Civilization2 Tips and Strategies Page

Advanced Modpack Creation

City Improvements, Wonder and Units for only Certain Civilizations

I have received a number of inquiries into changing Civ II to accomplish a number of things. One of the premier requests deals with a fairly advanced capability in the Mod Pack area regarding :

Making Certain Units and Improvements Available to only Certain Civilizations

Civ II has built in functionality to allow for this. Most of this is built into the stock game, but some of the finer points require the Scenario CD version of the game included on the Scenario CD. There are two ways to make it happen: Basically, modifications to RULES.TXT make this possible and it begins with the Technical Advances, and their various prerequisites, and the "technology tree" that results from them. It also involves the use of scenarios. Basically, you must decide the premise for your scenario, create it and the civilizations involved, and then give the civilzations involved certain basic technologies. Then in RULES.TXT, through use of the "no" option on technical advance prerequisites, you insure that the possible technical advances for each race are "blocked" off from each other. Once you have created these "individual" tech trees for your civilizations (and they can apply to single civilizations or several, depending on what advances are given in the scenario), then you move onto the City Improvements and Units areas of RULES.TXT.

In the City Improvements, Wonders and Units areas, just insure that the prerequisites for particular advances fall within the technology tree of the civilization you want to receive them. The same can be done with government types. Make sure you do not make the unit, improvement, government, etc. dependant on the advance with the "no's" in them. They should depend on tech advances that are down stream from the one's you block off with "no's". In other words, if you chose to make FP (Fusion Power in the stock game) a Tech Advance with a two "no's" as prerequisites, this will cause it not to be available in the game, even in cheat mode. But, you can make other technologies be based on FP, and when you give these techologies to a civilization, it will mean they alone can research the resulting tree of what is based on FP. You will of course have to deal with the units.gif, icons.gif, etc for new or modified units and improvements or wonders that you want to appear differently in the game.

2. Not allowing Technology Research for the various civilizations in a scenario

In this instance, things are a little easier. You set your technology advance parameter in the scenario parameters area to some unbelievably high number to effectively dissallow the possibility of any new tech advances. Then you giv ethe various civilizations the techs you want them to have. Then you insure that in RULES.TXT that the units you want each civ to have are based on the advances you have given them. That's it.

Potential Problems and Pitfalls

Now, the only problem is civilizations being able to require technology outside of "their" tree through negotiations and conquering. With respect to negotiations and trading between civilizations. The EVENTS.TXT file available through the new Scenario CD gives you an event called NEGOTIATION where you can prevent one or all civilizatons from entering into negotiations. This can be used to insure that certain civilizations can not negotiate (and thus trade) with one another. Without the Scenario CD, you can keep yourself, the human player, from trading, but the computer players may still do so. To offset this, you can use the AI and CIVILIZED modifiers of the technical advance in RULES.TXT to make the advance less desirable to computers, but then it applies to all of them. This also is true for aquiring certain technologies via conquering. I have not figured out any way to avoid the potential resulting from conquering to date.

At any rate, this methodology works and can be used to accomplish the desired results. As with all modifications, there are peculurarities of the civ2.exe which will have to be dealt with as they arise and are discovered. Most of these are simply undocumented limitations or aspects of the game.

Hope this helps. Good Luck!

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If you have any suggestions, comments, or information please email me at civjar@oocities.com

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