29-11-2000 10:03									#1
	Sacrificial Blood 2.0 Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations

I got this email from Shay about Sacrificial Blood 2.0 (I hope this is ok to post here). This sounds like a great scenario...

quote: Hello Steve, I wish to announce the release of the Civ2 MGE modpack "Sacrificial Blood 2.0: Rise of the High Native Empires". SB 2.0 features new unit graphics by the renowned French artist, Erwan Catesson. It also includes a new, solo play scenario called Dark Realm. This scenario is a quest-based game (no city maintenance). Dark Realm is a mythological adventure that introduces unique features such as bridges, shapechanging, and dimensional travel/teleportation. A new contest is underway with a $250 prize to the first person to achieve a Master's rating playing SB 2.0. Click here to download the new game file (8M): http://shayworld.com/games/sacrific...ownloadpage.htm It is STRONGLY recommended that you carefully examine the revised readme file before installing and playing each of the four scenarios. Have fun! Shay Yates Roberts Game Designer

	28-11-2000 23:06									#2
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

I downloaded it but I doubt I'll be spending much time with it, as it's not my particular flavor for scenario.

	29-11-2000 21:22									#3
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

bah...it's a really great scenario. I couldn't find anything wrong with it.

	03-12-2000 05:20									#4
	Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

Shay has really done a nice job with this, although it takes a little work to get everything set up properly. Batch files would be REAL helpful!

The introductory scenario is interesting and usualy moves to a conclusion fairly quickly. Unfortunately there's a heavy reliance on random events, and you can spend a lot of time wandering around waiting for important things to happen. Also, some seem to work more reliably than others.

He's done one thing I've never seen before. Several randomly generated units have the same name and appearance and occupy different positions in the units.gif file. There are also distinctly different events tied to these, and as a result you never know what's going to happen when you trigger an event with one of these units. Has anyone tried this before? It has both pluses and minuses, but I found it quite annoying at times (one trigger is essential to winning the scenario, while another, identical in every way, kills your civilization!)

	03-12-2000 07:49									#5
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

I download it but the password I got would'nt let me open the archive.....

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	03-12-2000 11:39									#6
	Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

Kull, I believe the concept you are describing is similar to that of Red Front in which Nemo makes T-34/85 Tank Guards and Red Guard units from normal T-28s and Red Army units.

	03-12-2000 14:45									#7
	Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

I remember that Mao, but this is different. In Red Front there are two types of "regular" army units (some are later transformed to Red Guard Units during the first Winter), and the player can't tell which is which. But it works because Nemo placed them on the map, and he knew which ones would later be upgraded (probably by using a different graphic during the unit placement phase). The T-28 is another story, since all of those will later get upgraded.

What's different in sacrificial Blood is that NONE of these "multiple" units are on the board at the start. They all arrive via events, and since they all have the same name, I'll be darned if I can figure out how the game knows which is which.

Let me give you an example: Imagine having three units in the rules.txt called "demon", each with different powers, although the graphic and the unit name are the same. Then imagine asking your events file to put ALL THREE onto the map. How is it that all three actually wind up in the game?

	04-12-2000 00:20									#9
	Put an end to popups!

This seems also like a miracle to me I wasn´t able to generate different units with the same name via events under FW

Perhaps such things work under MGE, but not under FW? This would mean that the unitslots in MGE are "identified" by the events internally, or? Perhaps they used a bit ToT technology here...

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Civ2000

	04-12-2000 04:51									#10
	Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

Here's what's going on. The names only APPEAR to be identical! Shay uses some kind of symbol (a black square) as the suffix and prefix. In the rules.txt and events.txt, all three names look the same because all you see are the symbols. But look what happened when I copied them into the UBB:

žDemonž
Demon
žDemon

Very interesting! This means you can actually structure your Rules and Events files so that even if the casual player "cheats" by looking at them, they still won't be able to figure out what's going on! Very slick!