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by Patrick Williams
June 4, 1996
email: Radiospace at aol.com
Some of the Menu Items I mention might have a slightly different name, as I’m writing from memory, but other than that the information is accurate, except where I note that I’m guessing about something.
If you are new to building scenarios
for
Civ2, or even experienced but achieving unsatisfactory results, these
notes may
help you in your next effort. The
material is organized as follows:
- Choosing a scenario
- Designing the map
- Placing the tribes on the map
- Starting the game
- Editing cities
- Creating units
- Controlling technology
- Influencing diplomacy
- Miscellany
1. CHOOSING A SCENARIO
Your first step is obviously to design the scenario in your head first. You can’t very well program the game until you know exactly what you want. Not that there isn’t room for improvisation once you get going, but try to have a solid idea about what you are going for. For example...you know you want to do a Civil War scenario. But you also need to decide: are you going to sim the entire War, or just East of the Mississippi? Do you want to include Britain and France as possible allies of the Confederacy? Do you want to include Mexico, or the Native American tribes? All of these questions need to be answered so that you can plan the area covered by the map, and who your (up to) seven powers will be.
This brings us to a second issue: how many powers. You don’t have to use seven, but I believe the game is most satisfying with a diverse number of nations, opening up the possibilities for alliances, etc. Civ 2 isn’t going to be the best mano-a-mano wargame. Also an issue: are you trying to simulate a single armed conflict, or an era of power? Again, Civ 2 isn’t at its best simulating a single war. You can do it, but it plays away from the strengths of the game, which is the simulation of progress. Civ 2 will never give you the best simulation of D-Day, in other words, but it would make a great model of Post-War Europe.
2. DESIGNING THE MAP
The
ATLAS:
You
will
obviously need an atlas of some sort. Perhaps more than
one. If you don’t own an atlas, it is worth buying
an inexpensive one before you spend an entire weekend struggling to
draw a
map. Look for one that has terrain
represented in the most detailed fashion, as this is extremely
important. If you are serious about your historical
scenario, you’ll want an atlas like The Times Concise Atlas of World
History,
which will give you the names of cities, kings, nations, from the birth
of
Civilization. You might also be
surprised to discover that the shape of the land has changed in the
past 4000
years. The Persian Gulf, for instance,
has retreated significantly from its BC shoreline.
PICKING YOUR BORDERS: As
you
look at the atlas, choose the smallest possible area on the atlas which
will
fully support your seven tribes historically.
This is where you need to know in advance what you’re using the map
for. If you’re doing the Peloponesian
War, there’s no reason to include Spain on the map, right?
Likewise, choose tribes or nations that are
not anachronistic, unless you’re deliberately suggesting an alternate
history. The Romans should compete with
the Goths and the Lombards, not the Germans and the Hungarians.
HOW BIG?: How big should you make the map in Civ2 squares? That depends on your taste, and on the ratio of ocean to land. If your map is going to be mostly land, you can make it a little smaller. You CAN actually have too much land on a Civ2 map, believe it or not. It gets to be a real pain playing a game that is too spread out. Another consideration is the level of technology in your scenario. An ancient scenario will see Chariots, moving 2 squares per turn, as the fastest unit, while a modern one will have tanks moving 3 and airplanes moving 6 or more. The same map will seem larger with ancient units than with modern ones. I think a map somewhere in size between the normal and large default is best, in general. If there’s a lot of ocean, you might want to make it as large as possible.
DRAWING:
When
it comes time to draw the map, if you are not a talented
artist, never fear. You can draw a grid
on the atlas map that will guide you, just like those drawing games
when you
were a kid. If you have a particularly
good eye you might be able to just eyeball it.
Another possibility would be to draw or photocopy a grid pattern on a
sheet of transparency, which you could then lay over any map you
wanted.
Whatever works. But do your best to make the map look as
accurate as possible. If the map is too
amateurish looking, nobody will even bother playing the scenario,
because it
appears that you haven’t done a careful job.
Note that the “World Map” stretches the image of your game map
vertically. You can’t make both the
world Map and the Game Map look accurate.
Make the Game map look accurate, and just use the world map for
orientation. If you need to see more of
the map, ZOOM OUT.
