This FAQ is designed to help you build scenarios for Civilization II. It is
completely unofficial and not affiliated with Microprose in any way. Then
again, neither is Brian Reynolds, so what the hey.
Some of the Menu Items I mention might have a slightly different name, as I'm
writing from memory, but other than that the information is accurate, except
where I note that I'm guessing about something.
If you are new to building scenarios for Civ2, or even experienced but
achieving unsatisfactory results, these notes may help you in your next
effort. The material is organized as follows:
1) choosing a scenario
2) designing the map
3) placing the tribes on the map
4) starting the game
5) editing cities
6) creating units
7) controlling technology
8) influencing diplomacy
9) miscellany
1) CHOOSING A SCENARIO
Your first step is obviously to design the scenario in your head first. You
can't very well program the game until you know exactly what you want. Not
that there isn't room for improvisation once you get going, but try to have a
solid idea about what you are going for. For example...you know you want to
do a Civil War scenario. But you also need to decide: are you going to sim
the entire War, or just East of the Mississippi? Do you want to include
Britain and France as possible allies of the Confederacy? Do you want to
include Mexico, or the Native American tribes? All of these questions need to
be answered so that you can plan the area covered by the map, and who your (up
to) seven powers will be.
This brings us to a second issue: how many powers. You don't have to use
seven, but I believe the game is most satisfying with a diverse number of
nations, opening up the possibilities for alliances, etc. Civ 2 isn't going
to be the best mano-a-mano wargame. Also an issue: are you trying to
simulate a single armed conflict, or an era of power? Again, Civ 2 isn't at
its best simulating a single war. You can do it, but it plays away from the
strengths of the game, which is the simulation of progress. Civ 2 will never
give you the best simulation of D-Day, in other words, but it would make a
great model of Post-War Europe.
2) DESIGNING THE MAP
The ATLAS: You will obviously need an atlas of some sort. Perhaps more than
one. If you don't own an atlas, it is worth buying an inexpensive one before
you spend an entire weekend struggling to draw a map. Look for one that has
terrain represented in the most detailed fashion, as this is extremely
important. If you are serious about your historical scenario, you'll want an
atlas like The Times Concise Atlas of World History, which will give you the
names of cities, kings, nations, from the birth of Civilization. You might
also be surprised to discover that the shape of the land has changed in the
past 4000 years. The Persian Gulf, for instance, has retreated significantly
from its BC shoreline.
PICKING YOUR BORDERS: As you look at the atlas, choose the smallest possible
area on the atlas which will fully support your seven tribes historically.
This is where you need to know in advance what you're using the map for. If
you're doing the Peloponesian War, there's no reason to include Spain on the
map, right? Likewise, choose tribes or nations that are not anachronistic,
unless you're deliberately suggesting an alternate history. The Romans should
compete with the Goths and the Lombards, not the Germans and the Hungarians.
HOW BIG?: How big should you make the map in Civ2 squares? That depends on
your taste, and on the ratio of ocean to land. If your map is going to be
mostly land, you can make it a little smaller. You CAN actually have too much
land on a Civ2 map, believe it or not. It gets to be a real pain playing a
game that is too spread out. Another consideration is the level of technology
in your scenario. An ancient scenario will see Chariots, moving 2 squares per
turn, as the fastest unit, while a modern one will have tanks moving 3 and
airplanes moving 6 or more. The same map will seem larger with ancient units
than with modern ones. I think a map somewhere in size between the normal and
large default is best, in general. If there's a lot of ocean, you might want
to make it as large as possible.
DRAWING: When it comes time to draw the map, if you are not a talented
artist, never fear. You can draw a grid on the atlas map that will guide you,
just like those drawing games when you were a kid. If you have a particularly
good eye you might be able to just eyeball it. Another possibility would be
to draw or photocopy a grid pattern on a sheet of transparency, which you
could then lay over any map you wanted. Whatever works. But do your best to
make the map look as accurate as possible. If the map is too amateurish
looking, nobody will even bother playing the scenario, because it appears that
you haven't done a careful job. Note that the "World Map" stretches the image
of your game map vertically. You can't make both the world Map and the Game
Map look accurate. Make the Game map look accurate, and just use the world
map for orientation. If you need to see more of the map, ZOOM OUT.
Your absolute first step should be to choose SET WORLD SHAPE and choose flat
or round BEFORE YOU START DRAWING! I'm here to tell you that there is nothing
more frustrating than designing a map and halfway through your work making it
flat and the edges fall in the wrong spot, and there's nothing you can do to
fix it.
