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4X Civ IV mods

covr

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Guys, I am looking for some quality mods for Civ 4.
So far I have played almost all iterations of Fall From Heaven 2 (which I loved), some Dune mod (didn't like it) and currently playing Realism Invictus, which is pretty good, as it improves the game in almost every aspect, keeping it close to the original. However I want some more different experience, with possibly more original mechanics added over the years of development.
How do you find the other huge mods like caveman 2 cosmos or A New Dawn: Rise of Mankind? Any good sci-fi or fantasy mods (except FFH2)?
 

oscar

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There was an Alpha Centauri mod I remember not being bad.

There's plenty of modmods for FFH2 (also make sure you use the two AI mods these should be considered mandatory) that take the game in different directions such as Master of Mana. Personally I found there was something to be said for the (relative) simplicity of FFH2 over the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach of a lot of mods what tended towards feature-bloat that the AI couldn't really handle.

I like Realism too but find it oddly.. easy unless I really jam pack the map with enemies. If I have space to grow I seem to inevitably end up quickly dominating the scoreboards.

Coming back to FFH2 after several years it was nice to actually lose a game (and on the default difficulty no less!). Hippus (with the economic-oriented leader) invaded my dwarves and despite the war going rather in my favour the first 15 turns their much superior production to my own slowly proved decisive. I thought I'd be able to turn the tide on acquiring Thanes of Kilmorph but enough forces (even if mainly crappy warriors) had slipped through the chokepoint and were (sensibly) wrecking my improvements to starve me out forcing me to leave my cities and take the offensive to try drive them out what ended up wearing my own city garrisons thin to the point a warriors and hunters mixed doomstack simply swarmed my capital (despite lacking siege weapons and their qualitative inferiority to my thanes). The AI fought sensibly and exactly how I would have in their position :salute: I'd inflicted enough losses they were happy to accept some crummy frontier city of mine but this would have left me boxed in with no room to expand..

tl;dr the bottom line of a good mod is can the AI handle it? A lot of the time with mods I've felt more like I'm playing SimCity than Civilization due to the timid and over-cautious AI.
 
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"a new dawn" is nice but lacks some important features "caveman 2 cosmos" has, but it's just too bloated for both the ai and your sanity to keep up. also by mid-ancient times turns already take 3-5 minutes each, mostly because of roaming barbarians and animals, which are the main reason to play ancient times -and- c2c.
 

covr

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There was an Alpha Centauri mod I remember not being bad.

There's plenty of modmods for FFH2 (also make sure you use the two AI mods these should be considered mandatory) that take the game in different directions such as Master of Mana. Personally I found there was something to be said for the (relative) simplicity of FFH2 over the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach of a lot of mods what tended towards feature-bloat that the AI couldn't really handle.

I like Realism too but find it oddly.. easy unless I really jam pack the map with enemies. If I have space to grow I seem to inevitably end up quickly dominating the scoreboards.

Coming back to FFH2 after several years it was nice to actually lose a game (and on the default difficulty no less!). Hippus (with the economic-oriented leader) invaded my dwarves and despite the war going rather in my favour the first 15 turns their much superior production to my own slowly proved decisive. I thought I'd be able to turn the tide on acquiring Thanes of Kilmorph but enough forces (even if mainly crappy warriors) had slipped through the chokepoint and were (sensibly) wrecking my improvements to starve me out forcing me to leave my cities and take the offensive to try drive them out what ended up wearing my own city garrisons thin to the point a warriors and hunters mixed doomstack simply swarmed my capital (despite lacking siege weapons and their qualitative inferiority to my thanes). The AI fought sensibly and exactly how I would have in their position :salute: I'd inflicted enough losses they were happy to accept some crummy frontier city of mine but this would have left me boxed in with no room to expand..

tl;dr the bottom line of a good mod is can the AI handle it? A lot of the time with mods I've felt more like I'm playing SimCity than Civilization due to the timid and over-cautious AI.