Your
absolute first step should be to choose SET WORLD SHAPE and choose flat
or
round BEFORE YOU START DRAWING! I’m here
to tell you that there is nothing more frustrating than designing a map
and
halfway through your work making it flat and the edges fall in the
wrong spot,
and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.
You
should first draw the coast outlines in a single terrain...plains are a
good
choice, as they in addition to being easy to look at reveal the special
terrain
squares, unlike grassland. Once you’ve
gotten the coast right, change the brush size to a larger (3x3 or 5x5)
size and
fill in the continents with plains.
PROTECTING
YOUR
WORK: At this point, you should go to the Tools
Menu and do 2 things. First, turn on
“Coastline Protect”. This keeps you from
destroying your beautiful work.
Secondly, choose “Set Resource Seed”.
It will ask you to type in a number.
Type in something between 2-33, (I think!). I think 1 is random,
and the others are set
patterns. The reason for setting a
resource seed is so that you can have some control over which special
resources
appear. While the game player can still
choose to randomize the resources, at least this way you can have a
version
that you’ve influenced. Basically, this
issue is this: Grassland squares, which
tend to be predominant, don’t get special resources, while everything
else
does. If you want to make an area of the
map particularly rich in resources, then don’t place grassland on any
of these
squares. If you want to make an area of
the make poor in resources, cover them up with grassland. You can
have a similar effect in choosing
between plains and grassland: to make a
region more productive put plains where the grassland has no
resource. To make it less productive put plains where
the grassland does have a resource and leave only the plain grassland
squares.
When
I’m choosing my resource seed I generally look at one area of the map
that I
consider important and use that as my guide in this sort of random
decision. For example, I just designed a
map of Western Europe and decided that whatever else happened I didn’t
want any
whales in the English Channel (seemed silly), so I put the map there
and played
around with the seed until there were only fish in the Channel.
Don’t forget to save your work
frequently, by the way. You never know
when that GPF is going to pop up.
SEA LANES: Make sure that where you want a navigable sea lane that you design the map so that ships can pass through. If you are zooming REALLY close, you might even choose to make a navigable river by using caddy-cornered ocean squares rather than river squares. However, ground units move as quickly along river squares as most boats move over the ocean, so there isn’t much benefit to this. When you are faced with a spot like Constantinople, you should decide if you want troops to be able to move across land or if you want them to sail across. By caddy-cornering land and ocean squares you can get both ships and ground units across the same intersection. Experiment with it. Keep especially in mind the AI’s ability or lack there of to solve problems like this. If you want an active Turkey in the Balkans then you’ll want a ground bridge, if you want to slow down their expansion then don’t build that bridge.
POLE WANDERERS: One thing to try to avoid is AI pole wanderers. If you connect to continents to an arctic cap, the AI will send units by land rather than sea to move from one continent to the other, even if it takes it 30 turns to cross the pole. Also the AI will tend to discover the land across the pole quicker if it can go by land, sending units across very early in the game. I think it’s best to assume that if they can walk across, they will, so keep it in mind.
3) Placing the Tribes on the Map
When you are choosing starting locations for your tribes, there are three things you want to keep in mind: historical accuracy, play balance, and AI limitations.
Historical accuracy will suggest that you start each tribe on their capital city. If you’re doing a historical sim, this will outweigh all other concerns. Sometimes, though, you may have a choice as nations change their capitals through the ages and you might be able to choose between two or three places. Iran, for instance, had a capital on Perseopolis when it was Persia, and now its capital is Tehran.
A second consideration is play balance. If you have three island continents and you put the starting locations for 5 of the tribes on one island, and let two others have a single continent to themselves, you can expect that the 5 will trade technologies and advance faster, but will eventually just not be able to compete with the countries that have an entire continent to expand on.
Finally, you should be thinking about the ability of the AI to improvise, or lack thereof. The AI is going to always be slower than a human player to:
- Recognize that it is an island power, develop sailing, and colonize other continents
- Move a significant distance from an extremely poor opening position before founding the first city
Extreme starting positions, then, may hurt the sim. I.e., putting a tribe in the middle of a vast desert may either cause the AI to found a city from which it can’t expand due to it’s settlers all starving to death, or it may wander around in the desert for 40 years looking for grassland and fall hopelessly behind.
Finally, if you are going to customize
tribes, you need to be careful in which tribes you choose to sub for
your
eventual custom tribes on the map.
