What is the best mod/s or overall modded experience for Civ 4??

[Civ 2.5]

(Mods: I have double posted this thread here and in the Civ 4 mods sub-thread in order to target the right crowds since I'm looking for the best feedback possible)

Moderator Action: Please don't do this. The mods sub-thread is for completed mods only. All threads of this nature need to be in General Discussions. I have merged the two threads together so that you have all the responses.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

A little background, so you understand how best to help me...

I've been playing and modding Civ since the mid 90's when I first fell hard for Civ 2, although with sporadic civ-less dry spells while doing other stuff in life since then. I'm trying to get back into it now, and since I bought a new comp recently I also bought Civ 5 at the same time...

What an absolute embarrassing dud of a game, hardly felt like civ at all.

Moving on, I remember liking Civ 4 quite a bit back when I first played it, but I have lost the game since then so i ordered another copy which should be here in a few days, I bought Civ 4 Complete which has all the expansions.

As my handle implies, I actually modded an extensive game-enhancement mod for Civ 2 many years ago which I called Civ 2.5. I went to great lengths to change everything the scenario editor would possibly allow, everything from all the unit and tile (even the pixel explosion) graphics, many rules, slowed down the science, changed the techs around some, added new techs, added units, changed all the existing unit numbers and tech prerequesites, etc etc... all for the sake of making it a more robust, balanced and deeper game.

I didn't just change stuff around for the sake of change, I really playtested it over and over exhaustively to make sure it all clicked, tweaking and refining as I went. I'm still proud of the finished result, I believe it deserves the moniker of 2.5. I borrowed some unit graphics from the CivFanatics database actually, so this site helped me out a lot. I think I submitted the mod a while back, maybe its still up there.

Anyway, I'm going to play vanilla Civ 4 BtS when it arrives, just to get the feel for the platform again, but what I'm really looking for is a sort of complete "4.5" sort of experience. I'm amazed what modders have been able to do, I mean working with 3D graphics isn't easy, and reprogramming the AI? That's awesome, things we wouldn't even have imagined being able to tinker with back in Civ 2 modding days.

I just started looking last night in the mods section, and I sorted it by number of downloads to give me an indicator of what the masses prefer, but even then it was a jungle to look through...

And time is at a premium these days. Im going to college for computer science and simultaneously working on a startup company I founded, got a few good programmers on board, in order to build an automated trading software which I've designed after daytrading currencies and stocks for a few years (didn't get rich but I definitely learned the ins and outs of the markets, enough to game it using a proprietary bot were trying to design). There are precedents for what were doing, its a near sure bet for success, and once we succeed the company we start will have a game studio as one of the co's branches. Ive been planning my own Civ-style 4x game for a long time, that's one of the key goals behind all my effort...

But right now back in reality that means unfortunately I don't have time to download and test out all the major mods and components, or piece them together from scratch one at a time, so I'm relying on you, CivFanatics' dedicated group of civvers and modders in order to show me a guiding light to go by.

So...

1. Are there any "complete" game-enhancement mods for Civ 4 that you've played through and that you can verify, as objectively as possible, are balanced, bug free, complete and which simply work when played, and which legitimately enhance the overall game by a significant margin?

2. Whether yes or no to #1, are there any additional components such as AI or graphics not included with such a mod which you would recommend installing in addition to it?

3. Useful utilities?

4. Any constructive notes or comments on these topics, despite maybe not offering concrete suggestions based on play experience, are also welcome!

 

[TheMulattoMaker]

1. Are there any "complete" game-enhancement mods for Civ 4 that you've played through and that you can verify, as objectively as possible, are balanced, bug free, complete and which simply work when played, and which legitimately enhance the overall game by a significant margin?

Well, this looks like as good a spot as any for a BUG plug...

I've never gotten into even the more well-known mods (RFC, RoM, Realism Invictus, etc.) simply because I don't have enough time to play Civ4 often enough to get bored with good ol' BtS. (Side note: some people will agree with your idea to start with Vanilla; I'm not one of them, but I see their point.) I'm not sure what mods will work with Vanilla and/or Warlords, and which are only for BtS. The one mod I swear by is BUG (BtS Unaltered Gameplay). As the name implies, BUG doesn't make the normal/expected changes in terms of techs, or leaders, or units, or anything like that. What it does, basically, is present and clarify game information that is accessible but hard to find. Which leader will trade which tech/map/resource, etc. How many more Great Person Points you need and which one to expect. Hey, this city is gonna grow into unhappiness next turn- but if you whip that factory you'll get this many overflow hammers. Stuff like that. (Waaaaay more than that, but you get the idea.)

Most of us that use BUG can't really remember what BtS is like without it. To my knowledge, it works fine with most of the other major mods.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I'll second the BUG plug, and add BAT to that.

