Civ2 ADVANCED SCENARIO MAKING IDEAS

When starting out to make scenarios, I found Patrick William's notes on the subject very helpful. It provides the basics and a lot of common sense advice on how best to design setups. I'm assuming you've READ THAT ALREADY before you even start this, a good amount of experience playing Civ2 and that you have a good amount of common sense. As long as this file is, I didn't cover everything; I tried to avoid the obvious stuff you should learn on your own no problem. What I'd like to explain here are some more little tricks and devices to help make a really good scenario. Things that aren't apparently obvious to everyone, but you have to kind of muddle your way through. Scenario making is really on the fringes of civ2 programming, meaning that much of it is not very obvious and some of it downright screwy. Hopefully this file will help speed up the learning curve.

I've only made two scenarios myself (working on the third) so I'm sure there are many folks out there with MUCH more experience than I have. But I like to think of myself as an observant chap, and I hope sharing some observations will allow other scenario makers to make better scenarios with less guesswork than I had to go through. Some of it might be obvious or nit-picky to you, but useful to someone else, so skim if necessary. Here, in only a vague order, are some things I found out not mentioned in Patrick's notes.

Don't blame me if you try something here and it doesn't work or causes your program to crash. Save often. Free distribution of this file on this internet is encouraged, but profiting by it in any way is prohibited. Finally, please don't e-mail me if you don't understand something here or something else there are several on-line discussion groups for such things. I am happy though to get any e-mails about corrections or additions to this file. My name's Harlan and my e-mail is harlant at hawaii.edu. Also let me know if I have mentioned something by you, a web link or whatever that you want removed.

a. GRAPHICS FILES
b. RULES.TXT
c. THE EVENT FILES

First I want to repeat what Patrick Williams said on this subject. The first thing you need to do after you've chose your map size and all, is set whether your "world" is a round or flat one. If it is round, there will be an extra line of polar squares automatically made on the north and south borders, so figure that into your plans. If they didn't do that, you could sail off the northern edge of the world and suddenly find your self in the south, kind of a fourth-dimensional world! The second thing you need to do is change the resource seed unless you really want it too be random. An easy mistake to make is assume that the special squares will be just the same in the game as what you see before you in the mapping program, but they won't be unless you change the resource seed number from 1 to any other number.

You may have noticed that the little map in the upper right of your game that shows the entire world (the World Map) isn't the same shape as the main map (lets call it the Game Map) you use. Well, believe me, it isn't. On the Game Map each square is a diamond shape, much wider than it is taller. So, if you move ten squares from east to west on the Game Map, you actually go a greater distance as measured by a ruler than if you go ten squares south to north. In the World Map in the upper corner, the distances would be the same. What does this mean? It means that if you say, okay, I'm going to make a square map, 100 squares tall and 100 squares wide, it will be a true square in the World Map but a really wide rectangle in the Game Map, which is the one that really matters. So you need to compensate accordingly. In the beginning it asks you for an X and Y value. If you want a square map, you would need to make 5 squares in the X dimension (north-south) for every 8 squares in the Y dimension (east-west). As Patrick mentions, a grid system works best. Overlay a grid on top of the map you are basing your map on (if you're doing that) and work in multiples of 5 and 8:

So on the Game Map it --should-- come out alright (I make no promises though!).

Pretty much everything you can do in the mapping program can be done via the cheat menu (once you have a map). Good idea becuause after you make a map and you've already started building cities and so on, sometimes you might want to change a little terrain here and there. Unfortunately, they forgot to include an option for adding or subtracting rivers outside of the mapping program. To get rid of a river, you can change the terrain to ocean and then back to some other kind of land terrain, and the river will be gone. But there's no way to add a river on after you've left the map editor program.

Now that you have your map, that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are loads of other files to edit (in order of usefulness):

Meanwhile, Labels.txt and Game.txt can no longer be edited for those with the CD. Actually they still can be edited, its just that the edited versions will not be automatically loaded up with a scenario if in the scenario directory. Only the copies of these files in the Civ2 main directory will be used.

In addition to all those files, people also edit the many sound files (all the files that end in .wav) to change the sound of the game. Also, you may want to throw in some kind of readme.txt file to give people more background and information on your scenario than the one or two paragraphs allowed in the yourscenario.txt file. A number of files exist to help you out in the artistic department. There are three files of units collected from many sources, called AllUnit1.gif, Allunit2.gif and Allunit3.gif. There is a AllFlags.gif that contains the flags of every country on earth today. Also, Allterr.gif, Allicons.gif and Allcities.gif exist. All of these and more can be found at ModHeavenhttp://www.heavenweb.com/modheavn/webdoc4.htm.

Next I'll mention a few things about editing the graphics files before launching into the tough one, editing the Rules.txt file.

See the file "How to Edit GIF Files with PSP" by Jeff Head for a basic explanation on how to use PaintShopPro (http://www.nebonet.com/headhome/jeffciv2/tipspage.htm). The file shows how to cut and paste unit pictures or other graphics from other files into yours. I'm only gonna mention a few hard to figure out things not previously mentioned.

