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Alinestra Covelia
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I sense the dodgy presence of Bing - a presence I've not felt since...
Feb 2000
time: 00:17
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Started this in another window but MSIE crashed. :irritated:
Yes, it's great to be a Master. Even though now I'm living in conditions not too dissimilar from the last days of Mr. Hussein (formerly of Tikrit), complete with bare floors, ventilation hole, and discarded Mars bars wrappers.
My degree was in journalism.
Now, onto the scenario.
The scenario is a Civ ToT scenario and is based on an Earth gigamap. It is set in the 1990s and 2000s and is a light hearted representation of that time period. There are 8 major powers:
Russians
Americans
European Union
Chinese (+Communists?)
Indians
Democratic Neutrals
Islamic Neutrals
Axis of Evil
I'm aiming for a Diplomacy-style game here, where conquest is supposed to be rather more difficult (perhaps to the extent that it is in Civ3, with foreign nationals creating unhappiness) and trade is important.
1. Trade: I want to structure the tech tree so that commodity availability is a major part of the game. Does anybody have a list of which techs make which commodities obsolete/available? I'm thinking of making Capitalization unbuildable, thus forcing players to spend more time on really thinking through the nations' economic situation. This scenario will probably also make abundant use of CivCity to manipulate trade routes on a turn-by-turn basis. I'm thinking of a situation where all trade routes to a certain nation will cease if war breaks out with that nation, or a nation can cut off trade as punishment for a variety of minor infractions (border disputes, colorful language, nuclear attack, etc).
2. Research: Traditionally, this has been improvements- and unit-focussed. In most scenarios this only leads to ways of out-fighting the opponent, rather than out-trading or out-smarting them. There will be several techs that the Neutral nations cannot research, although perhaps some house rules will be put in to allow what they can and cannot build. Research is likely to be very slow (as the game will probably move in fractions of a month per turn) but successfully researching techs will still allow for various improvements.
3. Production: This will have to be a house rule situation, but I was intrigued by the idea of "selling" production to another nation. An example might be that India produces its first nuclear weapon. A reasonable response could be that Lahore (an Islamic Neutral city in Pakistan) would then want to build one or more to counterweight the threat. Instead of giving the Islamic Neutrals the tech to build the weapons, which would allow for all the cities in northern Africa, the Middle East, and Indonesia to go nuclear simultaneously, there could be a house rule that a certain amount of money could be paid to another nation to buy a nuclear missile. Failing that, another nation could accept money to "set" that city to producing a nuclear missile even if that tech is not available to that civ.
So in the above situation, Lahore approaches the player of China for help and the Chinese leader decides on a sum. The Islamic Neutrals pay him that amount of money and the Chinese set Lahore's production to "Nuclear Msl." in the CivCity editor.
A lot of military trade is expected, too. This goes especially for Russia, which is going to have a substantial problem keeping itself economically viable. (And in the real world does in fact supply both India and China with a lot of military hardware.)
4. Corruption: I wish there were some way of better addressing this issue in this game. If there is any way of altering the specific effects of the various city improvements, I think it would be great to have a few improvements take off a few points of corruption here and there (eg police station). Either way, this scenario wants players to deal with corruption directly and as such, no nation is a Democracy. The Chinese run Communism as a government choice, and I'm still adjusting what level of corruption they should have, but it is definitely not zero. Either way, it's something I'm still pondering, perhaps to no avail.
5. Revolutions and The Axis of Evil: I thought that would lead to a better pun on the words "revolution" and "axis" but I'll leave that for others to find. The Axis of Evil are the barbarians of the scenario, plotting dastardly plots of unimaginable evil and led by various leaders that the player may find familiar. They start off in a few areas, mostly Hill Bases units with high defense, that sit atop airbases (so they don't stack defend with other units) and which blend into the terrain, producing military units every so often. I'm hoping to have some sort of house rule mechanic going that nations with unhappy cities can lose them through popular revolt.
5b. Revolutions: if a nation running Republic (Americans, EU) has a city in unhappiness more than one turn, it will automatically become a Democratic Neutral city. If a nation running Communism (Chinese), Monarchy (Russians, Indians), or Fundamentalism (Islamic Neutrals) has a similar problem, it runs the risk of becoming an Islamic Neutral city (if it isn't already one) or an Axis of Evil city. I'm still thinking about this one.
The Axis of Evil has some wicked cool units.
More on this as it comes.
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GoPostal
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I would hope Great Britain would merit its own civilization, considering the unique player that it is in modern politics. Possibly at the expense of India joining the Democratic Neutrals. Failing that, i think it would work as the 51st State. How do you make 5b happen?
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Alinestra Covelia
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I sense the dodgy presence of Bing - a presence I've not felt since...
Feb 2000
time: 00:17
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Yaroslav, that's great. Will you need the .sav file alone? Or do you need more things along with it?
