Seeking advice for El Aurens v2

[Boco]

@Eivind. The current version is very close to beta, so I'm reluctant to revise v1 at this time. There wasn't enough room to post it at the Geocities site. These links may work; they are from my Apolyton upload directory:

• Guide: http://apolyton.net/upload/view.php?...AurensGv10.zip
• Part A: http://apolyton.net/upload/view.php?...AurensAv10.zip
• Part B: http://apolyton.net/upload/view.php?...AurensBv10.zip
• Part C: http://apolyton.net/upload/view.php?...AurensCv10.zip
• DLL's and Skin: http://apolyton.net/upload/view.php?...AurensTv10.zip

@Merc. CityPref works well!

Version 2 is a major upgrade with a lot of effort to improve both gameplay and historical accuracy. Infantry has been upgraded to allow for Murray-style slugfests (e.g. Gaza I and II), but your best bet is a carefully planned Allenby-style juggernaut (e.g. Gaza III and Megiddo).

Arab and Sanussi fronts are fairly similar to v1, but with a few tweaks — individual Bedouin tribes, trains, nastier potential for Saudi vs Hashemite infighting, and a Darfur theater.

Here's a screenie or two from the latest Alpha. It's Sept. 1917. Allenby has massed 3 cavalry divs, 5 infantry divs, and 5 batteries of heavy artillery against the heavily entrenched XXII, XX, and III Turkish corps. Can he give the Allies Jerusalem for Christmas? It's a challenge, but with careful use of all arms at your command, it can be done!

[Boco]

This is what you're up against in Gaza.

[Boco]

Turks are pretty aggressive in the Hejaz. They'll try to approach Rabegh from Medina by two routes. If you plug those, the AI tends to advance toward Yanbo (west of the camel jockey in red-striped pajamas) or Jeida. That armored car is tough to take out!

[Allard HS]

wow, boco, that really looks great!
what are you going to do with that "darfur theatre"? Are you going to add another map?

[Boco]

Thanks Allard. Kudos from a master are always welcome, but the art is a compilation of work by Fairline, Catfish, curtsibling, Sarstock, and many others.

EAv2 has four maps: Near East Theatre, Arab Tribes, Order of Battle, and Political+Secret. Darfur is on the Arab Tribes map. The terrain gfx are not yet finalized. Wonder where I can find some terrain for Darfur?

Here's a screenie of an OOB map section. The gold bar leads to transport sites under Matruh, Cairo, Kantara, Gaza, and Jaffa. The idea is to move your units to one of these sites and hop to map0. I tried your idea of labels at these sites, but the city present flag messed up the transport flag. Is it possible to hex edit a square (on map2) to have a transport site, a city label, and no city present? How difficult is it to change the continent number on ~100 squares? I'd like to get the 'go to' command to work on map2, but after all my mapediting, there are multiple continents for one contiguous mass.

One nice feature of multiple maps is that you can specify units that can only be built on a particular map. I use that to allow Bedouin building only on the Arab Tribes map.

[Boco]

Originally posted by Boco
Is it possible to hex edit a square (on map2) to have a transport site, a city label, and no city present? How difficult is it to change the continent number on ~100 squares? I'd like to get the 'go to' command to work on map2, but after all my mapediting, there are multiple continents for one contiguous mass.

No takers on this? Are they silly questions?

More cheesy dialog atmospherics.

[AGRICOLA]

Are they silly questions?

Not at all. I don't know the answer to

Is it possible to hex edit a square (on map2) to have a transport site, a city label, and no city present?

Mercator's hex edit compendium is excellent for FW and MGE but only parts of it (with minor adjustments) can be applied to TOT. I'll take a shot at this but right now I don't even know how TOT stores multiple maps. Can't promise to deliver this baby.

How difficult is it to change the continent number on ~100 squares? I'd like to get the 'go to' command to work on map2, but after all my mapediting, there are multiple continents for one contiguous mass.

This is time consuming unless there is a utility that can do it quickly. I can do if you give me instructions as to what you need done and the map.

[Mercator]

Originally posted by Boco
Is it possible to hex edit a square (on map2) to have a transport site, a city label, and no city present?

I think it should be. But transport sites are stored in more places than just the map, so you need to be a bit careful with them or you'll crash ToT...

Try this... This will only work if all cities on map2 are just labels though...

• Place cities on the squares that need labels.
• Use CivEngineer to remove the city present flag from all squares that have the city present flag (on map2).
  Note: This would also affect transporter sites and airbases! If you still have some of those on the map too, either remove them first or use a different way to "mark" the squares that need to be adjusted. E.g. put units in the cities if there aren't any units elsewhere on the map and then use the unit present flag instead, or change the terrain type under those cities (before you build them) to one that isn't used elsewhere on the map and then use that to identify them in CivEngineer.
• When you go back to ToT, the cities will have become "invisible" (except for their names). You can now place the transport sites as usual.

