Civilization V: How to change the turn type of a started game

At some point in a game, you regret the turn type you selected hours ago when creating it. Fear not, changing the turn type is easy if you know what to do.

1. Save your game locally, not on steam cloud, and exit.
2. If you do not have an Hexadecimal editor, you’ll need one. On windows I use HxD Hex Editor.
3. Make a backup of your saved game file in case you make a bad operation and corrupt the file.
4. Open your saved game file with your Hexadecimal editor. (On windows, the default path for save games is your documents\My Games\Sid Meier’s Civilization 5\Saves\)
5. Search for “GAMEOPTION_DYNAMIC_TURNS”. This is the first entry of the turn types. You should see it followed by “GAMEOPTION_SIMULTANEOUS_TURNS”.
6. Now it depends on the turn type you are getting from and going to. If you were using the sequential mode and want to use any of the other two, you simply have to change the next character after the option you want to the hexadecimal value “01”. Here is an example where I selected simultaneous turns.

   

   If you want to change between simultaneous and dynamic, you have to replace the “01” following your previous option with a “00” and replace the “00” following the new option by a “01”. If you want to change to sequential turns, make sure both options are followed by a “00”.

7. Save the file.
8. Open the game, load your saved game, et voilà. If the game crashes, you did something wrong. Use your backup to recreate your file and try again.

I’ve had this issue while playing in multiplayer with friends and realizing when war was declared what really was the dynamic turns options and regretting it. About thirty minutes of hacking later we were back in play.