Ocean: Old School

This post is not in any way meant to disparage Zappara's incredible work that he has shared with us.

Some of us, however, prefer that early water units be limited to the coastal waters. I am one of those people. I have found out how to change the appropriate files to make that happen, which I will now share with you.

WARNING: Backup ANY files you change prior to changing them so that you don't have to completely reinstall RoM if you screw it up.

The important file that you will be changing is in the \Beyond the Sword\Assets\XML\Units folder. The file is called Civ4UnitInfos.xml Open it with Notepad, as Notepad doesn't leave any hidden characters in the file. Hit <Ctrl+F> and type in "galley".

Close the search window and then scroll down until you see the following line:



After you see that line, highlight that entire text, and replace it with this text:



This removed the ability for the galley to travel into ocean squares in my game. The War Galley and the Trireme are listed right below the Galley, so you can edit them in exactly the same fashion if that is what you'd like to do.

I'm up way past my bedtime. I'm off to sleep now.

For the record, I'm not a modder or programmer. I don't think this will alter anything else in game, but I don't guarantee it. So far it was worked well with mine.

You know I made a modmod that does that a while ago, the Seafaring Modmod, right? It's modular, so it doesn't alter the original game files either.

Is yours updated for 2.8, Afforess?

Iceciro said:

Is yours updated for 2.8, Afforess?

Click to expand...

That individual modmod works with 2.8 yes.

I knew that you made one, Afforess, but I didn't know if it worked with the latest version of RoM. It was a learning experience for me regardless, which has inspired me with a feeling of "if I don't like this, I'll change it" or "If I think this should be in the mod, I'll add it".

However your modmod is probably a safer way for most to go.

Everyone click on Afforess's sig to accomplish my above goal, unless you really want to get into messing with the .xml files and take a chance on messing them up.

It probably would never go anywhere, but last night I dreamed that I made a Fallout 3 mod for Civ 4. Super Mutant Barbarians would rock.

BTW, does your seafaring mod remove the storms? Otherwise I'm still on the trail of that goal.

Crusis said:

BTW, does your seafaring mod remove the storms? Otherwise I'm still on the trail of that goal.

Click to expand...

No. It is much more difficult to do that.

Drat. Ok, I'll see if I can figure it out. Life's not as fun when others haven't done my work for me.

Crusis said:

Drat. Ok, I'll see if I can figure it out. Life's not as fun when others haven't done my work for me.

Click to expand...

It's more difficult because it's a feature, you need to disable that, and because it gets spawned in some random events, edit those too.

But I'm not really invested, I like the storms. It adds realism.

Only thing that bugs me about the storms is that they all disappear medieval times.

Ok, I've removed the storms in my game.

Edit the XML file Civ4FeatureInfos.xml and search for "FEATURE_STORM"

Look for this line:



Set the value to -1 as you see here. I also set these lines as follows, not sure how important this is. This line is the likelihood that a feature will disappear in any particular turn. I set it ridiculously high, and if I missed something and a storm did appear, it would be a one term phenomenon.



The other line I changed is this:



Again, if I missed something and a storm does appear, it should be unable to grow and then be eliminated by the disappearance value.

I'll let you know later if this seems to speed up my turns.

On my system, at least, this seems to have boosted performance by a quite noticeable margin. That's just my perception, of course, but in the end, that's what counts.

OK, so I could reduce the storm frequency by setting <iAppearance> low (it's set to 300 in 2.8), and possibly increasing <iDisappearance> (1300 in 2.8) and reducing <iGrowth> (set to 500 in 2.8).

Where can I find a description of what these numbers signify?

RobO said:

OK, so I could reduce the storm frequency by setting <iAppearance> low (it's set to 300 in 2.8), and possibly increasing <iDisappearance> (1300 in 2.8) and reducing <iGrowth> (set to 500 in 2.8).

Where can I find a description of what these numbers signify?

Click to expand...

iAppearance is the chance (out of either 10000 or 1000, i forget)that feature can spawn on any tile at any turn

iDisappearance is the chance (again out of either 10000 or 1000) that feature will despawn at the end of any turn.

iGrowth is the chance (chances affected by number of surrounding tiles with this feature as well, out of 10000 and unable to spawn if an improvement or city is on that tile and a reduced chance if there's a road)either a forest or jungle will grow by 1 tile

Thanks. I think I'll try iAppearance unchanged, iDisappearance = 5000 and iGrowth = 100.

I can do that in my existing game without problems, right? It's just an xml file edit.

Edit: Those settings cleared all storms off the map after a few turns. So the good news is that it works
But I'll have to tune them down. I'll try iDisappearance = 2500 and iGrowth = 200.

Civ Fuehrer said:

iAppearance is the chance (out of either 10000 or 1000, i forget)that feature can spawn on any tile at any turn

iDisappearance is the chance (again out of either 10000 or 1000) that feature will despawn at the end of any turn.

iGrowth is the chance (chances affected by number of surrounding tiles with this feature as well, out of 10000 and unable to spawn if an improvement or city is on that tile and a reduced chance if there's a road)either a forest or jungle will grow by 1 tile

Click to expand...

iAppearance only affects when map is being created. It doesn't spawn them during the game. iGrowth 0 would effectively disable storms as new wouldn't be spawned mid-game (except from random events). RoM 2.7 had iGrowth 400.