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Comment by alexashka | Hacker News Reader

Civ needs to be moddable and they can get a little percentage of every mod sale. Then this franchise will be actually good rather than something people play for a week or two and forget about.

I want an invention tree that's thousands of items long based on actual human history, not an invention tree that's optimized for what a 15 year old will find 'fun' within the first week of play.

Civ is an unfortunate lost opportunity to make educational content that'd make people want to go read a history book afterwards.

Or maybe it's just me :)

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Europe Universalis is the one that made me actually want to learn history more. Civ was just a game with some historical names attached to units and buildings in comparison.

...what do you mean? Civ is very moddable.

I had to look it up. There are a bunch of mods, wow. I stand corrected, sort of.

The UI to browse these mods is something out of a geocities website from the 1990s.

I should've been more specific, I meant modding that enables creators to actually make money and gets promoted by the game developer - not a dark corner that hasn't been updated in 30 years where you can click an image but can't get to the next image without zooming out. That's not modding, that's, I don't even know what to call it - a historical artifact by people who don't seem to be aware of what century we're in.

> The UI to browse these mods is something out of a geocities website from the 1990s.

Is the Steam Workshop that bad for Civ?

It's a platform backed by a large company, it's bad for everyone (in the long term).

The much more problematic DRM and other walled garden issues aside, Steam's interface seems to be designed to emphasize safety, which would be fitting for software aimed at pre-teens, but is actually harmful for the teenagers and older that are its target.

(Of course one reason Valve likely did it is because it makes the job of their moderators easier - compare with the old Steam phpBB forums - and company-paid moderators is also the easiest moderation system to set up and maybe more importantly, remain in control of.)

That kind of modding, that's surely an utopia isn't it? Anywhere outside the Factorio utopia that this can happen?

To make it easier for those not in the know :

https://mods.factorio.com/

What amazes me is partly how easy it is for mods to work together. Really some software engineering done right there too, in the groundwork of their mod system.

Wait, what UI are you specifically talking about ?

Be careful what you wish for ;p :

Scrolling the tech tree of the Caveman 2 Cosmos mod for Civ4 :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWxAn5gXb2A

(not sure what the exact count is these days, but it's on the order of a thousand techs)

Mod presentation : https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/caveman-2-cosmos.2885...

Latest major version released last month and Player's Guide : https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/caveman2cosmos-v43-pl...

Modding is kind of in tension with the concept of direct sales... for similar reasons that open source is in tension with it. It's even worse for games, since most games are closed source, and mods generally directly build up on them.

I could see total conversion mods perhaps separately selling their art assets like this (since the open source of the rest of the code already often is in tension with the level of ownership that artists tend to claim over them).

The closest we got to what you suggest is probably StarCraft 2's Arcade mode, and platforms like these are bad for reasons too obvious to state on HN.

But Civ4 is a great example in how you can create one of the biggest and longest lived modding communities out there : you just need to open up your game ! And this is something that dates to Brian Reynolds' Civ2 : https://www.filfre.net/2023/01/sequels-in-strategy-gaming-pa...

Sadly, Civ5 was a regression there, and looks like Civ6 even more so ?

Speaking of educational content, here too Civ4 seems to be unsurpassed in its Encarta-like Civilopedia, and mods have only improved on the depth and breadth (if maybe not accuracy) by often cribbing their descriptions from encyclopedias :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WveveonsHM&t=495s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WveveonsHM&t=1326s

https://youtu.be/-titvSZsurE?t=945

(this player ignores the historical descriptions, but spending minutes reading them is something that most viewers are not likely to be interested in)

Personally, the regression from Civ4 to Civ5 in their Civilopedias is for some reason what pained me the most...

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