Welcome to C7: New Players Start Here

[WildWeazel]

What is this?​

C7 (working title) is an in-development 4X strategy game with a historical focus inspired by games such as Civilization, Galactic Civilizations, and Humankind. We aim to create a new game that looks and plays like classic Civ but incorporates features from the best of the genre and our own dreams.

Download the latest C7 here!​

Official links​

• Official C7 homepage!
• Official GitHub page!
• Official Discord server!
• Official subforum: you're in it!

Overview​

What it might look like: A Vision for C7​

Rationale: Why are we doing this?​

At more than 20 years old, Civ3 has held up well with attractive 2D artwork, excellent audio, and approachable but nuanced gameplay. It's also great for modding thanks to its scenario editor, data-driven rules, and relatively accessible assets. As such it has accumulated a huge library of custom content, maybe the biggest in the series, and many wide-ranging mods featuring lots of that new content. That in turn has contributed to its longevity, especially in the multiplayer arena where specialized fast-paced mods dominate.
however...
The flip side of straightforward modding is that it's not all that powerful. It's easy to swap out content, but pretty much limited to that. We've been very clever with our tools over the years, but there are plenty of hard barriers. The game was made with a lot of hard-coded limits and assumptions, and predates advanced capabilities like SDKs that modern gamers expect from "mods". Not to mention a number of problematic bugs, and a very frustrating lack of error handling. Civ3 is also a long-dead IP in legal limbo, and there is no hope that the developers will ever attend to it again.
however...
Some advanced community-made tools, like C3X by @Flintlock and the cross-platform editor by @Quintillus, allow us to do some things that the game was not intended to do. But even with these powerful tools, we are still quite limited in many ways. The structure of the game makes it impractical to even hack many things, particularly the (max) number of things, despite those often being the most wished for. We can't increase the number of civs, culture groups, eras, buildings or terrain types, cities, map dimensions, and more. The graphics formats and fixed UI layout are also limiting.
however...
Frustrated by those limitations, the modding community long dreamed of what could be done with Civ3 if it were actually designed around mod support and more flexible rules. Besides that, as time goes on it becomes harder to play the game on contemporary computers. Thus we've had several attempts to recreate the whole game or something very much like it ourselves, dating back to at least 2004. None have panned out so far, but C7 is doing things a bit differently: it's an open-source collaborative project that any developer can contribute to, and it's built on top of a modern game engine so that we can focus on the mechanics instead of reinventing the wheel.
The ultimate goal of C7 is to provide a much more flexible platform in which Civ3 mod content or similar can be used to create and play mods without limits.

Status​

At this stage, C7 is not yet a fully playable game, but becomes a little bit closer every month. Take the latest release for a spin, leave some feedback, and follow this subforum for updates. User discussion happens here at CivFanatics, development activity happens on GitHub, and a bit of both happen on Discord.

The current release is an early pre-alpha with basic engine mechanics and some artwork, and is available from the project homepage at c7-game.github.io. We will be making periodic releases that introduce new and improved mechanics, graphics, mod capabilities, and more.

For now, a local installation of Sid Meier's Civilization III Complete (or Conquests) is required for the art assets. This will change as C7 matures into a standalone game, though you will always be able to import content from your copy of Civ3 if you choose.

Sample screenshot from C7 Carthage 0.2

Release threads​

• Aztec
• Babylon
• Carthage Preview 1
• Carthage Preview 2
• Carthage Preview 3
• Carthage Preview 4

How to get involved​

Would you like to contribute to C7? See the Contributing Page on our Wiki for more information!

At the moment, additional developer effort (specifically in C# and/or Godot's GDScript) is our greatest need, but all sorts of help (art, writing, project management, sheep-herding) could be useful as the project moves forward. We can also use all-original Civ3 artwork (specifically units, terrain/map elements, and UI) to help mitigate the need to have Civ3 installed and give C7 a unique look. Eventually we will support better quality formats for new content, but since we haven't nailed down specs yet it's easiest for now to reuse art created for Civ3. If you have an original creation that you like us to consider, please let us know.

Poll: Help us pick a better name!
Poll: system requirements
Get help or report a bug
Request a feature

Technical stuff​

C7 is an MIT-licensed open-source, iteratively developed, cross-platform 2D 4X strategy game built with the Godot Engine and C#. The project was conceived by several users at CivFanatics but is open to anyone who is interested and able to contribute. We are developing C7 with Civ3 in mind, redesigned from the ground up with new features to support enhanced modding, improved graphics, and modern systems.

