A hexing question

[Marko]

In my Struggle for Europe scenario most of land is covered with fortresses and some parts of ocean too. The AI doesn't pillage them (at least i haven't noticed it).

How to create a fortress to ocean square:

1. Change an ocean tile to a land;
2. create a fortress there;
3. change the tile back to sea.

Same about roads/railroads etc.

[Mercator]

It won't be possible to add it as a feature to MapEdit (unless I add full savegame support). When loading a map for a new game all terrain improvements are lost, I'm not sure whether they're lost when using ToT's Import Map... thing though...

But as for adding it straight to a savegame using hex-editing, that shouldn't be too difficult, in principle... Does anybody by any chance know a hex editor that supports regular expressions in the find and replace options? That would make life much easier.

In principle, this fortress information would need to be added to several different portions of the savegame. But in this case (the fortresses surely won't have a graphic?), I think that won't be necessary.

I'll have a try at putting fortresses on all squares of a savegame map.

[Kull]

Have you tried Dusty's Mapcopy utility? According to the readme, it's possible to copy improvements from one map to another. Thus if you covered a 20x20 section of another map with fortresses, theoretically you could copy this one section to multiple portions (i.e. all) of your Gigamap. His utility is available here:

http://cullivan.com/civ/tools.html

(This might wipe out the existing improvements though - not certain on that aspect)

[techumseh]

Mercator, shall I email you my savegame?

Kull, welcome back! Does mapcopy work on sav. files?

[Kull]

Yes indeed it does!

(I'm only "back" for a few days - then it's off to defend Civilization from the Barbarians....who could have guessed that my fascination with civ and barbarians would turn out to be job-related!)

[techumseh]

Thanks. It's nice to have you back, even for a few days. And if you haven't already, try building the Great Wall!

[Mercator]

Done!

I created an ad-hoc little program to do it...

In the process, I found a neat little way to manipulate cities:
As you should already know, the Airbase tile improvement is a combination of the Fortress and City "tile improvement" codes. This, by the way, explains some of the (pre-ToT?) airbase bugs, like an airbase acting as road/railroad (just like cities) and having extra food/production (also like cities)...

Anyway, when adding fortresses to all squares, I suddenly got myself a map where all cities had turned into Airbases. And after removing an airbase nothing was left (except the city name). The cities were obviously still there (and accessible via the menus), but not accessible or visible on the map...

Maybe someone can use this idea. I guess this would also make it possible to build a city on that very square again (or adjacent to it), perhaps even multiple times (imagine that, a map with 255 cities all on one square!). That would probably also cause all those city names to appear on top of eachother, making it one big unreadable mess.
Then again, since this would require hex editing anyway (or someone creating a program to do it ), using this fortress trick won't be necessary, since it can all be edited without that just the same.

[techumseh]

That's wonderful. Good work. Are you going to post it on your site? Did you get my file via email? And what do you do to get your cities back?

[Marko]

Originally posted by Mercator
As you should already know, the Airbase tile improvement is a combination of the Fortress and City "tile improvement" codes.

If settler could be allowed to build a fortress in a city then it changes the city to airbase

But yes, can you improve the program so that it recognises the city tiles and doesn't create fortresses there?

Btw, your Mapedit 2 is great!

[Mercator]

Whoa, whoa! The "program" I created was about 10 lines of code... And I only created it because I couldn't find a hex editor that could properly do it, and was sure it wasn't too much work... I had no intention to do anything with it. I might work on it, since there apparently is a demand, but I have no intention to give it any sort of priority.