Hello~
First off, let me just say that this mod is great. I felt the original game's tech tree and whatnot ended way too early (unless you were playing with time victory checked, which I generally don't do) and I'd have at least 300+ turns of "future tech." With this mod I feel a generally smooth transition into futuristic techs and projects. Also, there's just something absolutely brilliant about the Assault Mech units. I can't really explain the joy of wiping out an entire civilization using 4 Mech units and nothing else.
Anyhow, I've been playing it on the huge earth 18civs map. But recently I found out about the GEM (Giant Earth Map) and am in love with it's detail and space. I managed to get Thomas' War to play on it, however, every civ starts in a random location and there is still the 18civ limit (and for a map that massive, I feel 24+ is necessary unless you like every empire to be gigantic as hell
)...
I've been giving it a whirl myself to little avail. I simply don't know enough about this sort of thing to make it happen. I've been reading around the forums for a while, hoping to find similar info, but I either missed it, or it's not there. :/
I was wondering if you, tsentom1, (or anyone, really) would be willing to give me any sort of info on how I might take your mod and implement a scenario on the GEM map with fixed starting locations (accurate to location but not necessarily time. i.e. America starting in Washington in 4000 BC is fine) and 24+ civs.
For an easier to read layout:
1) Thomas' War on GEM map. (accomplished)
2) 24 or more Civs.
3) Fixed starting locations.
Thank you to anyone who can shed some light on how to accomplish this.
EDIT: Okay, I was sort of mistaken. I got Thomas' War to play on a "clean" version of the GEM. It has no leader info at all, which explains why everything's random. Loading up the actual GEM with leader info (and thus starting locations) fails. I get a "Could not load" error and my only option is to go back to scenarios.
EDIT2: I messed around with it for quite some time, to little to no avail. I randomly just decided to see what would happen if I copied GEM to a clean mod folder and copied Thomas' War overtop of it and loaded it as a new mod. It worked, to some degree. I get errors here and there, but the placement of civs is correct, I can have 32 (I think?) civs with room for colonies, and it's all with Thomas' War units/structures/etc. The only thing is that I've tested with England and France so far, and as France things went fine. I was able to explore up through Russia and such, and played until turn 200 or so before I decided to try something else. As England, however, whenever I explore near Scotland the game crashes to desktop. I've done it twice now at different turn numbers, but all with my warrior in the same position. That really confuses me... what in the world is up there that causes that? :/
Also, randomly, I'll get "you have been defeated!" before the game ever even starts. I thought removing all the files in the My Documents\civ4\blahblah folder fixed it, as I did that twice and it would load properly, but just now it gave me that error with no files in that folder. So... I'm confused as hell.