You should first draw the coast outlines in a single terrain...plains are a
good choice, as they in addition to being easy to look at reveal the special
terrain squares, unlike grassland. Once you've gotten the coast right, change
the brush size to a larger (3x3 or 5x5) size and fill in the continents with
plains.
PROTECTING YOUR WORK: At this point, you should go to the Tools Menu and do 2
things. First, turn on "Coastline Protect". This keeps you from destroying
your beautiful work. Secondly, choose "Set Resource Seed". It will ask you
to type in a number. Type in something between 2-33, (I think!). I think 1
is random, and the others are set patterns. The reason for setting a resource
seed is so that you can have some control over which special resources appear.
While the game player can still choose to randomize the resources, at least
this way you can have a version that you've influenced. Basically, this issue
is this: Grassland squares, which tend to be predominant, don't get special
resources, while everything else does. If you want to make an area of the map
particularly rich in resources, then don't place grassland on any of these
squares. If you want to make an area of the make poor in resources, cover
them up with grassland. You can have a similar effect in choosing between
plains and grassland: to make a region more productive put plains where the
grassland has no resource. To make it less productive put plains where the
grassland does have a resource and leave only the plain grassland squares.
When I'm choosing my resource seed I generally look at one area of the map
that I consider important and use that as my guide in this sort of random
decision. For example, I just designed a map of Western Europe and decided
that whatever else happened I didn't want any whales in the English Channel
(seemed silly), so I put the map there and played around with the seed until
there were only fish in the Channel.
Don't forget to save your work frequently, by the way. You never know when
that GPF is going to pop up.
TERRAIN: You really need a terrain atlas in order to successfully place
terrain. If you don't have one, try to use common sense. Rivers will tend to
wetten the landscape, so put grassland and maybe even swamps (in the lowlands
next to the ocean) where there are rivers. I usually place foothills along my
mountain ranges. Try to leave enough plain/grassland amidst mountains and
forests to found cities if you want them to be habitable. The Swiss might
build there cities on mountainsides, but you can't realistically do this in
Civ, so perhaps cheat in the occasional habitable square. The same goes for
swamps. New Orleans might be built on a swamp, but go ahead and put a
grassland on that square. It's a good idea to know where your cities are
going to go when placing terrain. You don't want an unfriendly square where
there's cities. Conversely, you can force the player/AI to build cities near
historical points by laying trees, hills and swamps around and leaving the
grassland/plains squares where you want the cities to be founded. Obviously
you don't want to be extreme in this, it's most important that the terrain is
accurate. Some designers rely too much on grassland all over the map. Not
only is this unrealistic and unattractive, but tends to throw off the game
design due to the extremely large populations that cities grow to in these
areas. Another common error is to sprinkle liberal amounts of grassland in
all terrain, including deserts like the Sahara, in order to facilitate city
building there. This destroys the whole point of having a desert in the first
place. You may want a rare plain or grassland next to an oasis in such a
case, but not every 2nd or 3rd square.
SEA LANES: Make sure that where you want a navigable sea lane that you design
the map so that ships can pass through. If you are zooming REALLY close, you
might even choose to make a navigable river by using caddy-cornered ocean
squares rather than river squares. However, ground units move as quickly
along river squares as most boats move over the ocean, so there isn't much
benefit to this. When you are faced with a spot like Constantinople, you
should decide if you want troops to be able to move across land or if you want
them to sail across. By caddy-cornering land and ocean squares you can get
both ships and ground units across the same intersection. Experiment with it.
Keep especially in mind the AI's ability or lack there of to solve problems
like this. If you want an active Turkey in the Balkans then you'll want a
ground bridge, if you want to slow down their expansion then don't build that
bridge.
POLE WANDERERS: One thing to try to avoid is AI pole wanderers. If you
connect to continents to an arctic cap, the AI will send units by land rather
than sea to move from one continent to the other, even if it takes it 30 turns
to cross the pole. Also the AI will tend to discover the land across the pole
quicker if it can go by land, sending units across very early in the game. I
think it's best to assume that if they can walk across, they will, so keep it
in mind.
3) Placing the Tribes on the Map
When you are choosing starting locations for your tribes, there are three things you want to keep in mind: historical accuracy, play balance, and AI limitations.
Historical accuracy will suggest that you start each tribe on their capital
city. If you're doing a historical sim, this will outweigh all other
concerns. Sometimes, though, you may have a choice as nations change their
capitals through the ages and you might be able to choose between two or three
places. Iran, for instance, had a capital on Perseopolis when it was Persia,
and now its capital is Tehran.
A second consideration is play balance. If you have three island continents
and you put the starting locations for 5 of the tribes on one island, and let
two others have a single continent to themselves, you can expect that the 5
will trade technologies and advance faster, but will eventually just not be
able to compete with the countries that have an entire continent to expand on.
