Any interest in a Civ4 mod to add a Klingon civilization?

[weregamer]

Obviously transplanting true Klingons to stone-age Earth would result in easy domination. For playability and fun one would need to capture the right sense of honor while limiting them to mere human capacities.

I have had some thoughts along this line, and would probably be willing to tackle the XML if there was enough interest and some folks to contribute what I cannot: especially art, but also a deeper knowledge of true Klingon culture.

The most distinguishing aspects of a culture (civilization) in this game are its special unit and building; for each culture one of the standard units is replaced by one with slightly superior abilities, and one of the standard city buildings likewise.

My recurring first thought is that Klingons don't have non-combatants - or if they do, they are slaves. So the improved unit might well be a Settler that can defend itself, and is killed like a military unit rather than captured if it is defeated. (The Worker unit could be defined as slaves and left unchanged.) This would be an extremely powerful early-game advantage, so the unique building would need to be relatively minor.

For the building, the most likely items would be adding a social function (probably +1 happiness) to the Barracks, or a recasting and adding a military function to the Theatre (+1 experience to units produced would add 33% to the bonus given by a barracks in the same city; this would be pretty significant though and would probably make the culture overpowered. Perhaps also reduce the rate of happiness to cultural spending slightly?)

And of course there would need to be at least one great Klingon leader, defined in terms of two attributes selected from the available list. No doubt the most important leader would be Kahless himself, who is clearly Aggressive, and of the other options probably one of Imperialistic, Expansionist, or Charismatic. Someone with more knowledge of Klingon history than myself might come up with one or two more leaders who would have other combinations of attributes. (Almost any historical leader will be Aggressive, though I suppose Garron might not be.)

A good writeup in English, plus optionally other Earthly languages, for the culture itself, the leaders, the unit and the building is also necessary.

(Translating the entire UI and Civilopedia into Klingon would be a completely different project which someone could do separately - it's just a matter of taking a copy of a bunch of files already present for various Earthly languages and translating them.)

In terms of the amount of work, the XML changes are not too much - perhaps 20 hours of original work and another 20 or so debugging for me as a software guy anyway. The text is probably about the same for a writer. The artwork, well that's the rub. I can't draw worth a drubbing, and good pixellation is a talent in any case.


So, is this idea interesting to people? In particular, interesting enough to commit some time to development or testing?

[Klythe]

    Actually, what would be fun is to start them out more or less normal. perhaps only very slightly stronger and proprtionally more expensive.   Then given them a very expensive technology or building that represents Kahless's Ascendancy(Basically a Klingon Wonder).   Once they complete that they will get some big combat bonuses for all military units, and perhaps settlers too.

    But prevent the Klingons from attaining any Renaissance or Industrial technologies except for purely military culture adavnces such as conscription) except perhaps from plundering, demanding as tribute or trading.   Make a second superly expensive (Actually without any industry, normal costs would probably already be supremly expensive) Wonder to represent the overthrow of the Hur'q, and jump them up the Space Age Technology, but still leave their Social/Government/Market Economy techs behind as appropriate, but they could now research them.   This is a better simulation of Klingons basically post-tribal semi-Feudal culture that jumped from there into the spaceflight era when the Hur'q invaded.

     Would take a bit of tinkering, I'm not sure how much of this is possible or practical.  I seem to remember that you could steal advancements that you didn't have the prereqs for...  That loophole should be closed if at all possible.  It's been quite a while since I played a Civ game.   Alpha Centauri and Outpost burned me out on that type of game.

   Did any version of civilization keep track of the nationality of the population of a city?  It would be cool if a city full of Klingons would be ready to revolt at the slightest chance.   That would probably require a code change.  If the game hasn't been open sourced there is about zero chance of that...

[weregamer]

Well, this would be doable with Civ4, there's a lot of places you can put in Python scripts, and there is already a mechanic for tracking cultural identity and rebellions - though I'm not sure you could make Klingons any more likely to rebel than other cultural types in the same situation.

But it would be at least one if not two orders of magnitude more work. A heck of a lot of work, in fact...

[Klythe]

   
    Right.  We should start with doing the easy things first and work on the harder parts once we have a few small successes under our belts.   We can work on balance as we go or with each major release...

    But I don't really fear Python.  I know enough similar programming languages it shouldn't be hard for me to pick up.  The big thing will be becoming familiar with their object model and data structures