Personally I use PaintShopPro to do my editing, as it is shareware (free for a limited time) and easily downloadable from the World Wide Web. There are a couple of commands there I use a lot most people don't know about. One is "resize" (under "image")- I can grab any image off the World Wide Web, save it as a graphics file (just click on the right mouse button if you have Windows95), then fiddling around with the resize button, get it to be the right size to include in my units or icons file or whatever. So you don't need to be a great artist to make your own graphics changes, you just need to find the right pictures. The second is the "Color Replacer" button. A bit more complicated (look it up in the help section) but it allows you to change all instances of one color into another color in a second. So for instance you could change an unhappy red person in the People.gif file into a happy blue person in a matter of minutes by changing all the reds to blues. A major time saver.

If you look at any units.gif file, you will see green borders around each unit and blue dots on some of those borders. Lot of people (including me for my first scenario) are not sure what these dots mean. They determine where the shield (the one that shows what civ the unit belongs to and how much damage the unit has) will go for each unit. So if you are taking a unit from somewhere else, make sure to grab the top and left green bands around the unit (the sides with the dots) or else the shield will probably be in some hard to see spot. Having no dots at all, the shield will go to some default position, which probably isn't what you want either.

The Cities.gif file has two sets of dots on the borders for each building in the architecture sections. One set determines where the flag will go, the other where the sign showing how many citizens there are will go. In the flags section of that file, there is a special pixel in the middle of each flag. That pixel determines what color all the units of a civ will be (you CAN change the colors of the civs!). I think it is the fifth pixel from the top and the fourth pixel in from the left for each flag, but don't quote me on that. Mike McCart's AllFlags.gif file gives a good visual image of which pixel it is. The bar above each flag by the way is the color the name of the cities of that civ will be. If you make this at all dark it can be hard to read the city names.

For pretty much all the graphics files you have background colors that hopefully don't show up. Well, sometimes they do after you've edited something, don't ask me why. This isn't a problem with the Units.gif file, but for some of the other ones the olive green background color sometimes shows up as foreground. Solution? The background pink color never fails. So if something is showing up that you don't want, just paint it pink.

Speaking of background colors, in the Units.gif file the background colors of pink and purple make a kind of diamond pattern. The important thing here is that the bottom purple section does not get drawn over. If you do, the unit will look funny when its fortified, will look funny when it moves (the bottom section will disappear and reappear alot) and basically will be annoying. But feel free to go wild towards the sides and top- the only problem with moving into those spaces is that you may partially block views of other units standing on nearby squares.

Personally I think this is a pretty straightforward thing- it even has some advice on how to do it properly written right into the file. So I assume you can understand all that. I have a few additional items though. First, some generalities. I hardly know a thing about computer programming, but I know that everything in a line after a semi-colon doesn't count- it is just notes to help the programmer. You see a lot of this is the Rules.txt file. And with the names of things, you of course can't get the program to misfunction by changing those (unless they're too long). But if you screw up, mess up just one letter, miss one punctuation mark, on anything else, Civ2 won't run until you fix it. For instance, the abbreviations of technologies - Gun for Gunpowder and all that. Even getting the capitalization wrong here is a big no no. And you'll notice that those tech abbreviations come AFTER the semicolons, which means those are one thing you can't change.

No, you can't actually change what city improvments and wonders do (yet?!). But, you can rename them, make new pictures for them (editing Icons.gif), change their attributes (cost, upkeep, prerequsites, deadlines) and in the process come up with something pretty different. What's especially interesting I think is putting these things in time periods they're not meant to be in. For instance, Cure for Cancer (+1 happy person) renamed and with a new graphic could make a perfectly good extra ancient wonder. I renamed "SAM Missle Battery" (double defense against air units) "The Eye of Sauron" in my Lord of the Rings scenario to make a particular city harder to attack from the air. Be creative.

There are two ways to modify the science rate, one as a cosmic principles value at the beginning of the Rules.txt file and the second under the "cheat" option. They both do the exact same thing, but it seems the "cheat" option takes precedence over the other one in scenarios. Also, under "Edit King" in the cheat options there is a way to change both what each civ is working on at the beginning of the game and how far they've progressed on it.

Under the cosmic principles section of Rules.txt you can also change the food growth rate by changing the number of rows in the food box. But in fact this doesn't really work. Changing it from ten to twenty will make it twice as long for a city to grow, but beyond that, changing to thirty or more, does nothing. So if you really want to slow down or stop food growth, you need to change another cosmic principle, how much food each citizen eats, from 2 to 3. In fact, probably most of your cities will be starving after you do this, so you'll have to make some adjust - ments to fix that (such as you could make some terrain types more bountiful or improve the terrain around starving cities or give them the farmland function). The reason I mention this is because if your scenario is of a very short time period, like a several year war, it makes no sense to have city sizes double in that time!

