News: GOTM141 Celts - Pre-game discussion

[templar_x]

i was not bothered by the changed movement at all, but found it interesting. actually i find it better that way, especially more realistic if you compare early land movement speed compared to sea movement speed. in civ4 land units improve their speed on roads with later techs, which i find is a good idea.
t_x

 

[Lanzelot]

@Lanzelot
With respect to obtaining the missing .exe file(s), simply downloading the PTW 1.27 patch from CFC would not work, would it -- since this file was (presumably) designed for use with a CD-installed version of the game?

I do not own the Steam edition, but let me add those points I know for fact and those which are speculation but very likely true.

Facts:

• Each of the three Civ3 games (Vanilla, PtW and C3C) consists basically of three parts: an executable (containing some hard-coded/un-modifiable rules), a bic/bix/biq file with modifiable rules and artwork for the base game and the pre-installed scenarios.
• The executable for Vanilla is ...\Civ3Complete\Civilization3.exe
• The executable for PtW is ...\Civ3Complete\Civ3PtW\Civilization3X.exe
• The executable for C3C is ...\Civ3Complete\Conquests\Civ3Conquests.exe
• The C3C executable is able to open .sav files of the previous versions, but it will play them with the C3C rules, so it will e.g. use the C3C corruption model and the changed properties of leaders and armies. This will make a GOTM you played with the C3C executable un-eligible for submission! (It's impossible to make a fair comparison of your game with one played with the correct PtW executable, because basically it has been played under significantly different rules...!)

Speculation:

• Apparently the so-called "Complete" Steam edition contains all the artwork and scenario files for Vanilla and PtW, but they "forgot" to include the older executables...
• It may be possible to play Vanilla & PtW with the Steam installation, if you can get the missing executables from somewhere and if they don't have a CD-check. (Provided that nothing else is missing from the Steam installation... No idea about that...)

There are No-CD versions of Civilization3X.exe out there on the internet. (But using them is probably illegal... So the cleanest solution is probably to bother Steam until they finally supply the missing files. (I hope they have some kind of support hotline? ) Then you will also be sure that nothing else is missing.)

Or do what Memento did and spend 5 bucks on eBay for a "real" CD-based installation...

 

[tjs282]

Can confirm for once and all, the current GamersGate installation of Civ3'Complete' does not include a Civilization3X.exe, anywhere Here's a screenie of my '*.exe' search results, showing two .exes (game and editor) each in the root and Conquests directories, but only one .exe in the PTW directory...

(Technically this means that the C3C page at the GG website is false advertising, since they specifically say that it does allow to play PtW -- maybe I should write to them...)

 

[Più Freddo]

I went back to see how this might have happened. When you open the "Edit Rules" option, the value for road movement is highlighted by default. Using the scroll function on my mouse changes the value instead of scrolling the screen.

I know. This Windows "feature" is a female dog (the technical word was deleted by the system).

 

[Drb42]

Thanks for the help, I'll look into my own files when I get home.

One interesting thing I noticed this weekend while playing, was sometimes when I CREATE my own scenario, changing nothing but generating a world and changing AI starting units and such, when I start the game up sometimes it's s different version.

It's been years since I was familiar with the changes in each version, but I loaded a custom scenario once and there was no trebuchets (for some reason this also broke the upgrade chain of my catapults once I wanted to upgrade to artillery even though I had all necessary techs and resources) and then I replayed the game and this time I had access to trebuchets. The tech tree was also strange in some games, as there would be missing techs on the tree but the arrows leading to them were still there (ex: fascism is one I remember, the arrow pointing to it was there but fascism itself was missing). Sometimes radio was removed completely and the arrow did correctly display to advanced flight whenever this happened.

Tl;dr: steam version is definitely buggy and weird.

Edit: I have windows 8, if that makes any difference.

 

[CKS]

I had a similar problem when I didn't pick "Run as administrator" when I got moved to Vista - games started by someone else ran fine, but games I started myself ran using the original, unpatched ruleset (as far as I could tell) even though the game said it was fully patched. I'm pretty sure that I never saved, quit, and loaded a saved game to see what happened, though.

 

[Più Freddo]

Yes, under Vista and later versions of Windows, you have to run the game as administrator if you have installed it in the "Program Files\..." directory tree, which is the default of old. This is because this directory tree has been made read-only for security reasons. It makes it more difficult to install a trojan horse. The perhaps better solution is to install the game elsewhere, a custom location somewhere in your own directory tree (Users\yourusername\...).