without PKWare (PC) or Zip (Mac) compression) are most useful to study the file format specifictions or to make changes with a hex editor. Finally, to save the modified game, you choose the file format that you want your game to be saved in from the popup. you can use the options from the 'Tools' menu to edit some game data. When you want to load a game, you must first choose the file type that matches your saved game from the popup at the bottom: 'PC Saved Games (*.sav)', 'Mac Saved Games (*.sav)' or 'Uncompressed Saved Games (*.c3u)'. The 'Open' and 'Save As' dialogs behave in a non-standard way (I was more a Mac guy at that time). To start, you open a Caesar 3 saved game via File-> Open.

Some clarifying usage information (2008): If you are familiar with hex editing I can mail you a list with hex offsets. This is only useful if you want to do low-level editing with a hex editor.

edit the present values of the four ratings (culture, favor, etc.)Ĭ3GameExplorer incorporates the functionality of my Macintosh tool C3Converter. Quoted from the 'About' text file (2004): If there's interest, I can also post a few more details I found out about the Caesar 3 saved game file format, in addition to what Pecunia posted on her website. The webpage is from 2004 and the link to Dragon2's tools is misleading nowadays. It works fine with Windows XP (and likely with Vista, too, I guess). Maybe this little tool can still be useful for some scenario design purposes or even for the ongoing projects, so here is the download link: Seeing all the efforts being made to program editing tools and post format specifications, I think the cheating argument doesn't hold anymore. The predominant opinion at that time was that such a tool should not be made publicly available because it could be used for cheating in contests. The download link has never been posted anywhere else.

I don't have access to that specific sub-forum anymore and don't know if it's still there.

C3GameExplorer was beta-tested by Caesar Philon and posted in 2004 in the 'Designer' sub-forum of CBC. I gathered some insight to Caesar 3's saved game file format when I programmed the Mac-PC-Converter and a little tool for scenario designers, which I called 'C3 Game Explorer', some years ago. Scenario designers have an interest in editing saved games to go beyond the possiblities of the official editor and not all details of the file format that could be useful seem to have been uncovered yet. At its 10th birthday Caesar 3 seems to receive more attention from file format analysts and graphics modders than ever before. Well, I'm enjoying the current discussion about file editing tools.

Caesar 3 game cover