Developer wiki
Tasks for new developers
Technical resource index

FAQ​

Is this a Civ3 mod?
No, it's a whole new game! It is inspired by Civ3, the attempts to improve Civ3, and our frustrations with Civ3. But it will go well beyond Civ3. C7 is not to be confused with the Civ3 executable mod C3X or other enhancements. This is an entirely new project written from scratch.

Is this a Civ3 remake?
Not exactly, but it will greatly resemble Civ3 gameplay in its default state. We hope to borrow the best of features from classic and modern 4X in a more flexible game. There may even be game modes resembling other titles as well. C7 is something between a game and an engine, built with mods in mind.

Hasn't this been tried before?
Yes, there have been several attempts to re-imagine Civ3 in years past, to varying degrees of flop. We think it's worth trying again, with two important changes:

• This is a fully open-source team project that anyone can contribute to or pick up later.
• We're using a modern game engine to reduce the workload.

What does C7 mean? Is it supposed to be Civ7?
No, C7 is a silly acronym and only a working title. It has no relation to Civ7.

Then what will it be called?
We don't know yet. Naming things is hard.

Will I be able to reuse my Civ3 content in C7?
Yes! We intend for C7 to by fully compatible with all Civ3 artwork and even entire mods, while also using our own file formats for more advanced features. Technically you can already use some of your own artwork by replacing the default files.

Will you include my artwork in C7?
For now we are reusing artwork loaded from your local installation of Civ3. If you have custom artwork that you fully own (ie, it is not derived from Firaxis or any other copyrighted work) and you would like to license it to us for redistribution in C7, let us know and we will consider it. Ultimately we will need freely licensed or public domain content to replace almost all of the Civ3 files.

When will it be finished?
We don't know. Not anytime soon. This is a huge project and we're all working in our free time. We plan to make incremental releases at least every few months for the foreseeable future. Watch this forum, join Discord, or bookmark the project homepage for updates.

Where can I play C7? What if Civ3 doesn't work on my computer?
C7 supports modern Windows, Mac, and Linux. It currently uses some files from Civ3, but Civ3 does not need to run. The files only need to be present on the computer.

Will it be free? What about the Civ3 files?
C7 will always be free and open-source, meaning anyone is allowed to make and share their own changes. No Civ3 or other restricted content will be included in the game. For now that means you must have Civ3 installed locally, but eventually we will replace all content with our own for a fully stand-alone game.

How can I help?
See "How to get involved" above. For now most of the work is development, but you can still play and give us feedback. Also, spread the word!

What about money? Do you have funding?
For now, there is nothing that would be helped by adding money. All of the technologies and services that we use are free, and at our scale it's just not practical to hire contributors. We will consider crowdfunding options as the project matures, if we're able to make use of it for things like commissioned artwork or bug bounties.

What if I have other questions?
Ask away here in the forum or in Discord!

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

This really is impressive and exciting. Would you, or the "team" consider being supported through Patreon etc?

 

[Ozymandias]

We've tossed a few funding ideas around, and Patreon's not a bad one (I have a great deal of Wall Street-esque experience, and wanted to try a 501(c)(3) - not-for-profit corp -approach; but so it goes.)

... On the other hand, our devs ( ) seem to already off to the races ...

Aside from all that - Welcome to the team!

 

[unartis]

Hi everyone,

This project looks quite exciting, I have some ideas that I'm missing from civilization 3.
It would be nice if it were possible to set the nationalities in a specific city at the beginning of the game, this would be significant in scenarios where there are already pre-placed cities, for example in the southern states of the USA there would be native Spanish-speaking townspeople already at the beginning of the game.

I have the idea that a nation does not have a country, but it could become independent, I saw something similar in the Europe universalis game, that the provinces became independent after a rebellion. If one nation were to be conquered by another, it would be possible for it to become independent again in time, just as Ireland became independent from Great Britain, but if the nationalities live in a more developed culture, then they would not necessarily want to become independent.

It could be raised on the 32-piece limit of strategic and luxury resources. The units would prefer local raw materials, for example it could be set that people living in the territory of a given city are preferred.
Or it would be exciting if a city with a given population would create its pedestrians from the people of the culture living there, e.g. African cities would give a black pedestrian by default, Europeans would naturally give a white pedestrian and so on, different in every culture.

