First Civ4 mod project: Recreate SMAC

[Senethro]

Now also posted in the Civ4 forum so more people will read it.

Yes, I believe that the first mod for Civ 4 should be a step back in time. About the time I read that Civ4 was going to be fully and easily moddable I was working on my own balance patch for SMAC. I had begun with just trying to rebalance the SMAC factions but had quickly run into problems because the factions had many properties which were hardcoded. I was also unable to do anything about supply crawler abuse or the staggering power of Pop-booming. The inability to change things was frustrating. These issues demoralised me but it was the news of Civ4s moddability that prompted me to post this. I see no reason why SMAC cannot be recreated as a Civ4 mod and see many benefits from doing so.


This is what I see as the goals of such a mod.

Objectives:
-To acquire understanding of how to mod Civ4 in the Civ community, knowledge which will be useful to all in future projects.

-To recreate and revitalise SMAC as the game will not run forever on modern computers and is somewhat stagnating due to a lack of new players and an upper limit on innovation the current game allows by players.

-To create editing tools that may be used by all. It would be good enable other people to create mods easily. Direct equivalents for alpha.txt which cover governments, facilities, factions and all aspects of the game which people could edit in notepad would be the desired end.

-Many elements of SMAC (Social Engineering of governments) are well liked. These could be lifted from the SMAC mod and placed directly into Civ4.


Please, post your thoughts, support or questions.

[FrostyBoy]

I see this is as a really really great idea.


It could even be better, if you were interested, to build a game that goes after the space race victory of cIV.

You will come across the problem of graphics, not sure if you know me, but I can help you with the graphics, especially the terrain, but not the units.

As of writing this, I suddenly realised that the terrain system will be different, so now I am really interested to see how modding the terrains graphics will be.

[Solver]

I don't know if this would work at all. Civ4 isn't open-source. Can things such as SE or unit workshop be implemented with the Civ4 modding tools? That's still left to see....

[Civrules]

Re: First Civ4 mod project: Recreate SMAC

Originally posted by Senethro
-To acquire understanding of how to mod Civ4 in the Civ community, knowledge which will be useful to all in future projects.

Ok, well, The Gingerbread Man over at CFC has posted some great tutorials on how you'll be able to mod some parts of Civ IV, and what you need.

Here is his thread at CFC: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=97183
And here is his site: http://www.sthurlow.com/

[Senethro]

Great link, thank you very much. As a guy with very little (read, none) coding skill that will be very useful.
I would really love to see the code of whatever beta they have right now to see what could and couldn't be done.
I'm also hoping that they leave some of the systems from the older games in place in Civ4. Civ3, which was based on the AC engine I hear, had lots of anachronisms from previous games present. Civ3s governments could quite easily be compared in SMAC terms of growth, police, support, probe, efficiency and economy. If Civ4 has such things it would make rebuilding the Social Engineering table easier.

[korn469]

Senethro

I'm not sure how many anachronisms will remain in the civ4 engine that mod makes could exploit. I do think it's possible to create a mod inspired by SMAC. I doubt civ4 will have a unit creation tool like SMAC had, but devising the most common units shouldn't be that hard. Also it may or may not have social engineering so modding that might or might not be too hard. I guess once we really start learning more about civ4 then we can decide which parts of smac need the most focus to go into a civ4/smac mod.