Remember that you can’t have two tribes of the same color playing at
once. You should choose one tribe, then,
of each color. (You can always change
the color of a tribe by editing “Rules.txt” if you are confident about
your
skills at that, but then you’ll always need to include “Rules.txt” with
your
scenario file when you play it, email it, or upload it). Here’s a
list of how the tribes fall into
their color categories:
Color |
Civ1 |
Civ2 |
Civ3 |
| WHITE | Rome | Russia | Celts |
| DARK BLUE | Germany | France | Viking |
| LIGHT BLUE | China | Persia | United States |
| YELLOW | Aztec | Egyptian | Spain |
| ORANGE | Carthage | England | Greece |
| GREEN | Zulu | Babylon | Japan |
| PURPLE | India | Mongolia | Sioux |
Another consideration when choosing the substitute tribes is their architectural style. I believe you can also change this in rules.txt. Otherwise, those Babylonian Dutch are going to be building Bronze Age pyramids in Flanders. It would have been interesting but it didn’t happen, they’d probably have sunk into the swampy landscape. Sometimes details like this can really alter the enjoyment of the simulation.
4. Starting the game
Now that you’ve finished designing your map, including placing starting locations for your tribes, it’s time to save your map one last time, then quit the map editor. Start CIV2 and choose “Start on a premade world” and select your map. Choose the following options: NO to randomize resources, NO to randomize starting locations, and YES to customize rules. Under customize rules select CHOOSE TRIBES, FLAT/ROUND WORLD (depending on your map), and you may also want to choose DON’T RESTART ELIMINATED OPPONENTS to prevent the Zulus from popping up in a European scenario.
Now you select your own tribe. As the player you should choose the WHITE tribe you’ve included (Romans, Russians or Celts) because White goes first, and this will prevent the AI from founding any cities on the first turn. Then select the six tribes that you’ve placed on the map as your opponents. Or, alternately, you can choose a tribe that has the wrong architectural style, because at start up is the only place to change this. So you might start as Babylon and change their style to Medieval Castle where they are the Dutch. If you do this the AI will found a few cities on the first turn, but you can always rename them. Also when the AI founds cities it often gets free units (cheat cheat cheat) and you’ll want to destroy these ON THE FIRST TURN before they go exploring.
The game is now underway. Go to the CHEAT menu and TOGGLE CHEAT MODE. Then select Change Views, and select VIEW ENTIRE MAP. Now you can see all your little settlers waiting patiently for your work. Found your White city and name it as you wish. Then go to EDIT KING, and choose Roman, (I’ll assume your White is Roman), and give it the name you want. Go ahead and repeat this process for all seven nations, it will ease your confusion as you work to go ahead an have all the correct names in place. If you want multiple starting cities, you can simply right click on the square you want to found a new city in, and then choose CREATE NEW UNIT (Shift-F1 on the keyboard), and create a settler, and then found the city, giving it the historical name. Repeat as necessary. I also recommend putting at least a single phalanx in each starting city to protect it from barbarians. You don’t want a nation inadvertently wiped out on the third turn. When you’ve done with this, or if you are starting the scenario with only one city each, go to SELECT HUMAN PLAYER and choose another tribe, then repeat the process for each tribe. Now you have founded all of the cities that will be on the map at the start of the game.
5. Editing Cities
Once you’ve founded all of the cities you want, it’s time to edit them. The main ingredients to this are: size, structures and land improvements.
SIZE: How large the city is can make a big difference in a game. It is best if the cities are in the same range of sizes at the start from nation to nation. Starting one nation with a city size of 3 and all the others with a city size of 1 can be a huge advantage. It’s easy to forget how quickly those early turns go while you’re waiting to build your first phalanx and settler. If one tribe has a big city they are going to expand much more rapidly. Of course you may want to do a scenario where one nation has a few large cities and the rest have many small ones and see how it turns out.
