Legends of Ancient Arabia

For an overview of what this mod does, read my complete review in my blog

I have some files that fix bugs in Legends of Ancient Arabia (LoAA), an old Warlords mod for Civilization 4.

The file Ancient_Arabia_pl10.7z (7-zip needed to open) is a fully playable update to Legends of Ancient Arabia (albeit without the Arabian music the original scenario has) which fixes these issues:

Random map players are fixed. With the file, all nine tribes playable by the human are available in random maps, with the same tech tree that the scenario has.
Workers can now build windmills
Random map generators will now add LoAA-specific resources to maps
Four random map generators, all PerfectWorld variants (SandBar, SandBarMoreIslands, TotestraDry, and Totestra) added.
New map for LoAA; game now has two scenarios.
The “Arabian Merchant” unit is too powerful to be built an unlimited number of times (it allows you to have a “great merchant” every two or three turns). The unit can now only be built three times. Note: While the player can request another Arabian Merchant to be built after the third one, subsequent units are built then immediately removed from play, with a log message given to the player. While this is a little clunky, it’s done this way to minimize the performance hit. Oh, why didn’t Civ4 have CyPlayer.getUnitClassCreatedCount()? This nerf can be disabled by removing the Assets/Python/CvEventManager.py file before applying the patch.

There is also a diff file for looking at the changes this update makes (doesn’t include the map scripts).

People who wish to have the full Arabian experience may download Gordon’s original file and add the folder Assets/Sounds from that file to the file here.

Note that, if a given random map has more than nine players, some tribes will be played more than once; best to keep the number of players to nine or less.

Files

It is possible to browse the files in my LoAA patch.

Known issues

Even with this patch applied, Legends of Ancient Arabia still has some issues, which I do not plan on addressing at this time:

No thorough balancing of Caulixtla scenario map.
“Custom Scenario” does not work with the “Ancient Arabia” map; the workaround is to always “Play Scenario” to play this map. One can play the “ArabianCaulixtla” map using “Custom Scenario”, or play a random map (either with “Play now” or “Custom Game”).
Leonard Nimoy’s voice says the wrong tech names in multiplayer games.
Not all Civlopedia entries are finished.
Diplomatic victory only possible with “Ancient Arabia” scenario map.
Lack of a “Permanent Alliance” tech for the Arab tribes limits how cooperative a multiplayer game can be.
Endgame slowdown between turns. (I tried using SpeedMod and it doesn’t work with LoAA.)
The mod is for Warlords, not Beyond the Sword.
A cultural victory, while possible, is too time-consuming to obtain to be a practical victory condition. The only viable peaceful victory is to build an “Arabian Merchant Empire”.
The score visible in the endgame is too low; even a well-played game ends with the user getting a low “Dan Quayle” score.