Spanish Civil War ToT Mod

I just started reading George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" last night. He fought for the Republican side.

@Civinator

Thank you for your concern, but I'm afraid that you may have misinterpreted my avatar.

In playing CIV2 I have been continually inspired to ever greater heights of mayhem and bloodshed in trying to live up to the expectations of my beloved avatar.

Martin the Martial Martian, is NOT black. Excepting his mad , bloodshot eyes, the pugnacious little warrior is completely transparent. Note that his face, the only uncovered part, shows only the blackness of space behind it. The rest of him is visible because of the brightly colored clothing and equipment favored by his race of bloodthirsty little warmongers.

The avatar snapshot was taken on Martos, an as yet undiscovered moon of Mars. The planet itself can be seen in the background (courtesy of NASA).

AGRICOLA said:

Martin the Martial Martian, is NOT black... the pugnacious little warrior is completely transparent.

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Now, I have learned a lot about that great little warrior. Thank you very much for the explanation. techumseh and McMonkey, please forgive me, that I´m now asking AGRICOLA an OT question, but this is the great chance to ask the master of hexediting of Civ 2 (in my eyes) about a topic that is burning in my heart:

AGRICOLA, is there a real chance to enable the normal Civ 2 battle animations for Civ 2 ToT again by hexediting, that were disabled when Civ2ToT introduced the sprites?

Civinator said:

AGRICOLA, is there a real chance to enable the normal Civ 2 battle animations for Civ 2 ToT again by hexediting, that were disabled when Civ2ToT introduced the sprites?

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Not by hex-editing, I'm pretty sure. But if you break down the sprite animation, there is a sub-animation for the unit in combat, as well as one for the (attacking) unit being killed. So you could take your battle animation and sub it in for all the unit animations.

Mercator made a program to edit the unit sprites, called CivSprite. It's still available on his site, here: http://civ2.mercator.fastmail.fm/

techumseh, thank you very much for your understanding and your answer. I made some units with Mercator´s tool, that are still available at CFC and that are looking very nice when playing Civ2 ToT.They still can be found here.

The problem is, that Microprose forgot to add defensive animations in its sprites. So one unit shoots or beats on the other unit like mad (as the attack-animations are included in the sprites), while the other unit only stands there and does nothing, until one of the units falls down or explodes (as the death-animations are included in the sprites). Even to set a kind of battleanimation in front of the attacking unit (as the sprites also include the attack animations) cannot replace the battlegraphics, that are mutually appearing on both units during battle.

I must admit that I’ve never given a damn for anything that slows down the game, such as unit or terrain animation, or sounds that distract me from gameplay, so I’m definitely no expert on animation.

However, I have looked very carefully at both Mercator’s and Catfish’s hexediting compendia of the structure /contents of save files as well as the ICONS files in my rather extensive library of playes scens. There is no toggle either in MGE or TOT to turn gun blasts off/on. Furthermore, in at least one TOT scen the gun blast icons are completely missing in ICONS with no negative effect on the game.

I suspect that the unit animation programming for the MGE animation is hard coded in MGE.exe (original program lost forever?) and simply omitted in TOT.exe.

AGRICOLA, thank you very much for your answer .

AGRICOLA said:

I suspect that the unit animation programming for the MGE animation is hard coded in MGE.exe (original program lost forever?) and simply omitted in TOT.exe.

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Yes, I think the same. In Civ2 ToT they took out the battle-animations (or disabled them) because they thought, they are no longer needed as now they have the sprites to show the attacks and movements. As nearly nobody used the original sprites cause of their ugliness and because they were not complete (missing defense graphics), they restored the old movement settings, but forgot the battleanimations. So my farther thoughts are, if the right settings can be added to the exe, may be the original combat animations could be restored for Civ 2 ToT.

I spent some time yesterday removing stackable terrain (Fortresses) from the save I'm working on. After that I started removing railroads (used to represent urban areas around cities) in preparation for introducing limited ToTPP railways. In doing this I noticed that when I cheat to alter terrain (Shift+F8) most land squares have Fortress ticked even though there is no graphical representation of this (Fortress should show up as an orange blob). Is this to do with the ToTPP stackable terrain? When I un-tick fortress and re-tick it the orange blob appears. Can I use fortresses in the scenario to give a defensive bonus or will all squares have the bonus anyway. I'm a bit confused!

McMonkey said:

I spent some time yesterday removing stackable terrain (Fortresses) from the save I'm working on.

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The new TOTPP release contains a script to remove all fortresses/airbases from a map through the Debug scripts patch. There are also new hotkeys for the Edit terrain hotkeys patch to place/remove these improvements when cheat mode is enabled. Just be sure to enable the entire map view (Reveal map -> Entire map or Shift-Y) to see the changes!

Sounds great, but TOTPP doesn't seem to work on a 64-bit clean TOT installation with 1.1 patch.

I gather that the launcher doesn't detect your version? You posted that you "Tried to run it with various ToT.exe files...ToTPP cannot detect them". But the main executable is called civ2.exe, not ToT.exe...

Anyway, I don't want to hijack this thread, so could you upload your civ2.exe in the main TOTPP thread? Then I'll take a look.

Yep, it is called civ2.exe, that is what I meant.
I'll post on your dedicated thread, thanks!

Outstanding TheNamelessOne. I will get straight to work on my SCW update. Thanks a million!

