19-12-2001 09:47									#1
	A new(?) way of looking at things Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

Well, I doubt that in the 5 year history of Civ 2 I'm the first to notice and take advandage of this, but here goes:

My 'amazing' discovery is that you can copy and paste the tech and units portions of rules.txt into a spreadsheet for easy editing. While this is hardly groundbreaking or even particularly useful (exept in making tech Trees from scratch), it does mean that someone with a little knowhow and a copy of MS Excel and/or Acess (ie not me) could quickly whip up a crash-free utility to edit these files

Anyway, here's the files copied and pasted onto a MS Works 5.0 spreadsheet. I've niled all the prerequisite techs and added comments for the techs with special functions.

The file is a tiny 10Kb

Attachment: tech and units.zip
This has been downloaded 3 time(s).

	19-12-2001 18:31									#2
	Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

I've seen this suggestion elsewhere, so you indeed are not the first. I have never tried this technique, so I can't speak for its usefulness. It does make sense in that parts of the rules.txt are in csv (comma separated value) format. I guess this could apply to units as well.

	19-12-2001 20:09									#3
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

Yes, you need to use search and replace to get rid of the spaces and various functions like 'right$' and 'vlookup' to isolate the input fields to move things to a spreadsheet and then back to the rules.txt.

See here

http://www.civfanatics.com/doc/customtree/TechTree.html

	19-12-2001 20:32									#4
	Full PM-box? Change here!

It's good for organizing things, but when it comes down to placing them back into the rules.txt it can be a total pain.

	19-12-2001 20:54									#5
	Avatar Enlargement: We've got the solution

I did it for several scenarios when trying to write strategies for them.
First you search @unit in rules.txt, then select the text after it, paste them to an Excel sheet, then add two columns for file sequence (=1 at the moment) and unit sequence (1-62). Then (in case of multiple parts such as the red front) open other rules.txt files and attach the @unit part to the existing spread sheet. The file sequence will go up. Now you can sort by unit sequence and clearly see how each slot changes from file to file.
If you are making scenarios, sort it back by file then by unit sequence to make it easy to put them back.