Matrix Games Forums

Just purchased and DLed TOF and did the Tutorial and am setting up to play for the first time.

I selected Custom Game to avail myself of the 'many settings' and 'many' seems to be TWO! I can select Human or AI control and Difficulty Level. Where are the 'many settings' and what are they?

What am I missing?

P.S. A search of the manual for 'custom' = nada; I did try.

Go to the options section.

As far as I can tell there is no "options section". Certainly not in connection with the Custom Game. There I can choose Human/AI and Difficulty and then Start Game.

If you mean ESC/Preferences, surely not as that related to graphic resolution and sound and etc, and is available to the gamer playing the standard scenarios or even no scenario as it is available at the very start in the main menu.

Now I am playing v1.0 as the v1.1 download is not available and no longer available as a beta - the link is gone, AFAIK.

BTB, I do see a section with a lot of date to the right of the vertical list of countries on the Custom Game screen and it makes noises when I left click on them, but if I am supposed to be able to change the values I haven't guessed my way to figuring it out. And afaik there is nothing in the manual about this.

I did searched the manual for word custom and the acrobat reader jumped immediately to page 11.

When playing the custom game you can freely choose the controller for every single country and the difficulty level for every country. The quick start allows you to just choose the alliance controlled by you and all countries are set on normal difficulty settings.

Thank you doomtrader for your fast response.

I had expected something different from the term "many custom settings" than setting the controller and difficulty level for all the countries. I was expecting features that I expect I will find in the Editor. It might have been a question of the wording. What is there is very good and offers much, but at a more political level than an economic or technical lever; all good just not what I was expecting.

All of those can be very easily modded. You don't even need editor to make changes (expect the map itself).

I still think the that preferences are what you are referring to. There are indeed many settings that can be made, with regard to fog of war, fog of war type, combat reports, and so on.

With regard to counter info, it seems that each custom counter type, made available by players doing mods, presents different information. Usually the modder will provide an explanation of what's on the custom counter type.

Most of the info on counters, such as the lights, are unneeded. That's why I for one don't pay any attention to them. I generally go over the map carefully each turn, and can see by the action points on a counter if it has moved or is in good supply, and by the strength whether it needs to be reinforced.

Happily things are now sorted out.

When the Custom Game indicated 'many custom settings' I was thinking that meant something like being able to adjust the research settings so Germany would be move value out of investment in research than say Italy. Now I understand it means something totally different and if I want to perform the adjustments I was expecting I can go in and do some simple modding.

I was thinking I had either messed up the install or somehow just not seeing something obvious.

Regarding the counter values, as one who used to play board games the key to the counter values was always in the first couple of pages. Playing TOF without that information is kind of like going to the casino and playing the dealer with the cards marked in Chinese so you have no idea of their values. Sure you can play, but you can not make informed decisions.