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Note: In the Apolyton/Community forum (here - go there and vote people! 
), I gave Sir Ralph some tips to make his German version of the game more compatible with English mods (by making it a 'fake English version'). For future reference (so feel free to ignore this thread and have it drop to the bottom) it might be useful to have this explanation in this forum as well, so here it is:
), I gave Sir Ralph some tips to make his German version of the game more compatible with English mods (by making it a 'fake English version'). For future reference (so feel free to ignore this thread and have it drop to the bottom) it might be useful to have this explanation in this forum as well, so here it is:
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...
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...
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