I'm tired so that's all you get.

I finished the resource mapping for Rise of Rome (I might've missed some, and there's areas I just went scattershot through a combination of my broad strokes mapping and naturally dense terrain, but close enough), and as predicted, every civ has plenty of wheat already among others.

I'd rather each civ have like twenty of most resources and sparse on the rest than have any civ be screwed on resources altogether, though, so it's a healthy direction to take things in.

The other thing I did was the pediaicons and civilopedia for about half the buildings I need to make.
Not wonders, not great wonders.
Just buildings, there's about 70 left but I've gone through an extensive number already.
And mind you this isn't adding them into the game (that's a pain because it often has a glitch; you need to take them one at a time, gradually, and double-check your work ten times to ensure it's right), but it's a necessity to do before adding to the game. 

I could've done more, but I was feeling burned out, so dabbled in Majesty again.

Conclusion: mods are insanely fun to play, and worked better than I could ever hope them to.
City-building becomes a cinch with the combination of brokenly fast peasants (it's nigh-impossible to lose a building and even impossible-to-build buildings can be built using it), brokenly fast tax collectors (getting the money), and the marketplaces which at high enough levels rake in 4,000 gold per deposit (and have multiple deposits per day)--plus even over the minimum distance, trade caravans depositing that same amount. Four marketplaces each at a ballpark figure of something like 20,000 per day = ~80,000 in no time flat, when the gold cap is 2,000,000.

Not instant-refill, but fairly close. If you try, you can drain your treasury even when maxed out, if setting reward flags to like 111,100 and spamming them--but that's pretty much what you need to do and even then you need to keep it up to so much as maybe drain the treasury.

...But since city-building is what I most enjoy in the game...this is no problem to me.

​I am very happy with everything.

...But I am doing things that are time-consuming.
Well, I suppose work is both in the sense that it is literally draining me and leaving me half-dead, but that's nothing new.

In terms of my pet project on the civ game, what I am doing is taking a ridiculously long time.

I finished detailing the map in one night when I was worried I still had half a week's worth of work left on it.

I expected adding resources to take me a single night's worth of work to plow through everything.

...Two nights in.

...And I'm not even done with Rise of Rome; I still have Fall of Rome, The Middle Ages, Age of Discovery, Napoleonic Era, and two different maps of the world to add in on top of that.

I also am considering taking a small break on it to instead play some Majesty. A few mods have come out that were really good mods. There was a quest released with three key functions. Upgrading guard towers (later at my suggestion expanded to include ballista towers and wizard towers), later released as a game mod; upgrading monster lairs, later released as a game mod (not one I'm interested in tho); and upgrading marketplaces--the mod that just released.

On top of that, you have a mod to get rid of the freakin' plague.
Plague is literally the most annoying thing ever. If it were just a debuff of stats, and/or a minor continuous sap on health a la a weaker poison, I'd be fine with it--but it slows units to a crawl. I love the concept of it spreading...but it spreads faster than you can cure it when you have a mass of units, and it can literally cause the death of your fun playthrough of the scenario because even with a team of 30 healers, a treasury full of gold, and casts of heal, it's difficult to outright impossible to purge the plague altogether.

Another interesting mod was destroyable sewers; not sure if I'll use it, but it's certainly an interesting idea that holds promise.

And then there's the faster peasants mod to augment the faster tax collectors.

All in all, lots of good quality content being made for that game and I want to take it for a spin.

Uhhh uhhhh...
...Well.
...I don't have anything to talk about this quickly before I go to bed because I am a moron who didn't blog when she had more time to, so I guess that means I default to something which requires no time to do.
Which is just about what civ 3 is today.

I finished adding the Mesopotamian resources to the map. Still need to add the other maps, and then do a little bit of a resource balance check--probably not removing any in spite of the resource overload (literally everyone will be getting things like stone and especially wheat), but adding some for balancing purposes if, sayyyyy, every single one of a resource is in a specific location. (The invented resource, Whiskey, is particularly prone to this. The others exist across multiple maps, so should be fine.)

I actually completed the map for my civ 3 mod.

Granted, I need to manually add in all the resources, but I have the shape of the map as good as it's going to get.
And I just checked the distributed resources--all the resources exist somewhere on the map, even if not in as high of a quality as I would prefer, and not with the distribution I would prefer.

