|
It is time for the new version of the Mods
of the Mods:
Warlords: Total
Realism 2.3
07.05.2007
* * *
Total Realism GOLD 2.3.
Cooler than ever before.
Confused? Let’s assume you are, and you positively
don’t know what I am talking about. This means that you’ve never
ever played Total Realism before in your life. Then let me sum it up
a bit for you. If you’re not new to our mod, you can take your time
to look this through too, you might learn something interesting.
1.
What is Total Realism?
It’s a
mod for Civ 4 Warlords. Sure, yeah, we know BtS has been around for
some time already, and most mods are made for BtS. Well, we decided
that we could take our time and release the last version for
Warlords that we are satisfied with. Yep, this version, and if you
are reading this, it means we were successful. This also means that
you can now safely assume that we’re developing Total Realism for
BtS (“Total Realism Platinum”, I guess).
2.
Have you been around for long?
We
sure have been. The first public version of Realism mod for vanilla
Civ 4 was released in November of 2005, thus making the mod 2,5
years old already, one of the oldest mods for Civ 4. From February
2006 the mod is in hands of Houman, who has been the team leader
since, and still is. From March of the same year, we are based on
Sourceforge, and Sourceforge SVN repository has proven to be an
excellent way of organizing our work. In December 2006 we ported the
mod to Warlords, adopting the name “Total Realism Gold” and it has
been developed for Warlords ever since. 2.3 will most likely be the
last Warlords version, as the work on BtS port is already underway.
3.
What does the mod do? Does it add new units, buildings,
civs, leaders, technologies, features etc.?
Lots
and lots of stuff. Yes, yes, no, yes, yes, yes for short. If you’re
asking this, I guess you like figures. Here you are, some
statistics:
-
116 new techs, give or take two. All new techs complete with voice
acting and graphics.
-
14 new civics, 2 for each category. “Old” civics are also reworked,
in many cases completely so.
-
46 new conventional promotions; this doesn’t cover the traditions
and doctrines, providing another 60 unique advantages to your units.
-
48 new leaders for existing civs (3 of them has been since
independently added to BtS).
-
2 new leader traits Seafarer and Agricultural, to make sure there
are many unique combinations to try out.
-
National values, that work like less powerful leader traits, but are
assigned to civs instead of particular leaders; 8 in number.
-
0 new civs. That’s right, you read it clearly. TR doesn’t add new
civs in addition to the ones introduced by Warlords. We believe that
24 civs are already quite a lot – and considering we’ll be adding
BtS civs when we convert, the number is already quite impressive.
-
6 broad new unit categories (like Light Cavalry, Submarines, etc.)
-
30 new land unit classes (like Fusiliers, Hussars, Armored Cars
etc.)
-
18 new naval unit classes (like Sloop, Ship of the Line, Dreadnought
etc.)
-
3 new air unit classes
-
Unique limited national units for each civ (24 in total, obviously)
-
Too many individual new units for me to even estimate their number,
bringing both flavor and strategy differences for each civ (expect
to field lots of different phalanx as Greeks and learn to love the
desert as Arabs); I guess “hundreds” wouldn’t be an understatement
-
Unique artstyles assigned to civilizations; many buildings change
their looks according to the era and to the particular civ that
built them
-
50 new regular buildings to construct in your cities (Schools,
Caravan Houses, Manufactories etc.)
-
22 new special industrial buildings used to convert some resources
into other ones (ranging from smithing Bronze to producing
Microchips)
-
20 new World Wonders to give you an edge over opponents
-
30 new resources, some to be harvested, some to be produced by your
industries
-
Unique great people; when a great person is born, expect to see
his/her artistic rendition or photo and either find out his/her
biography or to learn a quote of his/hers. 888 total – imagine that
for a moment!
-
Deadly pandemics will devastate the cities of rulers that are
careless with sanitation
-
Great Generals can now found military traditions and discover Great
Doctrines, increasing the combat capacity of your troops
-
Inquisitors can purge the heathen from theocratic cities
-
Slaves and serfs can start rebellions that you will have to put down
by force
-
Assassins can carry out covert operations long before modern
espionage arrives
-
Units will get aid bonus from combined arms tactics. Using diverse
army composition has never been as beneficial before
-
Institute slavery, and capture slaves from combat – or free them if
you’re fighting a slave-holding nation, while you are not
-
No more pharaohs trading blueprints! Watch techs spread passively
from neighbor to neighbor instead, as was really the case in history
-
Place your faith into any of the religion-specific unique units;
every religion has one, and they all serve different purposes
-
Enjoy our custom-built World Map and bear in mind Total Realism was
designed to be compatible with random maps, and many custom map
generation scripts for even more replayability (and more
unpredictable multiplayer games)
4.
I liked some element from your mod (piece of artwork,
concept etc), and I want to use it in my own mod. May I?
By all
means you should do it! Total Realism by itself draws heavily on the
creations of other Civ4 community members, especially on CFC. We
would be delighted if some part of our mod would help other fellow
modders to create better stuff.
