Can I find out if 'Allow Cultural Conversions' is turned on?

[Villain]

I've got a PBEM game going with a buddy, and we don't know if it was turned on before we started the game up.

Is there a way I can find out if it's On or Off?

I mean besides the obvious way of playing thru the entire game and observing whether a cultural conversion occurs or not.


I'm sure some of his cities should be switching over to my obviously more impressive and culturally-rich empire!

[Purple]

If you start a new game, all the current settings should still be in effect, so just go through the setup procedure and observe.

[Villain]

Hmm.. good idea.

But this game was started quite a while ago, and I suspect my buddy's started other games since then. I doubt we can really rely on his current settings being the ones used for the game in question.

I'm hoping there is a more 'sure-fire' way of checking.

[0bsidi0n]

I'm not very proud of this, but once I changed one of the options midgame: The chinese kept restarting everytime I killed them a few squares away, and I just wanted them gone, so went into some file, looked around, tested, and was able to change the options. Bam! Conquered china again, and they didn't come back. It was some text file with a line of 0's and 1's (like in civ2 when you created a new unit with special abilities). I had to screw around for about half an hour before I figured out what spot corresponded to what option, so I don't really remember. Anyway, this wasn't very specific at all, but at least you know it can be done!

[Villain]

Originally posted by 0bsidi0n
It was some text file with a line of 0's and 1's (like in civ2 when you created a new unit with special abilities). I had to screw around for about half an hour before I figured out what spot corresponded to what option, so I don't really remember. Anyway, this wasn't very specific at all, but at least you know it can be done!

Perfect! Thank you!!

The file is the 'ptw' config file. I did a quick little test by starting a new game and turning all rules off EXCEPT for Cultural Conversions. In the new auto-edited ptw file, it was the only '1' in a long list of 0's in the RULES row.

Knowing which bit referred to the CC rule, I compared it to the other ptw files created from loading our saved games and it turns out CC is on fact ON.

D'oh. I guess I don't quite have the cultural dominance I suspected.

One funny thing I noticed tho... the Difficulty setting is set to ZERO (ie easiest lvl). This is definitely NOT the setting we chose. I'm gonna risk it and just put a 3 or 4 in there to pump the diff back up to where it was set in the first place. Grrr.

[0bsidi0n]

Great! I'm glad you got that from my ever-fading memory!

[Villain]

Hmmm...

Now I'm curious about some stuff in that config file. Like what are all the "Faction" entries about?
Obviously they represent civs in the game (as there are 30 factions listed)... but I'm wondering what the value represents.

In one game I have going the value is '-1' for all the civs listed. In one I just started, they are either '15', '25' or '-1'.

"Hmmm" I say.

It doesn't appear to have anything to do with gold or gpt. At least not that I could tell.

[0bsidi0n]

Once again my memory is failing me, but I think those values have been addressed at civfanatics. If I recall they represent the AI opinion of you, with certain values falling into certain categories. Therefore when you first start you will have a relatively untarnished reputation. This should be slightly better with AIs of your culture group. I wish I could remember the authors name because it was some damn good research. I'm sure if you look around you could find it. Or someone reading this may recognize it and point you to it...

[Alex]

The article to which 0bsidi0n refers was written by Bamspeedy, and can be found here