Workshop and New Units

[Axis Kast]

One of the most disappointing aspects of Civilization V by comparison with its predecessors, Civilizations II, III, and IV, was the fact that mod-makers and their offerings were many fewer in number. As I understand it, this had to do with changes in the nature of how new content was developed for the game, which was much more technically challenging than in earlier iterations.

Is this what has happened, too, with Civilization VI? I have honestly held off playing the game pending release of any interesting-looking scenarios and new units. What I've seen so far is interesting, but mostly appears to recolor or re-purpose existing game content rather than introduce something cut from new cloth.

Can anybody shed some light? Cheers!

 

[Gedemon]

The modding tools haven't been released yet, and without them we can't add new units models or upload mods to the workshops.

 

[Axis Kast]

Were similar tools ever released for Civilization V? Also, how likely do you think it is that Civilization VI will give modders a set of tools that lets them go as far afield as in Civilization IV, say?

I thought that the failure to create an easy "in" for modders was a big reason that Civilization V attracted less interest than past titles, and appears to be more readily abandoned with the advent of Civilization VI.

 

[Gedemon]

Civ5 SDK included:
- modbuddy: a small IDE to create mods and upload them on the workshop
- worldbuilder: an external map/scenario editor
- nexus : a set of tools to import and preview art files which was released broken and was never fixed (on which custom tools were made but this was the major problem for custom models)
- firetuner: a lua console, very useful to test and debug scripts

It was released one or two weeks after release and the code source was released (much) later

Civ4 had no official tools IIRC, but the files used were already known by modders, a lot of custom tools were made, and the source code was released much earlier than for civ5.

And civ4 was a solid base to work on, to mod on civ5 you had to fix the gameplay first or directly go for a total conversion, IMO that was the main problem, not the modding capability.

Modding in civ6 is similar (DB, sql, xml, Lua) to civ5, so it's not hard to jump to civ6 modding, but we have absolutely no idea of the tools that will be released for civ6 (except what was marketed in pre-release interviews), and as the file format for art is completely new, we'll have to hope that they'll be released ASAP and working this time.