...AND constantly updating!!!
I mean, really, what ELSE do we need???
Apart from Multi-Maps, of course.
You oughta see my goals list... we've really only scratched the surface still!
I know I've been oddly silent on this thread. I've wanted to say something meaningful here so I've been taking a long time to consider the answer. I guess I'm ready to make a jab at it now.
First off, I just want to thank Hydro for starting this thread. We've had so much critique that it becomes easy to lose sight of the positive, to even begin to react to the critique by moving to squash things that are, for the majority, the very thing that makes C2C a success. It was rather clever of him to ask this question of the site - yes... much easier for people to point out what is wrong with something than it is to say what is right. It's just a part of the human psyche as we are natural problem solvers.
But there's a lot RIGHT in C2C that gets unsung most of the time, even unrecognized as its silently put in place behind the scenes.
However, before I get into some of that, I'm going to back up for a moment and express why I started here.
When I found CFC, I was interested in looking into what the creative minds of Civ modders had come up with. Interested to see what had been discovered to be possible. Every game I played had inspired another idea for how the game could be expanded and I was wondering how many of those ideas had been implemented, and if not, how easy would it be to implement them?
Civ has ALWAYS been one of my favorite games. From CivI I have been an avid player in various chapters of my life. Back then, the goal was always to fill in as much as humanly possible of the Earth map before you overloaded the maximum city count. There was never much threat from the AI really. More of a Sandbox style game once you had it down.
But that inspiration alone had inspired a decade's worth of board game design efforts - throughout all that time I focused my free time on an endless pursuit of developing the best possible strategy game I could. But it always came back to Civ being the thing I was trying to duplicate somehow. Always trying to capture the joy of that game's amazing structure.
Civ IV was an extraordinary improvement - not in the processing speed by any means - III had it way over IV in that dept. But in the game play itself. The new Culture mechanics, Specialist mechanisms, Religions, and incredibly deepened strategic elements... I could go on and on here. My point is that I loved it because it frustrated me with all its new concepts - at first. Then... we mastered it. And it got dull again.
So when we came to CFC looking for a yet deeper experience, after playing a few great mods, we found A New Dawn. It was amazing. After playing it, I could no longer play vanilla. It was exceedingly buggy, had terrible processing, and had serious balance issues. But it captured the BIGGER picture - or at least was an effort in the making to do so. It deepened the things about Civ IV that had already been so vastly improved over its predecessors. That was that... I'd found my favorite mod.
I was about to start learning HOW to mod then, motivated by some ideas on how AND could be expanded yet further still. But some changes taking place in my life (a move etc...) distracted me from the game for some time thereafter.
When I returned, AND was a bigger mess than ever in some ways. Afforess was stepping away from the mod and there were bugs in the multi-player game that were completely intolerable. (My wife and I have always played this game together mostly.) The new AND version eliminated the ability to bring into the game so much that I'd come to love about it - primarily the new religions was what bugged me the most.
I almost gave up on CFC entirely in search of a different hobby.
Then I found a little thread about a mod called
Caveman2Cosmos where StrategyOnly purported to have adapted AND to bring back in all the great content it had lost access to. I was thrilled to hear that and decided to give it a shot. In the thread, Hydro and DH were already debating out issues like the early tech tree and they were responsive to suggestions and opinions. I felt welcomed to share my views.
But we found there were still some bugs AND had at the time, particularly in the multi-play religious issues. After reporting them and being told that they couldn't repair it because the problem lay within the DLL, and seeing nobody around to help them with that, I determined that I would take a shot at figuring out how to fill this niche, not only to debug the problem, but to also learn how to use those skills to add to the design of the game, introducing a concept my wife and I had long discussed before - a concept that shaped up to become Divine Prophets.
I may have come on a bit strongly with the idea, a bit out of the blue as I'm known to do (and am working on trying to avoid further incidents of) but the team, despite not feeling it was personally a valuable option for them, was well welcoming of the effort. At that point... well... I'm hooked. But frustrated. I was still in a mighty struggle to understand C++ enough to do anything useful.
When Koshling came along, I felt I could relax a bit and leave things to a wiser coder than I. We took a break from the game entirely for a bit as we got distracted by some gaming in another direction. My project to try to database the mod proved nearly impossible and ended up being a consuming dead-end distraction to any real contribution progress.
But after a break, and returning, playing the game with all the amazing new content that the team had been diligently contributing during my absence, I was inspired once more! Ever since, this has been a consuming passion to be as productive and contributing to the mod as possible.
Someone said it earlier - its a labor of love. I contribute in thanks for the contributions that I've so greatly enjoyed from those who've preceded my efforts and continue to mold this thing into what is becoming the greatest game that has ever existed.
At this point in time, sure, we still have a lot of work to address some frustrations some players have expressed. Sure we still have some great visions that are only implemented in minimal fractions of what they will become. Sure, the AI's aren't yet as caught up to a lot of the new content and as competitively effective as the Vanilla version. Sure there are endless bugs to address. Sure, time is marching on and CivV has emerged and new games continue to vie for the attention we have from our players. Sure... before long Civ IV as a whole will be next to completely archaic.
But what do we have? We have the most developed Civ game ever (with the exception perhaps of FFHII which we are still approaching). We have the closest thing that has ever existed to a simulation of Earth's politics in action while at the same time being a grand game of strategy. We have a far more powerful and streamlined processing code. We have the platform for and a lot of development towards some truly advanced AI. We have a LOT less bugs than its predecessor could really ever claim to have (though I think they're doing good at mopping those things up over in the AND realm lately.) We have MORE content than ANY mod that has EVER been for ANY civ game! We have a GREAT and GENIUS team with AWESOME ongoing conversations and planning to include yet MORE and MORE and improve what we have MORE and MORE and it makes it just so amazingly inspiring to see where we'll be a month, two months, a year, FIVE years from now!
C2C is not just a mod... not just a game... its a phenomenon. It's the first mod attempting to be all things for all Civ IV players - an attempt to fulfill all fantasies generated through playing Civ from its humble beginnings. Its everything Civ V should've been and everything Civ VI SHOULD be!
All this is true even in the childish infancy stage that its still in. If all things go according to all modder's visions here... this mod will shape the future of games to come in ways similar to how Gary Gygax's Dungeons and Dragons ended up shaping the future of games, in ways Trivial Pursuit revolutionalized board games, in ways Monopoly created an entire board game industry overnight. This may well become Sid's Opus - as the voices of the Civ playing community have come together to harmonize, no matter how great doing so may be a struggle, to generate the best mod that can possibly exist no matter who you are or what you want from it.
I'm in awe of this team, and in awe that I've been so privileged to be a part of it.
THAT's why I play (and mod for) C2C.