Specifying resources and goody huts

[Cassius Critzer]

Because MGE has the dreaded 255 city limit rule, then it seems like the best way is mostly preset up the cities, often under barbarian control (say in the New World) and then let the ai and human player battle it out for scraps in the Old World of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

A standard city radii has three rows of five plus two rows of three for a total of 21. But there is terrible overlapping because transforming territory (truly terraforming) comes very late to the game. Which means you seldom can acquire a perfect spot of all 21 squares in the matrix.

An island nation like Japan has a terrible quandry because they can try for mainland Asia but then must deal with the Mongols, Russians,or Chinese. The smarter move is to go for Indonesia and Australia, but to get there means less than desirable low city radii islands which can only be somewhat rectified with port upgrades so the ocean terrain translates into shields. It is hit or miss with ocean resources yet of course islands are bringing in food resources from the sea.

The map editor only allows a "seed" value for resources. I would guess similarly this is how goody huts appear too.

I don't want to waste any of the 255 city slots on a huge map. What I would like to do is mix it up with barbarians being specified in a goody hut and to specify resource placement too. Is this possible by hexediting the scenario file, a sav, or the map itself?

In this way I can replicate the indigenous people is very simplistic ways as barbarian cities but still have the players happen upon barbarians in the field as well. Then by specifying resources then create strategic locations, say for oil and uranium or saltpeter though I guess that would largely be for trade value or food value. Ideally a city improvement could only be constructed if the city had access to natural resources availability or by trade. And then even specific units might even be made only where these city improvements were constructed or found.

If I can hex edit a city that is under barbarian control and prevent the improvement from being sold, then this would be a way to differentiate city A from city B from city C as it adds a whole another kind of strategy to Civ 2.

 

[Noire Leblanc]

I don't think it's possible to specify crate contents in Civ 2. There's probably some way you can influence the RNG for the results, but it's always a call to the RNG when you open the crate.

If I remember right, MGE barbs won't sell improvements, although I don't think they build them either. When they completely wiped America while I was steamrolling Europe in the BCs in one world map game I played, I dimly recall seeing a message that the barbs had researched something, but I don't think that's relevant anyway, barb techs are based on those of the "real" civs.

The resources around a city (and the terrain itself, presence of roads and rivers, and numerous other sometimes insane factors like continent size and whether it's on an even or odd coordinate pair) do influence the three trade resources demanded or provided in a city, but that's only really relevant for trade route value and delivery bonus.

As for restricting units to a city with a resource or specific improvement, in Civ 2 that's straight up impossible; there's only three checks: prerequisite tech possessed, obsoletion tech not, and in TOT whether the unit's actually allowed for your civ; there's also special cases (the Fanatics slot is only buildable under Fundy and I think the Nuclear Missile slot is tied to Manhattan Project completion, while water units can only be built in a city that was coastal at settlement.)

As for specified resource placement, that's possible with the TOTPP, and it's saved in with the .sav file (and thus .scn or .map forms) but there's no other way to do it that I'm aware of.

[EDIT: added answer to resource placement because I forgot it the first time.]

 

[Cassius Critzer]

Thanks for the reply. The Civ 2 forum gets few posts outside of the scenario league.

I saw a clever way to trigger some effect in a tech tree like Isbabylon.or something like that but probably only making a specific unit like Fundamentalism and the fanatics. I was hoping for tech for a building to severely limit recruitment elsewhere.

MGE has so few slots that it is a waste to make too many specific units because you would quickly run out with seven civs. You could do a USA vs China and split it in half, I guess. I wanted something more complex.

It seems very limited.

In many games, when the AI is losing, it tends to keep losing. The errors the AI has made were replicated so it is easy to circumvent. So I hate to steamroll and do blitzkrieg tactics as the ai cannot cope. I find that boring and I intentionally do things to stop the conflict.

I would rather fight a very strong AI and barely win. I hate a blowout.