BAT is BUG plus a compilation of graphic model variety. I found very quickly that having my Greek swordsmen fighting <insert enermy Civ here> swordsmen that look exactly like them, so they could pillage a <insert enermy Civ here> village that looked just like their Greek village made the game experience very flat. With BAT your units are your units, your farms and villages are your farms and villages, and your cities are your cities. I'm way more about game play than visuals, but the difference is so remarkable in this case I think without BAT I couldn't have played near as much as I have.

I would be unlikely to try a mod that was not BUG/BAT compatible.

 

[Jourin]

1. For a basic AI and culture improvement to the vanilla game, I recommend K-MOD.
2. For a "has it all mod" that plays pretty good for this type of mod, I recommend Caveman 2 Cosmos
3. For the best overall mod, I recommend Realism Invictus

 

[Civ 2.5]

Thanks for the feedback, its much appreciated and a roaring good start, but I want to hear from as many as possible! The more the better. For one it'll give me numerous suggestions to consider, but furthermore the more people chiming in who happen to remark on the same mods or components by names are essentially voting it up in my mind, building consensus of which ones I should try first.

And yes im aware that at a certain point I simply have to choose some, get my feet wet and try them, and of course I will, but it doesn't hurt to fish for advice beforehand.

So BUG sounds like a utility that aids micromanagement and thus increases empire-wide efficiency, whereas BAT changes many of the graphics to make them nicer as well as more defining and culturally unique, granted that I don't already find a mod that has its own graphics set.

That's two votes for Invictus thus far, it's one of the mass-downloaded mods I noticed at the top of the list when I did a quick search.

... ...

I suppose while I'm asking, I should also inquire about multiplayer feasibility for Civ 4, even if its strictly on vanilla BtS or whatnot. Not to get sidetracked, the main subject of the thread is still relevant and desired, but feel free to chime in about your MP experience, if it works smoothly even to this day, if there is a good MP pool of players still smashing together to this day, etc.

... ...

I would ask one thing though from future posters, if in addition to putting in your two or three cents about the best mod, if you could also kindly explain even briefly WHY its your preference. That way when somebody like Jourin here generously offers their picks I can also get a sense of why that is, rather than having to merely take their word for it or research myself. Having said that, I actually did run across the K-MOD in my search and read about it briefly, by sheer coincidence, and apparently he tweaked the AI to treat resources differently, as well as reacting to humans differently, etc, very high potential stuff there...

 

[Jourin]

OK more detail as requested:
K-Mod: Builds are previously AI improvements and is just a Better AI. The culture improvement is also great because high culture inner cities now help out the culture on your boundary and protect against culture pressure. Will only play vanilla with K-MOD

C2C: Builds on ROM and ROM - AND. It has lots of everything and yet plays fairly well and has been very stable. When they do an update it has been save game compatible with previous version (at least most of the time). 2nd favorite after RI

RI: Best overall mod for unique civ abilities, balance . Includes K-MOD. V2 3.2 has a great new worldbuilder from Platy. V3.25 has an updated version which has a re-name city bug - I posted a hotfix that works for me. Has great documentation and some new features. RI team is continuing to make it better although new releases are VERY slow. Will probably include Advanced Diplomacy and maybe Rev later. Favorite especially with K-MOD now included.

 

[Drakarska]

Utilities: BUG/BAT, DCM, ADV DIP, and Limited Reli spring to mind. K-MOD speaks for itself, so I would consider that a given.

Hmnn, no offense to the C2C team, but I acutally prefer AND 2 for that "has it all" feel.

Best overall mod; Definitely have to pick Realism Invictus. No offense to any other mods/modders (and I have played almost every mod on these boards) out there, but RI has always given me that deep immersive feel I look for in a 4x game (much to my other half's chagin).

MP: I haven't done MP in a long time, as I do mostly LAN games with my boys. The rare occasions I do play MP, it is only with a group of really good personal friends. That way I don't have to worry about any of the childish antics that happen in the lobby. We usually agree to map, settings, and conditions before hand so that the game runs smoothe.

 

[Civ 2.5]

Seems like there's already some consensus around a few specific mods, its a good sign although that's going by only the handful of people who posted so far. Still something though..

I've actually been playing BtS vanilla for a couple days now, and it's probably better than I remember it (I think I only played Warlords years ago), and such a breath of fresh air after trying out the prettified termite mulch which is civ 5.

Going back a little ways here to understand why this happened, from a design perspective, what they essentially did with Civ 3 was to build off the enormous success of Civ 2 (both commercially and critically). In fact the only major things in 3 that were new or different from 2 were mostly welcome additions, and I can name them here:

THE GOOD: culture, culture-based borders, golden ages, spy agencies (as opposed to just spy units running around), national wonders resources, unique special units, bombarding, unit capturing, air unit overhaul.

