Will there be Rhye's and Fall of Civilization 6?

[Rhye]

For bonus points, where did Rhye get his name? Don't ask me why I remember this all these years later.

Spoiler :

It comes from "Seven Seas of Rhye", a song by Queen.
When I registered to CFC in 2001, I did it for posting a fantasy mod for Civ2 based on Ultima Online. In that RPG I had a fantasy-style named playing character, so I kept the same nickname for Civfanatics too

 

[Rhye]

I disagree with Rhye.
IMO the unstacking of cities and the 1UPT can't work with an RFC-mod. At least not to the degree with what we are used to in Civ IV.
While I don't mean any gameplay criticism with this (hopefully gameplay in vanilla Civ VI will be great), the scale and thus the immersion is just totally ruined for scenario-type mods.
Not only on a whole Earth map, but on continent maps too. We already had some interesting conversations about this, and RFC Europe definitely won't be ported to Civ VI, at least not by me. Leoreth said the same about DoC.
So yeah, I agree with everything need_my_speed posted above, those are exactly the reasons why I'm very sceptical about the moddability (or the adaptability to be even more precise) of Civ VI.

let's see how it works first.

 

[rastak]

Spoiler :

It comes from "Seven Seas of Rhye", a song by Queen.
When I registered to CFC in 2001, I did it for posting a fantasy mod for Civ2 based on Ultima Online. In that RPG I had a fantasy-style named playing character, so I kept the same nickname for Civfanatics too

Man, you weren't eligible to enter! Looks like my memory served me well!

 

[Riker]

let's see how it works first.

let's hope we won't have to found a religion with ethiopia again

 

[shaglio]

Spoiler :

It comes from "Seven Seas of Rhye", a song by Queen.
When I registered to CFC in 2001, I did it for posting a fantasy mod for Civ2 based on Ultima Online. In that RPG I had a fantasy-style named playing character, so I kept the same nickname for Civfanatics too

Which one: the instrumental on Queen I or the one with lyrics on Queen II?

 

[MAHRana]

It could work imho if they did improve the processing, and also remember not every city needs several districts and not every empire needs so many cities. If anything, we could settle with localized scenarios (a Rhye colonization mod would be awesome). You could really see how the community was trying to push for something like RFC lol, so we'd be glad to help this time round.
Would seriously consider buying a PC and the game just to rekindle those Civ IV days if the new release works out well, it's nice where Ed Beach is taking Civ so the modding capabilities should be fine if anything with a few work arounds.

 

[joncnunn]

Moderator Action: Moved to Creation & Customization

 

[Anders JJ]

Really hoping for the RFC mod for ciVI. Didn't really bother getting into ciV cause this mod was missing and the game seemed incomplete without it (well, it was incomplete when it first came out...).

 

[Lord of War N02]

I would love to see RFC in Civ 6, I miss that mod in Civ 4

 

[Mezzy]

I have so many memories of playing RFC on Civ4! I really hope it works on on Civ6

 

[Publicola]

Regarding the map, I agree with the concerns about movements. Actually the map in Civ V's RFC was large enough to allow decent sized empires - units could move around, at least in early game. I can't guarantee for late game, though.
However, there can be a solution to anything: I have a few ideas on how to manage this size problem - let's just see if modding tools allow such heavy modifications.

Rhye, I posted a few thoughts on dealing with the issues of movement and map size in another thread in this forum. It's written for a 'Rhye's of Europe' mod specifically, but I think quite a bit of it would also apply to the general "Rhye's of Civilization" mod covering world history as a whole.

The biggest challenge for any Civ VI mod, in my opinion, will be dealing with the scale of play. Now that cities are 'unstacked' so that districts take up multiple hexes, how can we ensure that a map of Europe is both realistic in size and still playable?

In Civ IV, it was easy to hand-wave when designing a mod, to say that each tile represented a large region of the countryside (which is why a single city could have so many buildings and wonders within it). Now that cities are unstacked, you have to talk in terms of each tile representing, not even a single city, but a mere portion of that single city.

So how to address it?

One option would be to drastically expand the size of the map. This would obviously cause some problems -- specifically, game speed for slow or even moderately fast PCs, given how much map space we're talking about. While a bigger map is probably necessary, making it so big that the map can on its own compensate for the new scale is unrealistic. We need to make other changes to keep things reasonable.

Another change we can make is to limit the number of units on the map. That's a common issue I see in mega-map games of Civ V -- after a certain point, every tile is carpeted with units, which causes maps of all sizes (small or huge) to lose that tactical edge. Even better, this would match the historical reality, since armies in medieval Europe were really remarkably small compared to modern-day. Limiting military -- so that, for instance, you could only produce/support a certain number of pikemen from a single city's barracks, or only have a single knight for a city's castle -- would go a long way to keeping big maps playable. I'll expand this idea in a later post.

