Playing as barbarians in Civilization 1

[Blake00]

Hi guys, when I was a kid first playing Civ1 Dos I remember using either a Civ editor or a hex editor to play as barbarians and had quite a fun game fighting the impossible odds haha.

I've found guides like this one on how to do it again, however now I'm mucking around with Civ1 Win and wondering is there a save editor or a hex editing guide that shows how to change your controlled nation and play as barbarians in the Windows version of Civ1?

 

[CivZ]

Here it is: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civwin-editing.254477/page-2#post-12128024

 

[Blake00]

Here it is: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civwin-editing.254477/page-2#post-12128024

Yes!! You legend! Thanks!

 

[Blake00]

Will be starting my barbarian game soon and am trying to decide what difficulty level to play.

I've read here that barbarian attack strengths are multiplied by difficulty level. Does anyone know if that bonus they get still works when you take them over (via hex edit)?

Also does anyone know if difficulty level in Civ1 has any influence on the frequency of babarian spawns and the amount of units spawning?

Playing as barbarians against 7 civs in emperor mode would be quite the challenge however if the attack bonus remains and they spawn bigger groups of units more often then that could almost make Emperor mode an easier choice haha!

 

[CivZ]

The difficult part will be actually getting to play as the Barbarians, because you'll lose immediately if the Barbarians don't control a city when you switch to them.

As for the Barbarian attack strength multiplier, I would also like to know if we can keep it when playing as them

 

[Blake00]

The difficult part will be actually getting to play as the Barbarians, because you'll lose immediately if the Barbarians don't control a city when you switch to them.

Darn! I don't remember that being a problem when I did this trick with the dos version as a kid. However if that is an issue I think I can get around it by save/load/load/load until i get barbarians out of a hut right next to an empty city & then let them take it. Maybe that's what I did as a kid as I do remember ending up with a beautiful red barbarian city under my control. Wish I could remember whether I got it before or after the hex edit player switch but it was like 25 years ago haha. Oh well if I did it before as a dumb kid I'm sure I can do it again now haha.

Once I've got a city I want to test a whole lot of things I didn't think of as a kid to try and push the limits of the game and make barbs more playable. The designers never intended anyone to take control of barbs so there could be some good loopholes to exploit. Eg I know you can't be at peace or research techs, but maybe you can still make money, use the free diplomats (barb leaders) you get to bribe an enemy settler unit to work your lands (as I think I couldn't build them in my captured city sadly) and maybe even get them to steal techs which might unlock certain units and buildings.

Once I succeed and test every trick I can think of to get them out of the 'stone age' and into a position to win a game I'll do a 'how to' video showing the results. Wonder if I'll get a buggy victory cutscene at end when all the other main civs are dead or if it'll just crash the game haha.

 

[CivZ]

I just had a go at it, and managed to switch to the Barbarians after they took two of my cities. Unfortunately, the game is quite unstable, and quickly becomes unplayable - I'm unable to switch production in my cities, for example. Do let us know if your attempt fares better.

 

[Blake00]

I just had a go at it, and managed to switch to the Barbarians after they took two of my cities. Unfortunately, the game is quite unstable, and quickly becomes unplayable - I'm unable to switch production in my cities, for example. Do let us know if your attempt fares better.

Well another idea I had was to set the city building what I need before letting the barbs take it. Eg set one city to build settlers, another to build buildings to sell, and another building phalanx.

Did you do the experiment in CivDos or CivWin? I'm trying in CivWin and I can't even get that far. Every time a barbarian cavalry (from a hut) enters an empty city I offer, it destroys the city and wipes it off the map instead of capturing it. Happened with a size 2, 3, 4 and a 5!

It actually even says "barbarians captured xx city xx gold lost" yet then its completely gone. So annoying! Guessing I need to let a different barbarian unit take a city eg a pirate legion. That's going to be hard as I'm only getting cavalry out of the huts.

 

[Autumn Leaf]

Well another idea I had was to set the city building what I need before letting the barbs take it. Eg set one city to build settlers, another to build buildings to sell, and another building phalanx.

Did you do the experiment in CivDos or CivWin? I'm trying in CivWin and I can't even get that far. Every time a barbarian cavalry (from a hut) enters an empty city I offer, it destroys the city and wipes it off the map instead of capturing it. Happened with a size 2, 3, 4 and a 5!

