The format reference, and four things the research corrected
The technical layer is the reason this site exists. Writing it properly meant contradicting the project's own planning document four times.
A format gets a page here if and only if there is a written spec behind it. Everything else stays a one-line row on a hub that says so and links nowhere, because the arrow on a linked row is a promise that the click is worth making.
Writing them turned up four corrections, and the masterdoc was wrong in three of them.
What the sources actually said
- .eng is documented
- The planning doc listed it as undocumented. It is written up, and it spans Caesar III as well — so it earned a page instead of a row.
- Caesar III saves are not ZIP
- They use PKWARE DCL compression. The engine's own file is called zip.c and its function zip_compress, which is exactly the sort of name that propagates a wrong assumption for twenty years.
- A .map is exactly 211,692 bytes
- Fixed size, on a 162×162 grid. A number that specific is worth publishing because it is instantly checkable.
- Cost and labour are not in the engine
- They live in c3_model.txt, which ships with the game and which any mod may rewrite. That single fact has shaped every table on this site since.