Thanks. By 2 AI mods you mean NavalAI something and ThorAIsomenthing?
You might try MagisterModMod - a one man effort adding all possbile buxifixing (AI inculded), lore updates and QoL improvements to the FF2. I was not able to run it properly on the steam version, but will try again. I believe it's one of the rare FF2 mods that keeps being updated regularly.

MadMaxHellfire - thanks, will try C2C.
 

coldcrow

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Cavemen2Cosmos is a freaking mess and games quickly become unplayable once you hit a certain turncount.

In terms of polish and mechanics the best mods are: DuneWars Revival, Realism Invictus - the SVN version has a clever revolt system and you should give the AI a chance with monarch+ diff

Planetfall is not very good, but might be enjoyable for 1-2 games.
 
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but realism invictus lacks rebellions and revolutions (on top of health and, most of all, police units) and slavery and feudal civics with systemic uprisings make for an ai which can't survive them.
 

oscar

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Cavemen2Cosmos made me laugh when it had shit like "Tennis" and "Primitive Dance" as researchable tech. It probably would have been a lot better mod if they'd just done an in-depth cavemen (early game), neolithic -> iron age-> classical era progression. Legionaries and phalanxes as badass scary late game units would be a nice change of pace.
 
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a shame that versions ago c2c had a "fewer stupid things" button which should had cut on those silly things. but never did anything. instead of making it work, they deleted it.
oh well, i'd be fine with just a "delete all barbarian units" command/script for the worldbuilder.
 

Cael

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Nov 1, 2017
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There was an Alpha Centauri mod I remember not being bad.

There's plenty of modmods for FFH2 (also make sure you use the two AI mods these should be considered mandatory) that take the game in different directions such as Master of Mana. Personally I found there was something to be said for the (relative) simplicity of FFH2 over the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach of a lot of mods what tended towards feature-bloat that the AI couldn't really handle.

I like Realism too but find it oddly.. easy unless I really jam pack the map with enemies. If I have space to grow I seem to inevitably end up quickly dominating the scoreboards.

Coming back to FFH2 after several years it was nice to actually lose a game (and on the default difficulty no less!). Hippus (with the economic-oriented leader) invaded my dwarves and despite the war going rather in my favour the first 15 turns their much superior production to my own slowly proved decisive. I thought I'd be able to turn the tide on acquiring Thanes of Kilmorph but enough forces (even if mainly crappy warriors) had slipped through the chokepoint and were (sensibly) wrecking my improvements to starve me out forcing me to leave my cities and take the offensive to try drive them out what ended up wearing my own city garrisons thin to the point a warriors and hunters mixed doomstack simply swarmed my capital (despite lacking siege weapons and their qualitative inferiority to my thanes). The AI fought sensibly and exactly how I would have in their position :salute: I'd inflicted enough losses they were happy to accept some crummy frontier city of mine but this would have left me boxed in with no room to expand..

tl;dr the bottom line of a good mod is can the AI handle it? A lot of the time with mods I've felt more like I'm playing SimCity than Civilization due to the timid and over-cautious AI.
The problem with FFH2 is that the AI has problems with spells. It does the normal melee/ranged/siege well, but it falls apart when you start getting decent spellcasters. Even basic tier 1 spells (Dance of Blades, Haste, Treetop Defence, etc.) can really wreck an AI if you use it right. To compound that problem, it doesn't know how to use spells effectively. The AI engine just wasn't built for it.

Your particular match was a good one simply because you were playing dwarves, whose weak point is a lack of good casters.
 
Vatnik
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Sword of Islam (++ or extended edition or whatever) is excellent, and it's a shame you didn't like the Dune mod, because I would strongly recommend the Dune Wars Revival mod.
 
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revival is only for dune wars experts. damn, its ai doesn't give a flying fuck, it'll attack you whenever and wherever, doesn't matter if it's your ally and neighbour.
 

coldcrow

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I will retract my statement about C2C somewhat. I downloaded the SVN version and was kinda surprised about the mount of effort they spent on polishing and making it playable. I am not evry far into a game, and it still suffers from way too many things to build and stuff to do and I don't know if the performance will drop later on. Also the AI doesn't seem to handle the systems very well (does not really hunt).
So I don't know when this massive change took place, but it's worth checking out.