Finally, you should be thinking about the ability of the AI to improvise, or
lack thereof. The AI is going to always be slower than a human player to:
1) recognize that it is an island power, develop sailing, and colonize other
continents
2) move a significant distance from an extremely poor opening position before
founding the first city
Extreme starting positions, then, may hurt the sim. I.e., putting a tribe in
the middle of a vast desert may either cause the AI to found a city from which
it can't expand due to it's settlers all starving to death, or it may wander
around in the desert for 40 years looking for grassland and fall hopelessly
behind.
Finally, if you are going to customize tribes, you need to be careful in which tribes you choose to sub for your eventual custom tribes on the map. Remember that you can't have two tribes of the same color playing at once. You should choose one tribe, then, of each color. (You can always change the color of a tribe by editing "Rules.txt" if you are confident about your skills at that, but then you'll always need to include "Rules.txt" with your scenario file when you play it, email it, or upload it). Here's a list of how the tribes fall into their color categories:
WHITE: Rome, Russia, Celts
DARK BLUE: Germany, France, Viking
LIGHT BLUE: China, Persia, United States
YELLOW: Aztec, Egyptian, Spain
ORANGE: Carthage, England, Greece
GREEN: Zulu, Babylon, Japan
PURPLE: India, Mongolia, Sioux
Now, when choosing which tribe to fill in for your eventual custom tribe,
choose one that exhibits behavior similar to that of your custom nation. For
example, if you are going to include the Dutch, you might choose Babylon as
their stand-in, so that they become of a "perfectionist" civ. If you use the
Mongols for the Dutch they will end up trying to conquer all of Europe, which
doesn't very realistic. Have you ever tried marching in wooden shoes? Again,
you can also edit "Rules.txt" to change a nation's personality, but this is
more difficult.
Another consideration when choosing the substitute tribes is their
architectural style. I believe you can also change this in rules.txt.
Otherwise, those Babylonian Dutch are going to be building Bronze Age pyramids
in Flanders. It would have been interesting but it didn't happen, they'd
probably have sunk into the swampy landscape. Sometimes details like this can
really alter the enjoyment of the simulation.
4) Starting the game
Now that you've finished designing your map, including placing starting
locations for your tribes, it's time to save your map one last time, then quit
the map editor. Start CIV2 and choose "Start on a premade world" and select
your map. Choose the following options: NO to randomize resources, NO to
randomize starting locations, and YES to customize rules. Under customize
rules select CHOOSE TRIBES, FLAT/ROUND WORLD (depending on your map), and you
may also want to choose DON'T RESTART ELIMINATED OPPONENTS to prevent the
Zulus from popping up in a European scenario.
Now you select your own tribe. As the player you should choose the WHITE
tribe you've included (Romans, Russians or Celts) because White goes first,
and this will prevent the AI from founding any cities on the first turn. Then
select the six tribes that you've placed on the map as your opponents. Or,
alternately, you can choose a tribe that has the wrong architectural style,
because at start up is the only place to change this. So you might start as
Babylon and change their style to Medieval Castle where they are the Dutch.
If you do this the AI will found a few cities on the first turn, but you can
always rename them. Also when the AI founds cities it often gets free units
(cheat cheat cheat) and you'll want to destroy these ON THE FIRST TURN before
they go exploring.
The game is now underway. Go to the CHEAT menu and TOGGLE CHEAT MODE. Then
select Change Views, and select VIEW ENTIRE MAP. Now you can see all your
little settlers waiting patiently for your work. Found your White city and
name it as you wish. Then go to EDIT KING, and choose Roman, (I'll assume
your White is Roman), and give it the name you want. Go ahead and repeat this
process for all seven nations, it will ease your confusion as you work to go
ahead an have all the correct names in place. If you want multiple starting
cities, you can simply right click on the square you want to found a new city
in, and then choose CREATE NEW UNIT (Shift-F1 on the keyboard), and create a
settler, and then found the city, giving it the historical name. Repeat as
necessary. I also recommend putting at least a single phalanx in each
starting city to protect it from barbarians. You don't want a nation
inadvertently wiped out on the third turn. When you've done with this, or if
you are starting the scenario with only one city each, go to SELECT HUMAN
PLAYER and choose another tribe, then repeat the process for each tribe. Now
you have founded all of the cities that will be on the map at the start of the
game.
5) Editing Cities
Once you've founded all of the cities you want, it's time to edit them. The
main ingredients to this are: size, structures and land improvements.
SIZE: How large the city is can make a big difference in a game. It is best
if the cities are in the same range of sizes at the start from nation to
nation. Starting one nation with a city size of 3 and all the others with a
city size of 1 can be a huge advantage. It's easy to forget how quickly those
early turns go while you're waiting to build your first phalanx and settler.