THE BAD: stacks of doom (at least the way they implemented it, Civ 4 vindicated stacks with its superior engine), broken MP, absurd AI tech brokering amongst themselves, and of course the simplified combat which basically regressed from Civ 2 back to Civ 1, with a single strength modifier that in practice allowed spearmen to occasionally beat modern tanks.

Of course that's not EVERYTHING in the game they did but those are just about all the major points, alongside and needless to say with a scaling up of graphics, the UI, certain details, etc. All in all though, they took what worked in 2, didn't fix much since 2 wasn't so broken it couldn't be seriously enjoyed, added a lot of things in obvious areas ripe for improvement, of course it wasn't perfect there were missteps, but it ran quite cleanly and upped the experience from 2 a good notch forward.

Same for Civ 4. They saw they were building on something with momentum and quality, so they kept the design and functionality of 3, which itself was only building ON TOP of Civ 2, not replacing it really or starting over. And they really nailed it too, with even less fumbles this time around.

Religion, unit upgrades, a rock-paper-scissors approach to unit design that on top of all the inherent differences in strength and abilities already there for tactical diversity makes for very interesting and satisfying stack-based warfare, even if its not perfect yet (and there is ample room for improvement in that engine), growing cottages as terrain trade-improvements, reworked corruption system into an economic pay-for-your-own-expansion model that feels more realistic and works, as well as paying for cities not the buildings in them which is again more realistic, and a few other major points, wont mention them all since you get the point by now.

On the bad side, the new bombarding scheme is a bit off, since suiciding artillery units makes no sense in real combat, and yes, surrounding any strategic land point in the real world with enough artillery (hell, even enough trebuchets) has devastating effects, as it should. Also the downside of unit promotions is that in the later game when you have armies with dozens and dozens of units, micro-ing all the different XP bonuses in a meaningful way becomes untenable except as a tedious chore, so its better to just give them +general strength or +city defend for fortified units in cities, etc, which in turn sort of negates the purpose of having all those different bonuses in the first place.

Altogether though, they again set out to EVOLVE the series, taking what came before, adding a lot of functionality, cleaning and fleshing out the design even more, trimming the fat and unpopular/needless aspects, and they got a better game for it.

And also along the way they had the offshoots like the Civ 2 variants CtP and ToT, as well as the imperfect but nevertheless brilliant SMAC to draw ideas from...

With Civ 5, however, it felt like they let the series' success over all that time allow them to trick themselves into thinking that- totally disrespecting and simply tossing away this long slow steady unbroken lineage of careful evolution over the past 20 years since the series started- that they had the Midas touch, and that a slick art-deco style mixed with a smooth and shimmery new graphics engine along with all the "creative" new ideas they could throw at it would surely be better than what came before.

What a lack of wisdom on their part... Having quite a lot of experience in game theory and game development, if only by studying it on my own, working on my own projects and hanging around enough friends over the years who are actual devs for game companies, gleaning insight over time, I can say that "design by committee" simply does not work. Civ 5 reeks of it. The best design for a game comes complete or nearly so by an individual or a very small team who collaborated on it, and which then gets handed down as a document, or at the very least a strong vision for how things should be, which is faithfully translated to the rest of a dev team. Not that I'm some sort of Metal Gear fanboy, but that series is a prime example of this concept in play. I've been playing Metal Gear since MGS1 for the PS1, and those games have seen steady and careful evolution, and been great because of it. That's because Hideo Kojima runs his own studio, and even if he doesn't know exactly how the next Metal Gear will play, he definitely has a worthy vision for it that his entire team can get behind, and he doesn't forget where he's coming from in order to know where to go next.

Civ 5 smacks in every way as the opposite of this design mentality. It's the result of an entire dev team being given every liberty to "come up with magic!" and through design-iteration and meetings with competing voices to eventually whittle down and focus in on what they wanted, by mixing around enough good-sounding ingredients in a sort of video-game soup.

And that's exactly how it plays and feels: a cobbled together, inefficient and functionally confused amalgam of many different devs' and designers' best intentions. And we all know what the road to hell is paved with.

I don't need to go into the mechanics of Civ 5 or why it's so broken and just so incredibly anti-fun to play, although in my search for a good criticism online I just randomly ran into this excellent and thorough overview of it, which even includes running commentary and photos through a game this person played before he gets into the actual critique in the end, and he (along with the references he quotes) really nails it. I highly recommend it:

"What Went Wrong with Civ 5":
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html

... ...

I guess with trying Civ 5 recently and now coming back to the superlative 4 after such a long dry spell away from my favorite strategy series (although it's been a dramatically love-hate relationship, let me tell you...) I guess I just had a a few thoughts I wanted to post down. Civ 4 kicks butt though, can't wait to try these massive mods after running through a few vanilla games!