These are pretty clear but I think two need some clarification. "Riot factor based on # of cities" is one of those things they never tell you about- after your civ reaches a certain size, any new citizens are gonna be a lot more unhappy than the already existing ones. This number determines how many cities are needed for this effect to start taking place. "Communism is equilivent of this palace distance" is a way to have corruption happen under Communism. The larger this number, the more the corruption (as usual, dependent on distance from palace).

Whoa! This is one of the wierdest and complicated but most important things. Bear with me on this one.

It took me a while to figure this out, but simply giving a computer civ the appropriate technology to build a unit does not mean it will EVER make that unit. There must be some kind of sub-program that determines which units are worthy of being built and which aren't. If two units are exactly the same except that one attacks with a strength of 6 and the other 4, why ever build the one with a strength of 4? In other words, the computer isn't always told explicitly which units are obsolete and so it needs to figure this out on its own. THIS IS A BIG PROBLEM. Sometimes even the people at Mircoprose don't notice it - I noticed that in the Mongol Horde scenario that comes with the Scenarios CD, many of the computer civs obviously don't want to produce the units the designer thought they would.

Here's an important point before I continue. The human player will always have the choice of building any unit it has the technology for and hasn't been explicitly make obsolete. DIFFERENT than computer players. So, let's say your scenario building technique chose "set human player" to the first civ, build up one civ completely, then "set human player" to the next civ, build it up, and so on. If this is so, you will never notice the problem I'm talking about here. Once that civ is no longer considered human operated, the rules determining which units to build will instantly change.

Luckily for us, we have a way of knowing what the computer is thinking on this. Under cheat mode, select "Reveal Map" and choose "Entire Map". Then you can go click on any city in the world and see what it's production options are even if it isn't the human player's. What you see there may surprise you. This is because of all the factors the computer could look at to determine which units to build (cost, attack strength, defense strength, movement, special abilities, hitpoints, etc), it only seems to look at a few. These are attack strength, defense strength, movement (to some extent), and what kind of unit it is (offensive, defensive, diplomatic, trade, etc). Special abilities seem to be ignored and cost even is ignored. So, let's say you have one offensive unit that's really great but really expensive and another one that's not so great but cheap. Since the computer doesn't think about cost in its formula, it may decide to NEVER built the cheaper unit. It only thinks, "Hey, the offense number and defense number both are better on this one unit so I must be out of my mind to make the other one". On top of that, if the cheaper unit has some special ability that the expensive one doesn't, like paratrooping, the computer tends to ignore that.

So, what can you do? Rule one, always check to see if the units you want the computer civ to make are in fact showing up in the production options in their cities. If some unit isn't, you may have to work with the numbers to get the computer to like it. A general rule is that the more you deviate from the original units setup, the more likely you will have trouble. The computer seems to want certain things. I'll bet the whole formula for how the computer figures out which units are to be used would be a hopelessly complicated thing, but we can make dim guesses. If you look at the civ2 poster, there are certain progressions of units (I'm thinking ground units here - most of my problems have been with them). There's the defensive unit (phalanx, pikemen, muskateers, riflemen etc). So the computer always wants to make something like that. There's the offensive unit that moves two but has a defense of one (horseman, chariot, elephant, crusaders). There's the offensive unit that moves two or more but has a defense greater than one (Knights, Dragoons, Cavalry, Armor). There's the offensive unit that usually moves one with a defense of one (Catapult, Cannon, Artillery, and Howitzer obviously falls into this category even thought the Howitzer has a defense of two- I'll bet the computer looks for a unit with an attack to defense ratio of 4:1 or so or greater). Suicide type units with a defense of* 0 also seem to be in their own category. So, in making your units you should try to follow these patterns of units. If you don't watch it you could make a unit that fulfills two or more of these slots the computer is looking for and then other units you want won't show up.

One good way of getting more units to show up is keeping the factors the computer is looking for (mainly offensive and defensive strength) the way the computer wants them and manipulating the numbers the computer doesn't care about. So, let's say you want two fast moving attack units and the computer wants to only make one. Make the offensive and defensive numbers for both the same, and change the hit points, fire power, cost, special abilities and so on.

Another aside- I wouldn't say the computer always ignores special abilities. I've been able to get it to make a special abilities unit with obviously inferior numbers (like a Siege Tower in addition to a Cannon). There's just no telling. Now, here's the bad news. Even after you do all this and the units you want show up on the computer city's production options screen, that STILL doesn't mean the computer will ever produce the unit. You'll have to do some playtesting and see if you ever see what units. I've noticed that for the defensive unit slot every computer player picks one as its default (i.e. a new city will build that unit first) and always builds that one regardless how many defensive units there are, until a better one comes along. So, let's say there are several defensive units with a defense of two (some having special abilities). The computer will always build just one of them (it often seems to be the last one on the list). So the computer could stupidly not build the one with special abilities just because it comes before the one without. I don't know if order on the list makes a difference with other types of units, but it could. Also, there were times when I couldn't get a computer to make a certain type of unit no matter what I did but when I put the unit into one of the three user defined slots (in the Rules.txt file) then it was happy. Conclusion: trial and error, trial and error. There's nothing more frustrating than making a really great unit only to have no one use it.

