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Trasnferring game saves to another computer

keslehr

Chieftain
Joined
Oct 31, 2011
Messages
3
Hi! I am a huge fan of the Civilization series, and I have a problem. I have Civ3 and Civ3:PTW on my upstairs computer and I would like to have the gamesaves on my laptop downstairs. Could anyone walk me through it? Thank you :)
 
Hi! I am a huge fan of the Civilization series, and I have a problem. I have Civ3 and Civ3:PTW on my upstairs computer and I would like to have the gamesaves on my laptop downstairs. Could anyone walk me through it? Thank you :)

What operating system are you running? On some versions the saves are in different locations.

If running windows XP, your saves should be in Civ3/play the world/saves. Copy the save files to some kind of portable storage device (a USB drive works well), then take it to the other computer, move the save files in to the same folder you took them out of, and load them in game.
 
Probably easiest way is to load your saved games onto a thumb drive and then upload them to the laptop into the same folder you copied them from before. That is, if your computer upstairs had the games saved into C:\Program Files\Civ Game Company\Civ III\saves, then on the computer downstairs you would want to put your transferred files in the same folder on the downstairs computer.

This works best with WinXP; Vista and Win7 security don't like the way that the game saves its games into a folder under Program Files. I have WinXP. As best I understand it, Civ3 saves will save just fine under Vista and Win7, but the operating system won't let you see them again until you tweak some security settings.

The real trick is to first decide where you want to keep the games on the computer. If you decide to put them in My Documents\My Games\CivIII Saves, you can navigate there on the Save menu inside the game, but the autosaves won't go there. The game will record the folder where you last saved a game into, so once you save a game somewhere you can find it rather easily. This is stored in the ptw.ini file, which can be opened by Notepad. Mine has this line in it:
Code:
Latest Save=D:\Civ3Complete\civ3PTW\saves\MiscSaves\Attack or not to Attack

Note too, that the manual saves you create are a lot smaller than the autosaves. Not sure why, but they are.

Also to note: the Save menu inside the game will NOT create a new folder for you. So if you wanted to add a folder for a new set of saves, this would have to be done by Windows Explorer.
 
Wait, so if I transfer the saves to the laptop, the game won't make new saves?
 
Also to note: the Save menu inside the game will NOT create a new folder for you. So if you wanted to add a folder for a new set of saves, this would have to be done by Windows Explorer.

You can add the line
Code:
WindowsFileBox=1
to you .ini file. That way, instead of getting the the ugly and utterly unfunctional dialog windows to save/open that are built into Civ, you get standard Windows file boxes to save/open files. Those let you indeed create new folders etc. (That setting is not compatible with MapFinder however.)
 
You can add the line
Code:
WindowsFileBox=1
to you .ini file. That way, instead of getting the the ugly and utterly unfunctional dialog windows to save/open that are built into Civ, you get standard Windows file boxes to save/open files. Those let you indeed create new folders etc. (That setting is not compatible with MapFinder however.)
That is neat!

Uh, what breaks on MapFinder?
 
where do i find my saved game on vista?

i want to transfer the save to another computer running xp, thanks.

nevermind, i figured it out.
 
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