Designer's Blog: Work the numbers
Originally we did not decide whether EIC is going to moddable or not. As the forum kicked off at paradoxplaza.com
it quickly became evident that the community wanted to be able to affect the game themselves as well.
We did not promise anything as we were unsure to what extent we should leave the game open.
Recently we finally announced that East India Company is going to be moddable.
What does this actually mean? Can you change how much damage you frigate’s grapeshot does to enemy crew?
Yes, you can. Can you model your own frigate in MAX and import it into the game? No, you cannot.
Can you photoshop the frigate textures to make your own black frigate with pink sails and you girlfriends face painted on the deck? Yes, you can.
So, the moddability of EIC is very much about scriptable items, numbers, and ship textures.
And there are a lot of variables you can tweak. Let’s start with ships. You can change basically every value ships have in the game.
There are values like ship build price, build time, hitpoints for hull and sails, number of crew and maximum cargo space.
You can also affect how much damage different shot types inflict. There are three shot types: solid ball, chain shot and grape shot.
All shot types do different damage to hull, sails and crew. So if you feel that grape shot should be even more deadly to the crew but not damage sails at all,
you can make it so. Ship behavior can also be tuned with attributes like speed and turning arc.
On the economy side of things, different port building upgrades are open. You can change how much time, money and iron wares each building upgrade requires.
Also starting funds for both player and AI companies can be changed.
Trade items prices, both for buying and selling can be tweaked, as well as the amount ports generate Main Trade Items annually.
AI behavior
Behavior of AI can be affected by a number of factors.
For example, you can change the amount of money AI is willing to spend on ships it builds and also if it prefers to build trading or warships.
Regarding AI, the diplomacy values can also be affected. All diplomatic items have value and by changing these values you can affect AI behavior during negotiations.
Values of pacts, alliances and other diplomatic items can be changed as well as the factor of how “afraid” smaller companies are when more powerful company is threatening them with war.
I’m no graphic artist myself, but if you are photoshopping guru, then you can mess around with the ship textures.
I could imagine that making all ships to reflect the colors of your chosen nation might be something skilled players want to do, to just give one example.
Well, that’s it for now. I hope you find East India Company even more appealing now that there are a lot of things you can tweak yourselves.
To see the complete list, check this thread on the EIC forum.
Kim Soares
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