STRUCTURES: The most important structure you can give a city is City Walls. Sometimes I give all the capital cities City Walls to protect a tribe from being quickly wiped out by an aggressive neighbor. The second most important structures are happiness structures: Temples, Coliseums and Cathedrals. Make sure all the cities you build aren’t in disorder at the start of the game!!! This is extremely important. There is nothing more frustrating than starting up a scenario where you have 15-20 cities in your nation and on the first turn they all go into civil disorder. I usually just quit the scenario when that happens, knowing that it isn’t well designed. You need to put enough temples and the like in each city so that they can be kept in order with a reasonable luxury rate unless you’re trying to simulate the fall of the Soviet Union or something like that. And sometimes the AI is incapable of restoring a city that’s way off the mark to order, which will completely ruin your play balancing.
Finally, I think when checking the attitude advisor you should have already SET HUMAN PLAYER to the nation you are looking at, as the AI gets happiness cheats on different levels and it may look as if a city is stable because the AI is running it when in fact it will be in disorder for a human player. This is a bit tricky, because the difficulty level you choose at the start of the game will determine the level of unhappiness, and then the player might play at a different difficulty level. Personally, I design all my scenarios at King level as I suspect this is the level most people play at, but if you want to be extra safe you should design the scenario at Deity level and then you’ll correct all the unhappiness problems for all the levels. (I don’t think a well-designed scenario is likely to be winnable on Deity level, though, because if you start each nation with more than one city there’s going to be more parity than in a regular game, favoring the cheating AI players. Most Deity players win through “perfect strategies” that won’t work in a scenario).
Then you want to think about other structures. Try to be historical if you are setting the game at a certain starting date. In other words if it’s a 20th century scenario I think London should have a library, marketplace, University, Bank, etc. You may want to place Wonders in their historical location. Sometimes you will want to ****** tech development and will not build any science-generating structures. Sometimes you’ll want to speed it up and might give everybody a library.
COPYING ANOTHER CITY’S IMPROVEMENTS: This is a great command. It’s found under the CHEAT MENU/EDIT CITY. If you know that in every city you want a few basic items: say barracks, granary and temple, start out by giving these items to ONE city, then use this command to COPY them to all the rest. (Remember also that you’ll need to “give” yourself the techs necessary to build these items in that first city, but you won’t need those techs to copy them to the other civs. See the tech discussion later.)
LAND IMPROVEMENTS: By which I mean roads, irrigation and mining. (Use Shft-F8 or EDIT TERRAIN AT CURSOR). Again, be historical first. If it’s midway through the Roman Empire everybody knows where all those roads lead right? Secondly, and this is as important as the temples above, irrigate enough land so that the city isn’t starving to death!!! You can’t make Mecca a size 8 city on the Arabian peninsula and leave it at that. You’re going to need to irrigate alot of desert around it. If you can’t irrigate enough, either make the city smaller or you actually change some of that desert into plains or grassland. Don’t leave a player in the opening position of having all of his cities starving to death unless you mean to simulate an Ethiopian famine.
If you want a lot of units at the start of your scenario, you’ll need to build some mines so the cities can support them. Later on you’ll FORCE A GOVERNMENT on each tribe. Remember that Republics can’t support as many units as a Democracy, so don’t build more units than can be supported, only to have the woeful player start the game with an endless series of messages about how his aircraft carriers have all been disbanded. This may seem overly obvious, but I’ve seen it happen in at least one scenario.
BARBARIAN CITIES: Yes, you CAN! Here’s how. You want at the start of your Middle Eastern scenario to have Beirut as a barbarian city to simulate the anarchy there during the Lebanese civil war. Found the city with a Syrian settler, edit it as normal, and build no defensive units in or nearby. Then go to CREATE NEW UNIT, and select the type you want, then hit the button that says “FOREIGN” and choose “BARBARIAN” and place this unit on an adjacent square to Beirut. When you hit END TURN it will move into the city and capture it. FOUR things to note here:
1) as far as I can tell the barbarian city will produce the same type of unit that captures it, with a few exceptions. In any case, it seems to produce units types of the same era. There for if you set a legion next to it the barbarian city will probably crank out legions. If you set a Musketeer next to it it will produce Musketeers.
2) the conquering barbarian unit will destroy a lot of the improvements you’ve put in. You MAY be able to COPY ANOTHER CITY’S IMPROVEMENTS on this city in order to get the building you want in there -- I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that if you try to change the production menu of a barbarian city the GAME CRASHES!!!! Yes, it does. No, I don’t know why. I hope you’ve been saving your work at regular intervals.