I have decided to abandon the attempt to make this a multiplayer game. I just don't see it getting enough use. In single player mode the choice is between recreating the victorious Nationalist campaign or trying to change history with the Republic. Though the Nationalists have some seriously cool units I just can't see the point of re-fighting the war as it happened and I'm also reluctant to promote the Nationalist / Fascist side. Therefore I will make the game playable from the Republican side. The player will begin with the remnants of the Army, Police, Assault Guard and the Militias and try and hold out against the determined AI Rebels until they can gain enough support from Russia and international volunteers to go over to the offensive.

My next important task is to work out the victory conditions. Obviously holding major cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao and Valencia will be key to gaining a minor victory but I'm pondering how the war could have been won by the Republic. I think that taking control of major ports like Cadiz and La Coruna would have been the key to choking off supplies to the Nationalists but they are both deep in enemy territory. What do you guys think would qualify as a major victory for the Republic? I don't want to go down the total conquest route. I need to figure out realistic objectives within the time frame that would have guaranteed victory for the Republic. Ideas welcome!

I'm also toying with the idea of starting the game with the Nationalists in control of Spanish Morocco only and having the Rebellion begin with a semi-random allocation of Nationalist units across Spain so that no two games will be identical. Obviously the allocation of Nationalist troops will be more concentrated around key cities like Sevilla, Cadiz, La Coruna, Leon, Burgos, Granada, Zaragoza etc... so that after the initial uprising the distribution of cities will be roughly similar, but there will be the element of chance over which towns and cities the Republic can hold on to. A good idea?

Good news, I'm looking forward to it.

Having the Republic hold significant territory (ie. not lose) for long enough is probably a victory in historical terms. The Civil War ended in March 1939, and WW2 began five months later. If the Republic had been able to hold out, there's a good chance Hitler would have not been able to launch WW2 when he did. So, if the Republic can hold Madrid, Barcelona and the Mediterranean coast until September 1939, a marginal victory? The Patch re-enables major and minor objectives, so you can easily vary the margin of victory if the Republic can gain a few key cities.

Random set ups and events are a great idea. Have a look at Operation Market-Garden which uses multiple randomized scenario and event files. It's a feature that's very rarely been used, despite first being enabled with Fantastic Worlds. Cheers.

I'll take a look at OMG for some ideas Tech. I have swapped all but the Moroccan cities to the Republic and now need to place more units. I have done away with some needless unit types in favour of more Infantry types. There are now several types of Falangists, Legionaros and Regulares as well as CCNN Blackshirts on the Nationalist side whilst the Republic now has several types of Militia, Urban Police (Civil Guard will be placed in the rural cities) and Loyalist Army Infantry to stiffen the defence before the Popular Army mobilises. Of course the Militias will be the bulk of the Republican forces in the early period.

I'm very keen to introduce a Red Front opening feel to the Nationalists Rebellion at the start of the scenario and I'm convinced a semi-random unit deployment will add to the scenarios re-playability potential. The Nationalist campaign will be largely events driven and I hope the Republican player will have to spend a fair part of the scenario fighting for survival before they can build up sufficient forces for a meaningful counter offensive.

I've always found those Red Front openings quite evocative (in fact, I believe one of the biggest accolades on my Korean War scenario that was made was almost losing South Korea before you had significant forces to act), so it would be quite neat to see in this context, to be honest, especially because, if I'm not mistaken, the Spanish Civil War wasn't cleanly defined fronts; in many cases, it was all over the place. I also look forward to seeing this.

Thanks for the feedback Patine. I really enjoyed the terrifying opening North Korean Blitzkreig. Really set the scene for the scenario!

You're quite right about there being no clearly defined front lines in the opening stages of the Civil War. Many cities were won for the rebels through bluff or deceptions whilst more cities could have been retained by the Republic if the local leaders had armed the Militias. Many regional authorities were more afraid of arming the 'Reds' than they were of the Civil Guard and Army and this hesitation gave the Rebels many opportunities to seize cities that should have been easily held by the Republic. The initial division of territory was in no way set in stone and I would like to enable the scenario to simulate this uncertainty. I would expect Pablostuka would have done likewise if he was working with ToTPP instead of MGE. Certain cities (IE Sevilla, Burgos and Pamplona) were always likely to fall to the Nationalists where others (IE Oviedo, Zaragoza, Toledo) could have gone either way.

I have re-assigned all mainland cities to the Republic and my main task now is working on the events. This part of the re-design shouldn't take too long. As ever the devil is in the detail of the play testing. I hope that the random nature of the opening phase will make this task a bit less tedious as it is the one part of scenario design I really struggle with being a perfectionist of sorts.

I look forwards to seeing the war evolve from the initial conflict between the Right (Carlists, Army of Africa and Falangists versus the Loyalists and Militias) into a wider conflict involving Itaian, German and Soviet supplied weapons and units. Should be quite a visual treat!

Patine said:

I've always found those Red Front openings quite evocative (in fact, I believe one of the biggest accolades on my Korean War scenario that was made was almost losing South Korea before you had significant forces to act), so it would be quite neat to see in this context, to be honest, especially because, if I'm not mistaken, the Spanish Civil War wasn't cleanly defined fronts; in many cases, it was all over the place. I also look forward to seeing this.

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Yes, that was a great events sequence at the start, wasn't it?