It actually even says "barbarians captured xx city xx gold lost" yet then its completely gone. So annoying! Guessing I need to let a different barbarian unit take a city eg a pirate legion. That's going to be hard as I'm only getting cavalry out of the huts.

Never played CivWin but in CivDOS Barb Cavalry always auto-pillage improvements and destroy any cities they capture. So yes, use a Legion. As a nice bonus, Legions don't auto-pillage improvements.

If you're doing it the hard way (as opposed to hacking the file the way I did to set up my Seven Cities of Barbarian Gold) it's sometimes faster to put a couple of Settlers on a ship so that when you do find a Barb Legion, you can rush the Settlers to the spot, land them on a good tile nearby (a couple of tiles away in the direction the Legion is likely to move) and found a city. Use the second Settler to insta-bump the population to 2 so that when the city is captured it isn't razed. Once you have your initial city you can safely switch to playing as Attila. However you will have serious budgetary problems, as Barbs don't collect taxes. Your only (and inadequate) income is from capturing cities.

Note that when the AI Attila captures a city it won't keep whatever production you had set; it will instantly change it to a Legion. Once you switch to Attila, you will have the option of keeping the production of any subsequent cities you capture.

 

[Blake00]

Yeah I just posted this over in your awesome Barbarian game thread but I'll stick it here too for others.

Yeah I gave up on my CivWin HD Barbarian game and switched over to dos. I've used the latest JCivED to setup a game with 4 Barb cities = 1 making settlers, 1 repeatedly building libraries for sale, 1 making phalanxes, and 1 making Chariots (I don't have your patience for 20 legions dying on a no longer invincible but super tough cap city haha). JCivED let me set everything I wanted (even the barb cities) however the moment I switch human player over to Barbs JCivED refuses to load the save file ever again, however fortunately I've discovered that CK's Civ Editor 1.5 allows you to edit barbarian city production. Sadly the one thing it can't do with a city is change its riot flag so I can't do what you did to fix it. So i'm thinking I'll just size 1 buy settler kill the city and build a new one with the same name in its place hahaha!

I've just taken my first capital and am having fun!!!

Thanks for the tip on the chasing around with settlers. I didn't think of that one. If I do go back to trying the hard way with CivWin (since I can't seem to find any editors for that) I'll use that trick!

 

[CivZ]

Did you do the experiment in CivDos or CivWin? I'm trying in CivWin and I can't even get that far. Every time a barbarian cavalry (from a hut) enters an empty city I offer, it destroys the city and wipes it off the map instead of capturing it. Happened with a size 2, 3, 4 and a 5!

It actually even says "barbarians captured xx city xx gold lost" yet then its completely gone. So annoying! Guessing I need to let a different barbarian unit take a city eg a pirate legion. That's going to be hard as I'm only getting cavalry out of the huts.

I tried with CivWin, as I haven't played in CivDOS for many years now.


Only sea-based Barbarians will capture and hold cities, while land-based Barbarians will instantly destroy any city they capture - IIRC there's a reference to this in the game manual.

If I do go back to trying the hard way with CivWin (since I can't seem to find any editors for that) I'll use that trick!

CivCracker is a decent editor for CivWin. Unfortunately the original download link no longer works, so I hope the author doesn't mind that I share it here again.

 

[CivZ]

After picking up that game again, I was able to play for a while with no major issues, but noticed a few limitations:

• It's not possible to change the city production (was mentioned before, and trying to do this is what crashed my game earlier)
• Barbarians collect no taxes nor search for new technologies
• Barbarian diplomats behave like normal diplomats, but cannot find new technologies to steal
• Capturing a city got me 7 coins, but the treasury remained at 0 coins

It was also interesting to get new units every few turns - mostly ships with 1-2 legions and a diplomat - and one of those was a hut with 8 units (cavalry + legions). Sadly, Barbarian units are terrible in battle, and the only city I managed to capture had just been founded and was defenceless.

Sorry, but I forgot to take some screenshots...

 

[Blake00]

Ooohh thanks for the editor CivZ, I'll have to have a play with it as I would have much rather done this experiment with CivWin! Do you know of any map editors for CivWin too? I found an old post from 10+yrs ago where someone said they had one but they didn't post the program lol.

Creating my own 'barbarian scenario' with JCivED for CivDos was really fun. I'm surprised there isn't a 'maps and scenarios' section in the CivFanatics Civ1 downloads area considering how easy it is to make them with JCivED.

