A new(?) way of looking at things

[Case]

Well, I doubt that in the 5 year history of Civ 2 I'm the first to notice and take advandage of this, but here goes:

My 'amazing' discovery is that you can copy and paste the tech and units portions of rules.txt into a spreadsheet for easy editing. While this is hardly groundbreaking or even particularly useful (exept in making tech Trees from scratch), it does mean that someone with a little knowhow and a copy of MS Excel and/or Acess (ie not me) could quickly whip up a crash-free utility to edit these files

Anyway, here's the files copied and pasted onto a MS Works 5.0 spreadsheet. I've niled all the prerequisite techs and added comments for the techs with special functions.

The file is a tiny 10Kb

[Gothmog]

I've seen this suggestion elsewhere, so you indeed are not the first. I have never tried this technique, so I can't speak for its usefulness. It does make sense in that parts of the rules.txt are in csv (comma separated value) format. I guess this could apply to units as well.

[kobayashi]

Yes, you need to use search and replace to get rid of the spaces and various functions like 'right$' and 'vlookup' to isolate the input fields to move things to a spreadsheet and then back to the rules.txt.

See here

http://www.civfanatics.com/doc/customtree/TechTree.html

[master on high]

It's good for organizing things, but when it comes down to placing them back into the rules.txt it can be a total pain.

[Xin Yu]

I did it for several scenarios when trying to write strategies for them.
First you search @unit in rules.txt, then select the text after it, paste them to an Excel sheet, then add two columns for file sequence (=1 at the moment) and unit sequence (1-62). Then (in case of multiple parts such as the red front) open other rules.txt files and attach the @unit part to the existing spread sheet. The file sequence will go up. Now you can sort by unit sequence and clearly see how each slot changes from file to file.
If you are making scenarios, sort it back by file then by unit sequence to make it easy to put them back.