If one tribe has a big city they are going to expand much more rapidly. Of
course you may want to do a scenario where one nation has a few large cities
and the rest have many small ones and see how it turns out.
STRUCTURES: The most important structure you can give a city is City Walls.
Sometimes I give all the capital cities City Walls to protect a tribe from
being quickly wiped out by an aggressive neighbor. The second most important
structures are happiness structures: Temples, Coliseums and Cathedrals.
Make sure all the cities you build aren't in disorder at the start of the
game!!! This is extremely important. There is nothing more frustrating than
starting up a scenario where you have 15-20 cities in your nation and on the
first turn they all go into civil disorder. I usually just quit the scenario
when that happens, knowing that it isn't well designed. You need to put
enough temples and the like in each city so that they can be kept in order
with a reasonable luxury rate unless you're trying to simulate the fall of the
Soviet Union or something like that. And sometimes the AI is incapable of
restoring a city that's way off the mark to order, which will completely ruin
your play balancing.
Finally, I think when checking the attitude advisor you should have already
SET HUMAN PLAYER to the nation you are looking at, as the AI gets happiness
cheats on different levels and it may look as if a city is stable because the
AI is running it when in fact it will be in disorder for a human player. This
is a bit tricky, because the difficulty level you choose at the start of the
game will determine the level of unhappiness, and then the player might play
at a different difficulty level. Personally, I design all my scenarios at
King level as I suspect this is the level most people play at, but if you want
to be extra safe you should design the scenario at Deity level and then you'll
correct all the unhappiness problems for all the levels. (I don't think a
well-designed scenario is likely to be winnable on Deity level, though,
because if you start each nation with more than one city there's going to be
more parity than in a regular game, favoring the cheating AI players. Most
Deity players win through "perfect strategies" that won't work in a scenario).
Then you want to think about other structures. Try to be historical if you
are setting the game at a certain starting date. In other words if it's a
20th century scenario I think London should have a library, marketplace,
University, Bank, etc. You may want to place Wonders in their historical
location. Sometimes you will want to retard tech development and will not
build any science-generating structures. Sometimes you'll want to speed it up
and might give everybody a library.
COPYING ANOTHER CITY'S IMPROVEMENTS: This is a great command. It's found
under the CHEAT MENU/EDIT CITY. If you know that in every city you want a few
basic items: say barracks, granary and temple, start out by giving these
items to ONE city, then use this command to COPY them to all the rest.
(Remember also that you'll need to "give" yourself the techs necessary to
build these items in that first city, but you won't need those techs to copy
them to the other civs. See the tech discussion later.)
LAND IMPROVEMENTS: By which I mean roads, irrigation and mining. (Use
Shft-F8 or EDIT TERRAIN AT CURSOR). Again, be historical first. If it's
midway through the Roman Empire everybody knows where all those roads lead
right? Secondly, and this is as important as the temples above, irrigate
enough land so that the city isn't starving to death!!! You can't make Mecca
a size 8 city on the Arabian peninsula and leave it at that. You're going to
need to irrigate alot of desert around it. If you can't irrigate enough,
either make the city smaller or you actually change some of that desert into
plains or grassland. Don't leave a player in the opening position of having
all of his cities starving to death unless you mean to simulate an Ethiopian
famine.
If you want a lot of units at the start of your scenario, you'll need to build
some mines so the cities can support them. Later on you'll FORCE A GOVERNMENT
on each tribe. Remember that Republics can't support as many units as a
Democracy, so don't build more units than can be supported, only to have the
woeful player start the game with an endless series of messages about how his
aircraft carriers have all been disbanded. This may seem overly obvious, but
I've seen it happen in at least one scenario.
BARBARIAN CITIES: Yes, you CAN! Here's how. You want at the start of your
Middle Eastern scenario to have Beirut as a barbarian city to simulate the
anarchy there during the Lebanese civil war. Found the city with a Syrian
settler, edit it as normal, and build no defensive units in or nearby. Then
go to CREATE NEW UNIT, and select the type you want, then hit the button that
says "FOREIGN" and choose "BARBARIAN" and place this unit on an adjacent
square to Beirut. When you hit END TURN it will move into the city and
capture it. FOUR things to note here:
5.1) as far as I can tell the barbarian city will produce the same type of unit
that captures it, with a few exceptions. In any case, it seems to produce
units types of the same era. There for if you set a legion next to it the
barbarian city will probably crank out legions. If you set a Musketeer next
to it it will produce Musketeers.