Anyway I just finished my big Barbarian game in CivDos. Killed everyone, and their respawns, got the full ending sequence saying Attila, was awesome!

Sure enough setting it to emperor makes barbs stronger, also made sure I put barracks in my starting barbarian cities. Legions are still too weak though as AI capitals get HUGE defense bonuses (once they've got a second city & are no longer invulnerable) so I did a lot of the work with Chariots, but then a couple of AI's got city walls and I just kept losing and losing so I went up to catapults, and even with them I still lost a lot but I finally got there today!

I used CK's Civ Editor 1.5 to change all captured cities to rush buy a settler, then I rebuilt the city to get around the rioting bug, then I set the new city to build libraries. Once I had a whole bunch of libraries selling away I had no more money problems. I pretty much left my starting cities on their frozen builds (1 making settlers, 1 repeatedly building libraries for sale, 1 making phalanxes, and 1 making Chariots) although like I said above I switched the chariot one to catapults late game.

I'll post a video soon but here's some screens:

 

[Autumn Leaf]

Congrats on the barbaric win!

There are 128 cities of 28 bytes each from byte 5384 in the CivDOS SVE file. The Disorder flag is bit 0 of the 7th byte. Maybe I'll extract the Disorder fix from my tool and post it as a standalone util.

There are quite a few Civ1 scenarios out there. Here are two I created (using JCivEd 0.18a) for the "Game of the Month" ( forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&f=189&page=1&pp=45&sort=lastpost&order=desc&daysprune=-1):

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/may-2016-riverworld.567470/
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/january-2017-dune.609372/​

"Game of the Month" is a misnomer for Civ1 - there's not enough traffic to keep the forum alive, so it'basically become a scenario repository. For a long time before DarkPanda completed his opus we were restricted to a number of other, less powerful save-editing tools that often left significant bugs in the files they produced. It was easier to spin and respin random worlds until you got more or less the world you wanted, then tweak it a bit.

Interesting maps by other people:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/2010-november-gotm-the-mediterranean.397603/ - Mediterranean
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/2010-july-gotm-pirates-of-antarctica.372483/ - Antarctica (the tool used to create it did not reset the Settlers map so it has a bug where AI will try to build cities in nonviable locations, but JCiveEd can now fix this)
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/november09-gotm-rise-of-rome.340697/ - Rise of Rome
​

 

[Blake00]

Yeah I tried following your advice but my hex editor displays things completely differently to any screenshots or instructions I've seen from you or anyone else here so I couldn't figure out where the city stuff was or which field to change (pic below).

Oh wow.. you're dune one sounds really cool!!! Yeah that forum looks rather dead. I think there should be a scenarios repository folder here just like all the other civ games have:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/categories/civilization-i-downloads.105/

I wonder who to contact about that.

 

[Blake00]

CivCracker is a decent editor for CivWin. Unfortunately the original download link no longer works, so I hope the author doesn't mind that I share it here again.

WOW! CivZ you are a legend!!! I thought you were just giving me a save game editor but this is a full blown CivWin map editor too! And on top of that I can load CivDos saves into it and and then save them as CivWin saves. ITS A GOD DAMN SAVE GAME CONVERTER!!!! I was able to convert my barbarian game that I built in JCivED over to CivWin format and it loaded just fine!!! This is brilliant!!

Screenshot from near the end of my CivDos Barbarian game loading up in CivWin in HD with the dos graphics mod.

 

[CivZ]

That's a very impressive screenshot! I'm glad the editor suited your needs, but credit where it's due - it was created by MountainMn10

To be honest, I didn't notice it could open CivDOS' SVE files until you mentioned it. Sadly, my old CivDOS games are long lost, but I'll try to use it to open some of the scenarios listed by Autumn Leaf in CivWin.

 

[Blake00]

Well it only took me 3 friggin years to get off my butt and release my Barbarian scenario to the world but here it is guys! The Attila's Conquest series has begun! Thank you so much again for all your advice guys!
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...civilization-1-scenario-civdos-civwin.673355/

I've also done a full video tour of the scenario showing people how to play as the Barbarians:
youtu.be/TyFLI_B_Cbg?list=PLZqnaGtTZxFbq3F5R6lqzyVvYzg9tRBPY