Also why is it running so fluidly? Did they clean up the code?
 

covr

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Holy fuck, this made me play FFH2 modmods again and they are crashing like crazy. MagisterModMod, which was supposed to be patched and polished vanilla FFH2, seems to be crashing every couple of dozens of turns, with some ultimate crash at the end.
Master of Mana extended (last stable revision v.66) doesn't even start. How do people run those mods?

I know there's a problem with Win10 and generally with Steam, but they should be bypassed by running the game with 'original unsupported' option on Steam. I want to play my FFH2 again :(
 

barker_s

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Grab the Codex by the pussy RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
I got Magister ModMod installer here . Installed it over my Steam version, didn't check the "original_release_unsupported" and it seems to work just fine, maybe you should try that? Can't say if it doesn't crash further in the game, but I played up to turn 42 on normal speed and haven't experienced a crash yet.
 

covr

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You lucky fuck. I've tried both normal and "original_release_unsupported" and it seems that there is no real difference between them. I am using the same installer as you. Surprisingly running the game as an administrator breaks the game completely, at least for me.
From the other hand, 42 turns is not much, it's like 15 minutes of early gameplay. All the crashing-related issues appears a bit later in the game, with certain events, e.g. founding a White Hand religion always permanently crash my game.
 

Sloul

Savant
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Mar 26, 2016
Messages
259
There is a mod in the universse of Fallout which isn't bad either.
You can play tribesmen, NCR, BOS, Enclave, Caesar Legion, Mr House, and maybe some other minor factions that I forgot about.
 

Azdul

Magister
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Nov 3, 2011
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Langley, Virginia
I recommend Better BAT AI - which is a compilation of AI, UI and graphics improvements.

UI is taken from BUG mod, AI from Better AI mod.
When it comes to graphics, it does not change them on fundamental level, but introduces more variety - e.g. british destroyer looks like Royal Navy ship from WW2, german tank looks like Panzer, and so on.
The only problem is that it uses a lot of memory, so I recommend 4GB patch to avoid crashes in late game.

It is more like BtS+++ than a real mod, but at least BtS is still the best Civ game to date.
 

Eyestabber

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Guys, I am looking for some quality mods for Civ 4.
So far I have played almost all iterations of Fall From Heaven 2 (which I loved), some Dune mod (didn't like it) and currently playing Realism Invictus, which is pretty good, as it improves the game in almost every aspect, keeping it close to the original. However I want some more different experience, with possibly more original mechanics added over the years of development.
How do you find the other huge mods like caveman 2 cosmos or A New Dawn: Rise of Mankind? Any good sci-fi or fantasy mods (except FFH2)?

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...heaven-thread-civ-4-mod-2016-edition™.107443/

TL;DR: Check extramodmod.
 
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holy shit fucking tripping balls O_O now i know how to pass this quarantine. i just hope "revolutions" means also "police units".

sounds good, doesn't work.
custom scenario, earth18civs, hatshepsut, generic common sense options selected, crashes almost as soon as i try to create the game.
 
Last edited:

Eyestabber

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I played RI very recently and it's every bit as boring as I remember it. Slavery, chopping and every single other good and impactful move is either castrated or straight up removed from the game.

Tons of attention to detail but "muh balinse" ruins RI.
 
Vatnik
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As I recall, RI was on the side of feature bloat, but nowhere near as bad as Caveman to Cosmos, and a fair segment of its bloatmaxxed feature count was actually interesting. Revolutions has always been YUGE incline.
Edit; lol just tried it out and it has so many boring features. Just let a farm be a farm ffs.
 
Last edited:
Joined
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I played RI very recently and it's every bit as boring as I remember it. Slavery, chopping and every single other good and impactful move is either castrated or straight up removed from the game.

Tons of attention to detail but "muh balinse" ruins RI.

[x] no revolts with slavery/feudalism
 

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