3) Barbarians pay no support for units. The land around barbarian cities miraculously improves without Settlers! (cheat cheat cheat). Barbarian cities grow as much food as a monarchy. Therefore: Barbarian cities can quickly become the Top Five Cities in the world early in the game (it’s sorta cool, actually) while everyone else is in Despotism, they may get up to size 7 or 8. Also, they can turn out a TON of military units. This is OK, unless the city is located on an isolated continent, as they’ll just roam around forever. If you put them on a continent with a player they’ll attack his cities and hopefully the AI will eventually conquer the barbarian city. The problem with these “lost continents” is that as a player once you “see” a barbarian you see him every turn that he moves within known landscape, unlike AI units which disappear. (I presume their reputation precedes them ;-)). This can get to be a real pain in the neck if there are a lot of barbarians on little islands, significantly slowing down the time between turns. Just something to think about. Play my Mad Max scenario -- at MDelPrete’s Civ2 page, among others -- to see this problem occurring to moderate effect and you might get a better idea of how many barbarian cities you dare put on a map.
4) Whichever nation you build the scenario with will “liberate” the city if it conquers it. This is merely chrome on your scenario but a nice touch to think about when choosing which nation to found the barbarian city with.
6. Creating Units
You can greatly alter the balance of power by how many units you give to each side. Giving extra settlers makes the largest difference, and extra attacking units the next largest (as they will probably be used to conquer cities). When you go to CREATE NEW UNIT you can first hit the VETERAN button if you want to create veteran units. Don’t hit the FOREIGN button until last! This creates the unit at the square that you’ve already chosen from the list. It’s an odd setup but you’ll get used to it. In general it’s a good idea to only create units from within the Civ you’re making them for (by within I mean that you’ve used SET HUMAN PLAYER and chosen that Civ). This will help you avoid mistakes. I only use FOREIGN to create barbarian units.
You can create units that are unresearched by hitting the ADV button. This can be cool in certain scenarios, for example, a colonization scenario where the colonists are provided with initial musketeers and cannons but will need to learn to build there own. You can also use the OBS button to select from Obsolete units. It could be useful if you’ve already set the technology level and want to create some militia to weakly hold cities (for example in a Civil War scenario you might only put Yankee militia units in Kentucky and Confederate calvary at the border so that the historical easy Confederate conquest of Kentucky early in the war will immediately occur).
You can also EDIT UNITS. You can set movement points and damage. I don’t use this, but there may be a time when it’s important to you to have a bunch of wounded units at the start of a scenario...say the Battle of the Bulge or something. More importantly, you can SELECT HOME CITY here, and you can select NONE!!! This means you could start out a nation with one city and a huge unsupported army. This might be an interesting approach to Alexander the Great, or the Fall of Rome, or the Viet Cong. Every nation WILL need at least ONE CITY at the start of the game. I’ve tried starting out all of the tribes with settlers in Galleons and the game crashed when I hit END TURN. Too bad, it would have been interesting (it was an attempt at a Sinking of Atlantis/Noah’s Ark scenario).
7. Controlling technology
There are five ways to control technology.
1) Under EDIT SCENARIO PARAMETERS you can set the Tech Rate. The default (normal) is 10. The higher the number the slower the tech rate. I don’t know the formula, but I assume that 20 is twice as slow, 30 is three times as slow, etc. If you want it faster you can lower it to 6, 3, whatever. Usually you’re trying to slow it down, not speed it up. You’ll want to slow it down if: You are simulating a limited time period and want to avoid advanced weapons (such as gunpowder in Ancient Rome); OR, if you are starting a scenario where each tribe has more than one starting city, which will otherwise speed the tech advances up proportionally. You’re just going to have to guess and then Playtest your scenario to see how close you were, then readjust it until you get it right.
2) Under EDIT SCENARIO PARAMETERS you can choose WIPE ALL GOODY BOXES. This will be necessary if you have a specific period and you want very few advances. The Goody Boxes will be the major factor in tech advances if you slowed down tech growth significantly with content.php/473-Radiospace-s-CIV-2-Scenario-Design-FAQ#1.
3) The more roads, libraries, universities, research labs, and larger cities you have the faster tech will grow. No duh, I know.
