Where to buy the chinese version?

[xo303]

OK, this is my first post here, but I've been lurking for quite a while now. Been playing Civ in the glorious Amiga days in Germany, then moved to Hong Kong in 1997 and just recently re-discovered it for the PC. I have Civ III Gold and Conquests, both US versions. My wife is chinese, and although we live in Hong Kong it is impossible to find both games with chinese characters. Anything would do: simplified, traditional, or Big-5 characters. Conquests is available over oder at yesasia.com, but as it is just an add-on, it is quite useless. I've tried to contact Atari Taiwan (the official publishers), but the game is not produced anymore in chinese. eBay Taiwan and Hong Kong did not throw up any results either.

My questions are:
- Anyone with the chinese version of Civ III or Gold, if you did buy it online, where so. Or, if you live in Hong Kong, can you direct me to a local shop?
- In case I have no luck, is it possible to install the chinese Conquests over an american Civ III/Gold version, or wouldthis result in a complete crash or even mixed version of both languages?
- An easier solution, is there maybe a language patch to simply replace any text files in the folders to change the display language?
- If nothing else helps, is it possible to translate the text files myself maybe? This would be the last option of course considering the amount of civilopaedia entries.

Thanks for any input - although my wife can read/speak/write english, it is more comfortable to understand the complexity if played in her native language, and apart from that I'd also like to introduce the game to her friends and colleagues which are not so firm in english.

And lastly I'd like to thank you for this amazingly great and resourceful site!

 

[starrider]

Did you try ebay? Finding a seller who will ship to hong kong might be difficult...but worth a shot.

 

[davidcrazy]

xo303, i have seen several websites with some kind of 'crack' software (maybe illeagal add-on) that can change all the english characters into chinese.
just use good and search for civ3 and 'han hua' (i guess you know what Han Hua means since your wife is a chinese and you can find those websites.

 

[xo303]

@starrider
Yes, I've tried both eBay Taiwan and Hong Kong, but there were no results so far (only for english language versions).

@davidcrazy
Guess that'll be the only way left to choose. I've emailed fireaxis yesterday and await their reply first, in case they can still name me a source, because a language file could be problemativ concerning the different patches available.

Thanks for your help guys!

 

[Blind Ryan]

In The Sims, I had to go into the registry and tweak the language settings but I don't know if civ3 would have that option.

 

[laconic]

I think the C3 Chinese Agent auth this web to do Chinese version translate.

http://www.kuankuan.com/

 

[xo303]

@blind ryan
Can you tell me more about that?

@laconic
That site looks very interesting, thanks alot!! I can't read chinese myself but my wife surely can make things out. Looks like those are all indeed authorized language patches, I hope it will solve the problem.

 

[laconic]

My friends who bought C3 in China told me about that site. I am still using Eng version although I can read Chinese by myself. ^_^

 

[xo303]

A quick update: I found the chinese version packed with PTW and Conquests in a local shop. One problem solved. Quite cheap also, HKD 390 which is roughly US$ 50 for the whole lot. So I had to uninstall my own english versions (I know you can run 2 different Civs on one PC but I couldn't find the topic about it here).

Anyway. Civ III is 1.027 and Conquests is 1.00 with included patch option to 1.22. So I installed Civ III. Nothing happens, screen just stays black. Installed Conquests, and everything works fine, except the fonts! It is supposed to be the chinese version, but the fonts look scrambled. To give you a better understanding of this, the characters look like if you are trying to access a japanese website but your browser's encoding is set to let's say Western European. You will then only see random characters or even question marks. If you change it (eg in Internet Explorer) under View > Encoding to Japanese, the website will be displayed correctly. Now obviously this cannot be done in Civ or Conquests. I had a look into the subfolders and in-game .txt files, and even those are scrambled already. I've played around with Windows Regional and Language settings, but to no avail. I uninstalled and re-installed the whole lot, but still no luck.

If anyone here has a clue what is going on, please please let me know! I finally found all chinese versions, they work fine, graphics, sounds etc, but completely unplayable (for my wife) due to the scrambled fonts. If there are some special options either in Windows or Civ itself to be adjusted, please let me know. There were no special instructions in the manual or readme files that came with the games.

FYI, I am running Windows XP Pro Corp SP1 w/ all latest updates and Asian font support. XP itself is the US version.

Thanks alot!

 

[Garbarsardar.jr]

I think you have to use Chinese XP because you have to be able to write and not only read chinese characters(rename city etc) . I hope I'm wrong.

 

[xo303]

Using the regional and language settings together w/ the asian font pack, writing under XP, Office (Word, Excel, etc) in chinese is no problem. My wife uses that for her work for example. Also we have some chinese games installed which work without problem. I'v even tried using the special Taiwanese font pack instead of the regular Big-5 or traditional chinese char set as the game is licensed and translated by Atari Taiwan, but to no avail. Guess I'll have to contact firaxis about that, but I'll do one last try on one of the office PCs which is running XP Pro Corp SP1 in chinese (which I will add as overtime work ).

Thanks for your help so far, if anyone knows more, welcome to share with me.

 

[davidcrazy]

cannot you teach your wife english, xo303?
i'm very sure that there're a lot of chinese players out there enjoying their chinese version civ. i don't know why those things you found in kuankuan didn't work for yours.
maybe you can try this one: http://www.civclub.net/down_list.asp?c_id=3&s_id=3
it's written in chinese and so u may need your wife's help in reading it.
i remember one of the initial motive for me to play civilization was to learn english. lol. though i found a lot of english in civ3 were not really good english. i guess because only a few civ speak good english such as england and america.

 

[laconic]

xo303

1. install CIV3 under an English name folder not Chinese
2. copy \Conquests\LSANS.TTF to \WINDOWS\Fonts (maybe other fonts, just try)

 

[xo303]

Ok everyone, the issue has been solved. Indeed it only worked under chinese XP. Yesterday my wife started her very first game (as the Chinese of course, sigh) with me as the advisor , and from now on, I am also forced to play the chinese version. No big problem except when it comes to trading. I absolutely don't know what these guys want to offer me for 25 gpt Luckily the manual is kinda bilingual, but I rather dig up the thread where someone explains how to install 2 versions of Civ on one PC. So my wife moved her warrior into arctic tiles and seriously asked me if he is cold there....

We are playing huge map Pangea 15 civs, Chieftain of course, Barbs sedentiary, AI least aggressive. Let's see where she will end up.

On a sidenote, two issues remain:

The graphics in the Science advisor screen (tech tree) are a bit messed up and the Unit upkeep costs/shields needed values are missing in the civilopedia entries. Another text missing, the Histograph of the world. Where the pop-up ususally says "The richest nations of the world, the most advanced" etc, only the civs are displayed, but not the trait. I'll look into that, maybe the .txt file did not install correctly. It's fully playable though

2nd issue, after upgrading Conquests from 1.00 to 1.22, it won't start because the error message to please insert the Conquests CD into the drive continuesly pops up. So we went back to v1.00. Again, it's a minor issue and I'll check that later also.

@davidcrazy
Excellent link, thanks alot! It looks like the chinese counterpart to civfanatics.com, they even have a banner there linking this site. Didn't have a chance yet to get a translation, but might that be the offiicial patches in chinese, along with mods, a forum and help files? Damn you admins could have redirected me there directly

Overall, everything else works fine so far. I'd like to thank all of you again for helping with this issue! I'll be off to germany tomorrow for 3 weeks, if there are problems installing that version, I'll be back