Problem with Aeterna Civitas

[RobRoy]

Hey McMonkey,

I'm extremely happy to see that people are still coming out with new Civ2 scenarios from time to time, especially in the ancient world (my personal favorite era). I find that when I have free time, I tend to return to Civ2, being generally disappointed in the some of the newer games out there for a wide variety of reasons.

So I downloaded your Aeterna Civitas (the old version, as well, since it was out there, along with your test version of Soaring Spirit). But I'm getting an error message and a crash when I try to start the scenario. I can load the .scn file as a saved game, to view the map and such (which looks excellent by the way), but if I try to continue the game, I again get the crash. I'm using MGE on Windows XP. I noticed that there are 255 cities and that there is a recommendation in the Soaring Spirit thread that people use the civ2unlimited patch; is that patch required/desirable for the the Aeterna Civitas scenario, too?

Has anyone else reported similar problems? I looked through the old development thread, I didn't see a discussion of this problem; sorry if I missed it. But if you have any ideas or thoughts, or if there are prerequisites that I might've missed that I should be doing before trying to start the scenario, please let me know.

Thanks. And thanks for continuing to breathe life into my all-time favorite game.

[McMonkey]

RobRoy

Do you have the Multiplayer Gold Edition of Civ2?

Civ2 Unlimited will be essential for A Soaring Spirit as later in the game (the Persian events) there will be way more than the 2048 max units. At the start there are way fewer units so you can run it with MGE.

Aeterna Civitas II was designed for MGE, though Civ2 Unlimited may be needed later in the game when the event generated units get up past 2048.

What error message are you getting?

At the moment both Aeterna Civitas II and a Soaring Spirit are intended for multiplayer games and might not be very challenging for single player mode. I do intend to make Test of Time single player versions of both games. In Aeterna Civitas I will give a lot of the Barbarian cities to the playable nations. This should make the game more challenging, especially if you play as the fledgling Roman Republic.

[RobRoy]

Yes, I am using MGE (the final patch).

But I think I figured it out.

I had simply copied the contents of your zipped folder into my CIVII directory, since it already had a subdirectory and all the files nicely organized. But apparently there is a limit on the size of the CivII subdirectories, so "Aeterna Civitas II MP v1.1" caused crashes, but when I shortened it to "Aeterna Civitas", it worked fine. Apparently 17 is the maximum. Not sure whether it has to do with CivII, Windows XP, or some setting I may have inadvertently done some time in the past.

I do actually have a vague recollection about this sort of error cropping up in the distant past. But I'm curious that no one else experienced it when using your scenario. Or maybe everyone else automatically shortened it?

Anyway, thanks, and I hope to keep enjoying your scenarios.

[McMonkey]

I have heard of this happening before. I will check all of my scenarios that I have uploaded to make sure the name is under 17 characters. It is strange that this only seems to cause problems for some people whilst others can run the game fine with long folder names. Anyway, glad you got it working and thanks for letting me know what the problem was

[Cyrion]

I think it's more a problem of using a dot in the name, rather than its length.

So "Aeterna Civitas v1_1" might be fine "Aeterna Civitas v1.1" wouldn't

[McMonkey]

Ah... Last night I went through all the scenario zips and re-uploaded them all, but I'm sure some of them had things like 'v1.1' in the folder name

I was planning to go through my SL pages and tidy them up / standardize the layout. While I am at it I will alter all the files. Thanks both

[Heresson]

wow, RobRoy, a person from the past.