Bypassing the over link bug

[Oni Ryuu]

When making a large or epic mod you’re going to create too many automated links in the resources civilopedia page. AnthonyBoscia found a technique for dealing with this problem that I’m going to expand upon.

• Try to minimise the number of required resources to 2 for units and 1 for buildings. (The more you max-out the resources, the more auto links you have that you can’t fix)
• Move the resources for units that have one or two down one slot so the first slot in now free. Do the same for buildings.

That’s one less auto link for each unit and building. The resource icons will now have been removed from those units and buildings in their civilopedia pages (but they still require the resources in your game).
You can’t do anything about the icons when a unit has three resources (pictured at the end of the post).

You can just mention the requirements in the civilopedia text but that’s just not the way we do things here.

This is a quick and easy guide for using GIMP on Windows to add the resource icons back into the game. If you don’t already have GIMP, I recommend downloading it for free.

(This template should be saved in a .png format)

1. Place the template (above) and a copy of your small resource icons in an easily accessible folder.
2. Load Gimp
3. Go to ‘File’ and ‘Open…’ the template
4. Go to ‘Image’> ‘Mode’ and confirm that the template is in ‘RGB’ format. (The template should already be set to RGB)
5. Go to ‘File’ and ‘Open as Layers…’ the first required resource file
6. Press the ‘M’ key on your keyboard to enable movement
7. Move the image to the appropriate green box. (The green box guides help you to place 1, 2 or 3 resource images depending on your needs). Repeat this process if you need more than one resource icon
8. Go to ‘File’ and ‘Open as Layers…’ the large image for the desired unit
9. Move the image neatly to the top edge covering most of the magenta section
10. Go to ‘Image’ and select ‘Flatten Image’
11. Go to ‘Image’> ‘Mode’ and select ‘Indexed…’
12. Confirm that ‘Generate optimum palette’ is set to 256 and select ‘Convert’
13. Go to ‘Colors’>’Map’ and select ‘Rearrange Colormap…’. (A window will appear with a bunch of coloured boxes)
14. Identify boxes 254 and 255 and drag-and-drop the lime green and magenta boxes to either of those positions. (It sometimes kicks the colour to the adjacent box so lime green and magenta are in positions253 and 254. Just drag the colour in position 255 to position 253. Lime green and magenta have to be in those last two positions)
15. Press ‘Enter’ on the keyboard to accept
16. Go to ‘File’ and select ‘Export As…’
17. Save over the large unit image that you opened to edit (It should be in a .pcx format)

If you’ve followed the instructions, you should have a civilopedia page that looks like this.