Managing Save Game Files

[Skippy]

Hi everyone,

just wondering if anyone had a good strategy for managing save game files.

I am the sort of person who likes to save after every turn, even though there is an auto save feature.

When I went to delete some of my old save games, I couldn't beleive that they take about 1meg or more each! I had something like 400 meg of deletions.

Anyway, the other point is the name of the file. When I want to revert to an old game where I played the Greeks (I often play the Greeks), I can never find which save it is, and get it mixed up with different games where I played the Greeks.

Perhaps someone has some wise words on this topic. Thanks.

 

[TheNiceOne]

It doesn't surprise me that the files are big - since they contain the complete map in addition to all cities, units and stuff.

If you want to keep a few saves of an old game, move them to another (appropritely named) folder so that it's easy to remember which game they actually belong to.
Then, when you want to replay an old game, go to the right folder (with good folder names it should be easy to find) and copy the save file back to the CIV3 savegame folder.

 

[Goodie Hut]

I went through this recently as well and here was my solution.

I probably had somewhere near 100 saved games, many of which had profanity, parenthetically.

Basically I always have my current game saved as "start here" to make it easy to know where to start.

I also have ten saved games titled "war1" through "war10" to help me keep track of how long I have been in a war situation. When I'm done with war, I save as "start here" again and the process repeats itself.

I then have other titles for good but uncompleted games I would like to address in the future. Those are titled "Good XXXXX (civilization) Game#

That about wraps it up, but I still have a few here and there that are titled, "@#$% it you @#$%^&* russians", etc.

 

[Exile_Ian]

Yes there's a couple of things about saving that are annoying - like if I actually change to a different directory to manually save one it would be real friendly if the program offered to save the next one to the same directory as before! You could create sub-folders for each new campaign you want to play (in Explorer ahead of time), but you'd have to remember to switch to it every time you save (which is a pain and easy to overlook).

One thing I do tend to do is change my Civ leader name whenever I start a new game (for instance I've played as the Americans as Kennedy, Nixon, Washington, Lincoln etc.) at least then, the file name is different from my last campaign.

I do clear out my saves frequently though (as they do waste a lot of space), and the few times I've wanted to keep them, I've 'moved' them to zipped folders.

 

[MummyMan]

Think of something in the game that you will remember and name it after that. For instance, in one of my games all the civs were against me so i named it me_vs._world. I also sometimes put an "aa" before my saves or an "ab" to put them at the top of the list.

 

[Rooker]

I'm with TheNiceOne Create some directories with good names. I use dates - something like Russians15-3 for series of savegames saved on the 15th of March.

Also if you keep alot of savegames, use winzip. It gets a pretty good rate about 1/4.

Jeez - I never throw anything away either

 

[Plume]

Being a saving manica, I thought I'd share my 2 cents. My way is kind of an (improved) hybrid of what's on this thread (even though I've been using for quite a while). At the very beginning, save your game in
blabla_4000bc

Then, the next time you save, use "a1". Then, use "a2" and son on until "a9". Then, start re-using "a1", "a2" and so on. I know you're going to say you'll lose savegames that way. But wait,

After you've conquered the americans or built a big wonder, save your game as
blabla_datebc

That way, you only keep major savegames (where something big happened) and you're not flooded by useless intermediate savegames. At the end, name the last one final or something and zip everything (except the a's) in one file (they compress really well).

If you have more than one game at a time, use b1 to b9 and so on. Using only one letter has the obvious advantage of being quick and easy to type, both for saving and loading (did I tell you I'm also a reloading maniac?). I think this method is a good compromise between keeping the important stuff and getting rid of the junk.