4) You can directly alter each kings technology level at the start of the game. Go to EDIT TECHNOLOGY and choose the king. Just like city improvements, if you want a base level for all players then set one king’s tech level, then use EDIT KING/COPY ANOTHER KING’S TECH for the other six kings, it’s remarkably faster. Under the EDIT TECHNOLOGY menu, you’ll discover the interface is a bit weird. Clicking OK gives or takes the selected technology. To get out of the menu you hit CANCEL when you’re done. In other words, the button that says CANCEL really means DONE, it doesn’t cancel your work. You can also use the GIVE/TAKE all technologies button. A WARNING: If you are “within” the Romans and you are editing the technology of the Greeks and they’ve made contact (or if the view is set to REVEAL ENTIRE MAP) you will get a message stating that Greek scientists have discovered Pottery (etc.). This is OK. What’s not OK is if you select GIVE ALL while this is going on. You’ll have to sit through about 5 minutes of endless messages that the Greeks have discovered ____ as it goes through the entire tech list alphabetically. I’ve done all these stupid things myself, that’s how I can tell you about them.
5) Finally, you can control the tech level by keeping in mind that most civs will trade techs when possible. Therefore, if you want to slow things down the most you should give not give each Civ exclusive technologies. Some can still be more advanced than others, but don’t give the English Gunpowder but not Polytheism and the Cherokee Polytheism but not Gunpowder if you want to prevent the Cherokee from getting Gunpowder quickly.
6) Under EDIT SCENARIO PARAMETERS you can choose (perhaps under SPECIAL RULES??) “FORBID TECH FROM CONQUEST”. You will likely use this not so much to slow down the entire world as to help maintain a technological gap in a Colonization-type scenario.
Almost always you are faced with the task of slowing down technological growth in a scenario. As you can see there are a number of ways to do it. In general I feel that the least satisfactory method is the Tech Parameter button. Obviously you will have to use this, but the question is to what degree. My reasoning here is that if on the average it is taking 75 turns to research an advance it just isn’t worth researching, you’re better off getting the Goody Boxes or stealing the technology. Worse, the AI won’t know this and will fall behind as it builds all those useless libraries. Another thing you can try is leaving some prerequisites unresearched to slow down the advances. In other words, if you are doing a scenario with Musketeers you can give Gunpowder to everyone but not give Invention, and everyone can build Musketeers but will still have to research Invention. This is the SMART way to slow things down, though its complicated. In any case, you’ll need to Playtest your scenario through to the end to make sure the tech level isn’t out of control. Usually you’ll be able to tell fairly quickly if you’re going to have Aircraft Carriers in Ancient Egypt, and will be able to go back and work some more on it.
8. Influencing Diplomacy
By now you have built up the physical infrastructure of all the kingdoms. Now it’s time to influence how they will feel about each other. If you want nations to already have contact you can go to EDIT TREATIES where you will be able to choose among: CONTACT, NO CONTACT, WAR, PEACE, ALLIANCES, and (best of all!) VENDETTA. It takes a while but you need to go through any King who’s had contact and set all of this up. A Vendetta means that this nation thinks it’s been sneak attacked by the other nation and will demand twice as much money for peace. Also on this page you may ESTABLISH EMBASSIES between countries.
After you’ve done this, you can go to EDIT KING/SET ATTITUDES. This is a numerical representation of how the nations like each other. 100=hate; 0= love. I believe that these are effected by the choices that you made above, i.e., if you put two countries at War then they will be set at 100 (maximum dislike). This is why I suggest you EDIT TREATIES first if you want them, then come here for fine tuning. You can have nations at war and set both attitudes to less than 50 and they will probably immediately make peace. But this is mostly used when you aren’t setting up treaties, or even contact, between the civs, and you can actually determine how they will behave toward each other when they meet. This can have a major effect on play balance, and historical accuracy, so think about it carefully. If you really want them to despise each other set both Kings with an attitude of 100 toward the other (unlike Treaties, attitudes are not bilateral, the Turks might despise the Persians but the Persians can like the Turks). If you want them to ally set them both at 0. Usually you will set nations more in the middle range, 25-75. But experiment with this, it’s one of the coolest parts of the scenario editor.
Finally under SCENARIO PARAMETERS/SPECIAL RULES you can choose something called, I believe, TOTAL WAR, which will prevent people from making peace. It might prevent ANYBODY from making peace, I’ve never used it myself. This would only be useful in a simulation of a single war in my humble opinion.