A few more things. If you really screw up on the defensive default unit, the computer will pick settlers to make if it doesn't like anything else. So when a civ player starts a new city it first builds a settler that could wipe that city out! (duh)* Also, I noticed when Gunpowder is discovered (allowing Musketeers defending with 3), the computer players will not make any defensive units with defense value of 1 or 2 anymore even if you moved or got rid of Musketeers (which might lead to the settler problem). This could happen again with Conscription and Riflemen, I haven't checked.

Certain units are have special abilities that are inherent in their position in the Rules.txt file. For instance, Engineers can do things Settlers can't do (such as the "transform" command) simply because they are in the second unit slot. Move a settler type unit to any other spot and they will not be able to do the special engineer functions (working twice as fast, "transform"), only the usual fuctions of Settlers. So be careful with these positions!

If you want a unit that can only be made by Fundamentalist governments, that unit better occupy the postion of Fanatics. You can't move Fanatics to somewhere else and expect that trait to follow, AND if you put some totally different unit in the Fanatics spot it will still be available to Fundamentalist governments only. The Partisan slot is another one to watch out for. Whatever you put there will do the partisan thing for civs advanced enough for that to happen (and getting rid of guerrilla warfare isn't enough to get rid of the effect- Communist and Democratic governments get partisans when their cities fall even without that tech).

Helicopters lose a little strength each turn they're away from a city and they also are the only air unit that can occupy an enemy city. This is not determined from the slot but rather from the fact that helicopters don't need to return to cities by a certain turn. Any air units that you say in the Rules.txt file never need to return to cities will have these attributes too. Alternately you could take away these special abilities from the helicopter by changing that number. Spies can do all the things Diplomats can't only if they're in the slot they're in. The nuclear missle slot is a real tricky one. If a civ has any units of that slot type, the civ will say in negotions that its words are backed with nuclear weapons (and presuamably act differently too). Even if that unit is some totally non-nuclear thing like a Smurf unit. The nuclear effect of lots of pollution and total destruction of a city might be connected to this slot or (I suspect) to having a really high offense number for a missle styled unit. There could be other slot specific rules I don't know about. Watch out for them and use them to your advantage if you can.

Notice how Barbarian units always tend to be the same things, but as the game goes on, they get more advanced? First, --I think--, they're Horsemen, then Elephants, then Crusaders, Cavalry and finally Partisans. I'm not really too sure about these- I kind of recall other barbarians too (Legions?). Regardless, this is slot driven, meaning that whatever kind of unit you put in the Horsemen slot, they could be used as Barbarians. Watch out for it in your scenario if you can. You wouldn't want some really wierd thing, like a Henry Kissenger unit, to come down from the hills attacking in droves! (scary thought, that) What kind of barbarian is created seems to be tied to whatever the most advanced techs are at the time. I --think-- as soon as someone gets Guerilla Warfare, all barbarians till the end of the game will bewhatever is in the Partisans slot.

Just like unit slots, there are some things that happen when a civ discovers a technology in a certain slot, independent of whatever that technology might be. So, for instance, let's say you rename Gunpowder to Ceramics, and totally change all the things you get with it. But still, when the first civ reaches Ceramics, a message will appear saying "The discoverery of Ceramics renders all barracks obsolete. Antiquated barracks sold for X gold." And the barracks are sold. So, if you're rearranging and renaming technologies, watch out for these kinds of things! Put Ceramics in some other spot, most likely. I'm not totally sure about them all, but here are some.

Obviously, the government-form techs, Monarchy, Republic, Fundamentalism, Communism and Democracy, will allow you to change gvmts regardless if you rename them.

I think, but I could be wrong, the techs that wipe out barracks are Gunpowder, Conscription, and Mobile Warfare. Explosives, Radio, Railroad, Construction, and Refrigeration all allow your Settlers/Engineers to do new things, regardless of how else you alter these around. Invention changes the architectural form to Renaissance, and Industrialization changes it to Industrial Revolution. I think a combination of Electronics and Automobile changes it again to Modern. You can use this to your advantage. For instance, if you strip these civ advances of their other benefits (move those to another slot maybe) and give the right advances to certain civs, you could have 6 different architectural styles at once (which you can edit in Cities.gif), not a max of four. These techs also change the appearance of your citizens (editable in the People.gif file).