 

[Drakarska]

Seems like there's already some consensus around a few specific mods, its a good sign although that's going by only the handful of people who posted so far. Still something though..

I've actually been playing BtS vanilla for a couple days now, and it's probably better than I remember it (I think I only played Warlords years ago), and such a breath of fresh air after trying out the prettified termite mulch which is civ 5.

Going back a little ways here to understand why this happened, from a design perspective, what they essentially did with Civ 3 was to build off the enormous success of Civ 2 (both commercially and critically). In fact the only major things in 3 that were new or different from 2 were mostly welcome additions, and I can name them here:

THE GOOD: culture, culture-based borders, golden ages, spy agencies (as opposed to just spy units running around), national wonders resources, unique special units, bombarding, unit capturing, air unit overhaul.

THE BAD: stacks of doom (at least the way they implemented it, Civ 4 vindicated stacks with its superior engine), broken MP, absurd AI tech brokering amongst themselves, and of course the simplified combat which basically regressed from Civ 2 back to Civ 1, with a single strength modifier that in practice allowed spearmen to occasionally beat modern tanks.

Of course that's not EVERYTHING in the game they did but those are just about all the major points, alongside and needless to say with a scaling up of graphics, the UI, certain details, etc. All in all though, they took what worked in 2, didn't fix much since 2 wasn't so broken it couldn't be seriously enjoyed, added a lot of things in obvious areas ripe for improvement, of course it wasn't perfect there were missteps, but it ran quite cleanly and upped the experience from 2 a good notch forward.

Same for Civ 4. They saw they were building on something with momentum and quality, so they kept the design and functionality of 3, which itself was only building ON TOP of Civ 2, not replacing it really or starting over. And they really nailed it too, with even less fumbles this time around.

Religion, unit upgrades, a rock-paper-scissors approach to unit design that on top of all the inherent differences in strength and abilities already there for tactical diversity makes for very interesting and satisfying stack-based warfare, even if its not perfect yet (and there is ample room for improvement in that engine), growing cottages as terrain trade-improvements, reworked corruption system into an economic pay-for-your-own-expansion model that feels more realistic and works, as well as paying for cities not the buildings in them which is again more realistic, and a few other major points, wont mention them all since you get the point by now.

On the bad side, the new bombarding scheme is a bit off, since suiciding artillery units makes no sense in real combat, and yes, surrounding any strategic land point in the real world with enough artillery (hell, even enough trebuchets) has devastating effects, as it should. Also the downside of unit promotions is that in the later game when you have armies with dozens and dozens of units, micro-ing all the different XP bonuses in a meaningful way becomes untenable except as a tedious chore, so its better to just give them +general strength or +city defend for fortified units in cities, etc, which in turn sort of negates the purpose of having all those different bonuses in the first place.

Altogether though, they again set out to EVOLVE the series, taking what came before, adding a lot of functionality, cleaning and fleshing out the design even more, trimming the fat and unpopular/needless aspects, and they got a better game for it.

And also along the way they had the offshoots like the Civ 2 variants CtP and ToT, as well as the imperfect but nevertheless brilliant SMAC to draw ideas from...

With Civ 5, however, it felt like they let the series' success over all that time allow them to trick themselves into thinking that- totally disrespecting and simply tossing away this long slow steady unbroken lineage of careful evolution over the past 20 years since the series started- that they had the Midas touch, and that a slick art-deco style mixed with a smooth and shimmery new graphics engine along with all the "creative" new ideas they could throw at it would surely be better than what came before.

What a lack of wisdom on their part... Having quite a lot of experience in game theory and game development, if only by studying it on my own, working on my own projects and hanging around enough friends over the years who are actual devs for game companies, gleaning insight over time, I can say that "design by committee" simply does not work. Civ 5 reeks of it. The best design for a game comes complete or nearly so by an individual or a very small team who collaborated on it, and which then gets handed down as a document, or at the very least a strong vision for how things should be, which is faithfully translated to the rest of a dev team. Not that I'm some sort of Metal Gear fanboy, but that series is a prime example of this concept in play. I've been playing Metal Gear since MGS1 for the PS1, and those games have seen steady and careful evolution, and been great because of it. That's because Hideo Kojima runs his own studio, and even if he doesn't know exactly how the next Metal Gear will play, he definitely has a worthy vision for it that his entire team can get behind, and he doesn't forget where he's coming from in order to know where to go next.

Civ 5 smacks in every way as the opposite of this design mentality. It's the result of an entire dev team being given every liberty to "come up with magic!" and through design-iteration and meetings with competing voices to eventually whittle down and focus in on what they wanted, by mixing around enough good-sounding ingredients in a sort of video-game soup.

And that's exactly how it plays and feels: a cobbled together, inefficient and functionally confused amalgam of many different devs' and designers' best intentions. And we all know what the road to hell is paved with.