How difficult is it to change the continent number on ~100 squares? I'd like to get the 'go to' command to work on map2, but after all my mapediting, there are multiple continents for one contiguous mass.

I think the latest MapCopy can help with that. Are you using land mass numbering "tricks", or do you just want to restore the land mass numbering to what it should be?
I think the following would work:

• Export the map through the ToT Map menu.
• Open the map in your map editor, Analyze it and then save it... If you want to play with the numbering, edit the map first so that you get different landmasses for each area that needs a different number.
• Use MapCopy to import just the land mass numbers for that one map back into your savegame.

[Boco]

Thanks, I'll give Mapcopy a shot. No tricky continent numbering needed on this map.

I'm rethinking what my objective is for the 'label cities'. Part of it is to provide destinations for the 'go to' command, but I suspect that that command only works with cities that have the city present flag on. If that's true, then that's that, and I'll stick with conventional cities. However, I'd rather that that 'that's that' is wrong.

(4x that! Top that Exile. )

[fairline]

You cheated - shouldn't your second 'that' be a 'than'?

EDIT: I misread it, you're right , that's that

[Mercator]

Originally posted by Boco
I'm rethinking what my objective is for the 'label cities'. Part of it is to provide destinations for the 'go to' command, but I suspect that that command only works with cities that have the city present flag on.

Nope. I just tested it. It works just fine with invisible cities.

[Boco]

Doesn't look like I can use Mapcopy. If I understand this right, to incorporate a MapCopied map2, I would need to start a new sav by importing maps from my current sav file (along with a MapCopied map2). That would mean redeploying all the units again, right?

To hex-edit manually, is it true that I'd have to find map data blocks 1 & 2 in a ToT sav file, then edit the continent ID for all the offending squares? Does that amount to 8 entries per square for block 1 and 1 per square for map 2?

@Agricola. Many thanks for the offer, but this is looking like a huge amount of work! Let me learn a little more, then decide whether it's worth the cost.

Thanks for the test Merc

[Edit]Never mind. I think I've got the continent editing worked out and finished[/Edit]

[Boco]

Originally posted by AGRICOLA
but right now I don't even know how TOT stores multiple maps. Can't promise to deliver this baby.

As far as I can understand, for map data block 2 each map is stored in a continuous block in the organization described by the Allard/Merc doc. They're spread out from each other by a sizeable offset that contains a little info and a lot of 00 bytes. Within this map data block 1, I think the only clue to map location is the continent ID: 1-64 = map0, 65-128 = map1, etc.

I believe this represents 0,0 of map0.

0A 00 00 01 02 00

It's ocean, unimproved, outside of any city, ocean #1, known only to the white civ, and a fertility of 0 (?).

Does Catfish have ToT hexing info anywhere on his site? I know he's very familiar with it.

[Boco]

Is this method for creating city labels on transport sites sound? My brain's beginning to fry.
[list=1][*]Create a city in a place you can locate easily in a hex editor.[*]Using a hex editor, find that square in map block 2.[*]Remove the city present code.[*]Find the city information block for the city created in step 1.[*]Edit the x coordinate to the desired position (i.e. the transport site).[*]Save, then load in ToT.[/list=1]

Is the transport site present code in map block 2 is: pollution + city present = 82h = 1000 0010?

[Mercator]

The CivEngineer thing won't work?

But yes, that looks like it will work.

And yep, that's the transporter code... But I suggest you do NOT mess with transporters. Transporter info is also stored somewhere else. Removing or adding a transporter just from the map just like that will screw that up and crash Civ2.

[Boco]

Ouch! There are a lotta gotchas with no-city-present-cities. If they're in famine they never seem to starve out of existence, but the starving pop-up shows up every turn. I created events to turn these cities into ocean (0 shields). As Allard discovered, the cities aren't razed, but there is a deficit of shields. The affected units were mostly disbanded, but @SUPPORT pops up for every one. In one particularly bad month, there are 36 withdrawals to click "Zoom" or "Continue". That might send a player ballastic.

So-o-o-o...it's back to conventional cities and dialogless razing. So I have a few dozen no-city-present-cities to convert to regular cities via CivEngineer (is the date of the current version Nov 4, 2002?), but...

[Boco]

Merc, in case you want to debug, here's the file. If you don't have time, I'll hex edit by hand.

[Mercator]

Can't you just make sure that the cities don't starve? Or am I thinking too easy.
Is that "control panel" on a separate map? Because if it is, you could simply adjust the terrain types to give just the right amount of food so that the cities have exactly enough food right? Or am I missing something?

