I am fooling around with the editor for the game and I can't figure out how to assign specific civilizations to the player starting locations. Does anyone know if this is possible?
Currently, it is not possible with the editor provided with the game to edit the starting location of civilizations. In order to do this you have to download any of the several tools that do this from a .sav file.
CTP, C3MT, and others can do this for you. I personally use C3MT (civ3multitool by Gramphos) since it sets the FOW (Fog of War) and it will find the starting location coordinates for you and write them to a file so you only have to edit the it to add the names and ID numbers for each civ.
Also, whenever I try to run my scenario, the game crashes. Does this have to do with the changing of the rules? Can anyone out there help me? I changed many of the rules ni my scenario, and when I played it, it crashed very soon after I started. I went back to the scenario and restored the default rules and played it again and it worked fine.
Yes, most likely one of the rules you changed caused the game to crash.
One thing to note when playing around with the editor is that it does NO ERROR CHECKING! It does some very rudimentary error checks, but many errors will go by unnoticed.
Example of common mistakes:
- Adding/Renaming units: If you add or rename a unit you must include a folder in the Art\Units\ named exactly the same as the unit. Inside this folder you must place an .ini file that is named after the unit as well, inside this .ini file you must specify the different animations the game will require to show this unit on screen.
-Adding/Deleting Techs: Adding and deleting techs will cause the game to crash when you look at some of the techs in the civilopedia. In a nutshell, the game is hard-coded to deal with 82 tech graphics presently. It will look for these 82 graphics and if there's an 83rd tech, it will be left without a graphic in the civilopedia, causing it to crash. The fix for this is rather nasty in appearance. Basically you have to change the Icon Number assigned to "Writing" which is the last tech (alphabetically) to a number lower than 82, how far you decrease it will depend on how many techs you've added. If you add change it to 81, 2 then it goes to 80, so on. This will mix up every icon for each advance creating a rather annoying effect! The solution for this requires too much work to even describe. Basically alot of file renaming.
-Adding things to the game without a civilopedia reference will usually give you issues.
-Adding wonders/small wonders/improvements without modifying the small_buildings.pcx and buildings_pcx file will usually give you problems as well.
-Adding wonders/small wonders without adding splash effects for them in the pediaicons.txt file or civilopedia references
-Adding additional civilizations and playing them will cause the game to crash, as there are bugs in relation to the foreign advisor which stand unresolved. You may change the name of an already existing civilization though.
-Giving too many attributes to a building might also be an issue, not entirely sure on this one though!
I'm sure there are a few more things that one can do to cause an error in the game, but these are some of the more common I've run across.
But my question is, why have the rules editor in place if you can't change the rules and then play the game. Very frustrating. I would appreciate any help.
Because there are people who can hack their way around these problems and give us the few mods that are going around currently, and once you know what you can/cannot do, you can tweak the game than if we didn't have an editor available.
Much like surgery, it requires a steady hand, preparation and careful premeditation, but if done succesfully, the rewards could be well worth it.
But yeah, ideally we'd all love if the editor did some actual error checking, modified and copied files based on the adding/renaming of units within the bic files.
Anyways, better luck in your modding, and hope some of this has helped with your problems.
If you still have questions, try doing a search for the things you're wondering in particular as there are several threads with answers on them already!
