20-07-2002 22:02									#1
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Is it possible to hex edit a Sav. file to add fortresses to every square including ocean squares? It's a giga map and the cities are already placed. Please help! Thank you.

	20-07-2002 22:09									#2
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I should point out to you that the AI will pillage any fortress it gets its hands on in your territory.

	20-07-2002 22:30									#3
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Not necesarily that is not my experience playing Bonaparte2 (where every tile has a fortress except for the mountains, I think that was done manually though)...

	21-07-2002 00:25									#4
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quote: Originally posted by DarthVeda I should point out to you that the AI will pillage any fortress it gets its hands on in your territory.

The AI on my territory? Is this some kind of joke? Seriously, if someone can come up with something, I'd be very grateful. It's a made for multiplayer project so AI pillaging shouldn't be a problem.

	21-07-2002 01:15									#5
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Actually Henrik raises a good point. Does the AI pillage forts, or does it occupy them?

	21-07-2002 06:49									#6
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Also speaking from my Bonaparte II experience, the AI only very occasionally pillages them. Having fortresses in ocean squares can lead to to other strange effects though; the AI often ends up with land units fortified in the ocean because their transport sunk without them.

Last edited by winterfritz on 21-07-2002 at 06:57

	21-07-2002 08:06									#7
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Tec, is this ToT or MGE?

If it's ToT, then DV, is it within your wizardry to write a CSPL program to do the hex-editing? Maybe even ask whether to put fortresses in sea squares? We could ask Angelo, but I suspect that his mind is currently overloaded with physics. Making all-fortress maps has been an occasional request of many designers.

	21-07-2002 08:23									#8
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Why it is ToT. Quell surprise! Hey DV, how about it?

	21-07-2002 10:16									#9
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Hex editing is not my cup of tea... especially in programming languages.

Besides... every map is highly variable; there's no way I could know where each tile's terrain bit is (especially because I can't even operate a simple hex editor on the save files correctly).

It is my experience that AI units pillage anything they can.

Hey tech, since you are working in ToT, you should consider airbases instead of fortresses. They don't provide extra trade, protection, or movement but they do prevent multiple units from being destroyed in a single strike. (This would only work if your scen doesn't have air units).

	21-07-2002 10:19									#10
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additionally... you can then use the fortress for an actual fortress.

	21-07-2002 10:57									#11
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quote: Originally posted by DarthVeda Hey tech, since you are working in ToT, you should consider airbases instead of fortresses. They don't provide extra trade, protection, or movement but they do prevent multiple units from being destroyed in a single strike. (This would only work if your scen doesn't have air units).

Airbases counts as Railroads, atleast in all other versions of civ 2, which is why people haven't used it for stackable squares.

quote: Originally posted by winterfritz Also speaking from my Bonaparte II experience, the AI only very occasionally pillages them. Having fortresses in ocean squares can lead to to other strange effects though; the AI often ends up with land units fortified in the ocean because their transport sunk without them.

Only the barbarian AI fortifies units in ocean tiles in my experience (and then only one or two naval units near the start).

	21-07-2002 11:20									#12
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*cough* I already stated that the Airbase in ToT doesn't work like a rail road or even a road.

	21-07-2002 11:28									#13
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Bah

What about farmland then? (which it also acts as in the other versions).

	21-07-2002 12:25									#14
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No. It gives no bonuses of any kind whatsoever. A little further testing has shown that the movement remains affected only by the tile's original movement or any improvements aside from the airbase.

And yes, they do prevent any other units on the tile from being destroyed and dying in a big pile death.

So in summation, Airbases in ToT provide the perfect way to remove stack-death.

Last edited by DarthVeda on 21-07-2002 at 12:31

	21-07-2002 19:49									#15
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I have considered using airbases, but this for WWII, so it would have an unfortunate effect on military aviation! I experimented with transporters as well, but they don't create the stacking effect.

I've been looking at Allard's hex-editing document, and despite the fact that I know next to nothing about hex-editing or programming, I think it should be possible to come up with a program to convert a map to all fortresses, or all anything.