I don't need to go into the mechanics of Civ 5 or why it's so broken and just so incredibly anti-fun to play, although in my search for a good criticism online I just randomly ran into this excellent and thorough overview of it, which even includes running commentary and photos through a game this person played before he gets into the actual critique in the end, and he (along with the references he quotes) really nails it. I highly recommend it:

"What Went Wrong with Civ 5":
http://www.garath.net/Sullla/Civ5/whatwentwrong.html

... ...

I guess with trying Civ 5 recently and now coming back to the superlative 4 after such a long dry spell away from my favorite strategy series (although it's been a dramatically love-hate relationship, let me tell you...) I guess I just had a a few thoughts I wanted to post down. Civ 4 kicks butt though, can't wait to try these massive mods after running through a few vanilla games!

Ermmm, Sulla? is he anyone important?......

JK. I think one or two of us may have a general idea who that Sulla guy may be. I do like your thesis though, nice work.

 

[pie_at]

Hey Civ2.5,

I am sorry, that I am not the fan but the modder of a mod, I would like to present you: Pie's Ancient Europe (PAE) for CIV IV BTS 3.19.

Your last post inspired me to post here, because your words fit with all my thoughts.
I would love to see the best features of all CIV versions in one overall version: the palace/throne room of Civ 1, the advisors of Civ2, the attack/defense props of Civ3 and of course the colony base of resources outside your cultural borders, the ranged bombardment, veteran/elite system as well the espionage, religions, corporations of Civ4, etc... and I tried it so far in PAE.

In PAE you are able:
-) first of all: fog of war. till cartography/drawing maps the tiles get fully black again except at mountains, cities with wonders,.. that's realism!
-) improvements and road building cost money!
-) you can get outland resources again with fortresses
-) range bombard with archers, skirmishers, catapults,...
-) spreading resources from some rare plots to all over the map (horses, olives, grapes,...)
-) become a vassal as human!
-) veteran system of units ( trained, experienced, seasoned, veteran, elite, legendary) during battle
-) new promotion system during battle (get promotions what you really deserve!)
-) wonders that needs certain religions: eg, German barbarians will never build Pyramids or Statue of Zeus!!! For Pyramids you need the religion Egypt gods and for Zeus the Greek one! Correct?
-) a new combat experience: withdrawals, flight and renegations!!
.... if my wife wouldn't call me all 2 minutes, I would write more... sorry

but, if you are finished with BTS vanilla, I recommend PAE. Just for one look. But be warned: it's an enormious historical accurate mod with it's limited but accurate possibilites. As if Thukydides, Cicero, Caesar, Herodot,... had helped me... of course, they did.

 

[Alchemind]

In my experience the best mod's have been ones that limit alterations for the sake of not changing every thing you can, but because it makes sense both balanced an intuitive, wise. Stability has always been a pretty big point for me, as well.

The first mod I ever got and still play it under my slight alterations is the Neoteric World modmod. Doesnt change anything drastic early game, but adds new units and tech's later on where they sorely needed it from BTS. The interface and Rev's mod's make it all the much better.

C2C has alot in it. And R2R still has too much. I actually enjoyed playing it for the most part when I first dived in, however the first problem Ive noticed lay wherein even in higher difficulties the game is considerably easier than BTS since the AI is poorly trained to attribute themselves to the new gameplay mechanics.

In C2c or R2R, there is too much too build with too many units to micro during war and too many technologies to seem like any are more particularly relevant to your civ than others. THis ends up slowing down your game, both in tasking or processing and it takes way too long to get to the end stages of the game at which point it may crash at any moment.

RoM: Great mod, in a little too in-depth for me and like most mod's some civics dont make very much sense, but its still very good. Interesting barbarian raiders from coast AI was a great addition, making sure you have units to defend your seascape. Unfortunately this mod is unstable.

Realism Invictus: Probably one of the best mods out there, consider its added conteent, and more importantly for me its stability. Has never crashed. I can do without all the "Distinctive Units" business, but at the very least it doesnt cause any problems and helps personalize a Civ.


The few thing I dont like about RI I just modded out, like the unit logistics and supply detriments, different Government national wonders that do nearly the same thing and loosened great and national wonder civic requisites, silly civic effects and added +1 espionage per city for protective trait civs.

 

[Civ 2.5]

This Sulla guy makes the rounds apparently, even my friend google seems to know him. Type in "Civilization 5 criticism" and thar she blows.

Some interesting concepts there pie. I'll resist the temptation to scrutinize each of those bullets in isolation, since I understand a mod needs to be experienced and judged holistically as a whole, not for each gear in the engine. Still though, roads and improvements costing gold, hmm... I hope it works because man is Civ 4 brutal on my virtual coffers, seems like I have to start as a Financial leader and spam cottages, foregoing farms in all squares except those that give me huge food bonuses like corn, and even with mostly villages and towns dotting my map I'm still struggling to expand and still retain a decent science rate! But I digress, it sounds very interesting.

