Grand Ages: Rome
Oh, I am very, very bad. Why am I very bad? I broke down and bought both Left4Dead and Grand Ages: Rome yesterday. Both were on sale and combined were still less than a single new release.
I don't really plan on playing L4D much in the near future, but at $15 I couldn't pass up the deal. I'll probably do the same thing with L4D2 as well, I'm just like that. I played it a bit, and honestly, while it is a good game and all, I was hoping for a bit more of the classic Romero zombie (or at least the 28 Days Later-style fast zombie) rather than the super-hero 12-feet tall, giant fangs, semi-intelligent monster pseudo-zombie. No Valve designers, I do not need Brawndo to mutilate my thirst, I come from a far-off land called Subtlety.
I put some decent time into Grand Ages: Rome, and have to say I felt challenged on the very first level of the campaign. The basic of goal, which is to build 15 insulae and achieve a food satisfaction rate of 50% is not hard at all. But I had a rather devilish time achieving the supplementary 20% entertainment rate. Kudos to Haemimont Games on that one.
Although I also have to say I had a hard time with it initially owing to the fact Grand Ages is much, much different game from Imperium Romanum. Resource allocation, population, supply distribution ... all much different. Though the game still has a feel to it that makes it seem very much like an Imperium Romanum 2. Looked at in that way, I also appreciate how Haemimont seems to be hitting a stride, as its differences make it both like and unlike its predecessor in ways one can still appreciate both.
One thing that is still "missing" is a supply-route mechanic. Meaning you do not need to build roads at all. In IR the lack made the game feel a little shallow, but it actually works quite well in GAR. It no longer feels like a core mechanic was left out.
Both a character system and technological research system have been added, which adds welcome layers of strategy to the mix. Very briefly:
- You character has talents which will add various bonuses (bonii, lol?) to your cities. Talents are unlocked by spending points you receive upon completing scenarios.
- You also receive money a.k.a. denarii ("personal wealth") which you can spend on estates which function similar to talents, except they add material supplies to your cities. These can be both purchased and sold, as you are given a limited number of estate slots to use.
The difference that was causing me so much trouble in the beginning is that of supplies and their creation and distribution. IR is much like any other classic city-builder - you set up a wood shop and your warehouse fills up. Then you use what is in the warehouse for new buildings and maintenance. In GAR the warehouse is done away with and you are forced to balance your production levels directly with your needs with no intermediary.
I found building position becomes much more important with this as a factor and over-building (something I usually guilty of, lol) is heavily punished. So far I have found this to be a really interesting system, and not the less for it's tripping me up all last night as I was thinking I was still playing IR.
So far I have two main criticisms of the game, both aesthetic but both heavily affect the game.
- The weather. I'm sure Haemimont spent a lot of time and put a lot of love into making the weather look as nice as it does. But I personally can't stand it, it just makes everything too hard to see. In IR you can turn it off through a shrine, but I haven't got that point in GAR yet. My point is that it should be able to be turned off from the options, not from an in-game building. So someone like me can just be done with it completely.
- GAR's left-click build menu is not as good as IR's menu. I like both much more than many other city-builder menus, but GAR's menu is unnecessarily hard on system resources, it is too big and because sub-menus open up on-hover (as opposed to on-click) it is cumbersome to use. The menu in IR was essentially the same, but did not suffer the defects I just listed.
One last, very minor, criticism: I don't like the illustrative artwork in GAR as much as IR. This is pretty minor, but the general skill in representing human proportions is not as good. I also think the painterly style of both IR's and GAR's illustrations was better represented by the IR artist(s) than the GAR artist(s). If it happens to be the same artist, then dude you are slipping.
But that is just my opinion, all in all I'd say GAR is shaping up to be a quality title that I am enjoying quite a bit.
A fail and a couple wins
I feel I must be forthright with a recent occurrence. An occurrence of failure upon my part, borne as is so often the case out of good intentions in conception going awry in prosecution.
Basically I volunteered my time to a Colonization project of someone else's then flaked. It was more or less my responsibility to dump the Civilopedia into a spreadsheet and modify the appropriate entries for the mod. I figured this would work for me as I planned on performing this task for my own mod, Grow Tycoon.
Well, one thing leads to another as they say, and here we are more than a month later and I essentially forgot all about it. Well, not really forgot - more like I just kept putting it off. Of course the lines of communication going both ways could have been better utilized, but what is past is past.
Yes, I am an old rascal and have immense and profound powers of procrastination. But there is nothing like failing in public to better prepare oneself to succeed later on. I also feel the double burden of being a stoner who flaked as people tend to blame their predisposed prejudices and look no further rather than attempt to understand the nuances of life. I care very deeply about the issue of ending prohibition and I almost feel like I damaged it through my irresponsibility (albeit very slightly).
So in atonement I have been working extra hard on laying the foundations for the creation of Grow Tycoon. In a move that somewhat surprised me, I opted to delve into the mysterious world of the SDK first.
