New Discovery! Extend Game.txt menus!

[Skysaw]

I am fond of editing whatever can be edited in Civ 2, and now I have found the possibilities to extend the startup options.

The startup menus are listed in game.txt , and in some cases you can simply add new lines to get previously unavailable options.

SOME EXAMPLES
World shape, climate and stuff
It is possible to write additional lines, which will make more or less extreme versions of the previously last option. So, if you write "Hot" and "Boiling" after "Warm" in the Temperature menu, you can have worlds with lots of deserts and jungles.

Barbarian activity
After "Raging hordes", you can add 4instance "Swarming Myriads" for even more barbarians, and a total of 50 bonus points. You can also add a second line (let's write "Nightmare") for numerous barbarians popping up each turn but this may cause the game to crash.

Number of Civs
It is possible to add option lines for two, one or zero civs. The choice of two civs will work the way you would imagine, one civ would work, but NOT give you victory for global conquest, and zero civs will make the game crash before starting up.

I found this out yesterday, so this is not so well-researched yet.

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90% of all war casualties are civilians. Join the army!
Skysaw
[This message has been edited by Skysaw (edited February 16, 2000).]

[myrlyn]

how about adding a civilization? after all there is that extra flag in cities.gif.
i realize ya would have to also add 3 civs in rules.txt and city.txt but would it work?

absolutely no more off topic forums for me.
lets just play civ!

[Harlan]

Very cool discovery.
Having gotten into hex editing a bit, I wonder where in the .sav file this kind of info is recorded, because then one could presumably go in other directions, that don't happen to be the last option on the menu.

[Miner]

Nice one, good discovery. Might be worth a SL Design Tip.

[Panda]

I've just tried this out, and while I can confirm that having only 2 civs works, which solves a problem for a future scenario I have in mind, for which I thank you, adding the 9th civilization is not as simple. I edited the Rules.txt, inserting extra civs with color style 8, but this was just ignored. The menu still only came up with 21 civs, which were in sequential order and included the extra civs I put in, but not the Carthaginians or the Sioux. This is probably determined by a line in the executable file.

It is however possible for a city to be under the control of the ninth civ. I played around with editing city ownership values a year ago and found that while you could change the value to 08 (for the 9th civ), the city did not have the brown flag and, IIRC, the game then crashed.

[Harlan]

Aha, Andrew, so that's what that rumor was about. I'd heard via Fast Eddie that you had been able to get an eighth civ to work, but I guess that's not really true (in that it didn't work too well). I sent you an email a while back but never got a reply- I thought you'd dropped out of the Civ2 world.

I've got another question Andrew, if you are in fact out and about. There are some dead links on your site that seem to be about hex editing other parts of the .sav file than the cities section. Have you written down somewhere what you know about that? I'd really like to know, for instance, what the first few lines in the file do.

[Allard HS]

A very interesting discovery!
However, it works in only a very limited amount of places. I think only in the ones you mentioned and a few others at the beginning of rules.txt
Of course it's possible to add "Maybe" after "Yes" and "No", but nothing happens then.

However, even if it only works for these mentioned, it's already useful. I made a map (by choosing a seventh option for land mass) that was almost land-only and even connected over the left-right border.

Yes, indeed, Harlan it's possible to hex edit these values (not terrain values, but number of civs, difficulty level and barbarian activity) but since these values start with "0" it cannot be lower than the first option in game.txt

About the 8th civ, it's possible to change a city or unit ownership with hex-editing to the 8th civ, but, though it does not crash, it basically shows a unit of civ #1 (the same color), that works as a new civ, but there are so many ways that it simply does not work (in theory it works, but the whole game is written for only 7 civs, so adding more will make things work badly) that it's not useful.

[Krusty]

How far will this go?

Could you create more difficulty levels, perhaps increase the accelerated start thingy. Can you make it so that the landmass thing goes like this:

landmasses
continents
average
archepelago
water world?

So many possible applications!

[Krusty]

STOP PRESS!
If you create a difficulty level above deity (I called it archdeity ) Then you get a civ that seems to revolt in a city size of over 1, with serious production penalties and for some reason, one advancement of your throne room every turn.

START THE PRESSES!
That takes over 3 hours sir

-Homer Simpson and Newspaper Worker
Guess who`s coming to criticise dinner

[Paul Hanson]

The landmass settings can be customised, so that it`s possible to have super-continents. However, changing the excelerated start only sort of works (you start with two cities and the extra units, but in 4000. B.C).

[Stefan Härtel]

Here's some stuff I found out:

-You can have from 1 civilization (yourself) to 7
-You can make very hot lands
-You can make the landmasses very large. The whole world was nearly entirely connected, with one exception, but that was only divided by a small canal, very few (large) isles
-You can include a larger world setting, but that will make the size normal (50*80)
-You can include higher difficulty levels, but "Super-deity" was just like "chieftain"
-You can increase the level of barbarian activity, but I noticed that as soon as the first Barbarians appeared, the game malfunctioned.

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Follow the masses!
30,000 lemmings can't be wrong.

We who grew up tall and proud
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud
Convinced our voices can't be heard
We just want to scream it louder and louder:
"What the hell are we fighting for?"
"Just surrender and it won't hurt at all"
-Brian May (Queen)

[WhiteKnight]

I've edited the settings before to get the difficulty level above diety. If you are bored with regular play, try that level. It will wake you up, starting in disorder!

[WhiteKnight]

I've edited the settings before to get the difficulty level above diety. If you are bored with regular play, try that level. It will wake you up, starting in disorder!

Imagine Swarming Myriads of Barbs, at the archdeity level?? Sounds like a nightmare of a fun game to me!

[Harlan]

So, I'd like to know, do extra tough barbarian settings crash the game or not? From Skysaw's comments, I'm guessing you can do one more level without problems, but from Stephan's I'm not so sure.

[Krusty]

What about the other end of the scale, could you make something ridiculously easy, ie easier than chieftain?