5.2) the conquering barbarian unit will destroy a lot of the improvements
you've put in. You MAY be able to COPY ANOTHER CITY'S IMPROVEMENTS on this
city in order to get the building you want in there -- I'm not sure. What I
am sure of is that if you try to change the production menu of a barbarian
city the GAME CRASHES!!!! Yes, it does. No, I don't know why. I hope you've
been saving your work at regular intervals.
5.3) Barbarians pay no support for units. The land around barbarian cities
miraculously improves without Settlers! (cheat cheat cheat). Barbarian
cities grow as much food as a monarchy. Therefore: Barbarian cities can
quickly become the Top Five Cities in the world early in the game (it's sorta
cool, actually) while everyone else is in Despotism, they may get up to size 7
or 8. Also, they can turn out a TON of military units. This is OK, unless
the city is located on an isolated continent, as they'll just roam around
forever. If you put them on a continent with a player they'll attack his
cities and hopefully the AI will eventually conquer the barbarian city. The
problem with these "lost continents" is that as a player once you "see" a
barbarian you see him every turn that he moves within known landscape, unlike
AI units which disappear. (I presume their reputation precedes them ;-)).
This can get to be a real pain in the neck if there are a lot of barbarians on
little islands, significantly slowing down the time between turns. Just
something to think about. Play my Mad Max scenario -- at MDelPrete's Civ2
page, among others -- to see this problem occurring to moderate effect and you
might get a better idea of how many barbarian cities you dare put on a map.
5.4) Whichever nation you build the scenario with will "liberate" the city if
it conquers it. This is merely chrome on your scenario but a nice touch to
think about when choosing which nation to found the barbarian city with.
6) Creating Units
You can greatly alter the balance of power by how many units you give to each
side. Giving extra settlers makes the largest difference, and extra attacking
units the next largest (as they will probably be used to conquer cities). When
you go to CREATE NEW UNIT you can first hit the VETERAN button if you want to
create veteran units. Don't hit the FOREIGN button until last! This creates
the unit at the square that you've already chosen from the list. It's an odd
setup but you'll get used to it. In general it's a good idea to only create
units from within the Civ you're making them for (by within I mean that you've
used SET HUMAN PLAYER and chosen that Civ). This will help you avoid
mistakes. I only use FOREIGN to create barbarian units.
You can create units that are unresearched by hitting the ADV button. This
can be cool in certain scenarios, for example, a colonization scenario where
the colonists are provided with initial musketeers and cannons but will need
to learn to build there own. You can also use the OBS button to select from
Obsolete units. It could be useful if you've already set the technology level
and want to create some militia to weakly hold cities (for example in a Civil
War scenario you might only put Yankee militia units in Kentucky and
Confederate calvary at the border so that the historical easy Confederate
conquest of Kentucky early in the war will immediately occur).
You can also EDIT UNITS. You can set movement points and damage. I don't use
this, but there may be a time when it's important to you to have a bunch of
wounded units at the start of a scenario...say the Battle of the Bulge or
something. More importantly, you can SELECT HOME CITY here, and you can
select NONE!!! This means you could start out a nation with one city and a
huge unsupported army. This might be an interesting approach to Alexander the
Great, or the Fall of Rome, or the Viet Cong. Every nation WILL need at least
ONE CITY at the start of the game. I've tried starting out all of the tribes
with settlers in Galleons and the game crashed when I hit END TURN. Too bad,
it would have been interesting (it was an attempt at a Sinking of
Atlantis/Noah's Ark scenario).
7) Controlling technology
There are five ways to control technology.
1) Under EDIT SCENARIO PARAMETERS you can set the Tech Rate. The default
(normal) is 10. The higher the number the slower the tech rate. I don't know
the formula, but I assume that 20 is twice as slow, 30 is three times as slow,
etc. If you want it faster you can lower it to 6, 3, whatever. Usually
you're trying to slow it down, not speed it up. You'll want to slow it down
if: You are simulating a limited time period and want to avoid advanced
weapons (such as gunpowder in Ancient Rome); OR, if you are starting a
scenario where each tribe has more than one starting city, which will
otherwise speed the tech advances up proportionally. You're just going to
have to guess and then Playtest your scenario to see how close you were, then
readjust it until you get it right.
2) Under EDIT SCENARIO PARAMETERS you can choose WIPE ALL GOODY BOXES. This
will be necessary if you have a specific period and you want very few
advances. The Goody Boxes will be the major factor in tech advances if you
slowed down tech growth significantly with #1.
3) The more roads, libraries, universities, research labs, and larger cities
you have the faster tech will grow. No duh, I know.