If there was a way to- until map making is discovered- to have all the map squares you discover gradually go dark after enough time, that would be a great and realistic hardcore addition to any civ game. I'll have to check it out how it works with them going instantly dark, it's a neat idea. Keep in mind that even cavemen remembered geographical information through stories and myths passed down (i.e, "The walls of the palace of the gods which lies beyond the elk run where the sky-fire dies" to stand in for a mountain range beyond a large plains to the west, where the sun sets), and newly settled agricultural nations still retained many hunter-gatherer tendencies even long after forming the first villages and cities, it wasn't a on/off transition but a gradual and overlapping one spanning thousands of years.

 

[Civ 2.5]

A nod to Alchemind here for dishing out the goods, just what I like to see.

Yeah, RI, seems to be the white swan of the group, I had gathered that much already. This much agreement between those of the veteran modding crowd can't be bogus.

I agree balance is absolutely key. Why has chess endured globally for so many centuries? Well, simplicity for one, you don't need a computer let alone even electricity to play it, but it's primarily because of balance. In Civ, too many choices, units, techs etc are desired, but too much in a loose way can saturate the frame of a game's original foundation not programmed to handle the load, per your AI-inability comment.

I think the best philosophy for making an overall whole-game improvement mod is to really know the base game so well that you understand fundamentally what's already there and as a result what's also not there, but most importantly what shouldn't be there because it'll disrupt what's already there. Sorry, guess I've been listening to Donald Rumsfeld's speech ".. and then there are your unknown unknowns, and also..."

So the first task becomes to fill in gaps and sparsely filled areas, then only after that's done do you add entire new functionality. Fill in, balance, add, rebalance, etc. I think the phenomenon you're referring to, and I believe you just by your word since I've seen it before myself aplenty, is modders that say "wouldn't it be cool if you could have a,b,c,d,e,f,g.... etc!!?" and then by the unholy devil below they actually labor ungodly hours and add all of this amazing content.

The only problem then, is that the darn thing still needs to be a "game", not merely a content delivery system, and again, "game" = "balance". Chess proves that, and I believe the only game lighter on content than chess is tic-tac-toe. Oh, and checkers.

 

[Jennvare]

Hail, Civ 2.5

If you're searching for unique mods, I've got two to mention.

The first would be Fall from Heaven 2. This is a completely fantasy based civ game which has magic system which is very similar to the old game Master of Magic. The AI is passable in terms of strategy, but the really don't use all the bells and whistles which give players an edge. It's easily one of the most downloaded mods here from what I remember.

The other mod I play extensively is Orion's Grand Inquisitions. OrionVeteran put ALOT of work in that mod. He has alot of components that work well together and he has worked the AI so that they can be very brutal to you especially if they build a lead on you. His crowning achievements if "Mine Warfare" which does add an unpredictable element to the game. I have lost stacks of doom to mines in his game and have used mines to wear down an enemy stack. His best contribution is the game speed. OV spent many months working with code to keep the gameplay fast. Many mods seem to bog down in the late stages of game where there are lots of cities and units around. His keeps moving along at a fast clip. This mod has recently been upgraded so it may not have alot of downloads yet, but I highly recommend it for you.

There are other great mods out there as others have noted. Try as many as you can and get a feel for what you like.

Peace

 

[Spillsandstains]

i'm not sure if it's been mentioned already, but the best one is the one you design yourself. if you want giant rubber ducks as naval units, you can put them in . . .

 

[Drakarska]

i'm not sure if it's been mentioned already, but the best one is the one you design yourself. if you want giant rubber ducks as naval units, you can put them in . . .

Oh wow, I just got this mental image of poor ol' Monty tring to do an amphib op with Jags on giant rubber ducks...

 

[calad]

Try rhye rise and fall dawn of civilization mod mod. If you like it then there is something to do next one year.

 

[Civ 2.5]

I'm playing right now, and thought I'd jot down a couple notes that I hope some of the mods are able to fix...

Two things. First is the game seems to punish you for going to war, both economically and socially. Meaning that the price of maintaining your existing cities is already almost unreasonably steep as is, but then you add the conquests of distant cities and the science and espionage sliders have to be zeroed out and you're still in the red. And this with plenty of villages/towns and even a couple marketplaces nationwide. This doesn't make sense either gameplay-wise and certainly not in a historical context.

Civ 5 proved disastrous in this regard by punishing the player in every way imaginable for so much as breathing, literally anything you try to do that in that game has some sort of immediate numerical-modifier related negative backlash, which makes it "anti-fun" to play (please see previous rant). But it also feels really cheap in a frustrating way, since it's not a repercussion that's part of a cohesive virtual environment with logical rules and physics, but rather an arbitrary numerical pimp slap to the face which leaves a big "Can't do that! -20 pts to you!!"-shaped red welt upside your head.