There are a bunch of other special features associated with the slots. Many (all??) are mentioned on page 93 of the book that comes with Civ2. For instance, the Nuclear Power tech slot allows all your naval units to move one extra space. Fusion Power, Philosophy, Electronics, Navigation, Seafaring, Railroad, Refrigeration, Theology and Communism are also mentioned on that page. Who knows what else there could be. I've noticed that as a civ gets more and more techs it tends to get more Partisans when one of it's cities is conquered but how this works exactly is beyond me (the Partisan thing is also connected to city size it seems and civs with Communist or Democracy forms of gvmt tend to get the most partisans). Also, I tend to avoid reusing Nuclear Fission and Rocketry for other things- I'm afraid there might be some nuclear connection there. Finally, if you do change technologies around, be sure to change the AI value and the Modifier value (see the Rules.txt file for an explanation). Without this the computer players won't value your changes properly. I think many forget this detail.

In addition to the three user defined technology slots, there actually is a fourth unused one- Plumbing. I don't know why, but its there in the middle of the tech list in Rules.txt and you can rename it and use it any way you want.

The events file is filled with troublesome bugs. I've noticed a bug with the ChangeMoney action. Giving money seems fine, but taking money doesn't work. If you take money and bring the civ's amount below 0, its supposed to stop at 0, but for me it would always end up at 30,000! Hopefully they'll fix this bug. I was unable to get the command MoveUnit to work either. I've had some other buggy problems too - if your scenario isn't working, the events.txt file would be one of the first places to look for trouble-shooting.

There seem to be two ways to prevent peace from breaking out between two civs. One is the "MakeAgression" action explained in booklet. But I don't like this. The two civs often still talk, trade techs, make peace and do all that except at the beginning of the next turn they're at war again.Sometimes you will get a message EVERY turn that two civs made peace (only to have the events.txt file break it the next), which gets really old fast. Better to get the two civs to be at war with each other on the first turn (by "edit King" under cheat) and then write something similar to this:

This will prevent the two sides from ever talking, thus freezing their relationship into place. Of course this could theoretically freeze any kind of relationship into place (except for cease fires which expire), but the other ones are a bit more risky. You could, for instance, try to free an alliance into place, but if one of the partners stole a tech from the other causing a declaration of war, the permanent alliance would become a permanent war. Also, if you really want to be sure two civs will be at war, you could use both methods (the above and MakeAggression) to be on the safe side.

What NoSchism does is to guarantee a civil war won't happen to a given civ or "anybody" if you choose that. I noticed too that civil wars only happen if there are less than seven civs alive at that moment, or else the civil war would create 8 civs, which is impossible.

The civ2 programmers made a few changes they failed to mention with their new Scenarios CD, aside from the general bug fixing. Now there are two kinds of objectives you can make your cities, major and minor. Major are worth 3 points, minor 1. People who play a scenario make with the Scenarios CD changes but don't have the CD themselves will find all the 3 point objectives worth 1 (but how to set the victory conditions to make both groups happy??). The "Don't change governments" option is more powerful now. It used to be that if you selected this for your scenario, a civ could still change gvmts only on the turn they discovered a tech that allowed a new gvmt form. The Scenario CD closes this loophole. I'm sure there are other changes too.

Most of the things on the cheat menu are straightforward or covered by Patrick William's FAQ, but here are a few that aren't.

Not really the most intuitive system. 1 = yearly, 2 = biannually, etc.., -1 = monthly, but then -2 = bimonthly, -6 = biannually. I did a -9 for my Mongol scenario, which makes a turn last 9 months. A -18 would be a year and a half long turn. Fractions/decimals don't work so there is no way of having time by go slower than monthly.
Also while I'm going on about time, it seems the max year is about 3000 BCE, if your scenario is set in the far future you'll have to work around that.

What I this does is that if patience is cleared, this civ doesn't want to talk to anybody until the beginning of the next turn. Patrick Williams thinks it means the leader will demand tribute. Whatever it does, it doesn't seem that useful.

Under the cheat option there is one option called "Total War". At first I thought, as Brian mentions in his FAQ, this must be some kind of no-holds-barred, never have peace type option. In fact, it just is another way to choose winning only by conquering the entire world, not through the space race.

Lets say I want to change the name of a civ and civ leader from the usual choices. There are two ways to do thischanging it in the Rules.txt file, or changing it with the Cheat Menu, under Edit King. Do the latter, even though this means you will have to start off with the wrong names at first. Why? To get the file City.txt to work. Usually your civs will want to build new cities, and so you will need to have names ready for them to use. If you change, say, Romans to Borgs, and go into the city.txt file and change Romans to Borgs there too, you'd think the computer would be able to link the two together. But it can't (or at least I haven't seen it do it). Better to keep everything Romans, change the list of Roman cities names to Borg type names, and then finally under Edit King change your civ name from Romans to Borgs at the last minute. Just another unnecessarily wierd thing you gotta know! If you do it incorrectly by the way, the civs will either use city names from the @EXTRA section at the end of the city.txt file, or just have no city names at all.

