With our Deity succession game finishing up over at CivFanatics, I wanted to put out a last call for Civ5. I'm personally done with this game, no interest in starting up anything new. And there's been shockingly little interest in Civ5 over the past two weeks around here, given that the release of a flagship Civilization title was barely over a month ago. Nevertheless, I don't want to cut off the community from this game just because I don't like it personally. So if you want to see the appearance of Civ5 Epics/Adventures, go ahead and post in this thread. Hopefully we could then find someone (not me) to be in charge of organizing and running the events themselves.

Or, if no one is interested, we can focus on more Civ4 stuff. Whatever the community prefers.

I'm working on a mod I would enjoy to play. In a nutshell:

- fun for me to play (highly subjective !)
- there should be more viable choices, variety is nice
- better balance
- weaker ranged units
- unnecessary but fun changes

Current release: 26_11_2010 (I'm using dates unless I come up with better version system)
It's bare bones, the archive contains WIZARDS.EXE, MAGIC.EXE, SPELLDAT.LBX and docs. Put them in your Master of Magic directory. Common sense regarding overwriting files applies - make a backup !

http://www.sendspace.com/file/sofc2m
Note sites like Sendspace kill links if files are not in demand.

Quote:Steppenbadger mod
###################

Introduction
*******************

This mod is a work in progress. The main goals are:
* Improve the balance, more choices should be viable
* Improve variety, effective but too similar tools gain new purposes

List of changes
*******************

Normal units
===================


All races
-------------------

* Spearmen, Swordsmen movement 1 -> 2
* Bowmen ranged strength 1 -> 2
* Cavalry (Paladins, Elven Lords, Centaurs) movement 2 -> 3
* All halberdiers negate first strike.
* Races with fs-negating halberdiers get first strike
* Ship movement - Trireme:2, Galley: 4, Warship: 6
* Unit costs not adjusted (yet)

High Elves
-------------------

* All units lose +1 to hit
* Pegasi gain Armour Piercing ability

High Men
-------------------

* Paladins are no longer Armour Piercing.

Dark Elves
-------------------

* Nightblades movement 1 -> 2, poison 1 -> 2
* Warlocks Doom Bolt -> Web, lose Missile Immunity
* Nightmares lose ranged attack, crosses 8 -> 4, gain Illusionary Attack
* Priests lose ranged attack, gain Missile Immunity, Summon 1 Demon

Gnolls
-------------------

* Wolf Riders movement 3 -> 4
* Settlers swords 2 -> 6

Orcs
-------------------

Theme: forced march

* halberdiers invited to the First Strike Club
* shamans movement 1 -> 2
* engineers movement 1 -> 2
* settlers movement 1 -> 2
* cavalry becomes cataphracts. 0 defense but Large Shield, 6 swords,
and First Strike.
* magicians become war mages. 6 figures, swords, 2 life, 3 shields,
weapon immunity, lose ranged attack but keep fireball.

Trolls
-------------------

* War Mammoths movement 2 -> 3

Halflings
-------------------

* all units no longer "lucky"
* swordsmen, spearmen get 1 strength 2 sling attack
* settlers get 6 stone 6 ammo attack
* slingers melee attack 1 -> 0. Ammo 6 -> 12


Fantastic creatures
===================

* skeletons, ghouls, nagas, guardian spirit, werewolves movement 1 -> 2
* hell hounds, giants movement 2 -> 3
* fire elemental has immolation, -4 melee
* sprites now have passive healing
* werewolves gain Forestry
* gargoyles gain Illusion Immunity
* shadow demons and werewolves no longer regenerate
* shadow demons, werewolves, night stalker, ghouls, skeletons 0 mana upkeep

Spells
===================

* Black Channels cost 100 -> 50
* Chaos Channels cost 50 -> 75
* Warp Creature cost 18 -> 8
* Phantom Warriors cost 10 -> 15

Heroes
===================

* Druid gains Regeneration
* Thief gains Web
* Dwarf gains Wall Crusher
* Orc Warrior loses Mountaineering, warrior random replaced with Armsmaster
* Magician loses Arcane Power, gains free Doom Bolt

Notes
===================

* unit costs not adjusted yet
* I'm unsure about leaving bowmen and shamans/priests at movement 1
* pikemen intentionally left at 1 movement
* unsure about leaving hammerhands, barbarians at movement 1
* more ideas to come

Rushing production
No progress = 5gc per production point
Less than 1/3 progress = 4gc per production point
More than 1/3 progress = 3gc per production point.

Production loophole
After buying any item you'll be unable to change to a new item, meaning you have to finish it.

Wasted production
Any surplus production is carried over to your next project automatically.


I don't like how easy it is to rush production in MoM. Partly because money is so plentiful, and partly because of the loophole that lets you evade the cost penalties when you're less than 1/3 done with a project.

It seems to be realistic to change the costs, less realistic to change the cost brackets. It also seems to be realistic to close the loophole of buying spearmen, changing to barracks, buying, changing, etc.

I also want to make it possible for production points to carry over from one project to the next. This also seems to be possible according to a guy named TRAC who promised to do it for me over half a year ago I still hope he'll get back to me on it.

End a unit's turn after attacking
This is partly to help the AI who probably won't be able to learn to take proper advantage of movement. It's also to reduce the tedium of micro management in combat.

Ranged distance penalty
I think there are two problems with how this works at present:
1) It means that high accuracy units can mostly ignore the penalty. With +5 to hit, a -2 penalty merely lowers you from 80% accuracy to 60% accuracy, a relative drop of 25%. I don't think this should be the case.
2) For low accuracy units, it makes no difference whether a unit is at -2 penalty range or -4 penalty, you're down to the minimum 10% accuracy regardless.

If it's possible, I think it'd be interesting to sidestep the accuracy system and have distance be an extra fail factor. Say, a distance x leads to an added fail rate of (x-1) * 10%, so a distance of 9 would lead to 80% fail rate which is applied after normal rolls.

About item slots
It's possible to mess about with item slots for heroes quite easily. For example, as shown below, I want to give Taki 3 ring slots since warrior monks don't use weapons or armour. And Theria doesn't use shields or heavy armour, so she gets 1 weapon slot and 2 ring slots. I'm really interested in the possibility of the following hacks:
1) Distinguishing between shield and armour slots (we could do this as a self imposed rule)
2) Giving some archer and warrior-mage heroes 1 bow/sword or staff/sword slot AND 1 sword slot (can also be done as a self imposed rule)
3) Letting some warrior heroes get 2 sword slots and 1 armour slot (2-weapon combat)

Suggestions for item slots, skills and fame level
In general, I want to remove random skills from most 0 and 5 fame heroes as that can unbalance early heroes significantly.

Racial units is the term I use for all units that are restricted to a single race (with pikemen being the sole exception, which bothers me). The racial stat bonuses and penalties applied to basic units do not apply to racial units.

I'm planning on raising the cost of most units to make it a little harder to create a killer stack.

I'll start. This spot made me build settlers unusually fast. 3x Wild Game, Nightshade, and Coal. Yes, I'm playing Myrran Klackons :-).

Scooter is such a cheater I really need to make sure I fill this first post with nonsense and whatnot or else he'll totally scroll over it and find out that I'm planning to crush him with my barbarian, warring hordes.

Players get lost!

I've been a fan of the Civilization Series for a while, I started with Civ III, and on that I managed to get up to Demigod before giving up on it.

Then a few things came about and I didn't play for a couple of years, then recently, I picked up Civ IV (can't pick up V because my computer....sucks)
and started playing a few games, mostly on warlord level.

Attaching a save of my first game, so if you can help me out to learn this game, it'd be swell