A final change we can make to partially 'restack' cities. Yeah, I know, districts are the centerpiece of Civ VI, so rolling them back sounds like mutiny. On the other hand, consider: the centerpiece of Civ V was the one-unit-per-tile rule, and we've already seen from the pre-release material how Civ VI has allowed units to be partially 'restacked.' It still doesn't allow unending Stacks of Doom, but there's quite a few screenshots showing different types of units (melee, ranged, support, civilian) and how many of them can move over the same space at the same time. 'Restacking' cities would be a similar change -- retain the principle, but modify how it's applied.

Specifically, here's how it'd work. I propose to treat every tile around a city as a district. Some districts would act as 'minor' districts -- these would include former improvements like farms or mining towns, or districts like harbors, that can be built anywhere in city limits, up to 3 tiles away from the center. The other districts, however, would act as 'major' districts -- these would be required for critical city infrastructure like markets and universities, and they would have to be built within a single hex or tile of the city center.

Now, instead of each city occupying an entire 37-tile region (all tiles at most three away from a center point), 30 of those tiles would represent the outskirts, the farms that feed the city, the trade-towns that dot the roads leading to and from it, the extended cultural and economic influence of the city in its region. Only the 7 tiles at the very center would represent the city itself.

This change would contribute significantly to the look of the map -- since cities would look like cities while countryside would stay rural. This change would also contribute to the proper spacing of the map, since each city would need quite a bit of space for its farms to support the inner districts. And finally this change would contribute significantly to keeping the map size reasonable, since each city would be of manageable dimension and could be positioned accordingly.

There's more in the rest of the thread (here), but I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts!

 

[w.s.burroughs]

Now that cities are 'unstacked' so that districts take up multiple hexes, how can we ensure that a map of Europe is both realistic in size and still playable?

I'm not a Rhye myself, but I want to tell that I think that balance should prevail over realism.

(I've seen many promising mods that were wasted by unbalanced gameplay and bad design decisions)

 

[johan313]

This is my first login in probably 6-8 years or more. I just came to say that this mod might be the only reason i decide to buy Civ 6.

Also, I pledge to provide programming help if needed. I can squeeze in a few hours each week.

 

[Rhye]

Thank you for the contributions!
It's great to see people coming back from 8 years, or other stating not to be "a Rhye"


Publicola -> yes, your ideas are all possible options, we just don't know what can be done until we put our hands on it.
Either making the map not only bigger, but also fatter (although some territory will lose some strategic value); limiting city and units spread in size and quantity; assigning city names to distant disctricts, or province names to cities. These are all means by we can try to keep the big scale of things (as from Civ5 on, the game instead is moving towards a small scale battlefield, such as Age of Empires).
As last resort, I thought about resizing the map one or more times in a single game. It will require a complex algorithm, but if the editor allows to cover/uncover/change tiles at pleasure, it's theorically possible.

 

[MAHRana]

As last resort, I thought about resizing the map one or more times in a single game. It will require a complex algorithm, but if the editor allows to cover/uncover/change tiles at pleasure, it's theorically possible.

Wow that's an idea! – centers of civilization start out magnified and then the focus shifts to Europe and Central America and balancing out in the end or something. How possible do you think that is though?

 

[Craig_Sutter]

I think a Rhyse of Europe (medieval) is certainly doable. Population sizes can be used to limit the number of districts. A simple xml entry likely gaverns the pop/district relationship.

 

[qwerty25]

Wow that's an idea! – centers of civilization start out magnified and then the focus shifts to Europe and Central America and balancing out in the end or something. How possible do you think that is though?

Not rhye but as long as theres a map editor script it shouldnt be too hard to change the entire map to "zoom out" with the same number of tiles. (Theoretically of course).

The map can be seen as a 2d grid (well i think its actually implemented with 3 axes for the the offset) and just every 200 turns or whatever era you choose have it replace every tile on the map with another premade map tile.

The larger concern id say isnt the map itself but moving all the units, cities, wonders, and districts (if using them) to proper places.

Like if the island before "miniaturization" was 3 tiles but will be shrunk to 1 tile, what happens to 3 warriors on the tile? Same question for districts and wonders.

City pop would have to be rebalanced, and merged tiles would also have to consider which improvement to keep. Theres even the question of how large a merged tile would be: 3tiles or 7tiles?

Honestly, I think itd be way easier to use the uncover and cover method rhye stated.Just load a large map at the beginning. Then basically keep the map covered in fog of war and surrounding civs in a suspended state for a certain radius. Of course this doesnt really solve late game. Perhaps combat will just have to be simplified or streamlined better. And of course using all the other tricks rhye listed.

 

[Prester John 2]

Apart from the possible problems with a TSL map I really like to see the mechanics which Rhye brought into the game: most important of all - stability, plus the way the congress worked (re-assigning cities), unique historical victories, mercenaries, etc. All this was also present in RAND and a Civ5 RAND wouldn't necessarily suffer from the map restrictions the proper RFC would face.

 

[ariel552]

Yes I hope they launch a Rhye's and Fall of Civilization 6. or at least the world map. to play in earth is what makes history resamble reality.

 

[Rhye]

anybody who's got Civ6 already, can they tell us how are modding tools?
I wonder if it's possible to import Civ5 maps easily. In that case I have one world map ready.