Game Creation Help

[Zlop]

Hi,
I'm at a loss on where to post this, but I thought it would be most appropriate here and I was hoping you guys could help me out.
Ok, so I'm a total amateur, I love to play games, don't know the first thing about programming. Thing is when I play games I always have a stream of ideas on how to make it better, how I could take concepts from 3 or 4 different games and make a new one out of it etc...
So recently I had one of those moments, I recently played a really old strategy game I used to like a lot Civilization II and I had a couple of fantastic ideas on how I could make it better.
So I went to modding forums and realized most of my ideas would actually require tinkering around with the game engine as well as other easier things.

Then I just thought, screw it, instead of busting my ass to make a complex mod using an obscure game engine with very little tools, references and ressources, I might just create a new game from scratch. And just use all of the cool concepts from the game and ditch the bad ones, then include my ideas.


--> Here is my question, for all people who don't want to read:
What would I need to do to create a 2d strategy turn based game?
as in ->
Do you know of any open source engines I could use?
Are there any specific programming languages that I will need to grasp to be able to make this happen?
etc...

I basically would really appreciate it if you guys could point me in the right directions.
That would be awesome thanks. If you don't understand anything I wrote, I am coming in with 0 knowledge here, so just ask for clarifications and I'll do my best to calrify.

[nimitzhunter]

Building a game is alot harder than tweaking the old one. Consider that you don't know any programming language. Not only language and graphic you'll also need to learn how to build in game AI. Not impossible to do, but it will take years. Try to write the tic tac toe game and see how difficult it could be for a beginner. C++ is what usually used in game. An open source engine you can check out is Ogre.

[MWAAAHAAA]

Check out freeciv.

[VirtualAce]

Moved to Tech board. No specific question here.

[CommonTater]

I basically would really appreciate it if you guys could point me in the right directions.
That would be awesome thanks. If you don't understand anything I wrote, I am coming in with 0 knowledge here, so just ask for clarifications and I'll do my best to calrify.

I'll spare you the lecture about how complex this is... I think the others covered it.

Bottom line... Learn a programming language... any programming language, to start with but be sure to learn C and C++ someplace along the way. Figure on a year to 2 years to become profficient at it, then another year to cobble your code together and get it ready for testing... then after 6 or 7 weeks of steady testing it *might* be ready to go online.

Really... this stuff doesn't happen in a week... never has, never will.

[Elysia]

Knowing an extra language or two is always handy, but C will not be a very good tool for building games. You will not have that much for it in this project. Just know this if you would still wish to learn it. Learning C++ would be enough to start your game.