To achieve something more complete and deliverable, I'm reducing the scope of resplendent in two significant ways so that I can expand it in one significant way and still have something deliverable.
First, I'm going to drastically
reduce the Nation pool, from 78 to 21 "Core' " (core-prime) nations. I'm arbitrarily defining Core Prime as the list of playable civs from Civ2. One regret is that the Civ2 selection bias drastically reduces the spread of traits (only one "Nomadic" Nation, for example, survives in Core'), meaning I need to trim the trait list down from 13 down to 8. New Trait List:
- Agricultural
- Imperialistic
- Industrious
- Inquisitive
- Maritime
- Mercantile
- Militaristic
- Spiritual
This leaves the below Nations, with reworked Traits. As I have trimmed traits from 13 to 11 to 8 and Nations from 78 to 50 to 21 these selections are getting increasingly dicey (in some cases) but they're still at least partially defensible- and more importantly, who cares?
- American (Industrious, Mercantile)
- Aztec (Militaristic, Spiritual)
- Babylonian (Agricultural, Mercantile)
- Carthaginian (Maritime, Mercantile)
- Celtic (Agricultural, Militaristic)
- Chinese (Agricultural, Inquisitive)
- Egyptian (Industrious, Spiritual)
- English (Imperialistic, Maritime)
- French (Inquisitive, Mercantile)
- German (Industrious, Inquisitive)
- Greek (Imperialistic, Inquisitive)
- Indian (Agricultural, Industrious)
- Japanese (Inquisitive, Maritime)
- Mongol (Imperialistic, Militaristic)
- Persian (Imperialistic, Spiritual)
- Roman (Imperialistic, Industrious)
- Russian (Agricultural, Imperialistic)
- Sioux (Inquisitive, Spiritual)
- Spanish (Maritime, Spiritual)
- Viking (Maritime, Militaristic)
- Zulu (Mercantile, Militaristic)
The new Nation-Trait distribution:
Second, I'm eliminating my
entire expanded tech tree (with it's associated doubling of the unit count). I may elect to keep a few of the technologies and units that I feel are truly punching above their weight, but I am going to try hard to keep that number to 5 additions or less, probably all coming in the Modern or Atomic ages, particularly if the advancement simply postdated Civ2's release date (1996- 22 yeas ago!!).
Finally, the good news: These two major scope reductions will allow me to expand the scope of Resplendent out to include nation-unique units (with buildings as national proxies, until better modding capabilities are added), unique buildings, and unique small wonders. For replacements, I will use simply the standard civ2civ3 tech tree, potentially with some limited additions of my own, for the above-noted reasons.
If I prove capable of delivering this greatly reduced foundation, it should prove relatively simple to expand the mod incrementally to embrace some of this content I am slashing, rather than trying to deliver the whole massive project from the get-go. We shall see.