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[UXP] Legends of Revolutions
Legends of Revolution
Unofficial Expansion Project
The Goal of Legends of Revolution is to simulate a "commercially viable" expansion pack. As with any good expansion pack a new base concept is introduced: Revolutions, which carries with it concepts like barbarian civs, battles effecting national borders, and civil wars. Further certain gaping holes in the unit progression of default cIV are filled; like the much needed bombard, and steam ship navies of the Industrial era are flushed out. Overall Legends of Revolution has been built with the idea that more is not better, rather the goal has been to add in needed units for balance, and concepts that enhance gameplay.
There are many mods available for those interested in "expansions" that add in dozens of new units and 100s of leaderheads, or go for a content driven approach. Legends is built with a coherency driven philosophy. There are a couple new leaders, and civs and units for sure, and some some damn fine concepts introduced. The expansion here is smooth, well thought, and balanced, the change to Legends of Revolution from Beyond the Sword is similar to the change from Vanilla Civ4 to Beyond the Sword. Currently there are no known critical bugs in Legends; it is completely stable.
Instructions:
1) Make sure you have BtS 3.19, if not, get BtS and update it to 3.19!
2) Download Legends of Revolution v0.9.3 (beta)
3) Install
Legends of Revolution is packaged in an NSIS installer .exe, installing is as simple as double clicking. On installation you will be given the option to create shortcuts to the mod, so that you can easily play it by launching from the desktop, and/or Start menu. No need to load or alter your regular BtS game in any way. I designed this mod with stability being a core necessity, 99% of users will experience no issues. Though like any software, there have been some known machine specific issues, see known bugs in the second post below for troubleshooting information if any problems occur.
Introduced Concepts:
The concepts incorporated in this mod are introduced from the RevolutionDCM mod by glider1 and jdog5000 as well as those like Moctezuma, PieceOfMind, and EmperorFool who have produced the components that really bring RevDCM together. The intruduced concepts are toggleable in the custom games start up, you may enable or disable them as per your tastes.
Revolutions: Cities now have a revolution index. This is negatively effected by such things as distance from your capital, Non State religion, wars going poorly, a poor economic state, etc. Revolutionary sentiment is quelled by troop garrisons, building of wonders, communication technology, culture spending, success in war, etc.
If a city or a group of cities gets frustrated with their empire's rule, they will demand independence; If refused they may openly rebel. This causes armed uprising, and entire new civilizations may spawn taking over sections of large sprawling empires. Balkanization can occur in empires that are not well maintained, or sometimes the rebels will topple the old regime completely. Well managed empires have no problems.
Legend Units: Think of these as wonders for warmongers. Legends are not incorporated from Revolutions, and are not toggleable like all other concepts listed here, they are core to the mod. There are ten Legends, and each may only be built once. As an example the first Legend to be available is 300 Spartans, which is a melee unit with
5 and 100% bonus vs melee, 50% vs Mounted, 50% defense vs early mounted units, and 50% defense against archers. 300 Spartans starts with Drill1, Guerilla1, and Formation, however it comes with the hammer price of 4 axeman/spearmen. All legends are similar to this in strength, though the 300 might be the most powerful because of when it becomes available (bronze working and polytheism).Barbarian Civ: Barbarian cities that develop high culture or get large may settle down, spawning entire new civilizations.
Start as Minor Tribes: Simulates the chaos of early history. All civs are treated by the game as barbarian (Unit color, flags and borders still show, you are aware of who is around you, they just cannot be peacefully interacted with) until they discover the technology of Writing, and may engage in diplomacy with other civilizations that have discovered writing.
Influence Driven War: Battles have an effect on the cultural depth of tiles. This means that in war the borders of empires become dynamic, and will shift according to those who succede in their war.
Unaltered Gameplay Enhancements:
Interface: The BUG mod is fully incorporated into Legends. The current version is 3.6 The enhancements to the interface are too numerous to count. If you haven't tried BUG you will be blown away by how much easier it is to get information, and how well everything is displayed.
Better AI: Better AI v 0.78c has been incorporated. Making the AI much smarter, especially at warfare. You will probably need to drop a difficulty level from what you are used to in BtS when playing this mod.
Art: Ethnic Unit art has been expanded. Overall the game will look much prettier.
Units and Civs
The bulk of the unit art and civilizations have been incorporated from the Wolfshanze mod. This mod was used because the overall changes were small, but needed. Overall the core game is touched very little. A few leaders, civilzations and a couple wonders (including Leonardo's Workshop!) have been added, techs and units have been added to smooth things out from BtS. Overall the focus of added units and technologies has been in the industrial era, where the interesting tech progression and unit steps found in the Mideval era fell flat in BtS. With Legends of Revolution, the unit progression stays paced like durring that period of gameplay through the End Game.
I always enjoy receiving feedback, so please feel free to post and let me know what you think, and any ideas you have to improve this mod.
. There are also a couple issues I need to address before I consider this a full instead of a beta build: First, and most importantly, the causes of Revolutions aren't fully transparent. Though it is much better. You should check out this thread, where I am trying to get jdog to better expose Revolution causation: 
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