4) You can directly alter each kings technology level at the start of the
game. Go to EDIT TECHNOLOGY and choose the king. Just like city
improvements, if you want a base level for all players then set one king's
tech level, then use EDIT KING/COPY ANOTHER KING'S TECH for the other six
kings, it's remarkably faster. Under the EDIT TECHNOLOGY menu, you'll
discover the interface is a bit weird. Clicking OK gives or takes the
selected technology. To get out of the menu you hit CANCEL when you're done.
In other words, the button that says CANCEL really means DONE, it doesn't
cancel your work. You can also use the GIVE/TAKE all technologies button. A
WARNING: If you are "within" the Romans and you are editing the technology of
the Greeks and they've made contact (or if the view is set to REVEAL ENTIRE
MAP) you will get a message stating that Greek scientists have discovered
Pottery (etc.). This is OK. What's not OK is if you select GIVE ALL while
this is going on. You'll have to sit through about 5 minutes of endless
messages that the Greeks have discovered ____ as it goes through the entire
tech list alphabetically. I've done all these stupid things myself, that's
how I can tell you about them.
5) Finally, you can control the tech level by keeping in mind that most civs
will trade techs when possible. Therefore, if you want to slow things down
the most you should give not give each Civ exclusive technologies. Some can
still be more advanced than others, but don't give the English Gunpowder but
not Polytheism and the Cherokee Polytheism but not Gunpowder if you want to
prevent the Cherokee from getting Gunpowder quickly.
6) Under EDIT SCENARIO PARAMETERS you can choose (perhaps under SPECIAL
RULES??) "FORBID TECH FROM CONQUEST". You will likely use this not so much to
slow down the entire world as to help maintain a technological gap in a
Colonization-type scenario.
Almost always you are faced with the task of slowing down technological growth
in a scenario. As you can see there are a number of ways to do it. In
general I feel that the least satisfactory method is the Tech Parameter
button. Obviously you will have to use this, but the question is to what
degree. My reasoning here is that if on the average it is taking 75 turns to
research an advance it just isn't worth researching, you're better off getting
the Goody Boxes or stealing the technology. Worse, the AI won't know this and
will fall behind as it builds all those useless libraries. Another thing you
can try is leaving some prerequisites unresearched to slow down the advances.
In other words, if you are doing a scenario with Musketeers you can give
Gunpowder to everyone but not give Invention, and everyone can build
Musketeers but will still have to research Invention. This is the SMART way
to slow things down, though its complicated. In any case, you'll need to
Playtest your scenario through to the end to make sure the tech level isn't
out of control. Usually you'll be able to tell fairly quickly if you're going
to have Aircraft Carriers in Ancient Egypt, and will be able to go back and
work some more on it.
8) Influencing Diplomacy
By now you have built up the physical infrastructure of all the kingdoms. Now
it's time to influence how they will feel about each other. If you want
nations to already have contact you can go to EDIT TREATIES where you will be
able to choose among: CONTACT, NO CONTACT, WAR, PEACE, ALLIANCES, and (best
of all!) VENDETTA. It takes a while but you need to go through any King
who's had contact and set all of this up. A Vendetta means that this nation
thinks it's been sneak attacked by the other nation and will demand twice as
much money for peace. Also on this page you may ESTABLISH EMBASSIES between
countries.
After you've done this, you can go to EDIT KING/SET ATTITUDES. This is a
numerical representation of how the nations like each other. 100=hate; 0=
love. I believe that these are effected by the choices that you made above,
i.e., if you put two countries at War then they will be set at 100 (maximum
dislike). This is why I suggest you EDIT TREATIES first if you want them,
then come here for fine tuning. You can have nations at war and set both
attitudes to less than 50 and they will probably immediately make peace. But
this is mostly used when you aren't setting up treaties, or even contact,
between the civs, and you can actually determine how they will behave toward
each other when they meet. This can have a major effect on play balance, and
historical accuracy, so think about it carefully. If you really want them to
despise each other set both Kings with an attitude of 100 toward the other
(unlike Treaties, attitudes are not bilateral, the Turks might despise the
Persians but the Persians can like the Turks). If you want them to ally set
them both at 0. Usually you will set nations more in the middle range, 25-75.
But experiment with this, it's one of the coolest parts of the scenario
editor.
Finally under SCENARIO PARAMETERS/SPECIAL RULES you can choose something
called, I believe, TOTAL WAR, which will prevent people from making peace. It
might prevent ANYBODY from making peace, I've never used it myself. This
would only be useful in a simulation of a single war in my humble opinion.
9) Miscellany
There are a number of other things you will need to take care of before you're
done. But you're almost there, and you're sleepy, and it's 5:30 am and you
have to be at work at 9 but you really want to get it done...you better go to
sleep, and finish it tomorrow! This stuff is the nitpicky stuff, and like
moving your apartment it takes longer than you'd think and requires patience.
