no more 'one more turn' for BTS

[BuddhaBubba]

I don't know if anyone's come up with this, but I always wondered how I could stop myself from spending much more time playing Civ4 BTS than I initially planned. Well, I found a solution that works for me. It involves scheduling a task that runs once and includes the command to terminate a process. Think of it as windows scripting. There are two versions: one for XP Home, and one for XP Pro (they use a different command is all, it has the same effect). There are uploaded here as .txt files so you'll have to rename them as .bat files (.bat = batch files). Oh, don't forget to put your autosaves to every turn (in the My Documents\My Games\Civilization 4\Beyond the Sword\CivilizationIV.ini file). You can save these batch scripts anywhere you want. Once you do those two things, just go to the Control Panel and double-click Scheduled Tasks. Click on add a task and follow the prompts. Then just schedule the run time as, say, 11:30 am. That way, if you start playing at 10:30 am you won't have to be worried about being sucked in to the game until midnight.

Please Note: This little trick worked for me. I make no guarantees whatsoever as to the effectiveness of controlling your Civ4 BTS addiction. Please Play Responsibly.

 

[sarysa]

Haha, I love the concept. I confess to having played well into the 25 century before.

 

[Jesus Civs]

So you just need to have auto-save set to every turn?

Essentially it's a "crash to desktop"?

 

[BuddhaBubba]

So you just need to have auto-save set to every turn?

Essentially it's a "crash to desktop"?

Yup, essentially it's a CTD. One obvious tip is to notice when the clock is getting to the closing time, that way you can stop after pressing enter at the end of a turn and you won't have to repeat any moves that you already made. Now, I'm guessing that some strict Civ4 players will consider this "loading from a previous save" and being able to change moves that you did mid-turn. However, you could do the same thing by saving at the beginning of a turn, then testing out some moves and then quitting and reloading that save. All in all, I'm not sure if this method is GOTM legal so, you know, caveat emptor