Suggestion: Culturally Linked Starts and Era-Specific Civs

[LemonTea]

Originally I put these suggestions over at the LoR subforum, but was advised to raise them here instead:


RevolutionsDCM is a brilliant mod (and a brilliant mod component in other mods...). I also love the work Jean Elcard has done with Culturally Linked Starts, where the relative positioning of civs' starting points is based on their actual proximity in RL.
So, Greece starts near Rome and Egypt, for example.


Perhaps the CLS code could be merged and adapted to work with the RevolutionDCM mod?


If BarbarianCiv spawns a minor civ near China and India, for instance, make sure the new civ is chosen from a shortlist of Mongolia/Persia/Korea/Khmer/Japan.
Similarly with civs spawned from Revolutions.


An Era-Specific component could also be bolted on, so that Mongolia, for example, could only emerge in the Middle Ages or Renaissance.
CLS and Era restrictions would also apply when selecting and placing civs at the start of a game.


I envisage CLS and ESC being provided as options, so that the player could choose both, one option, or neither.

 

[BobTheTerrible]

I agree completely with both suggestions.

 

[jdog5000]

I'll check out the CLS code and see whether it would be easy to incorporate, if so it could also help with selection of rebel civ types and perhaps replace the functional but not elegant RebelTypes.py file.

The era specific part I'm not as keen on ... seems like you'd see a lot more of the civs which would spawn in the earlier eras. America would basically never appear as a barb civ for example, but I guess if it can be disabled I could always turn it off. Hmmm

 

[LemonTea]

To compensate for America never appearing as a barbarian Civ, you could widen the range of civs that it might spawn from as a rebel civ in the renaissance, industrial and modern eras. So, not just from England (though England would have the strongest probability) - also from France, Aztecs, Maya, basically any civ that at one time or another had a strong presence in north and central America.

Or, when using terra maps, incorporate whether the rebellion is happening in the New World or not. There are a number of reasonable ways you could increase America's chance of appearing I think.

Edit: Just had a look at your RebelTypes.py file. I can see that you already have America has a rebel for Aztecs and Native Americans (didn't realise that before). So maybe the calculation of which civ to choose as rebels could be based purely on some application of the CLS logic?

 

[BobTheTerrible]

The era specific part I'm not as keen on ... seems like you'd see a lot more of the civs which would spawn in the earlier eras. America would basically never appear as a barb civ for example, but I guess if it can be disabled I could always turn it off. Hmmm

Well, the way that mod works is it has an xml file specifying a min era and a max era for each civ to begin. By default the min era is 1 and the max era is 5 for every civ, so it is unchanged from default, but it adds the functionality for the people who want it.

 

[Tholish]

My version of this wouldn't work for Rev DCM because it checks for minEra and maxEra only when the game is being started. Thus you can start in the Renaissance and play an entire game with other Renaissance era civs. Something more sophisticated would be needed for RevDCM. In fact in tjhe 3.17 version of my own mod I used to specifically make some civs that were tagged as neither human nor ai playable and they still spawned. I specifically wanted that, but the point is Civ spawning doesn't seem to check for Playable or AIPlayable and my EraSpecific modcomp uses the same methods.

 

[jdog5000]

Thanks for the info guys. It sounds quite reasonable, will check it out.

 

[SlightlyMad]

Just wanted to chime in that I'd also love to have culturally linked starts and barbarian civ spawning. I don't care at all about things being era-specific though.