Interesting play variant

[SlowThinker]

The suggestions that were posted here are related mainly to scenario building.
But Civ2 has also many serious bugs that corrupt the gameplay.

The most serious bug is the "black hat bug":
In Civ2 as you build more and more cities, you get more and more hapiness problems. But after one point (12 cities in deity with unchanged rules.txt) situation reverts (because of the black hat bug): new cities help you solve the happiness problems.
This causes a simple strategy where you build many small cities is better than large cities with improvements.

(Next I will mark
VU - black hat, very unhappy people
U - read hat, unhappy people
C - content people
H - happy people)
It was supposed that luxuries will convert VU people to U, then U to C, then C to to H.
The black hat bug is that VU are converted directly to H.
(More happiness quirk... - the happiness summary post)

 

[ElephantU]

A couple I'd throw in:
- The GoTo function breaking down across the DateLine.
- The Dye/Copper bug throwing off the Supply/Demand calculations.

If you're going to post patched executables they need to be clearly labeled as to what version and what is patched for each. Ideally one master would have all the patches together, and there would be versions for Classic, MGE, FW and ToT. I remember someone "fixing" the Dye/Copper bug once on Apolyton, but that was just a Classic version which left the majority of players using MGE out.

 

[Ali Ardavan]

The most serious bug is the "black hat bug":
(Next I will mark
VU - black hat, very unhappy people
U - read hat, unhappy people
C - content people
H - happy people)
It was supposed that luxuries will convert VU people to U, then U to C, then C to to H.
The black hat bug is that VU are converted directly to H.

I wonder if that is really a bug. It could be intentional. Improvements such as temple do work like you suggest (UV -> U), it is luxuries that turn UV to H directly. To me that makes sense; as in the real world you can make destitute people happy with just a little bit of spending.

 

[Fairline]

This is great to see, Skyer.

There is a huge wish-list of things that would be nice to have in civ2, so brace yourself now that Mercator has publicised your work on the Scenario League forum

One of the most important of these IMHO: Is it possible to increase the number of civs to 8 or more? If so, that would be invaluable to scenario designers.

 

[The Judge]

This is great to see, Skyer.

There is a huge wish-list of things that would be nice to have in civ2, so brace yourself now that Mercator has publicised your work on the Scenario League forum

One of the most important of these IMHO: Is it possible to increase the number of civs to 8 or more? If so, that would be invaluable to scenario designers.

Agreed, if you could somehow find a way to increase the number of civs in a game you would surely have created the Civ2 Holy Grail.

 

[SlowThinker]

I wonder if that is really a bug. It could be intentional. Improvements such as temple do work like you suggest (UV -> U), it is luxuries that turn UV to H directly. To me that makes sense; as in the real world you can make destitute people happy with just a little bit of spending.

I understand your point, but I doubt that it was intended ... it is generally known they intended to avoid ICS. They built in the effect of unhappiness due number of cities, so it would be strange they would suppress this function simultaneously.

Anyway the bug/the intent adds a lot of micromanagement, complicates management of happiness, damages balance between growth by large cities / many cities, forces players of MP to limit number of cities to their house rules... etc. It would be nice to have a version of Civ2 without it.até pole

 

[Skyer]

Here is the file, where I guess, I removed the units number limit and cities number limit.

I said "I guess", because I didn't test it.

 

[Skyer]

Money limit removed. But in fact - after 2 147 483 647 Gold your cash drops.

 

[#1 Person]

Skyer! How do you do this?! Cause I would want to make some of these versions for regular Civ2, if possible.

This sort of developement would refresh my zeal for Civ2ing

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

I hope the stuff you're using/doing to make this all happen is legal...

Anyhoo, my own wishlist:

1. for the AI to start using aircraft carriers.
2. To get rid of that annoying "long unit move" thingy whenever I have my civilization on autopilot.
3. for automated settlers to NOT build cities (this happens when I make an air unit a settler type unit with 42 moves in a turn)
4. An auto-research mechanism that has the game preselect a certain advance when you want to research a far-off advance (test of time already does this).

and I think there may be more. I'm gonna need to search the deepest parts of my own brain for this one

Right now, though, I'm fixated on playing Test of Time, which is a bit superior to MGE in some respects (but ToT still has those darned limits on how many units and cities one can have )

 

[Eivind IV]

Skyer, tell me, are you the new Messias?

It actually works this over the max amount of cities! This is absolutely revolutionary! I can't tell you how much this is apreciated!

More requests:

* Flying spies
* Flying freights
* flying/land based transporters

Not to menion opening more playable civs!

If you could crack this you'd be as big as Sid Meier!

 

[Peregrine]

BY FAR, the MOST IMPORTANT aspect of the game to change is the 7 CIV LIMIT.

If you can change this, it would easily be the most useful thing to the scenario-building community ever.

Dozens of historical situations would then become viable that have not been before simply because of the multitude of disparate kingdoms, empires, sultanates, etc.

Do this, and you will be worshipped as a god.

(I estimate that at least 15 different civs simultaneously playable would be just fine.)

 

[PlutonianEmpire]

Another request: make the AI actually use nukes against each other, not just against the human player(s). The only time I've EVER seen the ai nuke each other is in the WW79 scenario; and in normal games, ONLY when I cheat and switch sides just to launch a german nuke against an american city while i'm SUPPOSED to be playing as the indians (for example, of course )

 

[CurtSibling]

Can the unit/city limit removal be done for ToT also?

I can send Skyer the EXE if he contacts me.

 

[Catfish]

I removed the units number limit and cities number limit.

In addition to removing the city limit, are you also changing the data type for the city ID numbers? These are normally stored as a single byte. Unless this is changed, creating more than 255 cities will cause some real problems with things like trade and units' home cities.

Can the unit/city limit removal be done for ToT also?

There was another guy doing a bit of assembly coding on the Civ2 executable in this thread, although the amount of attention he received was close to zilch. I contacted him (approx. 4 weeks ago) about performing the same CPU fix for ToT. He graciously agreed. However, every time I tried to send him the game files (a Lite version of ToT 1.1, weighing in around 7Mb), I received returned mail. I sent him another e-mail regarding the problem, but haven't heard back. If anyone else wants to give it a shot, go for it.

Man, this thread's like a pack of seagulls fighting over a chip. Good luck, Skyer.

 

[The Person]

Well, what I'd like to see is bigmaps, more civs in each game, bigger city limit and bigger unit limit. That'll keep me satisfied until I have played it a bit.

 

[Skyer]

Attach a saved game(MGE) with 255 cities and a settler, ready to build 256th one So I can test it.

 

[Eivind IV]

How will this affect the trading? It has been afirmed that every unit produced in a post 255 city will get its unit homed from a pre 255 city.

 

[Skyer]

Thats why I am asking the save for testing

 

[biru biru]

Mercator, I followed you here from Apolyton. Skyer, this is very cool. Hard-core players (in addition to the scenario builders here) may have a wish list. For example, re-homing of caravans from inside cities might be banned, there are some strange results to mining hills in x2 production games, did someone mention strange effects of airfields? Good luck, and keep it well-intentioned.