Quick Answers / 'Newbie' Questions

Thank you for the welcome!

I'm doing some testing with AI-only games, and I'm curious to see how the computer reacts to a situation where every tile on the map has a city on it. I'll admit that it's kind of a silly thing to try and do, but the results might be interesting. You don't know unless you try!

 

In Civ 3 normally the minimum distance between two cities is one tile, but the Antal1987 exe allows to found cities next to each other.



That exe is attached to the mod 'CCM2' that you can find here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/ccm2-epic-mod.625812/

It is possible to create a map in the editor, that only holds land-terrain. As there is a limit of max. 512 cities in Civ 3, that map must be very small and only keeps max. 512 tiles (the minimum width and height in the standard Civ 3 editor is 16 tiles each). With the current Civ 3 editors only cities with the normal distance of one tile between cities can be preplaced on the map so it is needed to set additional settlers on the spaces between the preset cities (or to place them later in Debug Mode). To assure, that the AI will not draw settlers into existing cities or disband settlers, the game should be started with the Antal1987 exe as a multiplayer game in Debug Mode with the multiplayer tool, that is also attached to the CCM2 mod, setting every civ to be played by a human player to assure that a city will be founded in every tile of the map and after turn 1, when all cities are on the map, switch every civ in the multiplayer tool to be played by the AI. This said, I never did such a map and I don´t have any interest in doing such a map. .

 

The normal unhacked .exe file would never allow you to build cities and the unhacked editor programme wouldn't, either. You can edit a file manually (with a programme called a hex editor) and do weird things by preplacing things on a premade map. For example, you can have a distinction between coastal/riverine ships and seagoing vessels and have a few ocean tiles pre-placed directly next to land tiles. Or you can place roads on water tiles and resources out there. Or many other things if you can imagine them and find a workaround. For possibly the most complete and revolutionary modification of Civ3, I'll heartily recommend Vuldacon's EFZI scenario. Just… just go there.

And welcome to the forum!

 

Wow, the CCM2 mod looks incredible! I'm going to need some time to digest all that.

Anyway, the 512 city limit is a problem for what I'm trying to do, but luckily I already have a modified version of the executable that fixes that problem. So I combined that one with the Antal one to give me an executable perfect for Infinite City Sprawling! Here it is: https://www.civ3complete.com/Civ3Conquests-Antal-NoCityLimit-NoRaze.exe

Of course, this still doesn't fix the problem that it's impossible to plant adjacent cities in the editor, and since the prospect of manually settling thousands of cities by hand doesn't seem very appealing, I'll probably take Takhisis's advice and modify the biq file directly. Should be fairly doable. I already have some experience editing SAV files, and I'm guessing biq files have a similar structure.

Thanks again for all the help, guys!

 

Arm yourself with an extra dose of patience. Remember that Civ3 crashes to desktop at a staggering variety of errors, without any warnings. I learned that the hard way… about fifteen years ago. And I am still not over it.

 

Caro-Kann, thank you very much for your kind words about CCM2.

Are you sure, that the NoCityLimit (NCL) patch will really work? Normally all known NCL patches soon run into severe memory problems. Here you can find my post about the results of my test of such a patch with links to the documentation of that test: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/star-wars-the-mod-awakens.631116/page-4#post-15481533

The patch ran into severe memory problems starting with city 543. When City 543 was founded, none of the advisor windows could be opened any longer. The game still can be saved and some more cities can be founded with the city screen opening (up to city 556), but when any of the advisor screens was opened, there was a freeze of the game. When city 557 was founded, there was a complete freeze of the game.

The same was reported about the number of cities of the NCL-patch in another thread I gave a link in my post.

 

Hmm... I wasn't aware of that issue. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. It sounds like the game only allocates memory for 512 cities, and bypassing that restriction starts corrupting the memory of other parts of the game. Of course, that's just a theory. But if it's true, it might be possible to modify the executable to allocate more memory to cities, fixing the problem. Maybe.

