mod's entries. For it change the name: Drop "SOP_" and change line 7. Where it says "SOP_CIV4UnitSchema.xml" have it say "CIV4UnitSchema.xml."

For the art files (the "art" and "buttons" folders, the .dds and/or .nif files in "civ" and "terrain".) - Leave their folders and files they are: Modules/SOP.

If that's not clear ask further questions in the thread pointed to by the first link in my sig below. (It's a general modular mod thread. The first posts there may also have some info useful to you.)

For version 1.0 - when I'm confident there are no nasty bugs and am either happy with the balance or tired of tweaking it - I'll probably release non-modular version for Vista... for either FFH2 or FF if that's what most Vista users use. I don't know hpw much I'd maintain such a version, though - it'd have to be changed with every patch.

 

A quick note:

I was trying out a new scheme - cheaper settlers, more expensive Awakened, basically - and realized I really should reset the Settler cost as westamastalash does in his speed mod. (Mods, unless it's corrected-for, can add 100 hammers to Settler costs.) That'll change the speed at which other civs grow significantly for the better.

 

Some ideas on the Scions' Ideology.

Slogan: dead can not die.

SP consider age of being living as a human childhood. The aim of life is to prepare one's spirit to the post-life existance. Living people are free from any work or service and have as much pleasure as possible. After the death (natural, but performed with a special ritual) they gain a strong and durable undead body which is free from decay and able to renew due to developed necrotic technologies. Being unable to become undead is concidered a great dishonor to the whole ancestry. Undead looses most emotions and instincts and therefore can have some problems with motivations. So they rely on a severe ethic law and the idea of duty. Some time undead human work for the society, nurse, educate and entertain living offsprings. (And produce high culture.) With time going undead become less motivated and finally (s)he turns into "sleeper" and conserved in a giant ancestral tombs. But (s)he can be waken up when extra workers or warriors are needed.

SP are very lawful, very rational and very conservative. They consider living nations to be "orphans" as their ancestors can not take care of them. And they don't speak to living seriously because their legal age comes with death.

 

about the awakened being to "cheap to build": how about tying in a gold cost to their "add to city" option? Say, 50 gold or so (to purchase the ritual items needed to transform them into workers).

By the way, link the download in the first post, makes it a lot easier to find!

 

I figured it out. In the SOP_CIV4ArtDefines_Unit.xml file, there is an error in the awakened entry. WorkerWorker should be Worker/Worker

After this change, no more errors for me.

 

Good ideas... though currently I'm having them start out dead. The "natural born" Scions - The Awakened - are all from the Bottomless Tomb. Slaves represent a few people captured/turned. The Reborn and those created by the Necropolis building are "immigrants" turned on a large scale.

The living would have to work in the Scions cities. The Scions are terrible snobs and wouldn't put up with them otherwise, and are pretty engaged in the world. At least over the time-span covered by a game.

However, I can see established families of the living functioning as your describe. I may include a description like that in the Necropolis entry.

I may do that. The first experiment with the new system is going well, though, in that I'm not winning. Poor starting position, though. The Scions might just be hyper-sensitive to the Captial's location. That could be fixed, if true.

Good idea. I think I'll start a new thread, too, for the first post-beta version.

Thanks! Weird - I thought such an error would have been crashing everyone's game. Next time I'll know to check the art_def.

 

Giving all their units the ability to enslave is incredibly powerful (I would know since the civilization I'm making right now based on the same Fallow trait + slaves add pop mechanic uses the same principle). Having the ability to both build population for cheap and capture enemies is far too powerful and I've been experimenting to see what sorts of things can counterbalance such an amazing ability.

 

How high did you make the enslave chance?

I'm concerned about the Scions and the Slavery civic. I'd like to discourage it but I haven't thought of a satisfying rationale for a specific method. Or a good method, either. The best I've come up with so far is happiness penalties from certain buildings.

I wonder if a unit can be given a negative enslavement chance? So that if Slavery is used the +25 from the civic is either canceled out or diminished.

I'll definitely avoid going for more enslavement since you're working on such a civ. And the latest experiments with increasing build costs have been encouraging.




Version 1 released. New thread started. At least two bugs spotted already - go join in before they're all gone!

 

Starts at 50% for tier 1 units and goes up 10% per tier.

The thing I'm worrying about is the slave trade, especially since its only requirement is being part of the Undercouncil, which doesn't require a religion.

My actual idea for the civilization is to make it opposed to yours in terms of playstyle, focusing very heavily on war and enslavement with low culture and a very dogmatic build order. I think I'll keep the ability of the capital to produce "slaves" though, because otherwise the early game becomes far too slow. I'll tinker some more with what I have though.

You should definitely add a few units with enslavement chance though, it's a lot of fun.

 

im wondering why you bother with slaves? why not just give their units an undead capture like the werewolves have?
seems like you could avoid living slaves completely that way.. when you mix living in there it tends to become more like sidar (who are undead), and if you mix in demons you get infernal (they have a lot of undead units besides their demon ones)

 

The Sidar are definitely not undead. They despise the undead more than any other civ. It is an affront to their god Arawn (whom they don't really worship but instead revere, since he doesn't care about them). Apparently slowing consuming their own souls while alive if far less offensive than reanimating dead corpses.


I too see no point in slaves here.

 

Good idea! Thanks! I rarely see werewolves in a game - just didn't occur to me. (Though Spiders use the same function? I see too much of them.)

 

ya i was simplifying a bit, though sidar seem to me like mages in dnd on their way to lichdom, and id consider liches undead.. and shades are considered undead in dnd i believe, theyre definitely not run of the mill undead like zombies or skelettons, but i think their difference is more self proclaimed than a real distinction

 

near the bottom of the units entry in the unitinfos theres a unitcombatcapture tag or something to that effect where you can enter the type of units combat creates and chance for such

edit added:

the convert can be useful for similar purpose too if you want to keep promotions

you avoid the slavery problems this way too (since slaves wont be useful for them)