Incorrect tile info

I just installed Civ2 on Win98 running in VirtualBox. It's been more than a decade, since I last played it.

I noticed that the information you get, when clicking on the tiles, is all messed up.
Take a look at the screenshots attached.

The defense bonus is wrong for all the tiles, so is the production and turns to irrigate.

I never noticed this before. Has it always been like this?
Any explanation?

I'm using vanilla Civ2 with the 2.42 patch.

I have always used classic. I have never seen the erroneous information in your screen shots.

Thanks, that was all I needed to know. Now I can start working on a solution.

I've had the same problem for as long as I can remember.

see here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=352791

The problem seems to be very rare.

Thank you for the input Verrucosus. Nice to know it isn't just me.
Because of that I started digging around in the files and found the one called Get_info.exe in the Pedia folder. It accesses the Civilopedia.

I did a Google search for the file and found this old thread (among others):
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=79187

It has a solution. It's a problem with the Rules.txt file.

I'm glad the problem is solved, but I find it really strange that the Rules.txt file from the 2.42 update has the same errors as the unpatched version.
And why doesn't everyone have this problem?

That's puzzling. When I got no responses back in 2010, I wondered whether Civ2 players visiting this site were simply too familiar with the game to ever look at the terrain entries, but Ali Ardavan's comment confirms that it's just some of us who have the problem. Strange.

Anyway, thank you for that link. I must have missed it when I looked for a solution a while ago.

The get_info.exe has given me trouble when running Civ2 under Windows 7's XP mode. It does not actually crash the game, but at least most of the time, it just gives an obscure error message the first time the civilopedia is called during a game session. I assumed that that's somehow related to XP mode, because I never got those error messages when I had a real XP machine, but maybe it was just choking on a wrongly formated rules.txt. I'm using DOSBox to play classic Civ2 for now, but I'll check next time I use XP mode.

Just speculating here, but I think this is a plausible scenario.
The problem was not present in the early versions of the product. Later on when you are running it on more modern operating systems, some library functions have changed causing this misbehavior. I am still running my civ2 on an old Mac which is about 20 years old.

That sounds plausible. Just out of curiosity, could you please check your Rules.txt file for the empty spaces as explained in the thread from 7EA's last post?

I just checked my rules.txt and there are not always spaces after commas:
Hills, 2,4, 1,0,0, yes

Thanks for checking! That supports your theory that it has to be something in the operating system that explains why only some people get this.

So I just installed Windows 3.11 in DOSBox, just to see what would happen.

I can confirm that the tile values are correct in Windows 3.11.

7EA said:

So I just installed Windows 3.11 in DOSBox, just to see what would happen.

I can confirm that the tile values are correct in Windows 3.11.

Click to expand...

Are they correct before or after you added spaces to the Rules.txt file?

I had the problem under Windows XP back in 2010 as well as under Windows 3.1 in DOSBox on a Windows 7 machine until I added the spaces a few days ago.




Another point of interest is that the classic civilopedia has no apparent problem reading other values (for example the firepower values from the unit table) in the rules.txt file that are preceded immediately by a comma.

I didn't change the Rules.txt, and it is missing the spaces.

I also tried adding the 2.42 update. The values are still correct.

Mysterious. With DOSBox the two of us should have the same "operation system", so the terrain values from the unedited file should either display correctly or not for both of us. I can't think of anything that could explain the different behaviour. Anyway, thank you again for bringing it up and pointing to the solution.