In any case, I got the biq modification working, sort of. It works in the editor, at least, but like Takhisis said, it crashes when loaded from the modified executable. Now I know why.



I'll keep working on this and see if I can find a workaround, but it might not be possible.

 

Fixing that problem would be great!

BtW.: civ3complete.com seems to be an interesting site. In CCM2 I tried to transform the concepts page of the civilopedia to a kind of an 'Ingame Help'. May be this can be improved much more with some goodies of that site.

 

Yes! Civ3 was coded in the far-off days of the very late 20th century and 512 is a power of two.

 

Right now all that site hosts is an online version of the Conquests Civilopedia. I threw it together so I could look up gameplay information without having to be in the game itself. I thought I might never actually use it, but it comes in surprisingly handy for quick fact-checks.

 

Yes, the minimum distance between cities in Civ 3 is hardcoded and in the Antal1987 exe it was set to zero (allowing canals) by hexediting. I think the reason for the hardcoded minimum distance between cities of one tile was to prevent building cities by 'combat settlers' next to the enemy city containing barracks in those cities. As CCM holds government-specific barracks and the number of barracks is strictly limited for most governments in that mod, I decided to use the Antal1987 patch for this mod. The advantage of building a canal to cross an isthmus (see the screenshot above from one of the CCM2 testgames, building the 'Yokohama Channel' - canal would be better fitting) is too tempting.

So the minimum distance between cities is hardcoded, the game can be forced by special settings in the editor (setting the minimum distance between civs in the world size registry of the editor to a high number on a small map) to ignore hardcoded minimum distances of the editor when starting a game. I posted about this phenomenon in the thread 'Overcrowded Start'. Edited: I don´t clearly remember, if the civs founded the cities at their starting locations or wandered around to find places with 'one-tile-distances' to other cities, but I have 'the feeling' they founded the cities and soon battled each other - and what happens, if the map leaves no more place for the civs 'to wander around' ?

May be the possibility, to go during a game to an online 'Game Help' could be an interesting idea. When having a closer look at the screenshot about the 'Ingame Help' of CCM2, you can see, that the structure is limited, due to some limitations in writing civilopedia entries in Civ 3. Per example several 7a) and 7b) entries are needed to form a correct list of these entries, as otherwise the structure would be disrupted when contacting the 'Ingame Help' during the game.

Caro-Kann, how did you manage to place the cities next to each other in the editor ?

 

Oh, I didn't. I created a script to manually edit the biq file, placing cities on every tile. Then I loaded it into the editor afterward.

 

What did you run the script on?

 

Yes, this all sounds very interesting.

Btw.: Caro-Kann, as you posted that you have some experience in editing SAV files, can you please have a look at the save file I posted here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/barbarian-cities-in-civ-3.646253/#post-154629

This save file holds a rarity in C3C: Barbarian cities, that normally are not possible in Civ 3. Do you see a way to convert this save file to a biq that holds these Barbarian cities ? If yes, this could open a new way to do maps in C3C.

 

It's nothing fancy. Just a nondescript JavaScript script.

Have you tried the Civ3MultiTool? If I remember correctly, it can convert SAV files into biq files.

 

Is there an in-game list of Great Wonders that have been built at a given point in the game, and perhaps in which cities they are located? I thought I saw that somewhere other than in a dream.

 

Yes, it's one of the F keys. The first six take you to the advisers and then the others are also helpful, showing you various graphs, wonders, etc.

 

F7 key.

 

Could someone maybe tell me why my Coastal Fortresses are not shooting at passing enemy ships?

I usually don't build this city improvement, but decided to in a current game because I had some cities on narrow straits and some island cities where I thought Coastal Fortresses might actually be useful.
Unfortunately, enemy ships have not only passed right by these cities, but have invaded neighboring squares and attacked the cities containing the Coastal Fortresses - all without a shot being fired by this city improvement and the enemy ships remaining undamaged.

Does anyone know what gives?