Second status page

[Grandma Ruth]

I'm sure this is perfectly simple and I once knew it, but how do you activate the second status page? It might only be in 1.06 or it might be in all versions. I've searched everywhere and looked at existing games to try and identify how it works, with no success. Someone please put me out of my misery!

[Gumboots]

RoR said Ned got it to work to some extent. Not sure if it was on 1.05 or 1.06 or TM.

I think Ned mentioned some trick to get multiple status pages (don't have time to search, it's somewhere in TM forums, Ned was good at snuffing out what the game could do), but when I investigated it my conclusion was that it's impractical. IIRC you can have ONE status event run onto a second page via that trick, but virtually all story-driven maps get some hard-coded text to display dynamically at certain stages of the scenario. Meaning that the status page is made up with a lot of small snippets.

Which I suppose could work if you set things out so that all of your first status page was in one status event, but that's likely to be difficult to arrange. Not sure if the second page can be split into multiple status events or not, but it should be easy enough to test.

I do know that if your first page is multiple events the overflow will just be hidden, and there won't be a second page.

Edit: Just tried it. Doesn't work at all on 1.05. Anything longer than one page just gets hidden.

On 1.06 I can get it to show arrows for multiple status pages, but I can't get it to show content after the first page. All subsequent pages are blank. This is with one massive status event that runs out past the limits of one page, but with less content than the maximum the event input will accept.

Edit2: Aha! Found something.

B4 has been uploaded to the Patch106 directory...

• Added ability to override newspaper tertiary headline, title, price, and date text through the Choice 1-4 fields
• Extended status reports to six potential pages using the same trick

So it looks like you have to mess around with multiple choice options inside a status event, and it's 1.06 only. I do recall trying the custom newspaper overrides (which work - thread here) so a bit of messing around should sort out the status page thing too.

[Gumboots]

Did some testing. The drill is to start with a newspaper event, and use the usual headline and secondary text inputs to make your first and second status pages. Then switch to a multiple choice event, and use the inputs for the four choice options to make the third, fourth, fifth and sixth status pages. Then switch back to a dialog and change the event to status.

This all works, but there's a catch. I can't get the other pages to save variables. They appear to only save plain text, with variables being dropped on save. Which (unless I'm missing something) would mean the second to sixth pages are only any use for a sort of briefing, and not for status updates as such. That doesn't seem very useful though, so maybe I'm missing something.

[RulerofRails]

Since you spent the effort to dig it up, I thought I would test it also. What I did is save the map each time before switching the event type. Variables show up fine for me.

But of course there is a catch, these "special" fields all have length limits. What's worse: the nomenclature for a variable such as "[Years elapsed since game start]" appears to be eating up the space. I didn't take the time for counting exactly, but from observation the "newspaper body" field is about 3 full lines worth of plain text. The "choice" fields are barely over one line of plain text.

The biggest limiter for usefulness, IMO, is that such an event can only test against a single territory/company/player at a time. It's not just territory variables that are affected. For example, any task to haul x goods to a specific city/port/etc. will be using a territory test. You can test against one territory. One haulage task of this type will work, but not a second, third etc..

For sure it's a cool little feature for a bit of fun. An easter egg maybe? If you put one blank page, probably people will stop looking past that.

[Gumboots]

Ok, I wasn't saving between switching event types so maybe that was the problem. I don't know what the actual length limit is in those fields, but it's impossible to see what you've stuck in them once it goes past a handful of words.

I'm struggling to see a case where this will really be useful. If it severely limits what you can put on the first page (ie: if it's restricting the first page to newspaper headline amounts of text) then you'll lose so much from the first page possibilities that the other five pages won't be much use.

Does anyone know of a case where somebody actually managed to make good use of this feature?

[Grandma Ruth]

Thank you so much, both of you! I knew it was a comparatively simple thing to do. Now I'll see if it will do what I want.

[Grandma Ruth]

This all works, but there's a catch. I can't get the other pages to save variables. They appear to only save plain text, with variables being dropped on save. Which (unless I'm missing something) would mean the second to sixth pages are only any use for a sort of briefing, and not for status updates as such. That doesn't seem very useful though, so maybe I'm missing something.

Yes, that's the problem. On the original normal status page you can have up to fifteen or so events triggering a status line, but on these extra pages it's weird. I'm trying to work out what's what but at the moment I can't see anything at all on the second page. On the next pages, yes, but not the second page.
And now look what's happened! No idea what this is:

[Grandma Ruth]

Well I figured that out, at least. It puts that symbol in when there is no text - which of course it can't find because the text was in one of the choice boxes. It requires either a text it can find or an effect.