Never On Sunday

The current issue of PC Gamer reports three new mods available for Civ4: a swords-and-sorcery theme, a Dune theme, and, for those who cannot let go, a SMAC theme. Nifty. I’ll give them all at least a brief fling, and I might well spend lots of time on the Alpha Centauri version, if it’s done really well. Squeeze a few more drops of juice out of the game before Civ5 hits the shelves.

More than excitement at trying out new mods, however, I find myself missing Civ2, which openly invited modification. One of the Civ3 expansions aimed to improve on this, with a built-in editor that allowed you to mix and match building/wonder attributes, though the editor sadly did not come with the original game. Civ2, however, was still readily accessible: all the building, terrain, technology, and unit statistics were stored in ordinary .txt files, and the graphic were stored as .gifs. You didn’t have to be a coder to put out a mod of your own. I did: a tongue-in-cheek caveman scenario, including the “no poop in cave” civic advance and the “small rock” missile unit. A full-bore facelift like this, the “blob” scenario, or the commendable “bio” scenario (casting Civ as a race to evolve a spacefaring species from prokaryotes) were a lot of work, but small tweaks were readily available to even the laziest enthusiast.

Think settlers upgrade the terrain too quickly? Just pop into the .txt file and change the turns it takes to build a road or clear a forest. Think rifles are underpowered? Just pop into the .txt file and change the offense value from 5 to 6. Instant face-lift on whatever element you wish were slightly different.

Enthusiasts still put out mods today. (Obviously, since that’s how I got started on this commentary.) But you have to be a proper coder, with proper utilities to dig down into he code and reinterpret it all. I’m told Firaxis packages Civ data the way it does today, instead of in readily accessible files, because doing so allows Firaxis to generate wilder innovations, like the “Final Conflict” and “Old Gods” that came with the package. Maybe so. Maybe it’s not just about nailing down some kind of proprietary control. Even so, I think we’re the poorer for it. The mods offered today by Civ enthusiasts with the proper tools and training are no better than those of the 16-bit era, and the very possibility of modding is now off the table for the non-coding Civ enthusiasts.

Postscript: After all that, none of the mods worked on my system. I’m not sure why; perhaps it has to do with where the data is stored, in folders other than the default. Regardless, I haven’t been able to make them go. That problem never came up with the simpler .txt and .gif files, either.