Removing the Civilization IV Demo's Turn Limit

Greetings, salutations and a heart-felt howdy-doo!

Looks like I missed a ton of fun things this past month, like the release of the Civilization IV demo. Now, I don't want anyone to misunderstand me; I'm not one of those icky strategy gamers (ewwwwwwww). On the other hand, something about the Civilization series has made it a legendary time-waster and heroine-like-addiction. Best of all, it looks as if numero quatro has fixed almost everything I hated about previous entries in the series.

Unfortunately, the demo only allows 100 turns. ARGH! This situation is akin to showing me a new Ferrari, letting me sit in the drivers seat, and then telling me to get the hell out. The situation needed to be rectified.

It seems the new trend in game design is to include as many assets as possible in human readable (and editable) code, in order to make modding as easy as possible. In the case of Civilization IV, all of the game logic and resources are hand-delivered in Python and XML, conveniently located in the Assets directory. I think you can see the glimmer in my eye already. :)

Long story short, 20 minutes of fumbling around delivered unto me a fix for all my woes. All that's necessary is changing one line of Python code, and VOILA! Needless to say, I was playing the "demo" until 7:00 this morning, and I'm about to take it for another spin.

Oh... You wanted to know how to do it, too? I think I can work something out.

Easy as pie. Just follow these steps, and you'll be civing away.

1. Browse to the \Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4 Demo\Assets\Python directory (which is located in your Program Files by default).



2. Open CvGameUtils.Py in your favorite text editor (notepad will do).



3. Go to line 18, which should read:
   if ( gc.getGame().getElapsedGameTurns() > 99 ):



4. Then simply change the value (99) to something more agreeable. Mine currently looks like:
   if ( gc.getGame().getElapsedGameTurns() > 65536 ):



5. Save the file, and run the game.

You'll still see a counter in the upper right, telling you that you've got X many turns left, but at 0 it just disappears. I've succesfully played up to the 18th century, with only a couple minor problems. The tech tree comes to an abrupt stop leaving you with crossbowmen and war elephants, and I have had the game become unstable a couple times... Then again, what do you expect? It's a demo. :)

That's it. I told you it was easy, didn't I? Now run off and go play... Giant Roblog will be back next week with some blabber about standards based web-design, and how much I'd love to drop-kick Internet Explorer.

Keep it chill, kats...