alt_rules.txt

[dledgard]

alt_rules.txt
I found some shortcomings in Civilization II so wrote my own rules.txt. This version has:
- 1 food per settler for Communism and above, to make Communism superior to Monarchy in every way. It is also historically realistic reflecting five year plans, forced lobour and gulags. Unfortunatly other Governments also benefit, this cann't be helped due to how rules.txt is set up. So as soon as you build the Statue of Liberty you can switch to Communism. Remember you get veteran diplomats and spies which subvert cities at -50% cost.
- Industrial Shipbuilding requires Magnetism and Industrialization. Prevents transports appearing before magnetism and galleons and makes the game a little more difficult.
- Biology requires Magnetism (for exploring the world and finding new species) and Medicine. Allows Darwin's Voyage which really has nothing to do with the Railway. Also adds biology to the sciences: Chemistry and Physics not to mention Mathematics and English (Alphabet, Writing and Literacy). This also prevents the problem of halving to build the Eiffel Tower, Darwin's Vogage and Women's Sufferage (which the A.I. always goes for) all at once.
- All ancient units have +1 attack so cities actually fall. also makes horsemen more useful.
- Trade and Naval units have x2 speed to make trading easier (less Caravans moving at the same time), exploration faster and ships more useful and realistic. Battleships really become handy.
-All powers are expansionist meaning they build more cities to fill up the map thus preventing you to having to build endless cities and making them more powerful.
-Also I like to research Medicine and Refrigeration inmediately they appear to make the game more difficult and humane i.e. better health.

 

[yoshi]

- Communism: if you give it 1 food it then has an advantage over Democracy.
- Industrial Shipbuilding: Where the tech tree is concerned, the epic game is ridiculous IMO...but this tech does the job I suppose.
- Biology requires Magnetism: Yeah, I never understood why Darwin's Voyage was available with RR considering he made his voyage to the Galapagos about half a century BEFORE the application of the steam-engine to rail-based transport. Good.
- All ancient units have +1 attack: historically, cities were extremely difficult to capture and siege tactics only became truely effective with the Romans. PErhaps make Catapults more effective but I'd leave the rest the same so it's harder to take over the world in the early game. Again, Cavalary tactics were not made effective until the Romans and even then more as a flanking tactic to slaughter what was left of the enemy after dealing with the (initially) invincible Roman Legions. I'd leave Horsemen the same otherwise they will conflict with the infantry role. (The big change in cavalry effectiveness was later on when mounted knights came onto the scene.)
- Trade and Naval units have x2 speed: Making Trade faster is good but if you make ships too fast, they'll be very difficult to intercept as ZoC doesn't apply to them.
- All powers are expansionist: only if they are far apart (i.e. large map), otherwise you will have the AI settling everything before you get a chance to settle just a few cities--at higher difficulty levels.
- Medicine and Refrigeration:


[If you're not going to use Events and just want to make for a better epic game, I suggest you get Civ3 (with Conquests v.1.29 XP/patch--very important) where you get more features overall and you can mod things like buildings that are only buildable by certain governments.]

 

[Broken_Erika]

Hey! stop trying to assimilate the civ2 scenario creators

 

[yoshi]

There are plenty of reasons to use Civ2 (esp. if that source code gets released and the things get fixed that need to get fixed) but the vanilla game definitely isn't one of them. Since this isn't a scen but rather a basic rules change to make the vanilla game better, it makes more sense to go with Civ3 that has a way better vanilla game (and fewer hard-coded features)...the scens are another matter. (Also, Civ2 can run on anything and you can play it an switch to any other windows-base application without a fuss...Civ3, not so much.)