Zurai's Conquest

[Zurai]

Download the .ace files for the "lite" version of the mod (no unit graphics) here and here (you need both files, 3.4 MB total)

**OR **

Download the .zip files for the "lite" version of the mod (no unit graphics) here and here (you need both files, 3.75 MB total)

Download the latest patch here. To install, simply unzip the patch into your Civ3/Conquests/Scenarios folder, and choose to overwrite files if asked.

Download/view the readme file here (edit: fixed, thanks jalapeno_dude)

Make sure you follow the installation instructions in the readme! If you don't install it correctly, it will give you a ton of errors.



What is my mod, you ask? Here's a rundown:


UNITS:

• Graphical and Narrative flavor units for each civ and culture group
  Religious units including Priests, Monks, Inquisitors, Missionaries, and Shaman, able to convert your units to their own religion!
  Spies and Secret Agents with the ability to strike unseen deep into your enemy's territory - unless he has his own Spies, of course!
  Much more powerful Barbarians, capable of turning your own ships and soldiers against you!
  Futuristic units including Combat Mechs, Hyper Velocity Missiles, Aerospace Fighters, and Hover Tanks.
  over 300 units in total!

WONDERS/IMPROVEMENTS:

• 2 new small wonders for each civ trait.
  Seafaring civs can establish a Great Shipyard and Great Port to ensure their supremacy at sea.
  Fertile Farmlands and the Breadbasket of the Nation are the trademarks of Agricultural civs.
  Religious civs worship their diety(ies) at an Enshrined Relic and make pilgrimages to a Holy City.
  Explorers from far and wide are attracted to the World Travellers' Society and Cartographers' Guild built by Expansionist civs.
  Industrious civs multiply their production with the Blacksmiths' Guild located in their City of Industry.
  All the greatest philosophers and scientests received their training at the Scientific civs' Philosopher's Forum and Grand Academy.
  Militaristic civs rule the world from the Military HQ in their Unbreakable Fortresses.
  Last, but certainly not least, gold flows like sand into the coffers of Commercial civs after they construct Trade Networks and create a Trade City.
  Capitalize on newfound resources with Stone Quarries, Lumber Mills, Sugar Plantations, Silk Traders, and more.
  Get an early jumpstart on your production with the Blacksmith, or make your citizens just a little less like unculture brutes with the Monolith.
  Levy troops to defend your territory with the Archery Range, Fortified Barracks, Gun Range, or Nat'l Guard Recruitment, but be careful - your citizens tend not to like being forced into the military.
  Corruption a thorn in your side? Build the new Summer Palace and Winter Palace to expand your ability to govern your conquests. Then, build the Summer Gardens and Winter Gardens (along with the Palace Gardens and Forbidden Gardens) to increase your culture in your new home away from home.

RESOURCES:

• Make your citizens happier with Sugar and Tobacco luxuries.
  Mine Stone or chop Timber to construct ancient buildings and naval units.
  Enjoy the extra trade generated by Jade mines within your territory.

RULES CHANGES:

• Balanced combat! ALL units get two important changes: First, their hit points are doubled, to reduce the likelihood of a statistical fluke enabling that backward Zulu Impi to destroy your Modern Armor Army. Second, all combat values are doubled as a baseline to provide more room for tweaking combat values. In normal Civ3, there's no way for a unit to be better than a warrior but worse than an archer at attacking. With doubled combat values, it's a cinch.
  Extensive use of Defensive Bombardment makes attacking a fortified position riskier. All archers, gunmen, and non-tank cavalry units have Defensive Bombardment.
  Units now follow a more realistic pattern, with Spearmen and their upgrades being an offensive line, and Archers and their upgrades being defensive in nature. The two lines converge at Riflemen, and from that point on Infantry units are about as good at attacking as defending - just like in real life.
  Some terrains are harder to navigate in the ancient world - Deserts, Seas, and Oceans all take 2 movement points to cross. Advanced units are capable of ignoring these movement penalties.
  Helicopters are useless no more! Transport Helicopters and the new Helicopter Gunships are now mobile air units, capable of striking deep into enemy territory.
  Corruption now scales with difficulty level. Players starting a Chieftan game will have only 60% of default corruption, but watch out for you masters playing on Sid difficulty! Everyone knows the legendary Sid only plays with 130% of normal corruption.
  Resources in general are made more common than in C3C default.
  Number of Civilizations reduced. I'm sure this will be disappointing to some, but it was neccesary to reduce quantity to maintain quality with this mod. Civs cut: Babylon, Zululand, Iroquois (merged with America), Sumeria, Hittites, Portugal (merged with Spain), Byzantines (partially merged with Rome, Greece, Ottomans, and Persians), and Inca. This leaves 23 civs, which should be enough to satisfy most people.