One annoying thing when editing a civ other than the one you currently are choosing to be iswhat if there is just one unit on a square? It seems at first there is no way to do things like change the terrain there, remove or add units, or edit the unit, cos every time you click on that unit the cursor will bounce you back to one of the human player units. "Oops, I wanted those troops to be fortified". "Oops, I want that unit to be over here instead". It's kind of a *****, but my solution is this. Presumably you have selected "Entire Map" to be able to see the other player's units in the first place. Put your cursor (with the "view" option turned on) on a square next to the unit. Select "change map" to some civ who likely doesn't know that unit exists. Then move your cursor on top of the square you know that unit is on, and select "Destroy All Units at Cursor". Then you can do whatever you want with that square. Rebuild the unit (F1) and edit it the way you want if you like before moving to another square.

It is very easy to make any old scenario, but to make a good one takes alot of time and effort, if you haven't noticed that by now. I think there are three main things to worry about in making a good scenarioplayability, a good storyline, and accuracy (if based on something historical, or famous work of fiction, or even similar-to-real-world speculation). You don't want the game too easy or too hard. It is better if there is a point to the whole thing, like a clear goal, defined enemy, race against time or whatever. Probably the hardest to achieve (for a perfectionist like myself!) is accuracy. Luckily though, more and more stuff keeps getting put up on the net all the time, so you can learn all kinds of things about your subject whatever it may be, without even getting off your duff. Even better, if you see some graphic you like on the internet you can grab it and use it for a unit or wonder or whatever. Go to the library! Sorry if this sounds harsh, but in my opinion you have to be really lazy about it to make a historical scenario and not even look at a historical atlas (the several volumnes of the Cambridge Illustrated Historical Atlas of Warfare I particularly recommend since so many scenarios are war based). There are so many scenarios out there now that very few people are going to want to play a totally unthoughtout one. If you're not into accuracy, no problem, make a totally fictional scenario. A good storyline and accuracy I can't really say any more about, but here are some further ideas on playability.

One of the reasons having permanent war is such a desired thing is to prevent the exchange of technologies. It can be really frustrating to have totally different civs trade technologies when you don't want that to happen- who knows, they could even be different species and suddenly one species is making units of the other. Selecting the "no techs from conquest" is the first thing you need to do. Preventing the civs in question from communicating with each other as shown above is the second. But then you still have the problem that techs could be stolen by diplomats. One extreme would be deciding no civ gets to make diplomats or spies. But even then the two civs could exchange techs via talking to third party civs when their units meet each other. There is only ONE WAY to be totally sure a give tech will not be traded. This was discovered by Dirk Weber; what he calls the "Ghost Technology". I hope he doesn't mind that I reprint his entire file on this subject since its so short and most people don't know about it .

THE GHOST TECHNOLOGY

With this file I'll TRY to explain you, how to allocate a technology (and on this wayalso units) to a single civilization only. As an exampleGreek Fire (only for Greekcivilization).

What happens nowThe technology is not found anymore in your scenario. Not seen in the pedia, no wayto exchange with other civilizations - but, all civilizations (you allocate thetechnology to) are able to build the units of this technology level. Well, this isan 'illegal' way but the only without 'CiC' - and it works.

Thanks, Dirk. I don't know why it works, but it does (if you just change the prerequisites to "no" without doing the "nil" first, of course all that means is that no one can research that tech). He points out one of the downsides - unfortunately you cannot use the civilopedia to look up the attributes of any units or anything else associated with this ghost tech. But that a small price to pay. If you change your mind, don't freak out, just replace the "no" prerequisites with anything else and the ghost tech will be uncovered again. The other downside is that this only works with units. If you want only a certain civ or civs to be able to make a certain wonder or city improvement for instance, this above trick doesn't do it. If anyone finds a way, let me know.

A mark of a poorly designed scenario is when you start it up and a whole bunch of cities begin in disorder. Well, this could happen to you unwittingly if someone either tries to play a civ you didn't expect they would (a city controlled by a computer player will take less to be happy than if the human player is controlling it), or they start at a difficulty level higher than you designed for and you didn't think of that either. Its a good idea to playtest all the likely civs a person might pick at the deity level, if only for a single turn.

If you want to do a scenario right, usually you will want to make sure each civ starts out with the appropriate amount of explored and unexplored world at the beginning of the game. This can be very time consuming to convert all that blackness into known territory up to seven times (once for each civ). Brian Williams recommended flying fighters around each city. I'd go even farther and edit the distance fighters can fly to about 30 (more than that doesn't seem to work). With just a few fighters you've covered alot of ground. But make sure to change it back before starting.

Kind of an extra bells and whistles thing, but it is nice to have the Civilopedia working properly. For those with the Scenarios CD, this is no problem, just make sure to include a copy of Pedia.txt (even if you haven't edited it) and they will be able to see all the units, wonders, etc... exactly as you've edited them to be. What about those without the CD, who have the old info still on their Civilopedia? According to the Civ2 Fascist Page, you should move (or at least rename) your GET_INFO.EXE file from the Pedia directory. Now your Civilopedia will show all the proper numbers and so forth for the scenario (this disadvantage is that that is all they will show- no fancy graphics or long descriptions). When you want to play regular civ again, just move back or re-rename that GET_INFO.EXE file. If you've made alot of changes in your scenario and as a result a lot of things aren't going to ever be used (no nuclear weapons in a Roman scenario for instance), it is nice to make the prerequisites for all the unreachable techs all "no". That way, players who have done one of the two things in the above paragraph will have only the things they need to know about in their Civilopedia.