But it's there.

I just need the final fine-tuning, and then the map will be done.

The map, one of the big three challenges.

Done.

​This feels amazing.

The good news is, I finished that game idea and can now blog about it.
The bad news is, I'm not in the mood for it, so you get trash tier blog entry about my civ 3 mod which there's more good/bad on.

The good news is, for the first time ever, I have successfully managed to make a functional new wonder, and I have added in most Mesopotamian buildings, too.

...The bad news is, the art for the Mesopotamian buildings isn't working.

The good news is, though, that I have it narrowed down to one of two culprits. Either in the Art folder for city screen, it's the buildings large/small...
...Or it's the civilopedia icons folder with some variables therein.

The bad news is, I can't edit those--not without finding some program specializing in them or something.

The only reason I have resources done (which are the same file type, pcx) is because on the civ 3 forums, I was able to track down a download of all the Civ 3 conquest resources.

So now I need a similar download.
For the luxuries, as previously mentioned.
And for city buildings, as I'm now discovering.

So they work--they are installed in the system and don't break. They just don't display properly.

Again in my defense, I worked some on the idea, too--I'm close to completing it, just need a final push in brainstorming to complete it altogether. But for now, yes, new civ stuff.

The bad news is: I can't figure out how to get the scenario intro working.
The worse news is: the scenario is slow as molasses to load, and it's not even finished yet; I'm terrified that once complete, it'll literally crash the game from being too unwieldy.

I'm not quite sure if it's just the sheer size of the map plus all that's on it (fully possible), and/or (they're not mutually exclusive) just coding incompetence on my part, where there's clutter that doesn't need to be there. Basically, to do what I need to do, I'm not sure what needs to be there and what doesn't. I'm positive I have a lot in there that doesn't need to be...but I'm not sure what I can safely remove, and what is absolutely critical to keep where it is, as-is.

​It's not all bad news, though.
​One, I am 90% sure I know how to fix the city resource display problem; I found a promising variable. ​Art->city screen->luxuryicons seems to be the culprit. Of course, knowing where it is doesn't fix the problem; no scenario actually would contain the solution I'd be after, because I invented half of the luxuries I used. (Well, not really--I turned existing resources into luxuries. Olive Oil, Wheat, "Whiskey"/Sake, and Wool; Sake wasn't originally on the map and Wool is the only on-map one which was always a luxury.)

Two, I am 90% sure I know how to add the music into the game!
Turns out that, as I had hoped, there's a notepad file called Music, which lists the music used in the scenario, in the order it is used.

I'm not quite sure how much tinkering it'll take to get it to work the way I want it to, and want to table it for a while, but I at least know what to do when I get around to doing it.

​I decided to take a break from map-building and start getting into unit-making. Made five...
...And have by my estimate around 300 or so (give or take) left to add in, not to mention edit the existing ones. (I'll do the editing of the existing ones as I'm going along, though, when it's appropriate to do so.)

This will take a long time, though, so I'm doing it in moderation.

​Progress is happening tho!

In my defense, I DID work on an idea today--it's just not completed yet. 

Soyeah.

More boring civ stuff.

Just when you thought my blog might get interesting, nnnnnnope! Back to boring.

Last time I did my playtest, offhandedly I discovered that there wasn't really an intro--okay, maybe in spite of me swearing I did it, it didn't get done.

...Except it did. I tweaked said intro, but to no avail. Nothing will make it actually display. So add that to the list of things not working for the scenario that I need to troubleshoot.

I made significant progress on creating units and cities, and tweaked some terrain further as well.

​Still have a TON more work to do on these things, but we're getting there, slowly but surely.

So I did a little bit of a playtest--I didn't actually do anything, but I launched the scenario as each of the seven player civs, and did a tally of how many cities they have and such. I fixed a bug where Rome, Egypt, and Greece were the only ones who could build any units as well while I was at it. Today I went further, and added in all of the units seen in Rise of Rome--well, sort of. By that, I mean, I placed units on the map. Where there weren't those units in the game yet (e.g. the Roman Garrison), I substituted (e.g. Pikeman) and renamed the unit, "(Actual Unit Name) PLACEHOLDER".

