As someone who is trying to shepherd my own creation through this process, hopefully successfully but I have moments of doubt, I think the best advice is to follow your own passion and methodology. Personally, I agree with your approach of starting from top-down, but that's the way I think, and that's what motivates me. I can also see another approach that builds from bottom-up: one step at a time, working out small pieces and then assembling them into a whole. Since you ain't gettin' paid for this, whatever keeps you going is what you "should" do.
That said, however you work, a coherent but flexible vision is critical. I might suggest the following questions:
* What is the most interesting part of Civilization's gameplay?
* What is the twist or change that motivates your mod?
* Why will playing this mod be fun?
* And in the words of Sid, what are the interesting choices a player will have to make?
I do find myself going back constantly to the vanilla Civ4 mechanics and learning from it how to balance a game, how to sequence different choices for the player, and just figuring out what makes it tick so I can deconstruct it and put it together again.
For example, one problem that Roanoke shares with SotM is a lack of food -- as it turns out the Rule of Three (food, production, money) is a crucial balancing mechanism that is pretty core to the Civ game experience. If you make each terrain and improvement move in only one direction, you take away the "interesting choices." For example, in vanilla Civ I struggle with whether to put farms or cottages next to rivers -- because early on farms can only be put next to rivers, but rivers give bonus commerce which boost cottages. In Roanoke, while there are a handful of improvement choices, there is only one obvious choice per tile, which means there really is no choice at all.
My point isn't to get into the specifics of that particular mechanic, but to underline that understanding the core mechanics of the game is critical if you want to figure out (a) what makes the game fun, generally, and (b) how to make your own mod fun, specifically. My messing with the core resource model of Civ, Roanoke now faces a challenge of how to replace it with something equally fun, or putting it back and covering it up with cosmetics. (I guess this is a long-winded way of echoing what Thamis was saying).
In going back to the very first posts laying out this mod concept there was an idea that SotM would be a prelude to the colonization of Mars. IMHO, colonizing Mars is far more interesting that the Moon. Colonizing the Moon strikes me as quite static, kind of like an oil-drilling expedition. Colonizing Mars seems a lot more dynamic, as there is a realistic chance of terraforming the surface to be livable -- tho perhaps that's my own bias in working on Roanoke.
That said, however you work, a coherent but flexible vision is critical. I might suggest the following questions:
* What is the most interesting part of Civilization's gameplay?
* What is the twist or change that motivates your mod?
* Why will playing this mod be fun?
* And in the words of Sid, what are the interesting choices a player will have to make?
I do find myself going back constantly to the vanilla Civ4 mechanics and learning from it how to balance a game, how to sequence different choices for the player, and just figuring out what makes it tick so I can deconstruct it and put it together again.
For example, one problem that Roanoke shares with SotM is a lack of food -- as it turns out the Rule of Three (food, production, money) is a crucial balancing mechanism that is pretty core to the Civ game experience. If you make each terrain and improvement move in only one direction, you take away the "interesting choices." For example, in vanilla Civ I struggle with whether to put farms or cottages next to rivers -- because early on farms can only be put next to rivers, but rivers give bonus commerce which boost cottages. In Roanoke, while there are a handful of improvement choices, there is only one obvious choice per tile, which means there really is no choice at all.
My point isn't to get into the specifics of that particular mechanic, but to underline that understanding the core mechanics of the game is critical if you want to figure out (a) what makes the game fun, generally, and (b) how to make your own mod fun, specifically. My messing with the core resource model of Civ, Roanoke now faces a challenge of how to replace it with something equally fun, or putting it back and covering it up with cosmetics. (I guess this is a long-winded way of echoing what Thamis was saying).
In going back to the very first posts laying out this mod concept there was an idea that SotM would be a prelude to the colonization of Mars. IMHO, colonizing Mars is far more interesting that the Moon. Colonizing the Moon strikes me as quite static, kind of like an oil-drilling expedition. Colonizing Mars seems a lot more dynamic, as there is a realistic chance of terraforming the surface to be livable -- tho perhaps that's my own bias in working on Roanoke.