(Starting to feel the same way about this FAQ! :-P)
SET GOVERNMENT: You can use the FORCE GOVT. command to put each government in
the form you want it. Then go to SCENARIO PARAMETERS and choose FORBID
GOVERNMENT SWITCHING if you want to make sure that Iran stays Fundamentalist,
etc. FORCE GOVT. will allow you to force an unresearched government, by the
way.
EDIT MONEY: Here you can set the money level of each kingdom. I usually do
this last as all sorts of errors can put money in the bank (selling off
unwanted city improvements, essentially). Be very careful about giving out
huge bank accounts to everyone, especially in a war scenario. In one scenario
I was playing American revolutionaries against the British Tories and on the
first turn the Brits offered me something like 10,000 dollars for peace, which
I of course readily accepted, thus throwing the whole scenario out of whack.
I guess that was a tax refund check ;-).
EDIT VIEW: There is unfortunately no command for this, really. What you need
to do is SELECT VIEW and (you've probably been working under SEE ENTIRE MAP
all this time) then in turn select each king. (I hope women Civ2 players
aren't unduly offended by all the male pronouns, but I can't stand those
cloying slashmarks everywhere). Now you'll see the map as it will appear to
the player choosing this tribe on the first turn. You may be surprised.
You've probably created a few Roman units in China by mistake after all this
time, and since you used Rome to build that barbarian city up in Edinburgh
<g>, the Romans can see that as well. If these sorts of things are going on,
you need to go to SCENARIO PARAMETERS and choose COVER ENTIRE MAP. Yep.
(Conversely, if you want the world discovered choose REVEAL ENTIRE MAP). Now
you go back and whoops! You can only see that one square that Rome is sitting
on, and the people are starving to death because they can't work land they
can't see. That wasn't what you had in mind at all. This is where those
Roman P-51's come in handy. Go to CREATE UNIT, choose advanced, and scroll
down to FIGHTER PLANE, building it on or next to the city of Rome. This baby
has a huge line of sight and 10 moves. Move it carefully around in order to
reveal all the map you want this nation to have explored. Either fly the
plane until it runs out of fuel and crashes or disband it using Shift-D. You
need to repeat this process for each of your 7 nations. Even if you don't
have to use COVER ENTIRE MAP you'll want to check each nation's view...if
there are multiple cities you'll at least want a corridor between each of
these cities that is discovered in order to look realistic.
VICTORY CONDITIONS: If you want to use scenario objectives for Victory
Conditions, go to SCENARIO PARAMETERS/VICTORY CONDITIONS. First you have to
turn on this mode of scoring. (TOGGLE USE OBJECTIVE VICTORY FLAG). Then you
must select each city that you want to be an Objective. (Under the EDIT CITY
menu). Then you SET PROTAGONIST (default is barbarian). Finally you enter
numbers for Marginal and Decisive Victories and Defeats. Make sure you get
this right. At least one scenario I've seen gives you a Decisive Victory if
you quit after the first turn. The computer will check from the top
down....i.e., if you give two of these categories the same number of
objectives as its cutoff the player will always get the higher of the two.
Therefore your numbers should be descending from Dec. Victory down to Dec.
Defeat. You can also TOGGLE COUNT WONDERS AS OBJECTIVES which will increase
your number of objectives in the victory tally. Try to make a Dec. Win very
difficult and a Marginal Win the outcome of a well- but not brilliantly-played
game. Those easy Decisive Victories dirty up our High Scores list, ya know.
TIME SCALE: You can adjust the starting year, the years per turn, and turns
per game. Go to SCENARIO PARAMETERS (not SET GAME YEAR under CHEAT
menu...this is only for setting the game to the first turn, which you may want
to do at the end of your scenario design phase if you've had to use the END
TURN to accomplish anything in your design (such as selling off city
improvements). 1st do some math. You want to cover what years in history?
Say you're doing 1918-1945. That's 27 years. A normal game should probably
be 400-500 turns (at least that's how long a regular Civ2 game is, it will be
shorter if there are a lot of cities.) You have a few cities on the map for
each tribe at the start, so you decide that 300 turns will be enough. If you
have one month per turn that will be 12*27=324, which is close enough. Go to
SET STARTING YEAR and enter (1918*12 [get a calculator!]), following the
instructions. Negative for BC, Positive for AD Times 12 because you're using
months. Then select TURN YEAR INCREMENT and enter (-1), since negative means
months per turn, and finally go to MAXIMUM TURNS and enter 324. Now your
scenario should run from Jan 1918 to Dec. 1945. You can actually adjust the
starting month by changing that big 1918*12 number in either direction. When
you Playtest you'll need to keep an eye on the date and see that it is working
properly, and that you can finish the scenario in the allotted number of
turns.
