A couple of questions from a non-newbie.

[Ken Hinds]

I've played CIV II quite a bit but haven't played any scenarios except those that came with MGE. Yah, I know - Boo, Hiss, download some of ours! I have two sets of questions.

1. What is the difference between a modpack and a Scenario? I suppose it has something to do with the way they are loaded and which files get replaced.

2. My biggest gripe with the "Official" and "Best of the Net" (both versions)scenarios is that the designers went to all this work to develop new icons, tech trees, etc. and then quit without putting any decent discriptions of the advances and wonders in the Civapedia. If I start down loading scenarios from the various sites used/run by people here will I find this also? Is this something that I will just have to accept and live with. I've actually gotten to the point where I have seriously considered writing my own entries on the advances and wonders and installing them in an enhanced version of the scenarios that I prefer playing.

Ken

[Michael Daumen]

1.There is not much distinction even on websites that contain a "Scenario" section and a "Modpack" section. Ideally, modpacks are for general changes in your Civ2 game files for normal play, while scenarios are much more limited in time and place. There's really no difference to the way you load them, just make a new scenario file and put all files from the zip file in it.

2.Jesús Balsinde's scenarios have very thorough Pedia files, with Harlan Thompson's coming in a close second. Believe me, you can't go wrong downloading scenarios by these authors. In general only the city improvement and wonder descriptions can be customized. I'm not sure anyone has changed advance or unit descriptions. Harlan is probably the best at putting detailed unit imformation in his readme files; look for those scenarios with the longest ones.

[mrtemba]

the aforementioned scenarios makers bests can be found at http://mrtemba.civnation.com/ click on "Best on Net"

A modpack changes basically the same files as a scenairo, the diffference being you load them over the basic civ2 files and play the normal game with them whereas a scenario is something that you can click "Begin Scenario" and then start.

Hope that helps.

[Fast_Eddie]

You just want the extra traffic!

[Michael Daumen]

I pity the fool who doesn't go to Mr T's site!

[shamrock]

I also appreciate a thorough job on the Civilopedia - it's especially helpful when there's lots of new units, techs, improvements, etc. A point of clarification on Michael Daumen's comment regarding editing Civolopedia entries. In the latest version of Civ II, you can modify any entry that appears in the Civilopedia using the following two files as templates:
PEDIA.TXT
DESCRIBE.TXT

[mrtemba]

but not in FW. Hopefully this will still be possible in TOT.

Of course I want the traffic...I'm trying to break 2000 by the end of first month!

lol Daumen! I think I'll use that from now on.....

[St Leo]

What Mr. Temba means is that editing is not be possible with the horrible editors that ship with FW and MGE. One can always use Notepad for the purpose.:-)

P.S. They are finally getting rid of the editors in ToT. Yay!

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St. Leo
www.sidgames.com/imperialism/
www.sidgames.com/sidportal/
www.sidgames.com/forums/
Member of the AUP!

[EnochF]

It's not as easy as it sounds. I'm designing a space modpack using MGE, and I make extensive changes to describe.txt, which changes the descriptions for advances, units, wonders, terrain, the works. I've changed just about every advance, unit and wonder to something suitably science fictiony, and I decided to include a quote from an SF source to go along with a brief description of each unit and each advance. It's time-consuming stuff. And then if I make spelling errors, I still come off looking like an idiot...

[Ken Hinds]

EnochF,

Spelling errors, while not great to see, can be tolerated or if they bug me too much I can fix them and save the corrections under the old name. My problem is with Advances and Wonders that have no descriptions. Maybe I've just spent too many years writing manuals and regulations or maybe, as I've been told, I'm just annal retentive, but I like being able to read the descriptions and background information on the advances and wonders like Version 2.42 had. To me this is especially important for scenarios so that I can have some kind of idea of what the designer's thoughts and intentions were when the scenario was created.

As for the argument that it is so time consuming to write descriptions for the advances, improvements, wonders, or units, and yes I know that I just made the list bigger, being an "Old School" programmer I look at this like using flow charts. If you write up descriptions of each new unit, improvement, advance, or wonder that you intend to implement before you actually start writing the scenario code or placing units in slots or changing any of the controlling .txt files in the game you should come out with a much better scenario with less problems to fix than if you just make up your cool Icons and start winging it from there.

I'll readily admit that I haven't started writing any scenarios yet for Civ II but I have for other games. As I programmer I don't do Windows, yet, but I do write in COBOL, FORTRAN and machine code.

Ken

[Michael Daumen]

Heh heh ANNAL retentive. I get it.

[mrtemba]

all the editors work great except the events editor. I use all of them, except the events editor.

[Ken Hinds]

This is just to say thank you for the answers above. I've downloaded scenarios by the suggested designers and they are more along the lines that I was looking for. I'm getting some strange results from some and will take that up with the designers since I think it could be a Fantastic Worlds vs. Gold thing.

Thanks again for all the suggestions.

Ken

[apiquinamir]

The advancement descriptions can be edited with any text editor by opening the .pde files in the Pedia directory.

[St Leo]

.PDE files have to be placed in the pedia directory and I don't think that CiC+ allow the default Civilopedia to be used. I recommend using pedia.txt to change Wonder, Improvement, and Government descriptions and leaving Units with only stats.:-)

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St. Leo
www.sidgames.com/imperialism/
www.sidgames.com/sidportal/
www.sidgames.com/forums/
Member of the AUP!