Tell me something about the AP-Editor!

No



Haven't played Civ3 much so not sure, but you can edit some rules.


~SDC~

There are settings for Minors, however, that can limit their impact. You can allow or disallow both 'aggressive colonizing' and their ability to actually invade (!).

I've read the description of the Scenario-Editor. It says you can have triggers with it.

So could making a trigger like:

Event: Startup
Effect: kill the Minors

be used?

The other things sound interesting! You said, I can set them to be able to invade. So can I also make them work like majors at all? e.G. The minors at the moment cheat money but on the other hand sell or buy techs for far less than you'd have to pay to a major.

Another thig I could imagine was setting the minors to be at war with everyone. Is that possible?

A completely different question:
Can I disable Culture-Flipping or lessen the effect of culture far enough to prevent it? I read that one of the Scenarios will be something with higher culture, so I imagine that lowering it will work aswell.

The reason for my questions are that in Civ3 it is so, that without the Editor the game just had to many flaws for me to continue having a high replay-value. The same is true for GalCiv. That's why I am really looking forward to the Editor!

And I'll preorder as soon as AP-Beta is made available to preorderers as long as I don't get the feeling that the Editor lacks the power to do the things I'd like to from your answers in this Thread. Answer #1 however did not please me!

Umm, no you can't make the game end when you kill the minors.  Only the majors are affected by triggers.

You can't disable culture flipping, but you can hamper it by lowering culture.

 

I'm going to be working on minors this week. I tend to have the same feeligns about htem building wonders and super proejcts. That's goign to go away.

~SDC~

Cari: My question was if I can make a trigger to kill the minors at the start of the game, not if I would win if I kill them!

Well, with the ability to alter all techs after my wishes, I could disable the development of Culture-SB-Modules at all what would lower flipping to a point where it can't be exploited.

Frog: It's not the wonders that annoy me but the fact that they let exploit them like there's no tomorrow:
I lack tech? I go to the minors and shop them for very few money.

I lack money? I go to the minors and regularly sell them what I have and they don't for really huge money/turn sums that enable me to run my econonmy on 100% for a long long time in the game.

That is why I want to have an oppurtunity to completely disable them!

Of course I know, that I don't have to use exploits (never trade with minors and never build more than one culture base per sector) if I don't want too but then again their mere existance makes me ill! LOL

Why shouldn't minors build wonders. And by "super" projects do you include capitals in that. I can live with with no wonders but no capitals would be as good as removing them from the game completely.

Haha! That's exactly what I want!

It was not me who sayd they shall build no wonders, frogboy only let it look as if I had the same opinion what is not the truth! For me it's the too easy tading that annoys me about minors, not the wonders they build.

We don't currently have a way to disable the minor races.

But I think you should!

You really don't like minors, do you AIL? LOL

triggers are currently limited to:
someone dies --> you win/lose
someone feels a particular way about you (hates you/loves you) --> you win/lose
someone owns a particular star --> win/lose

not included, but muchly desired 8-) are triggers for events -- for example, time/location events to push a story... Heck, I've got a whole list of fun things I'd like to be able to do for the story part


~SDC~

AIL, there will be an option to turn Minors off in the the next build after 1.49c, which just went up.

Wow! Thank you! Now I'll preorder my AP!

Why?

I have been folowing GalCiv since before it was released, (Orion Sector site + MOO3), so i have followed its history even when i didnt have the game. You have constantly changed the starbase rules to balance the game and 'make the maps look better' (all of which IMHO has been great), but now your going to 'cripple' the minors? when i started playing GalCiv they were limited to one planet, then they were allowed to spread, and still do, like wildfire. Now they are going back to being nothing more than different colored bulbs on the crimbo tree that is the tactical screen? and not only that, not very brightly lit as your going to take away thier abilities for trade goods and wonders as well? is that not like killing the paitent to cure the disease? in the new expansion you have given peeps new ships for thier moral status, why not do something similiar for the minors, so that certain trade goods and wonders are specific to them. when the map is first calculated, seed the minors then, make them 'established' with a random amount of systems in a given area (no more than 4 systems say) then work out a starting economic level for them based on the random setup of systems they have, that way theres no 'cheating' from the minors, if they have 4 systems and 8 planets from the start, thats what they have to start with, no more no less, its then down to the minor civ what it does with that 'headstart'. If you limit the minors as well to only 5 on a gigantic map and then down to 2 on a tiny map, if one gets wiped out have a random event like the fundamentalists (scuse spelling) create another or if no event occurs to create one after a set number of years to brng the total back to 5.

My 50ps worth

Um, yeah, by giving us the option to turn minors off at all, I think there's no need to cripple them anymore for those who like them the way they are now.

Besides being able to turn off minors, another thing that will be vital for player-made scenarios and campaigns will be the ability to turn off random events. These are extremely unbalancing or can ruin the entire premise of a scenario - i.e., the Drengin getting the alignment-change event (as they did in my last game).

Doesn't matter now since the scenario editor doesn't work, but something to keep in mind for the future.

I actually like the challenge the randoms events gives me.

These events can turn a game i thought i had already won into a real challenge and thus make my games more interesting.

Allthough i think the fundamentalist event is unbalanced. If you are playing evil alignment you can loose anywhere between 0-80% of your planets and there is nothing you can do to avoid it (other than change alignement). That alone keeps me from play evil. I think some kind of restriction on how large a part of your empire can turn would be in place or some kind of relation to morale on planets would be nice (i.e 100% morale planets can't turn on you).

The random events will be a pain if someone goes through any trouble to carefully balance a scenario or make a campaign based on fiction built around this universe. Minors randomly popping up - and rule changes by the UP for that matter - can probably go all in the same bin as random events as far as things that would be best turned off when our storytelling demands it.

You are right....i can see now that i didn't read your first post carefully enough. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding.

What do you mean the scenario editor doesn't work? I keep an installed copy of Gal Civ and AP from SDC as well as my working copy, and the installed Scenario editor works fine for me. So what problems are you having?

I experimented with the editor a bit, and I noticed some limitations. For example:

You can't say "All races start with +200% cultural resistance rating." (that would basically kill culture flipping) You should be able to grant racial bonuses to specific or all races at the start.

You can't say "The Drengin start with a battleship." On a pre-defined map, you can give races ships. You can't pre-start a race with ships on a random map; a random map always gives you the colony ship and survey ship to start.

You can't say "The Torians start with the 'artifact of increasing power' event."

You can't say "The Torians get a PQ 30 planet as their home system." when randomly generating a map.

I created a scenario with the eight empires split up into four teams of two, and with the player starting with Stellar Cartography. I saved this to the Scenario folder so that I could load it in game.

I loaded it in game setup, and it still goes to the Race Setup even though, if you're using custom rules, it really should be bypassed. Once it was done generating the universe, I did not have Stellar Cartography. Once I found the Altarians, they were not on my team (there was no green line in the Treaties screen).

I exited the game and went to load the FourTeams scenario in the editor, and all the settings were wiped out.

However, the pre-packaged scenarios DO work. Just not ones I try to create. Are there very specific things one must or must not do in the scenario editor to get the file to work?

When I load a pre-made scenario, it has all the correct information. I changed the Twilight of Humanity one to start with Stellar Cartography, and all of a sudden, that scenario no longer works. I re-load it in the scenario editor, and it, too, is now all wiped out.

Um, there isn't anything special that you have to do.  It should have just worked.  I'm sending you a copy of the scenario editor's exe in case there's something wrong with yours.