ELVI (THE KING): Some additional things you may do under king. You can
change the gender of your King. Go EDIT KING/TOGGLE FEMALE FLAG. 1 is for
girls, 0 is for boys. You can set research progress, set research goal, or
clear research goal. I use this primarily at the end of the design period and
clear all research progress that might have accumulated and clear all research
goals (the player prefers to choose that first research goal). Also there is
a SET REPUTATION button. This is how many times your King has screwed people
over. Unfortunately there is no documentation as to how this number works,
and I haven't experimented, but an educated guess says that 0=unsullied and
the higher it is the less trustworthy the King is (based on the 100=hate in
Set Attitude). CLEAR PATIENCE means that King is going to demand tribute on
first encounter, though I haven't used this either. SET LAST CONTACT allows
you to set how long its been since the King in question talked to any other
King. One can assume that the longer its been the quicker they will talk, but
there is no documentation as to how many turns pass before Kings want to talk.
Ask Buddha.
NAME IT!: At last you get to name your scenario, under SCENARIO
PARAMETERS/SET SCENARIO NAME. Congratulations.
APPENDIX I: USING SCENARIO.TXT
If you want an essay on screen at the start of your scenario you need to open
ROME.TXT (this file came with the Rome scenario included with the game), and
choose SAVE AS...., and give it the name YOURSCENARIO.TXT [where YOURSCENARIO
is your scenario title, not the word itself. There must be a better way to
communicate, sorry]. After you've saved as, and not before, you can simply
delete the text for Rome and write your own. Make sure not to delete any of
the extra-textual material, it is clearly marked and obvious what is text and
what is program information. This is much easier than it sounds, trust me.
APPENDIX II: CITY.TXT FILES
If you are building a new tribe for your scenario, say, the Turks, then you'll
want to include a new City.txt file with your scenario. This is the file the
program looks to when the AI names cities. Changing it is quite simple. Open
with a text editor (any will do, I use Notebook). Again, immediately use SAVE
AS... and give this file a name such as Turkcity.txt. Now let's say you
turned the Sioux into the Turks for the purposes of your scenario. Scroll
down this long list of city names until you see the heading "Sioux". You see
under Sioux a list of city names starting with Wounded Knee and so on. You
may delete all of these Sioux Cities and starting from scratch type in your
Turkish cities, hitting return between each one. I.e., Adapazan [RETURN]
Istanbul [RETURN] etc. Make sure not to delete the header or end line by
accident. The header can still say "Sioux" rather than Turk...you changed the
name of that tribe within the scenario, but the game remembers to look for
it's cities under Sioux.
APPENDIX III: RULES.TXT EDITING
This is a FAQ within itself. Just backup your original before you start
messing around with it, for God's sake. You can do just about anything in
here, and there are instructions as Remark lines within Rules.txt which tell
you everything you need to know about the technical process.
APPENDIX IV: CHANGING THE GRAPHICS
Another FAQ in itself. But I just have one note. You can download a version
of Paintshop Pro shareware on AOL (KEYWORD Paintshop Pro, I think), and this
software successfully can edit the gif files that control the graphics. The
only problem is that if you follow the normal procedure of "Save As..." it
asks you to choose between several file type options. Not being sure which
the program requires I defeat this problem by copying the file into my
scenario folder BEFORE I open it with Paintshop Pro, and then use the simple
SAVE command when I save my work and it automatically saves it in the proper
format. And don't overlap the bottom sides of the diamonds, though you CAN
overlap the top. You can change any of the *.gif files that accompany the
program.
APPENDIX V: UPLOADING
When you upload to one of the commercial services or web pages, you should
first take all of your related scenario files (we'll use Turk again):
Turk.scn, turk.txt, turkcity.txt, trkrules.txt, turkicon.txt, etc. and ZIP
them together using PKZIP or WINZIP (you can also download the latest version
of these from AOL, though AOL includes PKZIP in its software, just look for it
in your AOL directory, or you may have it in your main directory in its own
folder) into a file called Turk.zip. Also be sure to include a readme.txt
file with your scenario explaining to everyone how to use it, telling them to
enjoy it, and also remind them to backup all their files before
copying/renaming turkcity.txt to city.txt for gameplay purposes. You should
assume that the user who downloads your material has never downloaded a
scenario before and will need these instructions, because yours might be their
first.
Hope you enjoyed the FAQ, email Radiospace@aol.com if you have comments or
corrections to this FAQ and we will try to get those changes or additions put