5.
I have a question/bug report/suggestion. Where do I go?
We
have a forum specifically for those needs. We invite you to visit
http://civ4.houmie.com/forum/ for all your TR community needs. We leave no post unanswered!
6.
I liked your mod very much. How can I help your team?
Well,
first of all, if you have any specific skill, ranging from C++ to
audio recording, anything that you think could be useful to TR, you
can join our team. Basically, that is how we get team members – all
of us, including myself, were at one moment just fans who offered
their help in working on the mod. If you don’t think you have any
skills valuable to the mod, you can just play it – every player who
shares his/her impressions, voices suggestions, reports bugs is an
asset to the team. They help improve TR almost as much as any team
member. Also keep in mind that you CAN’T give us money for our work,
because TR is strictly non-commercial. We have no account for
donations and aren’t getting one. You may, however, buy a team
member a drink if one happens to be in your vicinity (the chances of
which are quite good, since we have team members in many countries –
see the credits at the end of the file).
7.
I feel you treated some group/ideology/nation/religion
unfairly in your mod. You give it too much/too little credit. :-(
We are
VERY sorry you have come to this conclusion. We’re trying to be fair
and to carry out a balanced approach to all the stuff. After all,
this mod started as an attempt to correct some
unfairness/onesidedness present in vanilla Civ4. If you think we
should know your opinion, please share it with us at our forum (see
above), and we’ll discuss it.
8.
Can I use a custom map with your mod?
No.
Unfortunately, custom maps don’t work with TR. The reason behind it
is all the new resources we add that will obviously be missing on a
map not specifically made for our mod. If you have enough
experience, you can make a map TR-compatible by placing all the
appropriate resources on it by hand – if you ever do so, feel free
to send it to us, we will likely include it in our next release.
9.
Can I use custom map generation scripts with your mod?
Unlike the previous question, the answer is most likely “yes, you can”.
The majority of map generation scripts, if they weren’t made
specifically for some other mod, will generate perfectly playable
random maps in TR. Of course, we haven’t tested every single script
out there, but some of more popular ones, like PerfectWorld, can
give you an excellent TR playing experience, better than the scripts
that come bundled with Civ4. We recommend you experiment and find
the one that suits your needs.
10.
Will you extend your mod to the future? There is so much cool stuff
you could add…
No,
extending the tech tree to the future is beyond the scope of our
mod. As it is, even expanding it to the present is beyond it –
currently it is considered to extend as far as late 1980’ies. That’s
why we also aren’t including any contemporary leaders – they are
simply beyond our scope. We strive to model human history, and
contemporary events (and even more so hypothetical future events)
have not become history yet.
11.
Will you add more civs? At least my favorite one(s)?
No,
and there are several reasons for it. First of all, our World Map is
pretty cramped as it is, and will become even more so when we
eventually add BtS civs (most likely, not all of these will even
make it). Then, with the amount of attention every civ gets in our
mod (leaders, units, Great People, etc.), it would be a titanic job
to add even one – since it is not a matter of simply adding a couple
of leaders, a UU and a UB. A “civ” that is considered a standard on
CFC, for example, would look terribly incomplete in our mod, and
would require much more work to blend in than what already went into
its making.
12.
Why
don’t you use animated leaderheads?
Once
again, several reasons. The first and the strongest of those is that
I’m the person responsible for adding these, and I don’t like
Firaxis-style animated cartooney leaderheads. Ever since Civ 3, I
always substituted them for beautiful works of art I could find.
These painters are worth checking out! There are also two additional
reasons that reinforce this principle: first of all, since I can
make those static leaderheads myself, I am not bound to wait for
someone to make me an animated leaderhead – and thus I can put in
any leader I can possibly find, and you will notice that we have
more leaders than most other mods. And lastly, static leaderheads
eat up much less system resources. In a mod as big as ours, every
little bit counts.
13.
Can you make it so that civs found cities in historic places and
appear at historic periods? Rhye’s does it.
No,
implementing these features (as well as some other stuff present in
Rhye’s) would limit our mod to world map only. While we consider the
work of Rhye to be a top-class mod, we are developing a more
flexible product, that is suitable for a broad spectrum of random
maps.
14.
Why did you turn off tech trading?
We
have implemented tech transfer component instead. If any civ you
have open borders with knows the tech you’re researching, you will
research it twice as fast. We feel it does a better job at
simulating tech spread than Civ4 default “tech trading” (which
really only happened from late XIX century IRL). You can turn tech
trading back on, and it will function, but we don’t recommend it,
since logically it doesn’t work well with our tech transfer (there
is no real reason for selling techs left, if your trade partner can
just research it twice as fast).
Thank you for taking your time to read through all of
this. I therefore wish you good luck and lots of fun playing our
mod. Hope you’ll like what you’ll see. Best wishes, Walter Hawkwood
and the TR team. Have fun!
| 