Which game is better? Civ3 or CtP2?

[ALPHA WOLF 64]

Hi Locutus,
Nice to hear from you again. I havent played CtP2 in about a year. I always figured some of you would figure out how to mod it into a playable game but unfortunately, 60 hour work weeks got in the way of my modding time, and I grew frustarated that for every improvement I'd make something else would break. One of these days, I'll have to d/l the cradle and see how you guys did

[Locutus]

AW,
Yes, good to talk to you again as well, it has indeed been a while. You definitely ought to d/l Cradle sometime and check out the results, you won't be disappointed

Sir Ralph,
I can understand an hour for Cradle v1.2 if that includes studying readmes and/or downloading files (and maybe modswapper and the patch and such), but 2 hours for Cradle v1.3? WTF? All it takes to install Cradle v1.3 once v1.2 is working is to download the victory.zip file from Dave's website and extract it (and manually copy the files to the correct folder if you don't have an english version of the game), that should be doable in 2-10 min. What exactly went wrong, if I may ask?

As for a no-future mod, that can very easily be taken care off. The easiest solution would probably to play a 1-person LAN or Internet game, that will give you a lot of options to set the starting and ending age, number of starting settlers, etc. If you don't want that or don't get that to work, you could quite easily go into advances.txt and find those advances which lead into the future age and give those themselves as prerequisite. Although I've never actually tried this myself, this should without much of a hassle allow you to disable the future game altogether. If this doesn't work for whatever reason, I'll gladly write you 10 lines of SLIC code which accomplish exactly the same thing.

Failing that, you could of course play with the Cradle mod (which *can* go into the future but it takes a *long* time to get there and most of the time the game should be over by then) or the WAW mod, which plays entirely in the modern age (1900-1950).


Anyway, to fix your language problems Martin's solution in the FAQ works but is perhaps not the best one. For one thing you'll get a mix between languages (which, I can understand, must be quite annoying) and it also means that with every mod (and every upgrade of a mod) you download, you have to manually copy the files to the correct folder. Personally I always do this myself anyway (to avoid conflicts with my own modifications), but if you're not a modmaker this is probably just annoying.

So I attached a zip file which contains 2 things. The first is the English language folder (ctp2_data\english\gamedata), which will allow you to play the entire game in English. Note that the English sounds are still missing, I don't know if this matters to you. I can give you the English sounds as well but they are in total 15MB large so if you're on a slow Internet connection this might be a big download, and it's just sound after all (the only English-specific sounds in the game that I know of are some of the unit sounds ("Blood shall run" and stuff) - I don't even know if this was translated for the German version). The UI and graphics files from the ctp2_data\english folder are also missing but I'm 99,9% certain that those don't contain any English phrases that are actually visible during the game, so this shouldn't matter. All you need to do to use these files is to unzip them in your main CtP2 folder (normally C:\Program Files\Activision\Call to Power 2\) and manually copy the files in the ctp2_data\english\gamedata folder over the files in your ctp2_data\german\gamedata folder (or not, see below).

The second part of the zip file is the civpaths.txt file from the ctp2_program\ctp folder. If you rename your 'german' folder to 'english' and overwrite your civpath.txt file with the one in this zip, the game will think you have an English version of the game. The advantage of this is that you can unzip the various mods automatically in the correct folders, so it eliminates the need to manually copy files to the correct language folder after downloading and unzipping. To make use of this (and be able to play the game in English), simply unzip the entire zip file as I described above and, when prompted if you want to overwrite civpath.txt, confirm (if you don't want this, don't unzip that file or don't confirm the overwrite). Then copy/move the other subfolders of the german folder (graphics, sound and uidata) to the english folder. An added advantage of this is that it will leave the german\gamedata folder intact so you can easily switch back to German if you want to.

When this is done, you can download and install mods in exactly the same manner as English players, without having to be concerned about having a German version of the game. The only difference with the current situation will of course be that all the text in the game will be in English.
Now, if for whatever reason this doesn't work, don't hesitate to let me know and ask for help, that's (among other things) what I'm here for.

Anyway, it's good to hear you haven't completely given up on this game yet...

[Harovan]

Locutus: First, thanks for your support , I will try it again next weekend. For today I'm tired and just want to have a nice Civ2 evening. The second way of installation seems better (faking an english version), so I will try it.

What went wrong, well, it kept to miss files in its asset tree. I did as was described, copied the english gamedata folder over the german one, allowing overwrites, but this time it didn't work. I still don't know why. The time ran by reading Readme files, trying to figure what's going on, searching files manually, trying to guess where they belong, checking game again, uninstalling game and reinstalling it (twice) including the 1.11 patch, modswapper and apolyton mod.

As to the sounds, oh well, they are annoying anyway.

Still would like to have a no-future mod, may be I make one myself. I don't want underwater cities, fusion tanks, gaia controllers and futuristic wonders. The lack of this and the lack of terraforming (there is NO grassland beneath the Alps) is particularly, what I like Civ3 for.

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Locutus: First, thanks for your support

Your welcome.

I will try it again next weekend. For today I'm tired and just want to have a nice Civ2 evening. The second way of installation seems better (faking an english version), so I will try it.

Let me know how it goes.

What went wrong, well, it kept to miss files in its asset tree.

Well, that sounds like a problem with the manual copying of the files somewhere, you may have missed a file somewhere or maybe there are some differences between the English and German version of the game that Martin may have forgotten about. When you fake an English version, this problem will hopefully not occur (and if it does, let me and/or Martin know exactly what error you're getting and we'll see if we can help).