In my opinion, the major problem with Civ2 as a game is just how dumb the computer players play. You'd think they could have programmed them to have a bit more strategy. Like instead of attacking a city with units that randomly happen to get close to it, save up a bunch and attack with them all together. But noOOoo. What this means as a scenario maker is you need to get the balance right. For instance, lets say you make a Civil War scenario. It may be better to make one scenario and then at the last minute split it into two, one designed for the human player to be the North, one for the human player to be the South. Then, in both compensate for the stupidity and general lack of strategy of the computer side by giving that side more units. Or another way around this is make the scenario specifically for the human to be one of the civs, and that one civ only (or at most a few).

There seem to be alot more bugs when playing scenarios than playing a regular game. No big surprise there. One that really annoys me is that it frequently new wonders can't be built even when the proper technology has been researched. A lot of scenarios suffer from this problem (esp. mine!). Last time I made a scenario I noticed wonders disappeared from my production menus at some point between two saved versions of the scenarioin the older file I could make them but in the new one I couldn't and I have NO IDEA what the hell I did in between. So save often, and save under DIFFERENT NAMES so if this happens to you you can go back to an older file and not lose too much work. Hopefully the next patch from Microprose will fix this, amongst other things!

As an aside, if this happens to you when playing a scenario, I know one kind of lame way of fixing it. Turn on cheat mode, and just before the end of your turn switch to another civ. Use the change maps option under "cheat" and select "entire map". Then, (no peeking!) quickly go to the city you want to start the wonder in and change the production to that wonder. Finally, put the map mode back to your country's view of the world and switch back to your original civ. Although the wonders don't work for the human players, they still work for the computer ones.

Another whoa. This is another one of those impossbily complicated areas. I personally don't try to modify sound so I can't claim to know much about it (I got my info here from Curro Rodriguez). But it isn't as straightforward as each unit having its own sound file. Sound files are shared by units, and some units make more than one sound (during the basic attack) not to mention all kinds of special sounds like when an air unit runs out of fuel. Below is a chart of which unit slots use which sound, as far as I know, I'm sure there are some inaccuracies and things left out here and there

defaultsair or naval changed to landswordfgt.wav
naval or land changed to airdivebomb.wav + divecrash.wav
air or land changed to navalnavbttle.wav + largexpl.wav

other soundsjetsputr.wav, enginesput.wav - air unit falling

Making your own sound files can be tricky- files must be wav 8 bit mono at 22 Mhz. However, there are loads of appropriate sound files out there- try the Conflicts CD-Rom scenarios and most mod packs for starters. Some people have even put soundpacks together.

There are certain loopholes you can manipulate for interesting effects. If you know of more that could be added here, let me know. Also, some of these ideas I just thought up on the spot; no guarantees these things will work!

Let's say you really want to limit the number of a certain kind of unit. You could give a civ some or even one of this type of unit at the beginning of the game but not the technology to make more. This could even allow you to have one of a kind units, like a Robert E. Lee unit for the Civil War. Another way is to have the production of a city or a few cities set on making something the civ otherwise doesn't have the technology for. So the civ could make as many of that type as it wanted, but only at great cost (in not being able to make anything else such as useful city improvments in that city) and in a limited geographical area. For instance, you could make only Constantinople be able to build Greek Fire since historically the secret of Greek Fire was tightly held by that city and no one else knew it. But once the person changed the production of the city, that's it, no more Greek Fire. This works with the human player but unfortunately the fickle computer civs will be very unlikely to keep making that thing for long (a few turns?).

Yet another way is through the events.txt file that comes with the Scenario CD. Have the unit just show up on a given turn or even a randomly chosen turn. I've found the random turn and interval turn functions to be sometimes buggy, but specifying the exact turn or every turn seems to be bug free at least.

Since they cannot move, you can never activate them to do ANYTHING to them. So if you have a city build such a thing, it obviously could never leave the city, even if you say gave it paradrop powers (I tried). Still, you can do neat things with this by using them as defensive barriers. For instance, in my Mongols scenario, I have an actual Great Wall, made up of units that can't move and look like a wall. Or, you could make great city defending units out of them, like a Burning Oil unit (pouring hot oil on attackers in the Middle Ages). Or, say, a civ with Leonardo's Workshop has all of a certain type of unit suddenly "upgraded" to a non-movable unit and the civ's whole army freezes into place!

