Advice for a rookie scenario designer

[fairline]

Is there a good 'idiot's guide' to scenario design posted somewhere? Having tinkered with other people's scenarios for a year or so now (mainly replacing unit graphics and stats, and some minor tech tree tweaking), I want to have a go at a scenario from scratch.

I've got a couple of ideas for subject matter: the Romans in Britain, The Wars of the Roses, The English Civil War, the Roman/Dacian wars or the Zulu Wars. Have any of these been covered before?

[H Tower]

at CFC in the civ2 scenario creation forum there is an idiot's guide to scenario building, i think. and there should definitely be some resources on the scenario league webpage. http://sleague.apolyton.net/

[techumseh]

Here is a self-help thread from CFC., available here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showth...threadid=21649

I recommend the paper 'Advanced Scenario Design' by Leon Marrick, followed by the tips section of Scenario League. If you have any questions, I'd be happy to try to answer them. Good luck.

[fairline]

Thanks for the help guys

[fairline]

There's a lot of useful tips out there - one thing I couldn't find an answer to, though, is can a fighting unit have engineer ability? I'm aware that it will need to be placed in the engineer slot and given 'settler' ability, but what will hapen if you try to fortify - will it build a fortress or fortify itself?

I want to give Roman legionaries the engineer ability as they were the ones who constructed the roads and fortifications in the empire.

Also, can I give the AI settlers but restrict their ability to build new cities?

[Prometeus]

In colonies 3.12 by John Ellis, Refugees-Partisans have settler abilities, but only self-foritfy once - and only when they pop-up once a city is taken. I think Engeneer units have no self-fortify possibilities, sorry. I planned to use them for a WAS "Sappeur" unit, but never worked out properly...

[techumseh]

Originally posted by fairline
There's a lot of useful tips out there - one thing I couldn't find an answer to, though, is can a fighting unit have engineer ability? I'm aware that it will need to be placed in the engineer slot and given 'settler' ability, but what will hapen if you try to fortify - will it build a fortress or fortify itself?

Yes, you can, and the unit will attack and defend normally. (This was pioneered by Harlan Thompson for the dwarves in his 'Lord of the Rings'.) You don't need to place it in the engineer slot, just give it the settler flag. If you give it the 'fortify' command, it will build a fortress.

Also, can I give the AI settlers but restrict their ability to build new cities?

No. That part is hard-coded, I'm afraid. And the AI will use a combat engineer as a settler, not as a combat unit, so you may want to restrict their use to human controlled civs.

[St Leo]

You can restrict the AI ability to build cities by not using the default plains and grassland terrain slots or by hacking the map and setting the fertility flag of all tiles to 0.

[Stefan Härtel]

A lot can be done by placing "house rules". As a matter of fact, that's the only possibility. The scenarios I know of that have combat units with settler abilities, apart from the ones mentioned, are Seeds Of Greatness by Paul Cullivan, Second Front by Capt. Nemo and my very own Sons Of Heracles. In all three scenarios, this was done to reflect different things; armed settlers in SoG, the unability of fortification for vehicles in SF, and the Spartan population shortage in SoH.
Please keep in mind, that outside of cities, settler-type units can't be fortified, and I don't know if this is so appropriate for Roman legionnaires (except if you want to build a new city for every single fort they built).

[fairline]

Thanks for the info guys.

You don't need to place it in the engineer slot, just give it the settler flag

Techumseh, I thought that only settlers in the engineer slot had the engineer's extra building speed and terrain transformatio abilites? is there another way of distinguishing between engineer and settler attributes?

Stefan, I think you're right - I need the legionaries to be able to self-fortify and build fortifications independently, so it's back to the drawing board on that idea. However, if it's possible to increase the 'build fortification' speed I guess I could have them build forts instead of fortify. Could end up with a lot of forts, though.

You can restrict the AI ability to build cities by ..... hacking the map and setting the fertility flag of all tiles to 0.

Leo, I guess this will also effect the human-controlled settlers ability to build cities? I want the human player (Romans) to be able to settle new cities, while restricting the AI (various British tribes) to just irrigation, etc. In the time-frame of my scenario (c.40AD - 120AD) a huge amount of Roman towns were established in Britain, while there were no new Celtic settlements.

[Stefan Härtel]

Well, you could create two legion units, one with the settler/engineer abilities, the other without, but both with similar pics and combat stats.

[St Leo]

Leo, I guess this will also effect the human-controlled settlers ability to build cities?

No, humans can build cities on anything. The fertility flag just keeps AI's city placement moderately intelligent.

Could someone who knows more (Mercator? Gothmog?) chime in?

