Need some help making a total conversion.

I've been making a total conversion mod for Civ 2 MGE and stumbled upon a few problems, which I hope some of you might be able to help me with.

First things first. It's a space-galaxy total conversion, somewhat similar to Kobayashi's Star Wars mod or in a long shot to his Star Gate, although instead of planets I use stars of different kinds and other space objects (dwarf stars, novae, supergiants, neutron stars and so on), on a map that resembles a spiral galaxy much like M51 Whirlpool galaxy, with a 3x3 black hole in the middle and satellite galaxies surrounding it, on a 130x250 map.

Problem no 1.
Is there a good way to convert jpg files into set of 4 or even 9 tiles replacing river/mountain/hill types of terrain with continuity? It's something like in the aforementioned Star Gate scenario, where there are planets that take a square composed of 9 tiles on the world map. I've done this with GIMP and a black hole picture but it was a tedious, slow and frustrating experience. Although the final result was very satisfying, I had to literally manually pick every pixel I wanted to cut and put into one tile square in the terrain2.gif. Any way to do this faster/easier?

Problem no 2.
Tech Replacement. I've done a complete switch of all techs, I made a whole tree where each one depends on the previous techs in a logical and cohesive way, beginning with nil, nil techs, ending with future tech, including all the extra U1-U3 and X1-X7.
The problem is, when the game begins and starting techs are given to civilizations, the game doesn't chose from nil techs in rules.txt or any 2nd stage technologies, but assigns them by their original name. So in my case a tech which is around 60-65th on the list is being granted at the beginning since it replaced code of laws. Similarly with all the other base techs. I understand I can fix this by making the beginning techs in my scenario to correspond exactly to the original civ2's starting techs, but this means there's gonna be a revolution in the whole tech tree since I already assigned all the corresponding wonders and city improvements to them. Any other way, other than making the scenario and removing techs via cheat mode?
I would like this game to be playable from the start by choosing custom world and replacing original civ2mge files. I want to be able to choose how many civs I'm gonna play against, which tribe to play, barb level, custom rules etc, and not via the Begin Scenario option in the main menu.
Also it would be wonderful if there was some kinda program that would create a tech tree with desired names and connections and maybe also transform it into ready rules.txt @civilize section.

Problem no 3.
Is there a way to change to which techs the government types are assigned? I can change the tech name alright but if I want to make communism government independent from the "cathedral efectivness' decrese" typical for Com tech then it's impossible. It seems that tech's special options are hardcoded into the game, but what about government prerequisites? Other than that, there's a couple of special features to techs that I would like to switch or remove but can't seem to find a way: navigation causes a drop in trade revenues so in a total conversion I have to either remove the tech completely (I'd rather not do that) or make it somehow connected logically with trade to justify the drop in total conversion world that I'm making. Also Invention causes the huts to stop giving techs which is another thing I'd love to change. Same with nuclear power extending ship range by one. It seriously limits my ability to convert these techs to anything since they're assigned special features I don't know how to edit.
Same issue with techs that provide advanced terrain improvements - railroad, refrigeration, construction and radio.

Problem no 4.
The map that I created is composed of hundreds of 1 tile "islands" (star systems) and there is not a single spot on the entire map that doesn't have at least 1 tile of ocean access (except for mid of the 3x3 black hole but it's going to be impossible to place a city there). The problem is that creating the galaxy's spiral arms caused them to have the same continent number, which also limits trade revenues significantly. Many "pieces" of the galaxy, the arms I mean, are technically land tiles that stretch very far and are often composed of many tiles, not just single ones, connected on the edge without any larger aggregation. However, they all have the same continent number as every other - which is 63. Any idea why this happened? Too many "islands"? Since I'm planning to make at least 3 different trade units and make trading a priority in this game, this is quite an issue.

Other than the above, I've had a couple of smaller issues but these I think I'll be able to fix on my own. I'd greatly appreciate any help that expert scenario makers could provide.

Blasph23 said:

Problem no 1.
Is there a good way to convert jpg files into set of 4 or even 9 tiles replacing river/mountain/hill types of terrain with continuity? It's something like in the aforementioned Star Gate scenario, where there are planets that take a square composed of 9 tiles on the world map. I've done this with GIMP and a black hole picture but it was a tedious, slow and frustrating experience. Although the final result was very satisfying, I had to literally manually pick every pixel I wanted to cut and put into one tile square in the terrain2.gif. Any way to do this faster/easier?

Click to expand...

Seems like Paint make it a little faster.

Blasph23 said:

Other than the above, I've had a couple of smaller issues but these I think I'll be able to fix on my own. I'd greatly appreciate any help that expert scenario makers could provide.

Click to expand...

ooops. Sorry from the newbee

Paint scews up my color palette in all those bmp or gif files so it's out of the questions. Plus GIMP does everything that paint does and much more.

1. It took me about 10 minutes to come up with the following in Paint Shop Pro. I imagine it would take considerably less time the second time around.

