Grandmasta/Civ3Conversion

Thoughts on a C3C Mod

This came up in a thread over at RPG.net, and I figured I should get these ideas jotted down before I forgot about them completely or lost the paper I wrote them down on. Here's a rough transcription of my note sheet, until I can organize my thoughts better. Oh, everyone is explicitly allowed to go frigging crazy with this page as long as they make mention of who the hell they are. ;)

Civs and Capitals

- The Realm. Capital of the Imperial City, obviously.
- Lookshy / River Provinces. Lookshy.
- The Guild. Nexus.
- The Deathlords? Maybe just Mask of Winters. Should they be individual? Thorns, in either case.
- The South. I dunno, Gem?
- The East. Again, conglomeration vs. individual nations. I do want to see the Halta versus the Linowan, but maybe that's better kept for a Conquests scenario or something.
- The North. The Haslanti League would be in there, certainly.
- The West. ???

Leaderheads

I have no idea. The Empress for the Realm, or...?

Tech Tree Ideas

Well, I figured on having something to the tune of the following:

Jade Working goes into Daiklaves and Armor, then Daiklaves goes into Grand Daiklaves and Immaculate Philosophy, while Armor goes into Power Armor, and then GDs and PA go into Warstriders. That kind of thing. It occurs to me that all the techs should have flowery Charm-type names, so Jade Working becomes something like "MOLDING THE GLORIOUS ALLOY!" or whatever. I have no knack for naming these things. Somebody else chime in. ;)

Unique Units

Jason Hinds posted a bunch of great ideas, but I don't want to just rip them off, so if he wants to contribute them I imagine he will. ;P Here's what I thought up on my own, though, before I saw any of that.

- The Realm: Dragon Blooded (Immaculate Monks? ... early game)
- Lookshy: Warstriders, or Essence Cannon troops (late game)
- The Haltans: Fair Folk (early/mid)
- The Guild: Maybe a Slave Driver unit or something? Basic troop with the Enslavement ability.
- The South: Firewand trooper (mid game)

I also wrote down "Lintha: Castration pirate!" but I decided that they would work better as...

Barbarians

I figured Land barbarians would work best as Lunars and Beastmen and Very Angry People With Sticks, and Sea barbarians could be the Lintha or something to that effect.

Wonders

Only Wonder I thought of was Immaculate Philosophy, which the Realm would probably get at starting anyway. I figured it would create an Immaculate Monk (a Dragon Blooded with an extra point or two in a certain area of expertise) of random caste every five turns or something. For example, say a standard Dragon Blooded unit is 4.3.1; a Fire-aspected Immaculate might be 5.3.1 while an Earth aspect would be 4.4.1. A Wood aspect might forgo an attack rating altogether in exchange for Lethal Bombardment.

Strategic Resources

Jade.

And?

Um, who has Manacle and Coin? ^_^;;

Conquests Scenarios

Here's some ideas I thought would be cool.

- The Bull of the North: Conquer the world and restore the proper order of things.
- Halta versus Linowan: Always a classic.
- Realm versus Lookshy: A historical scenario.
- Realm vs. Realm vs. Realm: Imperial Civil War. Would require Leaderheads for each House, and a map specifically of the Blessed Isle.
- Gem versus Yeddim: Oh, hell, I don't know.

Comments!

I dunno, this isn't the kind of thing that I can see working too well. Exalted isn't the sort of thing that lends itself to a civilization scale game; in Civilization you lack the heroes, you have too much of a tech tree, and it's just on too much of a scale to see it working properly.

If you were going to try a total conversion of a strategy game, on a large scale, you'd probably want something more based around characters and with a less expansive tech tree - something like the Total War series, for instance. - Rez

To address your points, there are Leader units in Civilization which can be easily adapted to fit the role of Heroes; the tech tree is scalable to whatever degree you wish to construct or modify it, and too much of a scale? :) Exalted is all about epic scale! And I don't know much about the Total War series, but on the whole it would strike me as immediately too gritty to fit the theme and generally too difficult to make changes to, but then I don't know the scale of the modding utilities available to it. ~ Grandmasta

This sounds intriguing. Lets see, Scavenger Sons has lots of great resource ideas...healing flowers, those dreamsstones, firedust, various magical metals, drugs, the shells people use as currency in the west, slaves, manses/demsnes....oooh cap a demesne with a manse for some sort of crazy benefits...somehow require capped demesnes to use certain artifact weapons. How about cities building various kinds of manses as improvements? I cant remember if civ III does multiple levels, but imagine an underworld and yu-shan. Unit idea: Scavenger Lord. Maybe an eastern or river provinces unique unit, improved version of scouts; in any case, perhaps they can somehow get better benefits when they search "first age ruins" than normal units, or generate a small amount of research or wealth per turn. As far as research, manse construction, reordering celestial heirarchy, necromancy, maybe a way to generate celestial exalted in a set number of turns, and each city can only build one caste (perhaps require some sort of wonder)? Of course the most obvious would be first age secrets rediscovery. - Vizzeroth

Well, a lot of those ideas wouldn't really be compatible with Civ III (although some of them suit themselves nicely to another game I'd been considering for a conversion, Age of Wonders...a game probably more suited to the setting, though the effort involved in modding THAT would be even more insane) but I like the idea of Manses as city improvements. I did have an idea on how to get Celestial level units into the game, but it's past my bedtime -- will have to post them tomorrow. ~ Grandmasta