updating old Scenario maps
Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 7:53 pm
I've been fooling around with the North American map. A couple of quirks: I've noticed it displays incorrectly in my client because it doesn't have a code for its topography. The map is using "old school" topography codes. Currently it is "0" but it should be "4", equivalent to the modern ISO code. When I try to set modern codes for all kinds of things, they typically don't work. I'm imagining there's some kind of on-the-fly conversion from old to new .sav formats. The problem is, there's no way to save such converted files until one starts a game and enters the in-game editor. By that time, the .sav file has lots of extra garbage in it, and AI units will start moving too if you're not careful. Also the in-game editor doesn't let you easily edit various things, like changing a nation's starting position, reassigning starting positions, etc. so it's back to hand tweaking the .sav file. Also there's no coordinate readout for tiles, so if I want to make a new start position, I make it in the editor, save a garbage game, open the garbage game file to read the coordinates, then paste those coordinates into the original scenario .sav file I'm actually working on. Which is in a different format that modern maps.
Ok I worked around all of that. But what I haven't solved yet, is how to set modern start units. In the old school method, one sets settlers=4 explorer=2 and that's all you can set. I want workers in there, because I'm trying to set up a US Civil War era demo and the AIs are too dumb to build appropriate roads and rails on their own. I haven't looked at whether the AIs can be induced to have different priorities; I sure hope so because they're just terrible at nation building. I give them techlevel=60 and they don't even build factories!
So, again, how do I get workers into an old school Scenario file? Or convert the old school file to a modern file without a lot of extraneous save junk added to it?
Ok I worked around all of that. But what I haven't solved yet, is how to set modern start units. In the old school method, one sets settlers=4 explorer=2 and that's all you can set. I want workers in there, because I'm trying to set up a US Civil War era demo and the AIs are too dumb to build appropriate roads and rails on their own. I haven't looked at whether the AIs can be induced to have different priorities; I sure hope so because they're just terrible at nation building. I give them techlevel=60 and they don't even build factories!
So, again, how do I get workers into an old school Scenario file? Or convert the old school file to a modern file without a lot of extraneous save junk added to it?