Playing with more than 7 civs.

[Civfan]

At the moment, you can only play Civ2 with 7 players and the barbarians. This is hard coded into the game but maybe one day will be changed by a scenario creator. Well, I found the next best thing to adding more civs into the game. In a normal game of Civ2, a player that is eliminated is replaced by another tribe. Normally you can't pick the tribe who replaces the destroyed Civ. With some searching into the rules.txt, you can pick the next player.

Picking your next Tribe.
In Civ2 theres 7 colors for the tribes. Blue, Purple, Green ect. Each color has three tribes assigned to it. If you take a look at your normal Rule.txt the tribes look like this.
White Color = Romans
Russians
Celts
Green Color = Babylonians
Zulus
Japanese
Blue Color = Germans
= French
= Vikings

At the bottom of the Rules.txt, it tells you how there in order. The first number (0) represents the leader as Male (0) or Female (1). As there all o, all three players are male. The second number is the color number. Romans are color 1 (white), Babylonians color 2 (Green) and Germans color 3 (blue). If you follow the list down you notice the colors go to 7 and restarts at color 1 again with the Russian tribe.
0, 1, 1, Romans, Roman,
0, 2, 0, Babylonians, Babylonian,
0, 3, 3, Germans, German,

You can pick your next tribe by renaming the tribes in the color set. If I want the next tribe to be the Russians, I will kill off the Romans, who are the first tribe in color 1 (white). A new settler is created by the game for the Russians. It will be color 1 (white). But the game chooses randomly the next tribe in that color set. It could be either Russians or Celts. To make sure the next tribe you want is the Russians, rename the Celts to Russians. The game can't tell the difference between the names. As long as everything is the same, Russians will be the next tribe to join your game.

Ok, so you can change the name of the tribe but what about choosing the location of that new settler unit?
Well, at the moment you can't place the location of that settler unit. This is done randomly by the game. But you can place new units and techs using a new events file. Because alot of new scenarios are focused on using multiply events (Redfront, Spartacus), the death of a Civ can be a goal in the game. Say the you want to create a Persian empire scenario. There could be 7 civs. Persia, Medes, Babylon, Libara, Egypt, India, Greece and a Barbarian Cartharage empire. You can have goals for the Persians. Defeat and unite first with the Medes. Once the Medes are destroyed by Cyprus of Persia, use a new events file to create new units for another civ, say Macedon. As long as the new events file says Macedon as the new owner of the units, there won't be any errors in the events file or the game.

What about the settler units being randomly placed by the computer. Won't they create cities you dont want?

Theres two ways to fix this problem. Make the settler unit available for no civs. the unit has a strong defence ability, and obsolete when the new civ is given a tech through events. When you load the new events file, create engineers for that new civ and give it the tech to make the settler obsolete. The computer should disband the settler units. But this has many problems. The biggest is the computer doesn't always disband that unit.
The second way to fix this problem is to create a isolated city controlled by barbarians. Give the city the Da Vinci's Workshop wonder and using events, create units for the new civ around that barbarian city. Once the city is retaken, give the new civ a tech to make the settler unit upgraded to a air plane with fuel of 1 turn. It will die after the first turn. Also, when the barbarian city is captured, you can create units to attack certain cities you want them to have. Once those cities are taken, you can create barbarians to retake that barbarian city back with Da Vinci's workshop. And after , you can do this again for another civ.

How many civs can now be played?

Well, depending on how long you wan't to have the scenario to be, you can have up to 19 tribes. But 19 tribes means 19 event files. Too much I would say.
To limit how many tribes will be in a scenario, you can kill off certain civs in the beginning in the game. Its as easy as that. I'll have abit more of this later and a demo to show you how its done.