And obviously these are smaller gripes in BtS and nowhere near that level. But in terms of the gameplay in BtS, as soon as you go to war in the ancient/classical period, and this has happened with a mix of different civics in multiple games, your own citizens denounce you so heavily it instantly nullifies half of the happiness-dependent productivity in all your cities, oops there goes the base of your newfangled war machine. So it cripples your domestic scene enough to instantly punishing even just starting a war, let along waging it, but then as you fight on you're hit with the hefty fees of conquered territory. The only way to combat these problems seems to be building up an immensely profitable infrastructure, including nice big juicy cities all with towns and marketplaces and courthouses and collosseums, so that come wartime you can take the hit, but of course by the time you've built all that PLUS an army you're practically at renaissance age and the army you've built is obsolete. This makes ancient warfare a lot harder, and back in ancient times was exactly when things were so much more primitive as to make mass warfare simpler and easier, even standard in the world!

I think they did this in order to prevent a human player from simply amassing a stack of doom and then rampaging through a continent full of tactically inferior AI for an easy win, and Civ 3 started to go on this questionable design path through endless tech brokering, so that practically as soon as your army was built it was already obsolete due to the AI's promiscuous tech trading between themselves.

Historically, monarchies and ancient empire-republics like Rome were almost constantly in conflict, but because culturally that was acceptable and even honorable to them, people were fine and even ignorant of most of it so long as the grain and coin continued to flow through the streets. But in BtS I'm getting the equivalent of Vietnam War democratic-protest levels from my peasant-citizenry in 910AD? Please... so I'm seriously hoping some of the mods Im going to try do fix this in some way.

The second thing is the stack engine, which, while a vast improvement over Civ 3's complete lack of any stack physics (other than the ability to stack!), has some moments of WTH-ness. So I just took over a Portuguese enemy city and my massive army of 30 odd units (swordsmen, axemen, a few horses, maybe 5 catapults) is chilling inside. Two enemy crossbowmen attack it, and what are the two units they attack and kill first? Why, two of my super precious weak and defenseless catapults! Which wouldn't be such a big loss if it weren't for the fact that I need like 5 fresh catapults to take over each of their heavily defended cities, first bombarding and then sacrificing to whittle down their own stacks, so it hurt doubly bad. I was blown away when that happened... even in Civ 3 the best defender fought first, and don't get me wrong, the rock-paper-scissor scheme is for the best, but man what a misstep there, that almost ruined my whole war. Can't take cities without a hefty and constant siege weapon supply train in this game, and lots of them at that.

For an accurate depiction and modeling of siege weapons at work in real life, just watch the first war scene of Gladiator when they're fighting the barbs in the woods: the Roman ballistas sit comfortably behind endless row of encircling legionnaires, pummeling the advancing enemy ranks with huge arrows and flaming balls of fiery Roman ball death, weakening them before a single sword is drawn. Entire advancing enemy army defeated: 1. Siege weapons lost: 0.

So I know Im going off a bit here, but I guess my main point is that I'm secretly hoping the modding community has also noticed these flaws and addressed them in mods like RI or C2C or any of the ones you all have mentioned that I'm probably going to try.

 

[Civ 2.5]

A follow up to that since I hate just snarfing out superficial complaints on game design when I know the underlying cause for it...

Every game needs limits in order to constrain the gameplay into the desired proper domain for the player to engage in per the objectives, allowing for the balance required for a "game" to even exist at all. The most obvious example is a racing game, where the limits are literally the confines of the racetrack. It's not Grand Theft Auto, you can't "race" wherever you want otherwise there woudn't be a track and thus no race at all. Similarly, you take away the defining limits of any game and you don't have a game at all. Which is probably why aside from doing the missions in GTA it gets boring really fast, since aside from the ruthless cops gunning you down ruthlessly, bereft of any ruth, there's hardly any limiting factors to hone in and define your experience as you monkey around Los Santos. It quickly becomes a wash, blow up a few cars, gun down a few bystanders, do this and that, and the novelty wears out. There's no objective progression, challenge or limiting focus in order to hold your attention while carousing the "sandbox".

In a game like Civ you especially need limits, since otherwise the simple numbers-and-tables rules defining the entire virtual world, things like movement points and growth rates, etc, can be easily manipulated outside of the context originally intended. The problem, however, arises when game designers can't think of meaningful and dynamic methods of implementing limits, and instead opt for the way cheaper to develop invisible wall approach. This is basically saying, we don't want to draw a wall here or even talk about it too much, but there's an arbitrary wall we decided to place here to better constrain the game we're trying to make, even if it's not a hard one that will stop you right away, but cross it and you'll pay. It's black and white, a trigger switch. Problem is, while they use brute force to keep the game balanced and focused, invisible limit walls are always obvious and detected by the player. It kills suspension of disbelief, immersion, gameplay coherence etc. This always feels cheap since in reality there aren't many true invisible walls, everything is generally a gradient of activity or change, and also has clear logical causes and effects, and so these walls always come across as forced and unintuitive.

