Sometimes I think of making the Westlands only, well, the Westlands, but the benefit of doing it as a module and just adding the civs onto the base ones outweighs the desire for “realism”. I do plan to eventually add custom (well, custom as in not from Civ ) music for the leaders, but since I listen to my iPod while playing I don’t really think about that that often. What I really need to do is focus on finishing up the civilopedia and all the language the leaders use.

Talk to the hand

I added two new leaders to the Westlands mod for Cairhien and Whitecloak nation (haha). I made them a little more aggressive than the other leaders on purpose, and the result is I am in war a lot.

However, I really would like to add another civ to the mix, but making the Aiel seems a bit difficult: They don’t use swords OR horses, and the latter would remove a heck of a lot of units. Not that I use any of them, really, not a huge horse fan, but the point still stands. It also makes me think of making a non-modular version which would remove all non-WOT civs. That of course would be more “realistic” but also a major pain in the ass. I originally went with the modular version to avoid having to deal with those huge XML files.

The other issue is that there just aren’t that many nations to do. Or, I should say, that many city names known to us. Making up names for WOT crap isn’t easy, and I struggle to just figure out what to name their unique units because of course they couldn’t just call the stupid things “canons” and “guns” oh no we have to get poetic and call them “dragons”. But having every nation call their UU the same thing is boring, so, I have to get poetic in turn.

Anyway, the Seanchan will be the next civ I add. All the city names will have to be made up except for maybe two, and that’s assuming we know the capital name (is it Seanchan? I have no clue), otherwise, I can only think of one city name off hand. And I’m not going to go look up more info right now because I’m not making it right now!

1. Balance out the unique units. When I made Cairhien’s first UU it was mostly a reaction to getting killed off by the Aztecs all the damn time, in other words I was angry and not really thinking. This has lead to me having to try and balance all the other civs’ UUs which is becoming a little bit more difficult with the more civs I add. I’m thinking of bringing them down in strength a little, and also looking at the bigger picture of which units are good against each other, so that every nation has someone who can kick their ass.
2. Finish Civilopedia. I have been lazy with writing up the entries for the leaders/civs/UU/buildings, but it would be a lot easier to finish that up now than later when I have even more civs to account for.
3. Add more civs. That kind of goes without saying, but I do want to eventually add the Aiel and the Seanchan. The Aiel will be based on the Middle Eastern or African culture (the Native American one has too much specific graphics for me to deal with), but I am leaning towards ME since I wouldn’t have to worry about, you know, black Aiel. I just can’t for the life of me remember what the ME units look like. The Seanchan are easy since they have a Texan accent I will just use America as their base.
4. Add more leaders. I am not sure I want to add more leaders to the civs now or later, since leaders are far more of a pain in the ass than making a new civ. But different leaders do add to the play value so….

I’ve also thought of making a single page website for it, mostly to keep track of what I am doing, but also so it is easier to have a place to keep the most recent version. But mostly because I just like web design.

I suck at the Warlord difficulty setting, by the way. I really need to learn to build up military units. The higher in difficulty you go up, the more war hungry other nations become…. I suppose I could always play with the always at war/peace options, but that feels a bit like cheating. (And I am trying to cut back on my temptation to cheat)

One thing I am interested in is making my own map. A WOT based map, obviously. But I think it might better to wait until I have some more nations done (and I’m not editing/adding anything until I win some games on Warlord level!). Also making custom scenarios.

I’d also like Civ Rev to come out on Wii, but I don’t think I should hold my breath.

I haven’t been working on my Civilization mod for awhile, mostly because I’m trying to become better at the Warlords difficulty setting. Not that I have been playing all too much either recently.

I have begun my WOT reread. It’s not going too fast, or as fast as usual, but that might be because a) I’m not reading every day and b) when I do read I’m doing a more close-reading a là college cramming. The other problem might be out of the whole series New Spring and Eye of the World are books I’ve read more than the others.

Changed hosts. My new host uses DirectAdmin instead of cPanel, which might take some getting used to, but so far it is fine. One thing I really like is that each domain gets its own folder. With cPanel you needed WHM to do that, which usually cost more than regular cPanel. Even so, I still need to have a moiraine.meandraine.net subdomain for now, otherwise my redirect rule via .htaccess won’t work: it’ll just show an error page.

For some reason my vBulletin database is larger on this host than the last one. Don’t know why. Also, my disk usage meter has close to 40mb of data I can’t account for. I’ve waited a couple of days before sending in a ticket to ask about that. My other tickets (one for sales, others for transfer) have gotten answered nice and fast, so hopefully the same will be true here. So far, I am very happy with new host.

Also, MW forums aren’t down every 30 minutes. This is a nice change.

I’m kind of rambling here….

I need to find boxers for Elnore for two reasons: 1) It’s a part of her character, and 2) They’ll help keep her pants up. Caraline needs a new wig, and there is one girl who makes fur wigs that I like, but of course she is closed!

I want to go to Europe.

I am so behind the times. vBulletin has raised its prices across the board. Renewals for owned licenses (the renewals are for support/downloads of latest releases) is now $60. Unless you do it two months before it expires then it is $40. It used to be $30 no matter when you renewed. I liked the old way better, because vBulletin seems to have taken a page out of phpBB’s book on updates. That is, 4.0 is really no where in sight. Hopefully there is some information soon.

I have no desire to update to 3.7, since that release seems geared more towards those who want their communities to be more like MySpace. I don’t want more bloat, I want a more streamlined vBulletin forum. I don’t regret moving away from phpBB to vBulletin, especially considering how long it took them to come out with 3.0. But my reasons for moving to the other guys was for forum features (merging,splitting,better spam protection) not SEO.

I’m still enjoying Civilization IV. I’m not sure whether I have found a little bug with my Westlands mod or not: in the Civilopedia it shows that one of Tar Valon’s unique units upgrades to one of Andor’s unique units. Obviously that is not how it is suppose to go. I will look into further once my current game is over. The goal is to clean up what I have now, refine the leaders, and then add new leaders to the current custom civs. After that, I will add new civs/leaders.

And because I feel like adding pictures (as always click for bigger):

At any rate, it didn’t take long for me to want to create a custom civilization; and thus was Moiraine and the nation of Cairhien born.

Learning how to make Cairhien wasn’t easy: a lot of the tutiorals about custom civs were based on the vanilla install, not any of the expansion packs. And then some of the more clear ones were never finished. Basically the best way was to simply find a custom civ that worked, and see what they did.

I eventually got confident enough to go ahead and make another civ to counterbalance Moiraine and her empire.

Upon completing my second civ I realized I needed to breakdown and learn how to add civs the modular way, because the XML files were becoming a bit long and ridiculous. The modular method would allow me to keep adding more civs as I saw fit, with less hassle.

So far I have Cairhien, Amadicia, and Andor. I’m thinking of adding a Borderlands civ and maybe Seanchan. (why yes Niklas, I am a WOT nerd!) I haven’t delved to the level of creating custom meshes for units and all that jazz, but maybe one day. Maybe.