Mercator's MapEdit can already do something similar. If you select a "filler" terrain, you can add rivers to every square of that terrain with one click of the mouse. So why not fortresses?

	21-07-2002 20:44									#16
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In my Struggle for Europe scenario most of land is covered with fortresses and some parts of ocean too. The AI doesn't pillage them (at least i haven't noticed it).

How to create a fortress to ocean square:

1. Change an ocean tile to a land;
2. create a fortress there;
3. change the tile back to sea.

Same about roads/railroads etc.

	22-07-2002 00:54									#17
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It won't be possible to add it as a feature to MapEdit (unless I add full savegame support). When loading a map for a new game all terrain improvements are lost, I'm not sure whether they're lost when using ToT's Import Map... thing though...

But as for adding it straight to a savegame using hex-editing, that shouldn't be too difficult, in principle... Does anybody by any chance know a hex editor that supports regular expressions in the find and replace options? That would make life much easier.

In principle, this fortress information would need to be added to several different portions of the savegame. But in this case (the fortresses surely won't have a graphic?), I think that won't be necessary.

I'll have a try at putting fortresses on all squares of a savegame map.

	22-07-2002 06:56									#18
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Have you tried Dusty's Mapcopy utility? According to the readme, it's possible to copy improvements from one map to another. Thus if you covered a 20x20 section of another map with fortresses, theoretically you could copy this one section to multiple portions (i.e. all) of your Gigamap. His utility is available here:

http://cullivan.com/civ/tools.html

(This might wipe out the existing improvements though - not certain on that aspect)

	22-07-2002 08:14									#19
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Mercator, shall I email you my savegame?

Kull, welcome back! Does mapcopy work on sav. files?

	22-07-2002 08:19									#20
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Yes indeed it does!

(I'm only "back" for a few days - then it's off to defend Civilization from the Barbarians....who could have guessed that my fascination with civ and barbarians would turn out to be job-related!)

	22-07-2002 08:47									#21
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Thanks. It's nice to have you back, even for a few days. And if you haven't already, try building the Great Wall!

	24-07-2002 03:08									#22
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Done!

I created an ad-hoc little program to do it...

In the process, I found a neat little way to manipulate cities:
As you should already know, the Airbase tile improvement is a combination of the Fortress and City "tile improvement" codes. This, by the way, explains some of the (pre-ToT?) airbase bugs, like an airbase acting as road/railroad (just like cities) and having extra food/production (also like cities)...

Anyway, when adding fortresses to all squares, I suddenly got myself a map where all cities had turned into Airbases. And after removing an airbase nothing was left (except the city name). The cities were obviously still there (and accessible via the menus), but not accessible or visible on the map...

Maybe someone can use this idea. I guess this would also make it possible to build a city on that very square again (or adjacent to it), perhaps even multiple times (imagine that, a map with 255 cities all on one square!). That would probably also cause all those city names to appear on top of eachother, making it one big unreadable mess.
Then again, since this would require hex editing anyway (or someone creating a program to do it ), using this fortress trick won't be necessary, since it can all be edited without that just the same.

	24-07-2002 07:39									#23
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That's wonderful. Good work. Are you going to post it on your site? Did you get my file via email? And what do you do to get your cities back?

	24-07-2002 22:16									#24
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quote: Originally posted by Mercator As you should already know, the Airbase tile improvement is a combination of the Fortress and City "tile improvement" codes.

If settler could be allowed to build a fortress in a city then it changes the city to airbase

But yes, can you improve the program so that it recognises the city tiles and doesn't create fortresses there?

Btw, your Mapedit 2 is great!

	25-07-2002 02:46									#25
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Whoa, whoa! The "program" I created was about 10 lines of code... And I only created it because I couldn't find a hex editor that could properly do it, and was sure it wasn't too much work... I had no intention to do anything with it. I might work on it, since there apparently is a demand, but I have no intention to give it any sort of priority.