airbases

[moi]

hey! i've played civ2 since it came out in 199something, although never very seriously and i suck . i have a question though: why do airbases count as railroad+farmland? thanks.

[ColdWizard]

why? because they do

[shade]

Just because we could abuse it
(I don't think there's a reason,even if you use the cheatmode for tileimprovements an airbase is a free option(not like farmland wich is the connection of mining+irrigation) )

Shade

[DrFell]

Definitely a bug.

[shade]

hey it's cheating without cheatmode....so it actually is rather something like abussing a mistake.(like it is possible to build NONE units in civ 2 <2.42 )

shade

[solo]

They are not allowed in OCC, the other thing you asked about. Make sure to visit Paul's site and give it a try, since it's a great way of playing if you like shorter games with a challenge.

[Smash]

they do allow free movement but are not actual RRs.Cities connected by airbases only, don't get the connection bonus to trade routes.You still need a road and rails.

[William Keenan]

Re: airbases

Originally posted by moi
hey! i've played civ2 since it came out in 199something, although never very seriously and i suck . i have a question though: why do airbases count as railroad+farmland? thanks.

The answer to your question is a bit complex. The improvements to each map square has byte set of flags describing it. The flags denote irrigation, mining, fortress, city, road and rail. Airbases do not have there own flag. Airbases are a combination of the fortress and city flags. Squares with the city flag on (city squares and airbase squares) are treated as if they have irrigation and roads and units stacked on such squares are killed one at a time.

[Edward]

William Keenan,

Ahh! Very enlightening. In order to allow air units to land safely on an airbase, the programmers took a shortcut and just gave it the "is a city square" characteristic (since air units can land in city squares). The unintended consequence was that you get the production effects of farmland and the movement & production bonuses for railroads for free in your cities. Or more precisely in squares with the "is a city square" flag turned on.

[Xin Yu]

Flags: none, irrigation, road, RR, mine, fortress, city, pollution. A total of 8 (3 bytes). Adding more flags may affect other game modules since they require 4 bytes. So they took a shortcut and define airbase=city+fortress and farmland=irrigation+mining. Of course they left some loopholes while doing that.

[shade]

A total of 8 (3 bytes).

that would be 1 byte(8bits: 1/0)
(there are more than 8 possibilities eg road+farmland+pollution+railroad and road+farmland are 2 different things)

Shade

[William Keenan]

Shade, there are 256 combinations possible with eight bits. That fact is, however, irrelevent to the point in question. What matters is how the Civ2 engine uses those eight bits. To learn more about savegame hacking read Allard's most excellent compilation, http://allard.8m.com/hexediting.htm.

[Xin Yu]

Yea, I made a mistake. There are 256 possible combinations from those 8 flags. That's a length of a 'Byte', or 2 digits of hex numbers. Adding more flags will make it impossible to be fit into a byte.