A challenge to mod-makers: The short civ game!

[Slax]

I'm not much of a mod or scenerio maker, but I have a challenge for those who are: a 2 or 3 hour game.

Would it be possible to pare down Civ III into a mod where one can move at a faster rate through the time periods, exploration and war?

I'm thinking
- faster movement
- faster tech learning
- fewer techs (and units?)
- faster build time
- Tiny maps only

Would it work?

Any thoughts?
Note- I'm not talking about speeding up the player taking his/her turn.

[Ed O'War]

Small maps will definitely help. You can reduce the cost of technology as well as minimum and maximum research times. That will go a long ways towards making a faster game. You can also increase the appearance rate of strategic resources to make it easier to get the resources you need to develop. Also, try reducing the hit points for units by one or so, so that battles will resolve faster.

[Purple]

Seems like a workable solution to this problem will be found in scenarios with objectives that can be met in a given number of turns.

I haven't played with the editor, so I don't know: is it possible to create a scenario with specified start and end years, or that end with the achievement of a given tech, era, or Wonder?

There is an acceleration mod out there that does do some of the things you mention, but it definitely does not shorten the game to 3-4 hours.

[Ed O'War]

Currently the editor is not a real scenario editor: you can't specify starting or ending years or set specific objectives like "discover this technology" or "capture these cities". This month a new version of the editor is supposed to come out to make it a real scenario editor. There is no word as to whether one will be able to set objectives. However, simply being able to build scenarios should help to shorten the game, because then a lot of the development time can be reduced so you can just get down to playing the game.