Following an excellent old post by Kael on Civ Fanatics, I was able to get the open source C++ IDE Code Blocks working with the Colonization SDK. I compiled a vanilla (unmodded) DLL successfully and used it within a basic test mod.
Afterward I went on to the fool-around-with stage and was able to fidget out the way to add a new Yield to the game. For those not familiar with Colonization, a Yield refers to any resource in the game whether it be Ore or Education points. The Yield I added was more in the vein of Liberty Bells or Crosses, but by following the the short guide I posted on Civ Fanatics you could come up with any sort of Yield you want.
I decided to start there first, as I want to add a viable Cultural Victory to vanilla Colonization. I am still tweaking the settings, though. My biggest problem at this point is deciding how the points should be generated in the game. At the moment I am thinking they will either need to be "built" by a unit in a building (like a Statesman in a Town Hall) - I am trying to avoid this - or they will be tacked onto Founding Fathers making collecting them more strategic (currently the player is rewarded for passing on a FF in favor of saving points for specific one - this will make grabbing all the FF you can more attractive).
The Founding Fathers option is by far the easiest option to add to the game, but I am also considering adding the ability to use colonists to work the Printing Press and Newspaper buildings for Fortuente Culture points. This would also create the need for an Expert culture unit, the Editor. I may end up adding both options, but I don't want to spend too much time on mods or modcomps other than those which directly benefit Grow Tycoon.
While I have seen some XML editors that looked pretty nice, I am currently using Adobe Dreamweaver (I know what you're thinking) and it works well enough that I have not really been looking for a replacement. I am looking for a Python IDE also, but have been procrastinating that rather much. Notepad totally sucks for editing Python, but it does work after all.
So as of right now I am working on that. I have added in my Fortuente Culture points into the Info screen (I'll probably post a guide on that too) and am playing through otherwise vanilla Colonization matches to tweak and refine my Cultural Victory option.
More Grow Tycoon Ideas
In the course of dissecting Colonization (and to a lesser extent Civ IV), I have come across a few other ideas I have for my illicit-pot-growing Colonization mod, currently code-named Grow Tycoon that I wanted to briefly write down here both for myself and for anyone else who might happen to read this and be interested.
First, I haven't mentioned it but from the beginning I have planned on morphing the Founding Father system into a plant varietal system. Meaning rather than accumulating points and spending them to have a historical figure join your cause, you will accumulate points and use them to research and/or cross breed strains of pot to come up with other strains to grow.
I would like to have a mechanic that has a more sandbox feel - similar perhaps to the way one would create new units in Alpha Centauri. The player could mix and match to create strains that have specific bonuses (easier to grow, worth more money when sold, etc.), however for this mod I want to keep it as simple as possible. So an easier alternative given the Civ 4 engine is to simply make pre-defined strains that are researchable along a "tech tree" or in the case of Colonization the "Founding Father" tree. Plus, I always have fun coming up with silly names like Spanish Trampoline and it might make a nice way to pay homage to some real-life historical strains like Maui Wowee or Northern Lights.
Another thing that I have had in mind this whole time but I believe I have not mentioned is crucial to my decision to use Colonization as a base rather than Civilization IV itself - the town and trade system. Because pot farming in real life is itself an industry I want to preserve that (Tycoon) element by using the city-building aspects of Colonization. Where it uses schools, cigar-rolling factories, stockades and the like, however, I will be using (water) wells, generators and CCTV security systems. All which, like Colonization, must be constructed over X amount of turns and be manned by a "colonist" (I still haven't come up with a generic unit name yet).
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the scale of Grow Tycoon's world is much reduced from that of the other Civ games. But I was still having a hard time working out exactly what that means to the game. The way I have decided to approach it is to leave the basic mechanic largely unchanged and chalk up the scale difference to nothing more than graphics and text.
Which means you will still be using a unit to construct farms outside of your city, but it will be presented as constructing fields outside of your base camp. The base camp (like the Civ city) houses your workers and contains all your important buildings. From the base camp management screen (city management screen) you can assign your workers to pot fields you have constructed or other duties I haven't come up with yet. An example for a potential tile assignment would be guard duty that provides a bonus to defense from the Law or criminal gangs.
I'm going to end this here for today. As I am finishing the task of fleshing out my basic concepts I am turning more an more to creating specific units. Like the wagon - a land resource transportation unit - which I want to have a few different versions of to take into account for things like SUVs with hidden compartments, tractor trailers that hall other goods to disguise your contraband or basic cars that can travel fast but have a higher chance of getting caught by the Law. Or maybe only have one basic land transport unit that takes advantage of the experience-point system (but then how will it gain xp if it is destroyed on being caught?). That's the kind of stuff I have been moving on to lately, which I suppose means development is proceeding at a fair pace.
If you are familiar with Civ 4 and/or Colonization and would like to make some suggestions, I whole-heartedly welcome them! If you aren't familiar with Sid Meier strategy games and like turn-based strategy I also recommend you give them a try. Modding in Civ 3 was good, but as you might have seen modding in Civ 4 allows you to do almost anything you want with the only real limit being your time and expertise.