Still would like to have a no-future mod, may be I make one myself. I don't want underwater cities, fusion tanks, gaia controllers and futuristic wonders. The lack of this and the lack of terraforming (there is NO grassland beneath the Alps) is particularly, what I like Civ3 for.

Well, the solutions I outlined should allow you to disable all that (if you choose the disable-advances wisely), but if you want to make a full-fledged mod out of it, by all means (and let us know if you need any help)... I actually think there would be some (but not much) interest in such a mod on the forums.

[Miznia]

What's wrong with CTP2's map generator?

And this is a little bit off topic, but, what does DiploMod actually do? Is it mostly just map trading? Because I don't think I've ever seen AI players make peace after starting a war, and I've never seen any alliances in the game outside of the ones I pay for.

[Harovan]

Locutus: I already installed it and mage a few test turns, this time it worked from the beginning. Thanks again.

Miznia: The maps are unrealistic and look awful. I don't like octopus shaped continents with tentacles screw-like winding around the World, would like to have sound clima zones, non-forking rivers and arid lee sides of mountains. And that is not the spring of a river:

[Dale]

Originally posted by Miznia
What's wrong with CTP2's map generator?

And this is a little bit off topic, but, what does DiploMod actually do? Is it mostly just map trading? Because I don't think I've ever seen AI players make peace after starting a war, and I've never seen any alliances in the game outside of the ones I pay for.

Straight from the creator's (me ) mouth:

Diplomod enhances and de-stupidfies AI diplomacy. It does enable some AI-AI diplomacy, but back when it was written, there was no solution known for getting AI-AI treaties. However, with Diplomod, the player would find the AI diplomacy much better, more intense, and just simply not so stupid as the vanilla version. Hope this answers the question.

[Locutus]

Miznia,
Dale is being modest, Diplomod is a complete overhaul of CtP2's diplomacy system. It makes the AIs behave in a very logical and 'human' way towards human players, the AI actively makes proposals and responds in a sensible way (among other things). New Diplomod also makes major improvements in the AI-AI relationships and adds a duration to treaties (among other things).

Sir Ralph,
Great to hear it worked

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
The maps are unrealistic and look awful.

Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Although I agree CtP2 is pushing it, Civ3's maps are plain boring, all the continents are square and linear, they all look like Africa. Ever had a good look at a map of Europe, Asia, Australia or North America? The mountains in Civ3 don't make any sense either, they often come out of nowhere (no hills or whatever surrounding them) and exeter made a good point too: although realistic, there's waaayy too much useless terrain in Civ3 maps (and unmodded CtP2 maps too). I radically increased the amount of grassland and plains in CtP2 myself, makes for a much more interesting game (AIs compete better too, one or two always start out in poor terrain and can't deal). Although neither map generator is great, at least CtP2's one can be tweaked to fit my personal taste...

I don't like octopus shaped continents with tentacles screw-like winding around the World

This at least can be fixed, I experimented a lot with this and have been able to get all sorts of continent shapes, from the ones you describe to almost perfectly square ones. Again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder so I can't do this for you but you really ought to play around with the settings in map.txt some time (there are one or two other files that affect the map generator but this is by far the most important one).

would like to have sound clima zones

What's wrong with the those? They look fine to me...

non-forking rivers and arid lee sides of mountains. And that is not the spring of a river:

Rivers are indeed a bit f*cked up - but they fork fine if you ask me...

[War4ever]

a combo of the two would be best

[Mr. Nice Guy]

Originally posted by War4ever
a combo of the two would be best

Good point! This give me an idea for a new thread! Thanks!

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Locutus
What's wrong with the those? They look fine to me...

Well, things may have changed with the mods, I haven't checked that yet.

Rivers are indeed a bit f*cked up - but they fork fine if you ask me...

The point is, that they should not fork at all, because they don't do this in reality, or very very rarely. The Orinoco is an example. But it's the only one of importance I know. Now take a look at the CtP1/2 rivers (the map generator hasn't much changed). They fork at heart's content, or form total stupid rings (as shown above). Sometimes they even form checkerboard like monsters.

Maps aren't that important. It's a computerized board game, after all. They just look bad. A chess board looks worse.

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
The point is, that they should not fork at all, because they don't do this in reality, or very very rarely. The Orinoco is an example.

You have a point there, I guess it could be rarer. I was confused with rivers from multiple sources converging. But still, IIRC Civ3's rivers don't fork or converge at all, mosty the pretty much go in a straight line from a mountain to a sea, that's a little boring too.

[Dale]

I can't see any problems with river forking. In Australia, rivers fork ALL the time. River flow into other rivers making more major rivers. Take the Darling river which flows through New South Wales. It starts as a stream, numerous rivers/streams join it on it's travels southwards, then it joins the Murray River in Victoria and heads west to the coast near Adelaide. There's so many forks in Australia's rivers.

[War4ever]

river forking would be kewl

[Locutus]

Originally posted by Dale
I can't see any problems with river forking. In Australia, rivers fork ALL the time. River flow into other rivers making more major rivers. Take the Darling river which flows through New South Wales. It starts as a stream, numerous rivers/streams join it on it's travels southwards, then it joins the Murray River in Victoria and heads west to the coast near Adelaide. There's so many forks in Australia's rivers.

I think Sir Ralph's point is that that's exactly the opposite of forking (at first I was thrown off as well), which *would* be cool to have. In any case CtP2's system is closer to reality than Civ3's system, except that the forked/converged rivers flow in the wrong direction