The correct way to implement limits in a game is to let the player stumble out of bounds, in fact even create plenty of out of bound space that is free to trek on in order to provide more distraction and options for them, but then design the objective-achieving parameters in such a way that going out of bounds simply doesn't help very much. There is no punishment, no numerical modifiers for stumbling or trying something the developer doesn't want you to do. There is simply the slowly dawning realization that you've just spent a ton of effort trying out a tricksy, daring new scheme, but in the end it really hasn't gotten you that far owing to it simply not being all that logically effective after all. Not because the game is forcing a penalty for it, but just because your schemes lie in a different direction than where the objective/progression lies.

For example, in Civ, instead of punishing a player with an unhappiness modifier set on a conditional trigger for doing something like starting a war, you could program each war unit to be tagged with a certain variable, let's call this variable the "hometown family happiness quotient".

As that unit steps within the "enemy's" borders (enemy being another civ you're officially at war with who wasn't the aggressor), this variable takes a small hit for the happiness of that unit's hometown, representing their family back home, which is proportionate to distance. If that unit dies in enemy territory, this variable takes a bigger hit, whereas it'll take a smaller hit if it dies "defending" against the enemy on your territory.

However, despite the initial small hit of a unit being in enemy territory, if it WINS a battle which happens to involve the capture of an enemy city as well (let's say the city conquest needs to happen within 4 squares and 5 turns of that specific battle for a reasonable constraint), then there is a chance, calculated alongside the warlike-or-peaceful cultural value modifier for your specific nation, that this one unit's "hometown family happiness quotient" might even go up as they celebrate his victory! Hence actually causing temporary happiness in that one city. And of course time in the form of war weariness plays a part in that calculation as well. (I called it a quotient because that operation is generally going to be a divisional problem, such as a beginning neutral number divided by various circumstantial coefficients, even though the number can actually increase.)

There could be individual city variables such as this, nationwide ones, relative ones dependent on enemy/AI actions... but the point is that it doesn't take a whole of extra programming work in order to avoid dumb invisible walls. A little extra, but not really a lot. That way, the player can feel free to wage war as far and as long and against whomsoever he wants, and there is no immediate horribly crushing punishing number deducted from his economy or any such thing... however... given all the dynamic limiting variables coded seamlessly in a mesh underneath the playable facade of the outward gameplay, he could find that depending on his actions, subtle and increasing effects will materialize ever more to the point of being overwhelming. But at least it feels warranted since it was causal and gradual, much like the real world.

The player doesn't feel punished for anything really, the game world is simply ticking along according to what works and doesn't work within it's programmed environment. And as he sees that he's still fighting a massive war of attrition in a far away land with little to show for it and heavy casualties, his domestic economy and science stagnated due to lack of further improvement and drained by years of ongoing war, that most of his population will then, by that point, have indeed turned against him, and he'll know exactly why. And he'll remark, "Ahh. I did this to myself. Ok, that makes sense."

And it's not even that hard to program once you're aware of what to design.

 

[Civ 2.5]

So I finally beat the Portuguese only by spamming experienced +20% catapults with every city (about 12) for about a hundred turns or so, lord knows how many I lost, it was like a willing catapult genocide, sheesh.

Medieval soldier: "Look cap'n, I don't mean to be a wet blanket, but I just don't have the stomach for this axe and sword stabbing and hacking business, ya know wut I mean? I mean they drafted me from the engineer's guild back home, I've got brains, is there any other way I can help??"

infantry captain: "Why yes! Glad you asked. We've errr, fallen short of manpower to man the siege engines. Not enough, ummm, brains, as you would put it. Yes that's it..."

Soldier: "Really?! That's great, yes, I can do that, I'll keep those beauties humming I will Cap'n, thank you, oh thank you!" (runs off happily)

captain: (snickers)

The reason I'm posting though, is because while I was busy fighting I guess some cities were starving due to the absurd chronic war-induced unhappiness, which aside from putting them on as many high food yield squares as possible, there wasn't much I could do short of stopping the war cold. Not gonna happen. So then when the Portuguese are almost dead I look back at some cities that are just on autopilot spamming my catties, and...

5 out of 12 of my major cities are reduced to size 1! Go to war against a foreign enemy and hundreds of thousands of people drop what they're doing, abandon their farms and flee the cities, unable to cope with the emotional anguish of it all.

Don't worry guys, I know the mods fix these minor problems and more, its exactly why I started this thread. Nope, won't be long playing vanilla at all lol