9. Miscellany
There are a number of other things you will need to take care of before you’re done. But you’re almost there, and you’re sleepy, and it’s 5:30 am and you have to be at work at 9 but you really want to get it done...you better go to sleep, and finish it tomorrow! This stuff is the nitpicky stuff, and like moving your apartment it takes longer than you’d think and requires patience. (Starting to feel the same way about this FAQ! :P)
SET GOVERNMENT: You can use the FORCE GOVT. command to put each government in the form you want it. Then go to SCENARIO PARAMETERS and choose FORBID GOVERNMENT SWITCHING if you want to make sure that Iran stays Fundamentalist, etc. FORCE GOVT. will allow you to force an unresearched government, by the way.
EDIT MONEY: Here you can set the money level of each kingdom. I usually do this last as all sorts of errors can put money in the bank (selling off unwanted city improvements, essentially). Be very careful about giving out huge bank accounts to everyone, especially in a war scenario. In one scenario I was playing American revolutionaries against the British Tories and on the first turn the Brits offered me something like 10,000 dollars for peace, which I of course readily accepted, thus throwing the whole scenario out of whack. I guess that was a tax refund check ;-).
EDIT
VIEW: There
is unfortunately no command for this, really.
What you need to do is SELECT VIEW and (you’ve probably been working
under SEE ENTIRE MAP all this time) then in turn select each
king.
(I hope women Civ2 players aren’t unduly
offended by all the male pronouns, but I can’t stand those cloying
slashmarks
everywhere). Now you’ll see the map as
it will appear to the player choosing this tribe on the first
turn.
You may be surprised. You’ve probably created a few Roman units
in
China by mistake after all this time, and since you used Rome to build
that
barbarian city up in Edinburgh
VICTORY CONDITIONS: If you want to use scenario objectives for Victory Conditions, go to SCENARIO PARAMETERS/VICTORY CONDITIONS. First you have to turn on this mode of scoring. (TOGGLE USE OBJECTIVE VICTORY FLAG). Then you must select each city that you want to be an Objective. (Under the EDIT CITY menu). Then you SET PROTAGONIST (default is barbarian). Finally you enter numbers for Marginal and Decisive Victories and Defeats. Make sure you get this right. At least one scenario I’ve seen gives you a Decisive Victory if you quit after the first turn. The computer will check from the top down....i.e., if you give two of these categories the same number of objectives as its cutoff the player will always get the higher of the two. Therefore your numbers should be descending from Dec. Victory down to Dec. Defeat. You can also TOGGLE COUNT WONDERS AS OBJECTIVES which will increase your number of objectives in the victory tally. Try to make a Dec. Win very difficult and a Marginal Win the outcome of a well- but not brilliantly-played game. Those easy Decisive Victories dirty up our High Scores list, ya know.
TIME SCALE: You can adjust the starting year, the years per turn, and turns per game. Go to SCENARIO PARAMETERS (not SET GAME YEAR under CHEAT menu...this is only for setting the game to the first turn, which you may want to do at the end of your scenario design phase if you’ve had to use the END TURN to accomplish anything in your design (such as selling off city improvements). 1st do some math. You want to cover what years in history? Say you’re doing 1918-1945. That’s 27 years. A normal game should probably be 400-500 turns (at least that’s how long a regular Civ2 game is, it will be shorter if there are a lot of cities.) You have a few cities on the map for each tribe at the start, so you decide that 300 turns will be enough. If you have one month per turn that will be 12*27=324, which is close enough. Go to SET STARTING YEAR and enter (1918*12 [get a calculator!]), following the instructions. Negative for BC, Positive for AD Times 12 because you’re using months. Then select TURN YEAR INCREMENT and enter (-1), since negative means months per turn, and finally go to MAXIMUM TURNS and enter 324. Now your scenario should run from Jan 1918 to Dec. 1945. You can actually adjust the starting month by changing that big 1918*12 number in either direction. When you Playtest you’ll need to keep an eye on the date and see that it is working properly, and that you can finish the scenario in the allotted number of turns.