Granted, that does mean I have to later clean up and delete the placeholders and replace them with the real units once I'm ready to put them into the scenario (doesn't take much effort to do, but it does take a lot of time and preparation to do), and if I miss any placeholder units, it'll be a little bit ugly (fortunately, that's what playtesting is for; the unit tracker in the military adviser tab is a godsend for this), butstill. The groundwork is there. 

I just need to add the units from the other scenarios, and then I'll be golden.

Yes, I know, nobody cares.
I am literally the only one who cares about this.

It is still exciting to me.

Making this game mod come to life is just...exhilarating. Today I have gotten about 80% through the city-laying part of things. I still need to add a few cities in, and I still need to add improvements/culture to a few cities, but we're talking, a few Roman cities, a few debatable-owner cities (the scenario as I'm building it doesn't have an England so English lands aside from London get split evenly between the Celts and Goths), a lot of Napoleon cities, and mostly...cities which I'd make if the terrain was ready for me to make them. (I need to get rid of the placeholder terrain in favor of closer-to-real terrain.)

Still need to lay rivers, forests, and a few marshes.
Still need to fine-tune the terrain.
Still need to add literally hundreds of units to the game, some of which will require me adding the units into the scenario.
Still need to do all the other stuff--complete documentation, then implement the necessary changes to units and whatnot including the creation of new ones.
Which means I still need to complete the new tech tree.
And I still need to do all of the stuff on my to-do list I've mentioned before. 

But I did manage to get the fog of war set up appropriately. It is a fair approximation of what's revealed during Rise of Rome and Fall of Rome, with a little bit extra; all four original player civs have all their cities visible, and they have cities in locations they didn't always have, soooooo...

Butyeah.

It's coming together really, really well.

As-is, the scenario is almost playable. (Would be rather disastrous since four civs locked in war, zero units generated anywhere on the map, butstill.)

​Just need to keep chipping away at it, bit by bit.

I still need to do a TON of detail work.
Refine rivers, forests, and even just general terrain in a ton of spots.

...But with what I had, I took some initiative. 

I've done preliminary work in laying down cities.

Now, I only did Egypt, Carthage, Greece, Persia, and the Mongols.
I didn't do the Romans, Celts, or Goths.

...But these will give me a fine reference point, and so far, it looks...so good.

Carthage is a little huge (32ish cities, 22ish of which are VP locations), but they start second-largest anyway and I believe I made Persia appropriately large in response (a little more than that in cities and about the same in VP locations).

At this stage, Greece maaaaaayyy need for me to stretch things out a little bit city-wise, as they have about 22ish, which puts them behind Persia more than they originally were, but I'm a little hesitant, because Persia's cities are a little spread out.

I'm not too worried about Rome at this point. They're meant to start out smaller than any of the other four original player civs, so if I get them in the ballpark of 20 cities, they'll be golden--and keep in mind that they have multiple scenarios I can draw from. 

They originally start with only nine; I could expand that out to be more in the range of...lessee...potentially 20 more from Fall of Rome alone (not all will make it in, obv), 8 more from The Middle Ages (at least half which won't make it in), potentially 4 more from Napoleonic Era (which I'll be lucky if one fits in).

Absolute maximum, then, of 41--which if you take the more realistic numbers, is a maximum more in the range of ~24, give or take a few.

Like I said, mayyyyy need to buff Greece up, but I won't be needing to buff Carthage up beyond what they have now; they have plenty.

I've got a TON of terrain modification work to do, fine-tweaking the terrain to incorporate elements from various scenarios.

Still, this is looking to be awfully doable.

The pieces are starting to fall into place.

My slow, methodical approach is one which doesn't bear fruit immediately--but which once it starts to, suddenly, everything is there and just...working. 

It'll take a long time to get everything working, especially once I go from fine-tuning the Mesopotamian/Rise hybrid map to extrapolating details on the Fall/Middle Ages/Napoleonic/Age of Discovery maps. (I have placeholder terrain in, but nothing more.) I'll also be fine-tuning things with the map of the world (which will be necessary for the whole, "I went too far north", thing).

Then I can redistribute goody huts/resources (well once the cities are up that is--but getting all the cities up requires me to get the terrain expanded first), and manually add in more resources in all the right spots and then some that're manually added in.

Progress is progress!