I saw this in the King Arthur scenario- a land unit that has the advantages and disadvantages of a submarine. This means it is pretty much invisible (though you could also give other units the "can see subs" ability so they could see it). The down side? Like subs, it can't attack other units on land! Still, it can work for non-attacking units (a super stealthy spy!) and computer civs seem to attack with these kinds of units just fine, its only the human player that can't.

Another way to get an invisible unit is just don't draw anything in a unit slot - leave it completely background! The problem is the shield can still be seen, but even that can be fixed by moving the shield WAAAYY down, down to the bottom of the lower purple sections. Now, you have a totally invisible unit. But, keep in mind it is only invisible for the human player- the computer doesn't care what a unit looks like. Combine the unit with a movement of zero idea and you could have an invisible wall! Alternately, just do the move the shield way down bit but keep the rest visable, and you would have a unit where the human wouldn't know which civ it was belonging to (or how much damage it had suffered).

Similar to the land sub, putting the "adv. and disadv. of submarine" special function onto air units will also make these units nearly invisible. The good news is they CAN attack other units, the bad news is only over water (if the human player; computer civs cheat). So it is questionable if you want to add this to stealth airplanes (its a great boat destroying unit), but I think it would work quite well for non-attacking air units, like a balloon or spy satellite.

Yes, you can do this. Only by using the cheat menu, not with settlers though. You'll need to have the square in question be land, add a fortress while still land and then change it to ocean. Here are the notes on it from Shadowland by Shay Yates Roberts where it first appeared:

Naval FortressA standard fortress which happens to be built in the ocean. Naval units inside the fortress DO NOT enjoy a defensive bonus, but if stacked, can only be killed one at a time. Interestingly, any land units carried aboard a slain vessel ARE NOT DESTROYED. They simply remain in the naval fortress until another ship arrives to pick them up. Land units stationed inside a naval fortress enjoy the full benefits of a land fortress. Naval units cannot unload land units into a fortress, but they may pick them up from one. Land units can be left alone to defend a naval fortress only if their host ship is destroyed in combat.

You can do other wierd stuff with the cheat menu, like irrigated forest. Mined ocean square. Roads over ocean. However, the computer doesn't recognize them. So for instance you can have roads over ocean but units can't move onto them and you don't get extra trade for them, so why bother? But for non-ocean squares you can change the Rules.txt to allow things like irrigated forest in the terrain section. You can change this for ocean squares too, but in reality the computer won't accept those ocean changes.

One thing you can't ever manipulate freely it seems is food. One loophole here is making a caravan next to a city, and set home city on it to "none" and caravan supply to "food". Establishing a trade route with that city will give it an up front big amount of food, plus it will continue to get one extra food for the rest of the game from- ??? - from nowhere I guess. An interesting way to, for instance, have a thriving city in the middle of a desert. Or, start a game with one civ supplying lots of food to another civ, so that civ has to try and fight its way out of that situation.

As Patrick Williams mentioned, barbarian cities are possible. Just leave a city unoccupied and create a barbarian nearby to wander into it. However as Patrick mentioned, this is a real iffy zone fraught with crash potential. I've found I can look into a barbarian city and use the "create unit" cheat command to put any kind of unit in it (and fortify it there). But, barbarians have no technology pretty much, so they
will have virtually no choices on what units or city improvements to make. With the city improvements you can fix that by using the "Copy Another City's Improvements" but with the units it will turn out the same kind of unit that the barbarians that appear out of nowhere happen to be appearing as at that time (so, very early in the game it probably would be horsemen, at the very end partisans). Barbarian cities cheat massively, growing even when the terrain should have them starving, producing an unbelieveable amounts of units, and so on. Most annoying is how you always see them wandering around. An interesting thing, but use sparingly.

You can give these functions via the Rules.txt to any unit you want. Most combinations don't do much. You can't really have flying or sea-going diplomats or trade units (though they could defend themselves and as diplomats or trade units I imagine they wouldn't cost any unhappiness or shields for being out of a city). Flying settlers work though. They can perform settler functions on land they're flying over, believe it or not. Or course remember they also would eat food up and either have to return to a city by a certain turn or lose a little strength each turn (if they were helicopter styled). Boat settlers can't do much except they eat food up and can join a coastal city to increase its population. Diplomats can of course never attack but you could have attacking trade or settler ground units. Trade units funnily enough
could only attack units outside of cities- if it tried to enter another civ's city it would disappear and create a trade route.

Each civ has only one capital but that doesn't mean it can't have more than one palace. Once the game gets started each time a palace is built the old one disappears, but through the cheat button in the city report screen while still making the scenario you can make a civ has as many palaces as you want. The computer will still only recognize one as the capital and if the city with that one is captured it will want to build another one (this won't make any other palaces go away though). So why bother? Any palace will help lower corruption for government forms with corruption, cities with palaces cannot be bought and it is harder for a spy mission to succeed generally against it. Also, historically many civs really had more than one capital, esp. if you make a civ out of several similar real life countries. Or, in a fictional scenario a civ might be so spread out that corruption would be ridiculous without two or more palaces.