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#82 PLUNGE INTO THE ToT FANTASY WORLD Toby Robison wants the Fantasy-realm of Civ to get the attention it deserves. #83 THE SWING OF PENDULUM IN GAMING What goes up, goes down, and vice cersa, says Imran #84 PET PEEVES OF MULTIPLAY War4Ever speaks out against some aspects of multiplayer gaming. #85 SCENARIO MAKING: WHY CIV2 SUCCEEDED WHILE MORE MODERN GAMES MAY FAIL Blackclove puts C:CTP on the hotspot for what he sees as a lack of customizability. #86 GAME BASHING, SCENARIO MAKING AND GRAPHICS Skorpion59 comes to the defense of C:CTP after last week's "attack" from Blackclove. COLUMN ARCHIVE

In a recent article, Blackclove talked about the problems of making scenarios with the latest wave of civ games- ToT, SMAC, and CtP. From my experiences with CtP, I would agree with everything he said. I think it should be noted, though, that there is a difference between a modification and a scenario. While it is true that there have been no CtP scenarios to date, mostly because of the graphics complexities he mentioned, there are quite a few CtP mods available.

I think almost all CtP players who visit Apolyton know of Celestial Dawn's mod and the others which were combined to form the Apolyton Pack. There are many other mods available which represent their creator's tastes regarding other aspects of the game. Most of the work now going on, though, is being done by partners or groups. And this is because, as Blackclove stated, CtP has hundreds and hundreds of individual files. A quick check of the properties of my ctp_data, ctp_program, and scenario folders revealed a total of over 2,500 files contained within them. Most of these are great library files from the scenarios I use, each of which contain about a dozen words on average, but still....

This huge number of files is both the greatest resource, and greatest deterrent, to mod-makers. Most commercial programs start off relatively small, and grow larger with each edition (Word-Perfect, anyone?). This same evolution has happened in going from Civ 2 to the latest generation of games. To mod-makers, this represents an opportunity to do things that they had only dreamed of before- if they are willing to spend the large amounts of time required. (The Medieval Mod 2, which I recently submitted, combines all of my work, plus Nordicus' diplomacy side of the Awesome Aips, and tops out at close to 500 files, placed in 20 folders.)

As a mod-maker for CtP, I have sat down, played the game, and made notes of all the things I wanted to change. (And believe me, with CtP, this was a *lot* of things.) In the 5-plus months since I started altering files, I have been able to address about 90% of the things that I have made a go at so far. I am still finding things that I want to address, but the point is that you couldn't even approach doing anything like this with Civ 2. With Civ 2, you were given a residence, and allowed to rearrange the furniture some. At the time, this was a big breakthrough. With CtP, you can re-do just about everything except the basic frame of the house.

The main thing that Nordicus and myself have been doing the last two months is working on adjusting the AI behavior in CtP. This is the core aspect of the game, and was entirely off limits in Civ 2. If you want the AI to build more of one unit, and less of another- change it. Same goes for what kinds of attacks the AI prefers, what priority it gives to building units verses improvements, how it places it workers on the terrain tiles, etc. And we still haven't figured out all of the things that can be done with the files. (If someone at Activision would publish a report on what the individual code blocks do, it would save us months of trial-and-error, but I'm trying to look on the bright side here.)

The downside to this is that, like other big commercial programs, you have to learn a lot about the game before you can do even the simplest things in a thorough manner. I see a lot of CtP newbies who start threads asking how to do this or that, and its clear from reading their posts that they think that CtP is going to be just like Civ 2. I know that this is how I felt, too, initially. Many times I don't know where to even begin to try to explain to them that what they have so nonchalantly suggested would take several hundred man-hours to do thoroughly.

I think the result of this is that you will end up with far fewer scenarios and mods for these games, but the few that are well done will be able to much, much more than what was possible with Civ 2.

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Wes Whitaker has been a TBS enthusiast for the last ten years.

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