First edited Civ3, first problems

[str]

Hi,

I am new to this forum even though I have been reading through it for some time. Most recently, I tried the first modifications to my standard Civ3 (upgrade swordsman to med.Infantry and guerilla, added the Arabs including their UU Ansar Warrior). To wrap up, it worked almost fine. I actually finished the game (played and won as the Arabs). The unit graphics were o.k., Civilopedia entries were fine incl. the graphics. The Arab Leaderhead appears correctly in the new game selection and the victory screen.
But I observed some problems which might be solved with the help of this forum.
1. Going to the Foreign advisor crashes the game immediately. the remaining advisors are o.k.
2.Even the upgrade fields are checked in the editor for the Ansar warrior, I can produce both Ansar warriors (replaces the knight) and Cavalry after getting Military Tradition. I placed the UU between Knight and Rider in the editor's upgrade sequence. While the correct upgrade information appears in the Civilopedia entries for swordsman and Med Infantry, it does not show up for the Ansar warrior.
3. The icon field for each of the new units is empty in the city governor screen.

Any idea what I could have done wrong or what is missing?

For the records:
OS X 10.2.8.
Civ 1.21g
CivEdit 1.32.1

Thanks.

 

[n8mac]

Well, according to your post you are trying to play GOTM 23 indicated by the civ Arabs. Games created in civ3 only cannot play any other civs not originally given unless the game was already created like GOTM games.

If this is true then your plobem would be 1.21. You need to upgrade to version 1.29 to play these games. I would recommend doing this custom game or not. 1.29 is in a thread some where here in the Mac section.

n8mac

 

[str]

Thanks for your reply, n8mac.

You are right the configuration is similar to GOTM 23. But I just wanted to play around with the editor, adding units and civilizations and see how it works. As mentioned I could finish the whole game and I would rate the success of this modification to be around 90%. The missing 10% is the problem with the foreign advisor (by the way, I reloaded some saves from this game and observed that the foreign advisor crashes only in the ancient and modern times. In middle and industrial times all leaderheads are displayed correctly, only mine (the Arabian) does not show up, just a pink-purple circle). The remaining minor problem with the Ansars and Cavalry in parallel did not prevent a functioning game. The upgrades Horseman/Ansar/Cavalry works well.

Do you think these problems disappear with 1.29? I played with 1.21 because the editor does not like 1.29 and I wanted to check the modified version first with 1.21 and not to damage my 1.29 version.

 

[AlanH]

I'm not any kind of expert on the editor, but here are some suggestions based on my very limited limited knowledge:

1. It sounds as if you may have an error in your pediaicons.txt or diplomacy.txt file for the Arabs in the ages that fail. Spelling? Case? File names not included in all ages? Also, make sure you are using a text editor that doesn't use Mac OS line endings. You need DOS line endings - CR/LF. My modified TextEdit will do this for you on OS X (see sig link), or you can use BBEdit.

2. Ansars and Cavalry *should* both be build options for the Arabs once they reach MT. Unlike standard units, UUs are not made obsolete once they become upgradeable.

I'm not sure why the upgrade path is missing in the Civilopedia, perhaps the 'pedia software is missing it for some obscure reason when it scans the upgrade sequence. Does the upgrade option from Ansar to Cavalry show up correctly? Maybe you could try inserting the Ansar at different points in the upgrade chain? Theoretically it could go anywhere in the chain from after Knight to after War Elephant. BTW, I assume you have made the Knight upavailable to the Arabs.

I assume the standard unit has to be first in the upgrade sequence, and that determines that it becomes obsolete, as there is no other clue in the editor data. This seems to hold good for all UUs except the Panzer, which is not in an upgrade path after the Tank. Hmmm ... I wonder if Germany can still build Panzers after Modern Armour is available.

3. The city screen must be failing to find the icons for the new units. I seem to recall some problems with the icon number field in the unit editor. Check that this is correct - try pointing it at another unit's icon number to see if the numbers for existing units correspond with what you expect. As they show up OK in the Civilopedia, I guess you have the correct icon file names in the pediaicons.txt file. Are you sure you are using the latest version of the editor?

 

[str]

2. Ansars and Cavalry *should* both be build options for the Arabs once they reach MT. Unlike standard units, UUs are not made obsolete once they become upgradeable.

Oh, thats new for me. Thanks for the update. Makes sense.

It seems there might be a problem with pointing at the correct icon numbers in the editor. It works fine for the standard units/icons. But assigning an icon to a new unit does not work. I could not even find a systematic behaviour yet.

I am quite sure that I have the most recent editor, but I try to reinstall it. Maybe it helps.

By the way, does anybody know what files exactly are used for the player's leaderhead in the foreign advisor screen?

 

[AlanH]

I'm not sure, but the most likely candidate is the one in Art/leaderheads that has no suffix. For example, there are 10 leaderhead .pcx files for Alexander of Greece, with names beginnining with "AL". AL.pcx is likely to be the one you are looking for, as the others are used in the victory parades for various victory/defeat conditions.

It would be easy to check. Try swapping the names of two of these leaderhead files over in that folder and see if that swaps their pictures in the F4 screen.

 

[str]

Hi again,

I just want to follow up. Almost all of my problems disappeared when playing my edited version with the 1.29 patch. Foreign advisor screen does not crash any more, upgrade information in the civilopedia entry works fine, icons are displayed correctly. It seems that the editor was not the main source for the troubles but the 1.21. Civ3 version.