[fairline]

You may have something there, Stefan. However, I wanted to force the player to choose between using non-buildable legionaries to either fight or build roads. More specifically I wanted to stop the player from using them to defend cities and use weaker buildable auxilia as defenders.

More dumb questions:

- How do I place resources where I want on a map? Ive already chosen and edited a map from Mercator's site which is suitable for my scenario, but I want to place tin, coal, iron, lead and pottery resources in historically correct locations.

- How do I get rid of the damn goody hut things without sending a unit round the map to open them?

- What's the limit for FW events?

[Henrik]

Actually once I made catapults settlers by misstake and as I recall the computer used them both for attacking and settling (quickly electing them the universal unit, not building anything else than catapults, soon filling the rather large europe map I was playing on).

[klesh]

Originally posted by fairline
More dumb questions:

- How do I place resources where I want on a map? Ive already chosen and edited a map from Mercator's site which is suitable for my scenario, but I want to place tin, coal, iron, lead and pottery resources in historically correct locations.

- How do I get rid of the damn goody hut things without sending a unit round the map to open them?

- What's the limit for FW events?

-Resources are 'placed' by the computer with whats called the resource seed. It is a number that you enter in which sets the hardcoded pattern for terrain specials. The only thing you can do to get them, where you want is to adjust the seed, and look. Trial and error. Sometimes you'll get a section fo the map to look okay, whislt another is a bit off. You just have to find a happy medium. I believe the resource seed can only be set in the map editor? Not positive there.

-There is also a option under scenario parameters for wiping and resotring all goody huts.

- Not sure, smnaller than MGE. It depends on what type of events ytou are using, you can pack alot of small events into the samel size file as a few bigboys.

Hope that helps a little.


-FMK.

[BeBro]

Originally posted by fairline
- How do I place resources where I want on a map? Ive already chosen and edited a map from Mercator's site which is suitable for my scenario, but I want to place tin, coal, iron, lead and pottery resources in historically correct locations.

I think you can´t place where you want, you just can edit the "resource seed" in the editor, which leads - I believe - to other randomly chossen locations for resources (I never tested it)

How do I get rid of the damn goody hut things without sending a unit round the map to open them?

Open the cheat menu in Civ2, there is an option to delete the villages

What's the limit for FW events?

"Officially" 32kb, but in reality it depends a lot of the structure of your events.txt - some commands use more space than others. Most scns I´ve have seen use events files of 15 - 20kb. If your file is too large, the scn does not start, but will create a cryptic error - if your file is around 20kb, delete some events and look if all works then.

A nice method too save events space is to "mix" commands (triggers) in one event, even if they are not related to eachother. For example if you want three events, let´s say 1) for creating a unit, 2) for changing money, 3) for a text display, write all these three triggers into on IF - ENDIF event, instead of three single events, this saves space.

Here´s an example:

@IF
TURN
turn=251
@THEN
TEXT
135 BC: Slave´s revolt in Sizily!
ENDTEXT
CREATEUNIT
unit=Slaves
owner=Barbarians
veteran=yes
homecity=none
locations
54,90
endlocations
GIVETECHNOLOGY
receiver=Phoenicians
technology=30
CHANGEMONEY
receiver=Romans
amount=-200
@ENDIF

This event has four triggers: TEXT, CREATEUNIT, GIVETECHNOLOGY, CHANGEMONEY, you don´t have to waste four IFTURN=251 events for every trigger. The only limit is that you cannot have triggers of the same type in one event (eg. you cannot give money, or create troops for several civs without using several events)

Edit: FMK was faster

[klesh]

I beat you!!! , but now I am all thinking of goody huts....

Starting a new thread...

[fairline]

FMK. BeBro: thanks for the tips - very useful

I think I'm going to need multiple events files if I include everything I want. Presumably, I need to reset the event turn number to zero whenever I use delevent and introduce a new events file.

One more question - has anybody replaced railways with a second set of roads? I want to have standard roads as the Celtic pathways and railways as Roman roads; however, I don't want the Roman roads to be infinite speed railways - I want them to just allow faster travel than the standard roads.

[Mercator]

I'm not sure, but I don't think so... The number simply refers to the turn number in the game, and that doesn't change when clearing the events.

Another thing about the settler-type units... I don't think they can pillage either.

About the resources... You can't add them at will, but you can suppress them (using MapEdit ). So you can customise the pattern just a little bit.

No, humans can build cities on anything. The fertility flag just keeps AI's city placement moderately intelligent.

Could someone who knows more (Mercator? Gothmog?) chime in?

