House Rules

[Boco]

These questions may be too broad, but I'll ask anyway.

What 'house rules' are generally acceptable in scenarios (e.g. engineers can't build cities)? What house rules have you seen that could (should?) have been handled via Civ2 machinery?

[Heresson]

House rules are to be used if there is ABSOLUTELY NO
other way to keep the player from doing sth that would spoil the soul of the game. Engineers not able to built cities - it
can be done without house rules I think.

[Paul Hanson]

You should generally avoid them unless you really have to, but when it comes to things like city building and the general use of engineers, things like that, then it shouldn`t be too much of a problem.

Personally, I believe that a good scenario designer works with the limitations of the Civ2 engine rather than trying to ignore them, but that's just my opinion.

[Case]

I'd second everything that Heresson and Paul said. However, I'd add that house rules should be sensible, and the player should know when they're breaking them (see Captain Nemo's Second Front for a good example of how to impliment house rules).

I'd also add that in my experiance most players ignore house rules

[Boco]

Seems much of the problem stems from engineers, spies, and pillagers. I s'pose the elegant way is to either limit the number of these units, make it costly to use them, or both.

Time to go back to the SF readme. Any other good examples for handling these three activities?

Case do you read forums before or after breakfast?

[Kull]

This may seem obvious, but the AI will always ignore "house rules". Now you can still design on that basis, but it's likely that your human players will be far less likely to abide by house rules that an AI opponent is happily ignoring (think back to how frustrating it was to see the AI flouting the "trireme law")

Personally I don't care for them.

Now with respect to Engineers building cities, it may be possible to work around that. Hex editing can make all terrain appear "non-buildable" to the AI. For the human player, you could make all terrain 0-food except for that near your existing cities. Thus a city coud be created but it would soon starve. There may be other options too, but I'd need more specifics on what you're trying to achieve.

[Boco]

While working on a WWI/Turk theater ToT scenario, I've come across the following problems. They're not unusual, but I'm a rookie.

1) Historically, the allied advance was tied to RR building in both the Sinai and Mesopotamia. For this it's nice to follow Allard's River War lead -- units are usually too slow reach objectives unless they use rail. Unlike River War, however, RR building was not vital throughout the campaign. As happened historically, by early 1918, the RR's are extended to the appropriate objectives. The engineers are free to pursue historically irrevelant aims. If they build cities too far north, Bedouins can cause problems in Anatolia, something I want to avoid. While I can limit this using stingy terrain and partisans, I'm concerned that I'm not anticipating the actions of a Xin Yu.

2) Currently, several Arab irregular units are trireme air missiles. This gives them high mobility, finite range (1), and mimics their tendency to disperse after a battle. The finite range is particularly useful in keeping them in the Hejaz and Syria. I'd prefer that they don't skip across the Gulf of Akaba and wreak havoc with ZOC's on the Sinai front. At the moment, I'm seeing whether I place an effective 'Natural' unit border across the Sinai (got the idea from some guy working on a Guns of August scenario). Still a house rule about not moving Bedouins across water would help.

[Kull]

[1) A couple of thoughts with respect to railroads. If this is a multipart scenario, you can eliminate engineers altogether at a certain point in the scenario (ie 1918) by way of file substitution. Also, since this is ToT you could use impassable terrain to keep engineers out of areas that should be offlimits to cities. Of course, that would affect most of your other units too, so it may not be workable. You can also use hex editing to create 255 cities, thus preventing the formation of new ones (this was discussed elsewhere in the forum recently - the best bet would be to stack umpteen hundred Barbarian Cities one atop the other, in some distant, restricted portion of the map)

2) If you can solve the Sinai problem by using "Terrain Units" instead of a House Rule, then by all means do so! As others have said (and I wholeheartedly agree), House Rules should be adopted only as a last resort.

[Case]

Originally posted by Boco
Time to go back to the SF readme. Any other good examples for handling these three activities?

Actually, check out the in game stuff. Where ever possible, Nemo used labels.txt and game.txt to insert messages telling people when they're breaking house rules (eg, when they go to found a city with an M-4)

Case do you read forums before or after breakfast?

After [my original post was made shortly after 10 AM]

[LDiCesare]

Also, since this is ToT you could use impassable terrain to keep engineers out of areas that should be offlimits to cities. Of course, that would affect most of your other units too, so it may not be workable

Yes, look at Techumseh's red october scenario. He used a railroad bed terrain, on which you could build railroads, and all the other terrain was impassable. Only a few units (armored train f.e.) couldn't pass impassable terrain.