TECHS:

• Added over 40 techs, including 5 Futuristic Techs (Nanotechnology, Nanotech Composites, Combat Robotics, Anti-Gravity, and Advanced Space Flight), Religious Techs, and many "unseen" flavor techs that enable each civ to play even more differently from the rest than in normal Civ3.
  To make room for the new era techs, several techs were cut (Ironclads, Polytheism, Monotheism, Recycling) and most "era-start" techs were moved back to the end of the previous era.
  Maximum tech research time moved back to vanilla/PTW default of 40 from C3C's 60.

 

[Zurai]

reserved

 

[Bombur]

Originally posted by Zurai
By the way, I posted this here in the Completed section because there will be a downloadable version within a day or two, and I wanted to prime the charge so to speak. It's not "complete" in the sense of having a final 1.0 next to it's name, but neither are most of the other mods here. I will be updating this thread very frequently as I work towards publishing this. I figured it was better to have one single thread here ready with discussion and readmes, etc, than to have threads in several forums.

My apologies if I've transgressed, however.

-How will your religious units be able to convert enemy units? By enslavement???

 

[Zurai]

Originally posted by Bombur
-How will your religious units be able to convert enemy units? By enslavement???

Yes. They're similar to Firaxis's Jesuit Missionaries from the AoD conquest, but a bit different too.

 

[Zurai]

I'm in the process of making the Civilopedia entries for all these new units (yes, they'll all come with pedia entries! Not all will be unit-specific entries at first though.), and one side effect of my unit and rules changes I'm noticing is that my units actually match the pedia descriptions now! For instance, the pedia entry for Roman Legionaries mentions that they're almost unstoppable on attack but relatively weak on defense - this obviously does not reflect the standard Civ3 version at all, but mine are Swordsmen with +1 attack and +2 hit points (because of their training and discipline) instead of Swordsmen with +2 defense, as they would be if they'd been a straight conversion.

This was entirely unintentional - this is the first time I've ever really looked at the pedia entries - but definately an added bonus, IMO.

I'm about halfway through the Ancient foot units now. All of the offensive infantry units have pedia entries and I'm working on the first defensive infantry unit, Archers.



BTW, I'm anticipating having a full readme up as soon as I get done with the civilopedia.txt file, which should be on Thursday or Friday. I may get it done earlier if I need a break from copy & pasting. As soon as it's done I'll attach it here.

 

[Zurai]

Here's a teaser from the Skirmisher Civpedia entry:



#PRTO_Skirmisher
^
^
^[Skirmishers] are a special kind of fast light infantry unit designed with three tasks in mind: First, they serve as a military scout, locating targets such as enemy troops, supply caravans, and workers. Second, they act as raiders, harrying the flanks of enemy formations and attacking their vulnerable supply lines. Third, they act as fire support in pitched battles, using their javelins, bows, or other ranged weapons to disrupt enemy charges. Skirmishers are fast units and may {withdraw from combat} when fighting a slower unit. They have a {defensive bombardment} attack and exert a $LINK<Zone of Control=GCON_ZOC>.

 

[Roluce]

Looks interesting, I will try it out and give you feedback on balancing and such if you like. You are implementing some of my own ideas - particularly the double hp and combat values. Also the defensive bombardment idea, and the civ trait specific small wonders to better differentiate the traits. I'm anxious to check it out.

btw, is this on a world map? if so, what size?

 

[Lachlan]

No bug please

 

[Zurai]

Originally posted by Roluce
Looks interesting, I will try it out and give you feedback on balancing and such if you like. You are implementing some of my own ideas - particularly the double hp and combat values. Also the defensive bombardment idea, and the civ trait specific small wonders to better differentiate the traits. I'm anxious to check it out.

I'll need a lot of feedback on balance and unit upgrade chains (I'm sure I'll have a few broken links in the chains - it's very difficult to get 335 units all linked correctly). The first public release will be a "no-graphics" version, because with the graphics only about 2/3 done it's already over 200 MB unzipped (125 zipped, which is over the extended upload limit here). I'm looking at sometime this weekend or early next week for the first release to be posted - depends on how fast I get through all the civpedia entries.

btw, is this on a world map? if so, what size?

No it's not, currently, but I have no problem making a world map version available. It's a simple addition. Do you have any preference?

 

[Zurai]

Originally posted by Lachlan
No bug please

Tall order, but I'll try. The first public release is almost certain to be at least slightly buggy and have some balance problems - it's impossible to fully bugcheck and balance check something this size all by myself. That being said, I'm aiming for all the bugs to be non-critical ones - in other words, it won't be giving you file not found errors.