Affirmative.

[fairline]

Thanks, Mercator.

One more question - has anybody replaced railways with a second set of roads? I want to have standard roads as the Celtic pathways and railways as Roman roads; however, I don't want the Roman roads to be infinite speed railways - I want them to just allow faster travel than the standard roads.

Anybody know if this is possible?

[El León]

It just occurred to me that a way to do this without the romans going from the black sea to gibraltar in one turn is to:
1. make RRs unbuildabe (don't give anyone the RR tech)
2. Place them sparsely with the cheat menu, but always in pairs, along "roman" roads. Speed will be faster, but still limited.
3. Make both road and RR graphics the same to avoid ugliness.

Only disadvantage is that you cannot have roman roads except those at the beginning. Unless...

Can you use the changeterrain event to add land improvements? Can't remember just now.

[Exile]

El Leon; I've already done that. In Imperialism 1870.

Fairline; I've already tried to do just what you're suggesting, using every trick I can think of short of altering code. No luck.

[fairline]

Originally posted by Exile
Fairline; I've already tried to do just what you're suggesting, using every trick I can think of short of altering code. No luck.

Oh well, looks like another idea that's a non-starter.

Thanks to all for the tips

[techumseh]

It is possible to use one of the multi-cell terrains (forest, hills, mountains) as a road terrain. You can set it's movement to 0, thereby making it similar to railways, or 1, and set higher movement costs for the other terrain, with a corresponding increase in the movement rate of units.

Roads can connect at the corners of the terrain diamonds, while roads as terrain cannot - they only connect along the common side of two diamonds. Therefore, the road graphics will have a zig-zag look on the map. Also, the moveunit command has no clue how to use zero movement terrain.

[Henrik]

Terrains can also be given partial movement costs by inserting the same values that get you partial movement points for units.

[AroSch]

Originally posted by El Leon
1. make RRs unbuildabe (don't give anyone the RR tech)
2. Place them sparsely with the cheat menu, but always in pairs, along "roman" roads. Speed will be faster, but still limited.
3. Make both road and RR graphics the same to avoid ugliness.

Only disadvantage is that you cannot have roman roads except those at the beginning.

And if this roman roads will be destroyed (pillaged), you never could build them again...
I once planned to use this effect for simulate winds and currents(?), but it was be pillaged by barbarians. Winds pillageed! ...

[El León]

I once planned to use this effect for simulate winds and currents(?), but it was be pillaged by barbarians. Winds pillageed

And I thought their irrational attacks on merchants were barbaric! Those poor winds and currents.


Anyway, an effective combo of the tecumseh and exile ideas would be to make some terrain transformable into "roman road" (0 movement terrain) (i.e. plains and/or grasslands), but not forests and mountains.
This way, the romans cannot transform all of europe into one huge railroad, but it will help get them across open terrain quickly, while halting at hills, mountains, forests, swamps, etc. Also, the planning may be such that the corner connection problem can be avoided by placing the untransformable terrain at convenient places...

[Exile]

I was gonna save this idea, but then it seems someone's used it before me so . . .

In order to minimize the use of the engineer unit (in the engineer slot), you can elect to start the scenario with only one engineer unit for the Romans. Set up an event so that if it is ever killed, another will be created at the coodinates for either Rome or Constantinople. Don't allow the engineer unit to be built in any other way.

[fairline]

Originally posted by techumseh
It is possible to use one of the multi-cell terrains (forest, hills, mountains) as a road terrain. You can set it's movement to 0, thereby making it similar to railways, or 1, and set higher movement costs for the other terrain, with a corresponding increase in the movement rate of units.

I've tried a variation on this: I used the mountain slots for Roman roads, but gave them a movement value of 171 (see the tips section of Kull's site). As suggested by Henrik this gives a movement value of 1/3 (same as standard roads), so I reduced the standard roads movement multiplier to 2. The only problem is I need all the normal multi-cell slots for their original pupose....

I've decided instead to give Roman units a movement value of 172 (1 1/3) as Kull indicates in his tips section, and have only one road type.

In order to minimize the use of the engineer unit (in the engineer slot), you can elect to start the scenario with only one engineer unit for the Romans. Set up an event so that if it is ever killed, another will be created at the coodinates for either Rome or Constantinople. Don't allow the engineer unit to be built in any other way.

Exile, I intend to make legionaries/'combat engineers' unbuildable, but reinforced by events on the date when new legions arrived in Britain

[St Leo]

It is possible to use one of the multi-cell terrains (forest, hills, mountains) as a road terrain.

Such Roman Road graphics may be found inthis scenario.