Leader Tweaks

[7RED7]

First let me say that in spite of its flaws, I absolutely loved Civilization Revolution. Hate at me if you want, but that's where I'm coming from.

One thing I enjoyed about Civ Rev over Civ IV is that, while there were fewer options for leaders, every leader seemed to play much differently, at least in a more immediately visible way. Regardless of how the bonuses turned out in the end, everything just "felt" like it had more impact.

Take Japan for instance. I like the idea of the Bushido ability. It fits their flavor well and provides a nice combat bonus. But what happened to the incentive to build flourishing coastal networks, and go island hopping? Bushido is nice, but Japan could start in a desert area (provided that realistic food supplies are available) and not notice a difference either way. Egypt's Bonus and uniques make sense, but shouldn't they be more adjusted to desert life (maybe an ability to better work river floodplains for more food and some utilization of blank desert squares instead of the original +1 Food, Trade for all desert though?)?

Getting new abilities during different eras just made the game more fun in my opinion.
List here VVV for non-console users.
http://www.civfanatics.com/civrev/civilizations

So, like the idea or hate it, I'd be interested to know if these modifications to the leaders are possible, or if they could be achieved through other means.

While thinking about how it may be implemented, I also came up with another idea. Assuming that research is easily modifiable, how hard would it be to introduce civ-specific techs related to history? Someone would have to come up with a set for every Civ, but I can't imagine there aren't some history buffs around here would love to propose historic events to be used for the tech options. For example, let's say you're playing Washington/America and you reach either either the industrial age, or the 1860's. A new set of options becomes available in the tech menu which are mutually exclusive, and have drastically reduced research requirements. You can research either Union or Confederacy. The war will give you a hit to your population in some way, but you will emerge with a powerful bonus depending on the historical outcome you chose. What if India was unable to gain full autonomy and the British managed to convert Ghandi's movement into a political puppet. There must be a decent selection of options for civil wars, leadership changes, and revolutions throughout the years to provide a decent selection to every Civ.
This would present players with a bit more late-game flexibility if things aren't playing out to the strengths of their chosen Civ.

[Procylon]

You can mod leaders pretty handily. All the traits are pretty much tied to leaders also. They even have Civ 4 traits in the files. Though, when I added them to my leader I didn't see their effect in game, so they are probably unplugged.

For instance, I modified Alexander so that he has all the traits in the game. And then I went and modified the traits so that they were all stronger.

Also, you can add to traits or create new traits. For instance, you could add a trait that gives +food to all jungle. Or +gold and production to rivers. You could have a trait that doubles great engineer generation. A trait that gives production bonuses to units or buildings. Reduce the experience required for promotions.

Pretty much all of these things are modular in nature. You could add them to a tech, to a building, or a wonder.

You could make Civ 5 into a completely different game using only the XML files.


Modifying tech is also simple. Creating whole new tech trees is kind of tedious though. The easiest thing to do would be to modify the current techs in the tree.

It will take quite a bit of work to sort out new tech tree orders, adding in new techs, working out the UI, and then setting the prerequisites for the dozens of units and buildings you altered as a result.

Tedious but doable.

[7RED7]

Interesting, I imagined the difficulty scale would be the other way around.

I've honestly always had something of a mental block when it comes to programming (always seems too much like english/grammar and not enough like math), but I'd like to give it a shot. Is there a generally agreed upon best tutorial on the matter, or is it mostly just trial and error?

I'm kind of hesitant to just start messing around with the files. The game's buggy enough without me breaking it. Is there a good starting point for learning how to modify, change, or add/remove abilities and bonuses?

Edit: I almost forgot to ask, but does steam reset files if they are modified in Civ 5? I had a problem a while back where Stalker SoC mods weren't working because steam kept reseting all the files.

[Cursis]

When you download a patch steam will download any modified files.... Or at least it did that with the total war games.... they should not be reset randomly by steam...

But who knows what steam may do.


EDIT: Forgot to ask.... What file are the traits in?

[Procylon]

Files such as LUA can seem pretty jumbled and nonsensical when you don't know what to look for. I would suggest downloading an XML editor and a LUA editor. XML and LUA are the 2 basic types for most of your game files.

The editors should clear things up for you so that you know which parts are important and which are "fluff".

XML is the easiest of the 2 to get into, so start with that.

For XML I use microsoft's simple little "XML Notepad". It is free, and it works. You might find better.

For the XML Notepad. It separates the file into 2 formats. A tree format(like your file trees in windows) and a code format. You modify in the tree format, which really makes it much much simpler to understand for people who are not native programmers.

Beyond that, I can't really tell you how to do it other than look at the dev's code as your example, make everything look like theirs, and start small. Change a grassland yield to 3 food. Test it in the game. Move up to more complicated things like copying the gold modifier on a river and adding it to your grassland. Go from there.

I have searched for all kinds of tutorials online for these kinds of things, and they are practically impossible to find. The best way I found was to try and mod just about every game I play. Most of it is pretty easy if you have an eye for detail and some good logic.

When you download a patch steam will download any modified files.... Or at least it did that with the total war games.... they should not be reset randomly by steam...

But who knows what steam may do.


EDIT: Forgot to ask.... What file are the traits in?

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\sid meier's civilization v\Assets\Gameplay\XML\Civilizations

You can turn off automatic patching, so that the game will only overwrite your files when you are ready for it to do so. I think you right click the game in your steam library, and then go into properties or something.

[Cursis]

Thanks man.... damnit i must be blind lol