At the moment, if you want your own civilisation, you have to sacrifice an existing one. I found some interesting things in the language file of the game. Perhaps in the near future it will be possible for modders to add more civilisations of their own? You can check it in the language file (key-value-strings-utf-8.txt), just open it and jump to about line 5437:
I hope it will be possible in the near future. Currently, there is no way to add a new civilization, as it is automatically locked. Does not work if you specify a unique “data_name” value in the civilizations.json file and you add a new civilization in the data file. (“MODDABLE-CIV-1” and the rest will not work.)
I expect them to be limited to custom scenarios and disabled by default in singleplayer & unranked, but that indeed sounds great.
Yes, restricted as balance would surely get out of the window. Even if you can pick bonuses & UTs from an existing pool (similar to Empire Earth 2), some nightmare synergy would be possible.
Ultimate knight civ :
spanish tech tree (full upgrade paladins & hussars)
UT1 : polish szachta privilege (-60% knight line gold price)
bonus : georgian cav health regen (I hesitated with the frankish health and teutonic armour)
bonus : sicilian -33% bonus damage
bonus : cuman +15% cav speed
UU : at this point who cares when you make up the tally ? Let’s say the cataphract for an anti-infantry cav that would be near immune to halbs thanks to the sicilian bonus…
Which would result in full-upgraded paladins who are faster, strike harder, regen health, take less bonus damage and… cost only 48 food in imperial age. Also leaving the hussar (quite buffed) to deal with monks who may remain the only viable counter if you have a micro worthy of Skynet
What is the difference between this and doing custom civs with triggers? Like, having Byzantines getting bloodlines, blast furnace, architecture, masonry, ballista, comitatens and make Cataphracts getting affected by comitatens? And call them “Mapuche”, or whatever
It would streamline the process (you’d just pick your custom civ from a list instead of having to recreate it from the start), possibly with an unique civ icon, and it would be more flexible.
Right now you cannot pick the civ’s bonuses, only bonuses would be having some unique tech unlocked.
likely not. we can add extra civs in genie but whats ultimately disabling us to play them is the UI in civ selection page. someone could do trial and error on modifying civilization.json but I seriously doubt it’ll work given fact that its how they expand game and make money, to keep it fresh
the linkage between UI to the civs might be hardcoded with the executable and requires modifying the .exe, so if you’re able to do this each time and don’t mind multiplayer it can work.
If money were the reason, there would be no way to create civilization even if an earlier one had to be sacrificed. The game can also be kept fresh by adding additional buildings, units, special abilities, campaigns, scenarios, random maps and editor objects. I think it’s unnecessary to limit civilisations, without limits I don’t think the company’s revenue would decrease drastically. Anyone can create the Armenians or even the Romans, and then upload it as a mod for anyone else to play without buying the dlcs. Just copy the graphic files and add them to the data file. Just have to sacrifice an existing base civilization and change it to Romans, Armenians…In multiplayer mode, the selected data mode must be set.
money is one of the reason and i’d argue its a big one
yes anyone can make armenians or new civs and people could potentially play them without paying, they’d just need to sacrifice two civs to replace them. furthermore they cannot play them on ranked and must find players themselves to play with, ontop of having players who play with them also lose access to the civs that were replaced.
see the issues that come with the above? if one was to make the mod, they’d have to sacrifice in many other aspect
Custom civs would be too limited to be a real competition with new official ones. For a start, forget about them in multiplayer, and I also suspect “parts” of non-owned civs would be locked.
Looks like they are planning to make civs moddable, I mean it literally says “Moddable Civ”, not “Custom Civ” or anything else.
Why would they add those if they don’t want us to mod civilisations?
Why would they call them “Moddable” if it’s supposed to be customizable ingame.
I really hope they add official civ modding that doesn’t require replacing existing civs.
Yes this is what I’m hoping for. I was just thinking of the variant civiliations because they are modded versions of the civs and they have taken ideas from other AOE. Anyways I hope it isn’t.
