Xconq - Advanced Play

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## Advanced Play

This section covers additional features that may interest experienced players.

- Mixing Game Modules
- Personalizing Your Side

### Mixing Game Modules

Some interfaces (such as those using Unix-style command lines) may let you ask for more than one game design when starting up. This is sometimes useful, for instance, if you want to play on the `steppes` world with a non-standard set of units; your command line might look like `-g my-hacked-standard -g steppes`. You can also turn things around and load a file with your own changes after a complete game, as in `-g gettysburg -g my-tweaks`.

Be aware, however, that this cannot be guaranteed to work always, since the mixed-together game designs may have mutually conflicting definitions, or interfere with each other in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. Just imagine the disaster if the world consists entirely of terrain that is instant death to your initial units! Worse, Xconq may start up and run OK for awhile, then at the moment you're about to win--the object that you must capture simply cannot be captured by any unit at all.

So be careful about mixing designs!

### Personalizing Your Side

Many games will pre-assign your side's name, emblem, enemies, and so forth. However, others allow you to change all that to suit your tastes.

The name is a proper noun such as "Poland", the noun is what you would call an individual, such as "Pole", the plural is for more than one, and <adj> is the adjective for things on that side, such as "Polish". The color scheme is a comma-separated list of color names, and <image name> names some sort of image file (like a bitmap).

The image may be of any size and combination of colors, with the caveat that it may not always work correctly. For instance, two subtly different shades may get fused into a single solid color. The emblem should also be small enough to fit reasonably into unit icons. As a rule, most national flags will fit into a 7x5 rectangle, and coats of arms into a 7x9 region. The color scheme should be useful by itself, when the unit icons are too small to fit the emblem.

Xconq will not allow you to have the same name, color, or emblem as another player in the same game.

[ but none of the interfaces actually make all this work? ]

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