Instilling Civ with a cast of 20th century political characters was always going to be a little problematic, as this ambitious mod proves. Take the late Lady Thatcher, for instance, whose impact on the country she steered for a decade is here reduced to a paltry and wholly positive Deregulation stat (“Improvements cost 50% less maintenance”) for the purposes of international hex-battling. Her entry may as well read: “Mostly harmless”. Still, an ambitious mod it remains, quite breathtaking in its scope. Shall we take a look?
“So I am a [computer science] major at my respective Uni, and figured that doing some light modding in Civ 5 would be good for me,” writes creator JustAnotherBrick on Reddit.
“I always loved the Cold War mod from Civ 4, so I based my project around that. Eventually it grew over the weeks into something else.”
The project adds historically pertinent races and scores ofnew unitsto the game, spanning the Modern, Atomic and Information eras. Its 1950 scenario takes in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, the Balkans and Turkey.
Brick hopes to develop the mod further after the release of new Civ expansion Brave New World. He describes the current release as a beta, and is asking for feedback from the community.
“I am trying to figure out how to balance it out,” he says. “Right now the USSR has no workers and is incredibly underdeveloped. The few games I played, it took them decades to actually fix their infrastructure and field a large army.”
To download the mod, you’ll want to place these files in your Civilization 5/MODS folder, and this one in your Civilization 5/maps folder.
As for Thatcher? “I wasn’t sure what bonuses to give everyone, so I just looked at a famous policy they upheld or an event that they were at the center of and tried to base it off of that,” says Brick. “Hopefully as things go along they will get more even and balanced.”
What do you think, UK chums? Can we let him off with a warning?