Customizing Starships?

You can customize the ships just by changing the files in the data directory. The ship files have an extension of ship or SHIP. The only complex thing is the model of the ship. Here is an example entry.


//------------------------------------------------------------------------
SHIP SurveyShip
//------------------------------------------------------------------------

Name "Survey Ship"
Model "Ship21"

HitPoints 40
Attack 0
Defense 1
Speed 2
Cost 200
SensorRange 5
Ability "Survey"
Tech_Requirement_ID 0
Maintenance 0
Range 4

ENDSHIP

One thing I meant to add was to make a backup copy of any files you change or better still just create a new file (custom.ship) that has any special ships you want.

If you create a new file, will the game see it (is it only looking for files with certain extentions, like .SHIP)? Also, I've been wondering this ever since I looked through those .SHIP files...if you create a new ship (with a new name on the SHIP line) will the game still see it, or will it only look for a ship that it already knows the name of, like SurveyShip, or SensorDrone? If I create a new ship and name it KrazyKroozer (lol), will the game be able to use it?

Yes, if you create a new file with one of the given extensions and follow the format of that file, it will read it in and use it. For the ships, though, you have to make sure that you specify a model that exists, or it will cause problems. Eventually, you'll also be able to create your own models.

If you make a backup copy of an existing ship file be sure to use a different extension for it. The code looks for all files with the extension .ship (or .SHIP - it is not case sensitive) for ships. Duplicate definitions for the same ship could cause confusion. The same is true for many other extension names, such as .tech for the technology definitions, .anomaly for the anomaly definitions, .imp for the social improvement definitions, .sbmodule for star base module definitions, and .event for colonization events. Do not use these file extension names for anything that you don't want the code to read and be careful to use the correct extension name for the file's content.

p.s., there are two other files called stars.lst, which contains the names of stars the code can choose from, and english.str, which contains a lot of text strings in english. I don't know if these file extensions work the same as the others.

Gal Civ only looks for 2 .str files, English.str and ToolTips.str, and it only looks for Stars.lst. So those should be safe for just renaming.

In reading some information on the OS/2 version of GalCiv, I saw that they were planning on creating an option of creating your own starships within the game. Presumably, these new ship types wouldn't be available to the other races, since they were only developed by you. Are there any plans on this for the current GalCiv, or is there any way to create your own .SHIP files that can only be used by Humanity?

That was Shipyards and it was in the OS/2 version. But it won't be in the Windows version, at least not in 1.x.