Adding new buildings and traits, is it possible?

[Qwertqwert]

Is it possible to add new buildings and traits? If so can I also give 3 traits to every leader? Can the game handle it?

[Locutus]

Sure, why would the most moddable Civ game to date not allow that? You can add all 8(?) traights to a leader if you want...

[Qwertqwert]

Cool, what about buildings though?

Anyway, I want to add these traits, do you think they are balanced enough?

Farmer - All farms, pastures, and plantations produce +1 food

Engineer - All tiles that already produce 2 shields produce 1 more

Scientific - Automatic +25% reashearch

Popular (or a better word) +2 Happiness in all cities

What do you think?

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Qwertqwert
Cool, what about buildings though?

Again, this is the most moddable civ game to date, why would there be a limit? Add as many as you want, using whatever effects and pre-conditions that you want. Your creativity and ability to code it are your only limits (unless you're gonna add few million but I don't see that happening anytime soon)...

Anyway, I want to add these traits, do you think they are balanced enough?

Experimentation, observation and reflection are the three principal means of acquiring knowledge -- for game design I find it most effective to use them in that order (and to rinse and repeat until you're satisfied).

But at first sight the first three seem horribly overpowered. There's a reason food, production and science are not touched by any of the existing traits...

[Qwertqwert]

Creativity I've got, just not the ability to code. But I'll see what I can do with those anyway.

Is this better?

Farmer - Farms that produce 3 or more food produce 1 more

Miner - All mines that mine some resource produce +1 shield

Scientific - +10% Reashearch

[proviisori]

IMO looks better.

Scientific is still very powerful.

[JackRudd]

Don't forget to look for overpowered trait combos with that lot. I like the look of Expansive/Farmer, Industrious/Miner and Financial/Scientific, for example.

[Solver]

Adding buildings is easy as it's pure XML. For adding traits, you need to use the SDK, but it's not that problematic, either. As for balance, generally a lot of testing is needed to determine whether something is balanced or not.

You Farmer trait throws a red flag for me. That means floodplain and food resource (wheat, etc) farms immediately get a bonus, which puts a farmer civ way ahead in generating GPs, and also lets them expand somewhat faster due to faster Settler construction. Uhmm.

Miner is better. You won't ever have too many mines mining a resource, and +1 shield is tame. It might even be underpowered.

Scientific - you're throwing a +10% research, which is the benefit of Free Religion, in for free and from the start? Red flag! Not necessarily unbalanced, but borderline, and gets a "needs testing" flag from me. Unbalanced in combination with Financial, possibly too strong with a high-food start and/or Parthenon/Great Library/Pyramids wonders.

Sorry if I sound harsh there, I just kicked into my "Civ4 tester mode" for this post.

[Solver]

Well, to correct myself, you can create new traits in the Assets\XML\Civilizations\Civ4TraitInfos.xml file. But you can only modify some stuff there, for example, you can't add a global research bonus, that would require the SDK for defining a completely new trait bonus type. Or so it seems.

[Locutus]

Why do people keep underestimating the power of Python, even ones that should know better?

[Solver]

Because I'm not sure about that. Well, I know that you can add stuff such as beakers via Python, but it wouldn't be a *true* trait defined in XML with new tags, would it?

[Locutus]

So? The end-user won't notice the difference, what's the problem? Half the SLIC mods in the CtP games used these kinds of work-arounds, I never got any complaints

[Solver]

Well, yeah. Although it's an interesting question on what to do when you have both options available, the Python one and the SDK. SDK's a bit faster, Python's open...

[Locutus]

Python's easier to code, easier to combine with other mods, easier to update to Warlords once it's out, easier for others to further improve on, and its performance not nearly as poor as most people seem to assume. If you can avoid using the SDK, do so.

[Qwertqwert]

Well I have to go with XML because I don't know Python. I don't know XML eigher but I can atleast guess at it with what they already have.

Where is the SDK and how do I use it (is it an application or what)