ELVI (THE KING): Some additional things you may do under king. You can change the gender of your King. Go EDIT KING/TOGGLE FEMALE FLAG. 1 is for girls, 0 is for boys. You can set research progress, set research goal, or clear research goal. I use this primarily at the end of the design period and clear all research progress that might have accumulated and clear all research goals (the player prefers to choose that first research goal). Also there is a SET REPUTATION button. This is how many times your King has screwed people over. Unfortunately there is no documentation as to how this number works, and I haven’t experimented, but an educated guess says that 0=unsullied and the higher it is the less trustworthy the King is (based on the 100=hate in Set Attitude). CLEAR PATIENCE means that King is going to demand tribute on first encounter, though I haven’t used this either. SET LAST CONTACT allows you to set how long its been since the King in question talked to any other King. One can assume that the longer its been the quicker they will talk, but there is no documentation as to how many turns pass before Kings want to talk. Ask Buddha.
NAME IT!: At last you get to name your scenario, under SCENARIO PARAMETERS/SET SCENARIO NAME. Congratulations.
APPENDIX I: USING SCENARIO.TXT
If you want an essay on screen at the start of your scenario you need to open ROME.TXT (this file came with the Rome scenario included with the game), and choose SAVE AS...., and give it the name YOURSCENARIO.TXT [where YOURSCENARIO is your scenario title, not the word itself. There must be a better way to communicate, sorry]. After you’ve saved as, and not before, you can simply delete the text for Rome and write your own. Make sure not to delete any of the extra-textual material, it is clearly marked and obvious what is text and what is program information. This is much easier than it sounds, trust me.
APPENDIX II: CITY.TXT FILES
If you are building a new tribe for your scenario, say, the Turks, then you’ll want to include a new City.txt file with your scenario. This is the file the program looks to when the AI names cities. Changing it is quite simple. Open with a text editor (any will do, I use Notebook). Again, immediately use SAVE AS... and give this file a name such as Turkcity.txt. Now let’s say you turned the Sioux into the Turks for the purposes of your scenario. Scroll down this long list of city names until you see the heading “Sioux”. You see under Sioux a list of city names starting with Wounded Knee and so on. You may delete all of these Sioux Cities and starting from scratch type in your Turkish cities, hitting return between each one. I.e., Adapazan [RETURN] Istanbul [RETURN] etc. Make sure not to delete the header or end line by accident. The header can still say “Sioux” rather than Turk...you changed the name of that tribe within the scenario, but the game remembers to look for it’s cities under Sioux.
APPENDIX III: RULES.TXT EDITING
This is a FAQ within itself. Just backup your original before you start messing around with it, for God’s sake. You can do just about anything in here, and there are instructions as Remark lines within Rules.txt which tell you everything you need to know about the technical process.
APPENDIX IV: CHANGING THE GRAPHICS
Another FAQ in itself. But I just have one note. You can download a version of Paintshop Pro shareware on AOL (KEYWORD Paintshop Pro, I think), and this software successfully can edit the gif files that control the graphics. The only problem is that if you follow the normal procedure of “Save As...” it asks you to choose between several file type options. Not being sure which the program requires I defeat this problem by copying the file into my scenario folder BEFORE I open it with Paintshop Pro, and then use the simple SAVE command when I save my work and it automatically saves it in the proper format. And don’t overlap the bottom sides of the diamonds, though you CAN overlap the top. You can change any of the *.gif files that accompany the program.
APPENDIX V: UPLOADING
When you upload to one of the commercial services or web pages, you should first take all of your related scenario files (we’ll use Turk again): Turk.scn, turk.txt, turkcity.txt, trkrules.txt, turkicon.txt, etc. and ZIP them together using PKZIP or WINZIP (you can also download the latest version of these from AOL, though AOL includes PKZIP in its software, just look for it in your AOL directory, or you may have it in your main directory in its own folder) into a file called Turk.zip. Also be sure to include a readme.txt file with your scenario explaining to everyone how to use it, telling them to enjoy it, and also remind them to backup all their files before copying/renaming turkcity.txt to city.txt for gameplay purposes. You should assume that the user who downloads your material has never downloaded a scenario before and will need these instructions, because yours might be their first.
Hope you enjoyed the FAQ, email Radiospace at aol.com if you have comments or corrections to this FAQ and we will try to get those changes or additions put in for a 1.1 version.
THE END