But...
I won't have time till tuesday evening at least... I can't even check if you got the latest CivEngineer version. Explorer hangs when I right-click... Oh wait... No I don't think that's the last version... Not sure where I posted that one, or if that'll fix the problem, though..

Um, I'll just attach it...

Edit: Or add a download link...

Download CivEngineer

[Boco]

Thanks. Adjusting terrain values will let a careful player grow larger cities on the control panel, which would gain free victory points. The big killer, though, are the several dozen withdrawal notification dialogs. I had hoped that they would be informative. They are that, but they're too tedious to go through.

I'll check the newer version tonight.

[Boco]

New version of CivEngineer choked, too. Everything's hexed now, though.

[Mercator]

I was afraid of that... I'll have to check later...

[Boco]

I ran across a very strange bug. On turn three, all the Allied cities on map2 gained a 50% shield bonus. Yep, it was linked to Hoover, which is situated in Turkish Aleppo on map 0; I could prevent the bonus by making Hoover obsolete.

So then I got to looking at sav files with my hex editor. City indexes were shifting between turns 1 and 3! On turn one, the first city started with idx=F4 (yes, it should 01), but shifted to F1 on turn 3. That probably corrupted all the WoW assignments.

I'll see if I can correct the indices so that they are correct and stable. If not, I've got to go digging through old backups until I find the latest with uncorrupted city indices.

Wanna bet I screwed things up with my +city-present edits?

Fairline, this'll set me back a few days. Don't rush to finish any artwork for me.

[Boco]

City numbering got corrupted on 3 July. I think this is the sequence:

• Deleted a dozen Turk cities from map4. Somehow this must be the key.
• Saved the file. City Number Codes appear okay.
• Made two minor terrain changes on map1 made via Shift-F8.
• Saved the file. Cairo's city number changed from 01 to E5.

All of this occurred before I played with hexing city-present codes. Makes no sense at the moment, but one thing's clear: I've got to redo a lot of map changes. After 3 July, I made major edits to map2 (and Events.txt) to ensure that goto commands worked well.

Simply hexing in the correct city number codes into the latest SAV file doesn't give a stable solution. The hexed file loads okay, but the codes get corrupted after a turn.

One possible symptom that can be seen without hexing: at the beginning of a turn in the game (often turn 3), the announcements of city x completes y improvement appears to cycle through many cities twice. Seems quite possible with corrupted city numbering info.

Fairline, this'll set me back a few days. Don't rush to finish any artwork for me.

More like at least a week. Merc, I'll be putting off playing with SpriteGen as well.

[fairline]

@ Boco: OK, I'll finish up the Riverwar gfx first instead. Nearly done with those anyway.

[curtsibling]

Bump!

Boco, I have some cities for you, in case you miss them in the city thread...

[Sarsstock]

Curt those might be the best cities you've produced to date!! This might just be one of the most graphically superior scenario's in ages.

Let me know again if there's anything I can possibly contribute.

[Boco]

I did overlook them in the other thread. Many, many thanks! You improve with every building!

I've started to reconstruct an uncorrupted sav file, but I have to admit that playtesting River War sounds much more fun than continuing the recontruction.

Sarsstock, let me review my Impxx.bmp/Improvements.bmp/Icons.bmp collection. Would you be interested in replacing parts?

I'm also planning on an alternative spaceship. It'll represent transfers from the EEF to the Western Front. When I'm at that stage, I could use some artistic contributions. The palette is likely to be very limited!

Any suggestions for a theme? Hopefully a screenie is attached.

[Boco]

Btw, does anyone know where the A.S.S. label comes from? I know, I know ... I don't know an A$$ from a __, but I'd like to tailor the ship name to something more appropriate to EA. My guess is that it is derived (hard-coded) from Allied Space Ship. Might just have to 'white it out' with an image background of the same color, if that's possible.

[Sarsstock]

Well I'd love to take a crack at the icons so needed, though I fear I might not be as good as Curt is at making spectacular new ones.

As for the alternate to the spaceship, my only suggestion would be some sort of photograph or painting or other piece of artwork featuring an army travelling by foot, by rail or gathering for transport at a port. The image would be broken up in Photoshop perhaps, and as each spaceship improvment is built a new element will be added to the artwork to represent whatever has been added. Such as a new train car full of supplies added to an image of a train parked at a railyard, or a small freighter loaded with supplies being added to an image of a ship convoy gathering in port.

I hope that idea makes at least some sense as its the only thing I could think up. I remember I had made a similar sugestion to HT for Gold Gultch.

[Mercator]

ToT has an alternative to the spaceship too though. The Midgard game, I believe, uses completely different graphics. Something with a siege engine. I'm not quite sure how you can get ToT to use that set of graphics though.