I give up - How do you interpret the scrolls in the Ante-room

[Ken Hinds]

I guess I'm not going to figure this out on my own, so I'll ask the experts out there. I know that some of you have said that you can use the scrolls in the ante-room to figure out where you stand versus the hearld's civ. The manuals and guides don't say how, only that you can.

So what's the secret?

Thanks,

Ken

[Comrade Dan]

I don't really understand what you mean but...

I think you're talking about the two panels to the sides of the leader's portrait. The left panel denotes military power and the right side denotes technological progress.

The Left Side: made up of between 0 and 6 icons. These denote the amount of units a civ has, the more icons the more units. And sometimes the icon changes, representing how modern yor army is. A spear is Ancient, an arrow is Medieval, a rifle is Industrial and a rocket is Modern. These correspond with the icons with your military techs that you research.

The Right Side: These are icons that show the 6 most recently discovered techs that civ has researched. You can see the icon of a tech (like the military tech. arrow or the social tech. hammer and sickle) but unless you have an embassy established or have Marco Polo/United Nations you cannot see the name of them.

I ope this is helpful to you...

[DaveV]

Only one thing to add to Comrade Dan's comprehensive answer: I think the number of military icons shows the military rank (0=pathetic, 6=supreme). You should know where you rank from the opening diplomatic window; here you can determine the relative rank of the AI. Military strength is based on number of units or number of shields invested in units, depending on whom you listen to.

Wow, good question, another civ fact I never knew. Imagine just a few years ago, before I ever came here, I thought I knew everything about civ.
Well not that it matters, no matter what their ranking, I alwasy surpass them, and kick their ass later. This may be more helpful in MP, but I don't have Gold edition.

[Ken Hinds]

Thank you Comerade Dan. That is the info I was looking for. Now, does the color of the panels make an difference. Without changing my windows setup I occasionally get the panels in gray like a grayed out option in CIV menus, usually it is a orangish brown. Does this just mean that they have not researched anything or that we are at an equivelant level of technology. I don't think that I've ever seen the miltary side grayed out.

Thanks,

Ken

[Comrade Dan]

It's the techs that are greyed out, right?

Probably because that's what they are supposed to look like OR if they turn a different colour - you might have researched it before them. I don't pay much attention to the screen myself, as I always end up killing them anyway.

And I have never seen the heralds move.

[East Street Trader]

I used to like it in far off days when I used to play on my 486DX2 machine and the heralds moved around. Somehow gave them character. My current machine is a 300 MgH Pentium II and they are frozen. My daughter's machine has a 600 MgH Pentium processor and I noticed they were moving once when she was playing but mostly they are frozen on that too.

I am not computer literate but know from other old games (notably Theme Park) that sometimes a modern machine justs runs too fast and aspects of older games won't operate. Still, if there were a patch for this I'd be glad to find it.

Ken. Have a look at the symbols above the two collumns. They tell you what form of gov.t the herald's civ is currently under. That's not a bad guide to its level of advancement but can also tell you something about how warlike the civ is feeling and whether it will be a good trading partner or not. (Often other sources for this sort of info tho').

As you study the manual I may well not be telling you anything new. Thought I'd mention it tho' just in case it helps any.

[Ken Hinds]

On the animated heralds. You have to set that when you install the game. There is a pop up question as part of the install that tells you that you should have at least 16MB of memory for the animation to work correctly. One thing to try is running the AVI files in Win Explorer. Not IE, but the disk explorer. If the AVIs work OK then it is either a function of your game settings or quite possibly you do not have the correct video driver installed for your version of windows and your video card. Or it is possible that your CPU is too fast though if you are using MGE it may be a CD that is not passing data fast enough or at the speed that the game is expecting.

Even though you may think that you have the correct driver installed it may not have been pickup by Windows. I had this problem for a long time and had just about given up having advisors that could speak correctly or Wonder movies that didn't take 15 mins to run. I had to do a reinstall of win95 for other purposes and discovered that the original installation had never picked up the correct driver file off the CD that came with the video card. After fixing that, all the videos and their sounds worked just great.

On the greyed out techs in the ante-room it is not with all civs just some and only some of the time. The little tech level Icons show but are greyed and the names are blank. Other civs have the icons and names in an orangish brown.

Ken
[This message has been edited by Ken Hinds (edited June 23, 2000).]

[Comrade Dan]

I have the 16mb of RAM but probably a superior video card...

[Civ-wrecked]

I've always had the impression that the greyed-out techs only happen when those techs are so far behind compared to your techs and so the AI Civ is too embarassed to show them .

[Smash]

Oh man.When I read stuff like that(above) I'm glad when 1 of the 2 had to go,I picked my G3 and sold my PC.

Mac setup for civ2.

1.Click installer.
2.select size(I always go for large installs as I have memory to spare)
3.Begin play.

Thats it.

No drivers.No nothin.


hehehe...no software either.Well not quite.

[finbar]

Hear Hear!

------------------
finbar
Mono Rules!
#33984591

[East Street Trader]

Ken

I searched for *.avi and was offered explorer amongst other things. So I clicked on that and a series of files seemed to be opened in turn. The cycle worked through without any message appeared to say that anything was wrong. Does this mean I have to consider the alternatives which you give as possible reasons for the frozen heralds?

I tried up dated the drivers for my video card not long ago but am not 100% confident I did it right.

[Ken Hinds]

East Street Trader,

The Heralds are in the Kings folder and the Wonder Movies and council movies are in the Video folder. Both of these remain on the CD unless you manually copy them to disk. Try opening the Kings Folder and double clicking on those avi files. There are no sounds but they should be animated. If they work there then then you know it is not a CPU related problem. As I found out it still could be a Video driver problem though. If the heralds work try the wonder movies next. If they also play without any problem with speed or sound then I would try a quick game on diety so that you have two settlers at the start.

Have both settlers found cites as quickly as possible preferably with a whale, buffalo, Pheasant, or silk. Have one city start building a wonder and have the other crank out warriors as fast as possible. Send the warriors to the wonder city and disband to speed up the wonder. If the wonder movie plays correctly then I would say that the herald problem is something other than the video card drivers.

Ken

[Scouse Gits]

This is not very helpful - but this problem has been seen before on these fora, debated and solved - I just can't remember where or what the solution was - that's the unhelpful part

My memory suggests that it is something to do with Quicktime 32 conflicting with QT16, but this could be hogwash...



------------------
____________
Scouse Git[1]

"CARTAGO DELENDA EST" - Cato the Censor

[Mark von Wagner]

That could well be it. When I want to play an older game, like Myst, I need to re-install the appropriate version of QuickTime. When I want to play a newer game, I need to re-install the version of QuickTime that came with it.