I'm currently trying to figure out what to do with the African continent. Most of the Saharan region is Islamic, so that counts as Islamic Neutral territory. However, many of the countries further south have serious rule of law problems and hot spots like Liberia, Somalia, and Sierra Leone probably count better as barbarian cities.
I'm also not sure what to do with Vietnam, Laos, and Burma (Myanmar), given that they are all politically close to the Chinese-Communist ideology (i.e. strict political controls, unreliable rule of law, slowly disappearing Communist ideology, Confucianist background). If they don't count as Chinese-Communist nations, then what do they count as?
Right now, for stylistic reasons more than anything else, I am looking for city images for the Indians, and I've found a few photographs on Google that I will try to use for their populace icons.
That's about it for now.
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Mr. President
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The leaves that are green turn to brown
Jul 2001
time: 15:17
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quote:
Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia
I'm currently trying to figure out what to do with the African continent. Most of the Saharan region is Islamic, so that counts as Islamic Neutral territory. However, many of the countries further south have serious rule of law problems and hot spots like Liberia, Somalia, and Sierra Leone probably count better as barbarian cities.
I'm also not sure what to do with Vietnam, Laos, and Burma (Myanmar), given that they are all politically close to the Chinese-Communist ideology (i.e. strict political controls, unreliable rule of law, slowly disappearing Communist ideology, Confucianist background). If they don't count as Chinese-Communist nations, then what do they count as?
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 Burma is not quite evil enough to be the Axis of Evil (they have the largest army in South-East Asia and most of them are armed with machetes), but it has traditionally been close to Communist ideology. I guess that's your call.
If it were me, I'd put most of southern Africa as barbarian - with the chaos and the starvation and the millions of refugees. (I'd also look for a way to simulate the Ebola virus, but that might just be me.)
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Mercator
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Sorekara no Nanimo
Jan 1970
time: 06:17
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I think many of the ideas you have that involve using utilities or house rules can be accomplished with Angelo Scotto's CSPL (availabe at http://coc.apolyton.net, http://cullivan.com/civ and http://www.civgaming.net/mercator/mapedit). That would require quite a bit of programming, though.
I think CSPL should be able to control trade routes based on treaties or attitudes between different civilizations (point 1 in your earlier post). It should also be able to change production to something that isn't available yet (your earlier point 3). Yaroslav's CivDip would be excellent for this, I guess, but that only works for MGE. CSPL could also address point 5b, by changing city ownership due to unhappiness.
For the Axis of Evil bases, you could probably use "hidden" cities (can be done by hex-editing). Such cities can not be conquered and don't display graphics, but still produce units etc. That would make the Axis of Evil unconquerable, but you could add a DestroyACivilization event which would kill off the "evils" when, say, Osama is killed, or all of their leaders.
quote:
Originally posted by Alinestra Covelia
2. Spritegen doesn't work on my copy of Civ2 ToT. I've tried running it and found that it brings up an error message saying that "comdlg32.ocx" is incorrectly registered. I was hoping to use spritegen to erase the telltale health bars above the Axis of Evil's Hillbase units. |
Try typing in regsvr32 comdlg32.ocx in the Windows Run command. If SpriteGen still doesn't work, you'll have to download and install MapEdit (well, that's the easiest option).
If you don't want MapEdit, you can uninstall it again straight away. The comdlg32.ocx file will remain installed.
Oh, by the way, removing the health bar on a unit will make the unit appear on top of fortresses, rather that under the fortress graphic. Just so you know.
quote:
Originally posted by yaroslav
About 1, the easiest way is to hex-edit. Please feel free to send me an email with the file and the wonders you want to remove and I'll do it. However, as I'm not very used with TOT I guess I'll not be able to do it before weekend  |
See the Civ2 SAV/SCN file format thread for that. It's pretty empty still, but that information is already in there!
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Alinestra Covelia
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I sense the dodgy presence of Bing - a presence I've not felt since...
Feb 2000
time: 00:17
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Awesome! Thanks, Mercator. I'll head on over and pick up those utilities as soon as I can get a floppy disk free. (Part of the problem with living on the lam is that I have to access computer labs for email and online access. Hopefully once I get a permanent address this should clear up.)
So right now I'm simultaneously messing around with the core rules, the scenario saves, and the graphics files.
One graphical problem is that there are only four "people" styles, even though there are six "city" styles. I think I could solve this by placing the Russians/Americans/EU as one people style, and giving the Chinese, Indians, and Islamic Neutrals each their own people style.
City wise, I've got separate styles for Islamic, Chinese, and Russian cities. The EU/American/Demo cities share the usual "Modern" cityset from vanilla Civ2. I'm finding it hard to locate any Indian cities, though. Maybe if anybody has a few screenshots of RoN T&P...? 
Otherwise, just the usual arsing around for me. Oh, and lots of Capcom vs. SNK 2 on the GameCube. Can't do without that.
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