The number of cultures could be increased, the 5 cultures (European, Greco-Roman, Middle Eastern, Native American and Asian = city builders) could be supplemented by others, e.g. African, Indian, nomadic Asian, Polynesian, Australian, etc.
The nomad could also be included in the characteristics of peoples, because it was at least as decisive in the past as seafaring cultures. But it could obviously be further expanded as a city builder and island dweller.

The resources of the sea squares should be made available to the cities if they are a strategic resource, e.g. if fish is a strategic resource such as food, then it should not be placed on the land (swamp) as well, as in C3c there is no other way to solve it.

The expansion of the terrain tiles would also add new dimensions, not to mention the inclusion of the weather, e.g. favorable winds could be used in the editor, which would be so important on land that if it were there, buildings using wind energy could only be placed there (windmill wind farm) .
favorable winds would be possible on a nautical square, sailing units would travel faster in certain directions.
In the polar regions, there could be permanent ice and ice formation, from time to time, units could be placed on the ice.
The cold seas would provide richer food, but they could also be stormier, a storm could break out from time to time, similar to a volcanic eruption, only there would be a chance to survive.

that's all I can think of so far...

 

[Takhisis]

It could be raised on the 32-piece limit of strategic and luxury resources.

The what now?

 

[unartis]

The what now?

Maybe I worded the 32 strategic and luxury limits wrong in the epic game, you can go over them, it just causes a phantom resource error.
I use the DVD version of c3 conquests on an old PC with the win xp operating system (my child usually uses the newer computer, so I rarely use it). This old pc is perfect for making mods.

 

[Plotinus]

How are things going? Just thought I'd check as it's been a while since much has happened on GitHub!

 

[WildWeazel]

Very slow, but moving. I was just considering posting a status update. I was pretty tied up for the past few months. Meanwhile Paul, our non-CFC dev, has been working diligently to port the UI layer to Godot 4 and it's looking great. I've been catching up on reviewing his code this week, and plan to be more available now. We need to put together a final Carthage release, and then move on to Dutch with a bunch of big open questions.

 

[Plotinus]

Excellent, good to hear!

 

[Lord_Hill]

Crikey, I just stumbled across this after my post got moved to the mod development forum. Some of the best Civ III reverse engineers are building a clone engine!? That's fantastic! I'll be sure to keep my eye out for updates. Good luck guys.

 

[RedMaul]

Same here! Keep up God's Work team

 

[Blake00]

Glad to hear this is still going!

 

[WildWeazel]

Not really an update, but something to chew on.

We've been working publicly for a while now, and there's been a lot of discussion and questions about what might be included, or considered, or possible, with C7. The original announcement came with a kind of assumption about what C7 would be: You know, The Remake. The thing we've all been collectively dreaming about for 20 years. The final answer to all of our technical frustrations and modding limitations and questions about the meaning of life and the universe and everything. See, those of us who've been in the C&C community for years had a loosely shared idea of what this thing would be, should be, and we've made several attempts to realize that idea. But none of those attempts have gotten past the stage of moving Civ3 unit graphics around a Civ3 map and into the meat of what we're actually going to all of this trouble for. What they did was reveal some differing opinions on direction and scope, but a consensus that this would be really cool but it’s so much work. For those who haven’t been a part of that legacy, this all probably sounds like a bunch of hand-waving hoopla.

So I want to give everyone a more concrete walk-through of what C7 might look like once it's finished (or at least, stable). Let's assume the perspective of a new player who is familiar with Civ3 and other 4X games but hasn't been following the project until now. Now, this is all somewhat speculative and the details are just examples. But it should give you an idea of what we can potentially do, and how the experience might compare to Civ3.

I present to you, A Vision for C7:

---

The year is 20XX. You hear about [whatever-C7-is-ultimately-named] and go to the website where you download and extract the latest release on your [whatever-device-people-game-on-these-days]. With one more click you launch it (it checks for updates; of course there are none yet), watch an intriguing new intro video, and are presented with a somewhat familiar main menu with some additional options.

You decide to dive right into a new game. Now things start to diverge. You notice several new options to customize the world, like the terrain set, different map types, and several more sizes. The next screen presents a set of 48 civilizations to choose from, or to customize your own. After much deliberation you of course select the Romans, and enable all rivals with their default AI personalities.

