Could, Woulda, Should?

[Zechnophobe]

Just a little thing that I noticed while working on my scenario that is fun for everyone.

You can open a World Builder save in notepad, and change some of the basic information of it, including what leader and civ each player is. What is cool about this for the random person, is it lets us ask "That went well, but what if I'd played a different leader or civ, in that same situation?"

For instance, I'm trying to get a good gauge on whether I like Falamar comapared to Hannah, so here's what I do:

1) Played a game through with Hannah, won on turn 230 with a conquest victory (Yay, go Hannah!)

2) Loaded the initial Auto save for the game.

3) Enter world builder, and immediately save the game as a 'scenario'

4) Open the scenario file in notepad, and replace "LEADER_HANNAH" with "LEADER_FALAMAR". I also make sure to make "ModPath=mods\Fall From Heaven 2" so I can load this as a ffh2 scenario.

5) Double click on the scenario to play it, and choose to play Falamar of the Lanun.

Now I get the exact same map, with the same starting position, but get to play it as Falamar instead of Hannah.

Even more so, however, is that you can also change the CivType=CIVILIZATION_LANUN

to, say
CivType=CIVILIZATION_GRIGORI

to play as the Grigori. Assuming you wanted to play with a real leader, you'd also change LEADER_HANNAH to LEADER_CASSIEL

So if you've ever wondered how well one civ/leader can do compared to another this might be worth a try.

 

[Verdian]

That is pretty neat. I know that sometimes I get great starting locations for civs other than the one I chose.

How did the game with Falamar go?

 

[xienwolf]

But you know the map and the opponents now, so the second round isn't quite on equal footing. Unless you peek at worldbuilder in advance during the first game, but even then you aren't familiar with it, you are just seeing it.

 

[Zechnophobe]

Yeah, so you'd err on the side of 'better'. However if you do worse, that is still rather telling.

Second time with Falamar was pretty amazing, though I employed a different strategy (Building warrior-settler-warrior in the 30 turns it took to research fishing, with Hannah I waited much later to build that first settler).

 

[Kael]

Thats a pretty cool idea. Keep in mind though that you may lose a lot of game information. The Armageddon Counter will be reset to zero, duration will be lost on units, events are reset (so unique ones could trigger again), etc etc.

 

[FireBlaze]

So out of curiosity, when employing this, would the same exact events happen at the same exact time the second time around?

 

[Kael]

So out of curiosity, when employing this, would the same exact events happen at the same exact time the second time around?

Nope, its random. Its only that the thing that marks events as having already occured (to keep unique events form happening twice) will be reset.

 

[Zechnophobe]

Thats a pretty cool idea. Keep in mind though that you may lose a lot of game information. The Armageddon Counter will be reset to zero, duration will be lost on units, events are reset (so unique ones could trigger again), etc etc.

There's a few other quirks too. The fact that your starting units will be those of your initial civ is a slight problem. That is, if the first play through you were Bannor, and second time Elf, your first guys won't have the elf promotion (But will have guardsmen). That is probably the most extreme situation however.

While all of this can be solved with a bit of World Buildering, the idea here was to prevent people from having to muddy their hands with that.

I'm now wondering if I could right a little VB script or something that would let a layman get around this. Might be interesting to do 'choose your own civ' Game of the Months now and then (Assuming we do a GotM at some point).