 

[Zurai]

Stats update:

All Ancient Era unit pedia entries are done, and the Medieval ones are almost finished. Those are the two largest eras - Industrial, Modern, and No Era all have 50ish units in them compared to 103 in Ancient and 77 in Medieval, so I'm over halfway done. I'm anticipating finishing Civilopedia.txt in the next day or two. After that, I need to add in the ICON_ and ANIM_NAME_ entries in pediaicons.txt, but that will only take another day at most.

Once those two text files are "complete" (I don't have historical descriptions for most units at the moment - concentrating more on getting it playable for now. I *will* have historical civpedia info for every unit for the "final" release.), I will zip it all up and post it here. Currently looking at either sunday or monday night for the release, though I reserve the right to delay it if neccesary.

For another teaser, here's my units_32.pcx:





All the repeated icons (for example, the 2 extra settlers and workers and the extra scout on the first row) are placeholders for units I havn't confirmed graphics for yet. The icons with a big purple X through them are completely new units that I don't have confirmed graphics for. I have most of those holes filled tentatively, but havn't had a chance to check them out in a game yet since I'm working on getting the no-graphics version out for testing first.

 

[Zurai]

Update: I've completed all units from Settler through Armored Tongkang, completing the Ancient and Medieval Ages. Anticipating having the Industrial Era done by tonight.

 

[Zurai]

I have now completed civilopedia entries up through Junsen Class Submarine, finishing off the Industrial Era. Only 103 more units need civpedia entries. I'm ahead of schedule currently, but I'm still aiming for a sunday night release of the no-graphics version.

 

[zulu9812]

Why do you have duplicate unit icons?

 

[Lachlan]

Zurai will probably replace them in the future ...

 

[Zurai]

Another 2 hours, another era of units done. The civilopedia now has entries up through Refitted Battleship and thus the Space Age units are all added. Only the 47 no-era (building produced mostly) units are left, as well as a few behind the scenes techs.

 

[Zurai]

The duplicate icons are units that I have data for (ie, they're created in the editor) but that I havn't settled on graphics for. They're placeholders, as I said. I do have graphics lined up for most of those (about 3/4 of the ones up until the no-era units... there aren't very many religious type unit graphics out there, so those will probably be duplicated for a long time). I *could* have just pointed the units in the editor to existing graphics, but that makes it a pain to add new unit graphics - you can't tell just from looking at the image, but that entire units_32 file is in the order of the units in the biq. Ancient Age noncombat, offensive foot, defensive foot, cavalry, artillery, ships; repeat for medieval; Industrial infantry, mechanized, artillery, air, ships; Space Age infantry, mechanized, artillery, air, ships; no-era grouped by building type they're produced from.

 

[Zurai]

Ok, after reviewing the work required, I'm toning down the religious units from 1 per age per religion group (total ~25) to 1 generic unit for the ancient age and 1 per religion group that comes about halfway through the medieval age (total 6). The reason for changing them is that they have limited stealth attack capability (they can pick "common man" type targets - ie, settlers, workers, levied units, and the like, as well as enemy priests and spies) and I seriously don't want to go through the effort of managing the stealth attack list for that many units. Stealth attack with a large number of targets is a royal pain to set up, and I already have to set up the lists for all 10 subs (early sub + 3 flavors, nuke attack sub + 2 flavors, nuke missile sub + 2 flavors) and all 6 spies (one for each era, with asian civs getting the ninja as flavor for the first two eras). Adding 25ish priests to that was getting into the "seriously unpleasant" workload area.


So, with the new model, religious units will be very powerful throughout the Ancient age and almost as strong through the Medieval and early Industrial era, but will fade in importance other than as harassment units in late Industrial and the entire Space Age. I think that's fairly realistic, so I'm going to go ahead with it.

 

[DB_in_Omaha]

Originally posted by Zurai
The reason for changing them is that they have limited stealth attack capability (they can pick "common man" type targets - ie, settlers, workers, levied units, and the like, as well as enemy priests and spies)....

I'm not sure this will work the way you intend. Something I discovered -- actually, something my son discovered -- with similar units in BBW is that if a unit uses stealth attack to target a worker or settler, it actually *attacks* that worker or settler, and kills it. It doesn't just "convert" it like it would if it had encountered the unit on its own.

-- Darryl

 

[Zurai]

Yeah, I figured that's how it'd work. I was actually counting on it working that way for the Spy units (which also fill the roles of sabateurs/assassins). The Enslavement chance still goes off though even on noncombat units, I believe, and that's what I want these guys to do anyway. Capturing a worker gives you one that works at 50% efficiency - creating a religious Convert gives you one that works at 75% efficiency (yes, that's counting the "enslaved worker" 1/2 penalty - the base efficiency is 150%).

This mod definately won't model peaceful religion much better than plain Civ 3, even though the Asian area religion is Buddhism. It will do a fair job of modeling the crusade/inquisition/jihad type religious fervor of the middle ages, though, I believe.