You start the game. A friendly pop-up offers to guide you through your first game. You choose the "I've played Civ3" option for minimal guidance, and proceed with the early game. Everything looks and plays like a graphic overhaul of Civ3. Familiar, but different. Despite the same art style the world looks more detailed and vibrant, and once you zoom in you realize that the graphics are rendered in full-color animation at twice the resolution of Civ3. You recognize some of the artwork from mods, while others like the animated coasts and resources are totally new. Impressed, you leave the zoom on since you can still see more of the world on your 4K display than you could in a 1024x768 window back in the day. The UI also adapts to your screen size, providing good readability with plenty of space.

You play through your typical expansion phase, noting no difference in rules and behavior from what you're used to, but the occasional tutorial tip points out new mouseover popups and more intuitive menus and shortcuts. However as a veteran Civ3 player, you find the new look distracting. For now you just want to play Civ3 as you know it, only without the bugs and compatibility issues.

You go back to the main menu and see an option to import from Civ3. You navigate to where you had installed it through Steam - you never could get it to run on the new [redacted] OS - and select the default Conquests.biq. After a moment, you're dropped into a much more familiar game setup: all the same media and options that you know from C3C, down to the button click sounds. Playing through this game, you'd hardly know that anything was different, except that it just works. The AI is a bit smarter, and you don't see random magenta, but otherwise you almost forget that this isn't actually Civ3 until the late game fails to bog down under your hundreds of harbors. You contentedly play through and win the game by domination, watching the game replay with satisfaction as this one doesn't crash at the victory screen. Remembering your favorite Civ3 mod, you go back to the import menu and select its BIQ in the same way. It’s all imported and sure enough, it looks just like you remembered.

Speaking of mods, you decide to see what this new game has to offer. You find the usual spread of rebalance mods, historical scenarios, sci-fi and fantasy total conversions, and so on, but also mods that overhaul the game to make it work more like Civ2, Call to Power, or ironically, FreeCiv. The latter mods come with extensive media assets and scripts that affect almost every aspect of the game. You spend a while experimenting with all these new possibilities.

Having scratched that itch, you next decide to try your hand at a mod of your own. You open up the scenario editor, a user-friendly application also built with Godot, and start to learn the ropes. There is extensive online documentation and a modest library of player-made tools, but you don't need much because everything under the hood is JSON data and PNG images: much more approachable than when you bounced off Civ3 scenario creation years ago. There’s so much more you can do in the JSON, with either the tools or any text editor. You can adjust almost any value, define any type of new content, replace text or sounds, even add whole new eras and culture groups. You only need to include the JSON for the parts you’re adding or changing, and you can mix and match content from other mods by referencing names instead of copying files. If you want to build on existing Civ3 mods, you can convert them to these new formats.

You have some 3D animation skills, so you whip up a new unit animation, taking full advantage of the 32-bit color and transparency effects. It’s a simple matter to import the frames as a PNG sprite, and then you create a new JSON file with all of your unit’s data. After reading up on the JSON schema, you add stats to give this polearm unit a bonus against mounted units. You drop these new files into a folder along with some basic metadata, and copy it into the mod directory. That’s it, you’re done. You can start up a new game, enable your mod, and your new unit is available. Any other mod can now include your unit with a few lines of JSON.

After some time getting the hang of mod creation, you decide you want to go deeper. You have ideas for new rules and events that are not built into the game. So you learn Lua, a friendly scripting language that provides the full mod API. Now you have much more power. For this WWI scenario, you start with an event script that triggers civs to declare war on each other under specific conditions. Then you create the trench, a new terrain overlay with a defensive bonus and movement penalty, along with a job to build it. It will be built by military units, so you tweak the unit AI rules to utilize the new ability. You convert and pull in many of the excellent period units from Civ3. Finally, you override some of the combat calculation functions to change the way artillery bombardment works.

You fire up the scenario for the first time. Oh no! You forgot to include a pedia icon for the trench. No worry, the game provides a placeholder terrain improvement icon and logs a warning in the debug console describing what file it was looking for. You also made a syntax error when editing one of your new unit stats by hand, so that unit is disabled and also logged with the offending line number. You have to reload the scenario from the main menu a few times as you correct these errors, but soon enough it seems to be working smoothly. You decide it’s time for a beta test. You zip up the mod with some release notes and upload it to the online mod directory, where other players can find and install it directly in-game.

Congratulations, you're now a [whatever-C7-is-ultimately-named] modder.