A list of things never to do!

[Unconquered]

Never assign cruise missile and nuclear missile toggles to the same unit... It freezes the game

[miccofl]

Don't allow cities on water! For more information check this thread: http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...threadid=57796

[Jaybe]

Do NOT assign Roads a "Commerce = 0" for any terrain. Doing so prohibits your building roads there at all.

Prohibited roads are not good when you want the ability to build colonies.

--
Regarding giving "Blitz" capability to modern naval units, the jury (of one, myself) is still out. It DOES allow multiple bombardments, but it also allows a single modern unit to take out a transport and its escort in one turn (which is good, especially when its medeival shipping).

[Father Beast]

Originally posted by Willem


Perhaps you may have noticed that he had "sometimes" in quotation marks?

I hope you understand as well that the AI will have no idea of what to do with a Settler/Worker. By giving that unit those particular abilities, you're giving yourself a very big advantage. Considering how stupid the AI is overall, I wouldn't consider it very fair myself.

Come to think of it, when playing that mod, the AI never did seem to build any roads, mines, or irrigation.

I'm going to try making a settler clon and calling it a "worker" and see if the AI uses that...

[Father Beast]

NEVER EVER give a settler both the AI strategies of "settle" and "terraform". if you do , ALL the AI beginning settlers will just stand there and never found a city!

unless you want to play by yourself....

My worker and settler are identical in every way, except that the worker has the ai strategy of "terraform", and the settler has the AI strategy of "settle". I myself only build settlers, as it makes no difference to me...

[Level]

I have given a unit (the only unit the AI had)settle, terraform, offencive, and defenceice, in some games they make a lot of citys, in others they attacked, and in others they just sat there intil I killed them and they responed.

[Zen]

Does anyone know if there are any problems related with too many starting civs/culture or something of that sort?

I have a scenario which crashes upon loading and I haven't been able to successfully troubleshoot it.
I have about 130-140 cities. This was the checking stage before unit additions.

The map by itself works, and the map with about 50 cities works.


thanks,

-Zen

[Thrawn05]

Never:

Delete all improvments

Or:

Delete all techs


This causes Civ3 to hang while it's loading the game.

EDIT: Nor place units under the control of civs that didn't research that tech yet. Game crashes.

[miccofl]

Never work on a mod and keep adding to it, improving it, adding units, graphics, etc. without checking the file size of the mod as you go. Otherwise you will end up like I did with a mod that is 37MB uncompressed, 22MB as a zip file and 18MB as an ace file. I have some games (entire games) that don't take up that much space. FYI: It was the 11 units I added that took the most space 25MB.

[Andrew_Jay]

In fact, never delete wonders or improvements at all. I made an ancient scenario and got rid of everything Medieval, Industrial and Modern. When ever a Wonder or Great Wonder is built it crashes because it can't bring up the splash screen. Also, the graphics in the build list are messed up (Harbours look like Universities, Forbidden Palace like a SAM Battery).

[Thrawn05]

Originally posted by Andrew_Jay
In fact, never delete wonders or improvements at all. I made an ancient scenario and got rid of everything Medieval, Industrial and Modern. When ever a Wonder or Great Wonder is built it crashes because it can't bring up the splash screen. Also, the graphics in the build list are messed up (Harbours look like Universities, Forbidden Palace like a SAM Battery).

I wonder then why Firaxis put a Remove button there to begin with? I guess someone was tripping and decided to add it to every tab and not just a couple.

[Thrawn05]

Here's another:

Don't do whatever I did that causes the game not to see that some units can only be built by some civs and not others in my AvP mod.

[Father Beast]

Originally posted by Andrew_Jay
In fact, never delete wonders or improvements at all. I made an ancient scenario and got rid of everything Medieval, Industrial and Modern. When ever a Wonder or Great Wonder is built it crashes because it can't bring up the splash screen. Also, the graphics in the build list are messed up (Harbours look like Universities, Forbidden Palace like a SAM Battery).

I think that the game assigns a number to improvements and wonders based on their position in the impovements listing in the editor. in my civ1 mod, I deleted a number of improvements and wonders, and sure enough, the game crashed when I tried to build the collossus. said it was unable to load WON_SPLASH_22. I looked in the pediaicons.txt, and sure enough, there was no number 22. the won_splash's started at 32.

Now, if you look at the editor, you will note that in the unmodified civ3mod.bic, there are 31 in the list before you get to the first wonder, the Pyramids. if you felt inspired, you could set the appropriate won_splash number for each wonder. myself, I just copied about 12, pasted them right above, and renumbered them 20 - 31. That keeps the game from crashing (even though the splashes are sometimes wrong) and lets me play the original civ3 without a hitch.

now I have the same problem in the city view, and it is odd to build hoover dam and have it look like the Pyramids, but I can still play, so I don't let it worry me too much. Perhaps some exploration of pediaicons.txt would be in order if it bugs you.

[Andrew_Jay]

I got around it by putting all Medieval Techs in the "none" age. That way you'll never get those buildings (you weren't supposed to get out of the ancient age anyway).


Another thing not to do is to indiscriminately delete all of the techs, even if you're not using them. I did this in the same scenario because, again, it was to be ancient only, and I wanted to clean out my lists of stuff to make editing easier. This is rather a stupid mistake looking back, because it made EVERYTHING possible. There was no longer a prerequisite for railroads or the such. Luckily I had deleted all the units I didn't want (which causes no problems at all, unlike deleting improvements).

[dunk]

Never add too much to the bic file without testing it.

Add very slowly and test before proceding. At least until you get the hang of what needs to be done for each addition.

Never delete too much either. Same reasons.

For example, a new civ requires a leaderhead for the diplomacy screen, one for the diplomatic advisor, one for the endgame screen, one for the civilopedia, etc. etc. Forget one of those and your game may crash or simply not function properly. So remember to either copy, create, or download all of these before proceeding.