1. Picked the first image from a Google search of 'planet':
   
2. Rescaled the image to fit 3 x 3 tiles, ie, a 190 x 96-pixel diamond. Cropped the excess.
3. Created a new image. Built a 9-tile diamond by pasting smaller diamonds together from one of the other graphics files. Cropped the image to 190 x 96 pixels, selected the diamond (magic wand or macro; I use the latter) and inverted the selection. I use smooth grids, as described by Mercator.
4. Copied and pasted this selection on the original image:
   
5. Pasted 9 smaller diamonds over the image above, each diamond in a separate layer. That allows me to toggle visibility with a single click so that diamond-shaped sections of the underlying image can be easily hidden or revealed. Then it's a very simple task to select individual diamonds and copy merged:
   
6. Pasted each of the 9 smaller diamonds into terrain2.bmp:
   
7. Here's what it looks like in ToT with some of Fairline's excellent Star Wars units. Note that because I use ToT, I'm not restricted to the 8-bit palette, which is, in fact, really only 192 colours.
   

2. I'm pretty sure the starting techs are hard-coded: the number is determined by the quality of the starting position, but the selection pool is fixed. There are people in the strategy forum who could answer this question better than I.

3. Tech properties are hard-coded, including those that unlock government types. Here's the list for FW/MGE.

4. The game allows up to 64 land mass indices. Excess land masses will be assigned an index of 63. Not much you can do about that save reducing the number of land masses. New continents added using Change Terrain in the Cheat menu, instead of the map editor, will also receive a land mass index of 63. If that's the case, your best bet would be to save the map from the SAV file and start over. It's either that or hex editing, and I'm not even going to go there - especially for MGE. In ToT you can export maps from within the game, but I'm not sure about MGE; I think you may need Mercator's MapEdit.

Very nice guide, thanks a lot Catfish. I'm gonna play with those graphics soon. I thought all those techs & other stuff was hard-coded, just wasn't sure. Ah well, I'm gonna have to rethink some of the tech connections and prequisites. I still have the .mp map file so I might as well modify that. I haven't done any city/unit placement yet so technically I'm not gonna lose any progress if I change the base map. I think I have an idea as to how to reintroduce the continents' numbers, now that you told me how this works. Thanks again for help, this solves a couple of variables

I stumbled into another problem. In my total conversion I'd like to keep barbarians and be able to play with them from the beginning.
Normally I play with villages only as barb level but I'm aware of what happens on raging hordes or barb wrath. The problem is, since I'm going to replace all units, some of the land units might turn out to change into air or sea and vice versa, more or less powerful that the original. I wouldn't want to replace horsemen with a super star destroyer type of unit and spawn nine of them in a hut or change musketeers into Raging Bloodthirsty Necro Mutant and then face a hundred of them randomly spawning around.

Is there a way to tell the game through some *.txt files which units are meant for barbs and which are not?

I suspect it's not possible and the game simply knows which line in rules.txt is supposed to contain the unit parameters and just spawns whatever unit corresponds to that line in my scenario's rules.txt. Am I correct?

No to the first question, yes to the second, but you can influence the type of barbarians with technologies. William Keenan examined barbarian activity in his Barbarian Paper. The latest version is normally found on the Cradle of Civilization site, but it's currently down. The Scenario League site has a slightly older version, but it's been down for nearly a month. The Apolyton admins can't take a trick. I'll attach an offline version of the CoC page.

Yes, from what I understand certain techs trigger barb types, probably gunpowder, machine tools, conscription and maybe magnetism. Anyway the thing is in my conversion I'm going to let all civs start from the scratch so it will be necessary to go through the entire tech tree anyway. Well, I suppose I could just make a scenario and set some things permanently rather than leave them to the game's randomity.
Thanks anyway, the attachment you provided might be extremely useful if or when I decide to make a scenario out of it anyway.

Can't do much about the starting techs, but there's nothing to stop you from tinkering with the rest of the tree. It should make little difference whether you're making a mod or a scenario.

Problem no 6.

There are tech descriptions in describe.txt. Now, I would like to add descriptions to the user defined techs. So I added the proper index, 89 which corresponds to user defined tech 1, but the description doesnt show in civiliopedia. It says instead:

@IMPROVEMENT_DESCRIPTIONSNONE

I'm 100% sure I got the syntax right, I checked a few times. I replaced the "User Def Tech 1" string with a new name, also replaced the name in rules.txt.
If I don't add the @@Tech Description, after @@University which is the last 88th indexed tech, then the Description button in civiliopedia is inactive. When I added a description, the button was active but instead of displaying the description, it shows the above. I've seen this done in other scenarios, any idea what I'm doing wrong?

EDIT. Ok I think I figured this out. Just had to add one more @@ and the game accepted that as the description. No idea why though, but it doesn't matter.

Prob. no 7.

It seems the game decides on starting positions of human/comp players more or less randomly, perhaps with some additional conditions, but I'm not sure.
I wonder if it's possible to tell the game how to place civilizations, other than fixing their positions in editor?

It's a serious matter because if some civ starts in a lone star system far away from other stars versus a civ that gets a position in the galactic core, the potential for growth will be extremely different in each case. I'd like to avoid that and let all civs start with roughly the same capacity for expansion.

Prob. no 8.

I have a question about in-game date. I noticed that AI tends to change its behavior around 1000 AD in a normal game. Around that time, it seems to suddenly set alliances between AI civs against my civ. Is that year some sort of a trigger? It happens when my civ is supreme and reputation is spotless, usually when I'm in the lead tech-wise. Not sure about other conditions. Any idea what that might be related to? I have noticed that happens irrespectively of chosen human civilization, map type or size.

I reckon you've got more chance of getting that question answered in the General or Strategy sub-forums.