Scenario Design in Civ3

[JPetroski]

Personally, I feel that this is the most important issue in Civ3. Ease of scenario creation. Now, not everyone plays scenarios, heck, there might be more civers out there who dont. The thing is though, Civ2 is still really popular because of scenarios. Civ3 will last for years as well if you make it easy to make great scenarios. Here is my list of ideas that would be great to have for tools:

1: Bring back the scenario editor, but get the bugs outta it. I dont like ToT cuz it does not have this.

2: Give us more unit spaces! I can't even begin to tell you what I would do with 100 slots. 200 would be great as well. Would it really be impossible to do this? If its possible the more unit slots the better. You dont have to use them in the regular game, but man they would be great to have for scenarios.

3: Unlimited events space. This would be a joy so that there would be no more multievents scenarios.

4: DONT overdo the graphics. TOT does not really benefit from them IMO, unit animations are not necessary, Captain Nemo and others can draw better units then you guys can anyway (no offense). I'd say keep pretty much the same graphics as Civ2. They are fine. The only thing the game needs is better playability options, it does not need a whole reworking of art.

Just my opinion.


------------------
John Petroski
Vudak@aol.com

[Napoleon I]

I agree completely. There is no possible way that the designers over at Firaxis can give us everything that we want so the only way to have a truly great game is to let us make everything we want for ourselves. Civ2 had a good basis for scenario creation but I would really love to see it expanded to fit many more historical epochs and situations.

------------------
Napoleon I

[UltraSonix]

I was put off by the scenario editor being integrated with the actual game in Civ2 and SMAC - it's like putting IE with Windows, and we all saw what happened to that!

Instead, a sophisticated and dedicated scenario editor should be available, with abilities such as copy-paste (eg drag a box and copy and paste a bunch of units that you've spent ages pefecting the hit points etc, so you don't have to redo the samething over and over again if you're designing an army. Same thing goes for copy paste of cities.)

------------------
No, in Australia we don't live with kangaroos and koalas in our backyards...

Yeah, I wouldn't care about the graphics as long as they're customizable. But if you use beautiful 3D animated sprites, at least give us the option to use static 2D units (But make it easier to do so than ToT, please).
I have some ideas for a revised events.txt.
Make it like the original events script, but extended. We don't want some complicated programming language like SLIC.

Oh, and Ultrasonix, I like your sig, it's about time someone clarified that



------------------
Smutty Porn Site
There you go! It is hard to be anally probed in a base in Kansas and being told you are just being ****ed up the ass because you are living in Ohio
- Imran Siddiqui
"I am the world's most expensive tampon"
- Me
Wtf!? No, not Dracon! Anybody but our furry atheist friend!
- Ghost Ham

[UltraSonix]

Thanks Dracon - the sig was 'cause I got sick of relatives in Canada bugging me about our marsupials...

And your mention of easy-to-design graphics is a good point. As I pointed out in the long thread on using Black and White's super graphics engine to power Civ3, I haven't personally figured our how to use motion-capture techniques to create a proper 3d person.

Also I think I mentioned somewhere else about a revised events.txt (is that why you brought it up?). Instead of like in Civ2 - where designing events was through a text editor only, Firaxis should not be ashamed to copy Starcraft's secnario editor's intuitive triggers-events design.

------------------
No, in Australia we don't live with kangaroos and koalas in our backyards...

To see my views on the subject, check out the Scenario Editor and Customisation section in the Firaxis Forums appendix of the list v. 2.0...