Colonialism for ToT?

ElBiotipo

Chieftain
Joined
Jun 22, 2022
Messages
4
Hi! I'm new to the forum, but I've been playing Civ2 ever since I was a kid, and I've been tinkering with scenarios for almost as long too. I've never made anything too concrete, but it's just so relaxing to edit scenarios when I'm bored. And it's amazing to see all the new features allowed by ToT!

I've been brainstorming an update to the Colonialism scenario (you can find it here) which I don't believe has a ToT conversion yet! Since I'm not very good at editing with ToT (in fact I don't know how to make the conversion), most of these ideas are just that, though I might test them in the MGE version and see what happens!
  • The whole trade thing never worked well in single player. I've been thinking into adding "rare resources" units and tribal villages instead. The second could give you minor gold and mostly be an annoyance to prevent (or maybe encourage in the AI case) your expansion. The first would be the gold, spices, etc. the Europeans looked for, and would be a major prize to get. Gold would be hard to get it otherwise.
  • You would also get huge rewards by conquering native cities, particulary Asian trade ports, which would be the hardest to crack.
  • Maybe the AI could get a little assistance with events spawning colonists and conquerors in historical places, like the Dutch in New Amsterdam or the Spanish in the relatively remote Rio de La Plata. The Minor European civilization that has no colonists of their own could also have their own little colonies (like New Sweden)
Which reminds me, the 1500s were the age of the Reformation and religious wars in Europe, and I would like to represent that somehow. I think there would be a fun challenge to the Habsburg civ not to only ensure dominance in the colonies but also in Europe and the HRE. I've thought of some alternatives:
  • After a certain date or with a certain wonder, the Europeans civ would begin a total war with the Habsburgs that would last quite a number of turns (I don't remember if this is actually possible but I've seen it done in other scenarios like Red October). The Habsburgs would of course try to take the most of Europe while the Europeans or rather Protestants would try to expel them from anywhere but Spain. Diplomacy is disabled for both of them, but other civs can ally or declare war with them at will, it was a chaotic time.
  • OR: Replace the Ottomans or the Netherlands with a Protestant League civ, including Sweden and some German cities at first, that can get more by event. I don't like this idea because I like the Ottomans as a playable civ (one of my favorite playthroughs was making a re-reconquista with them), and while the Netherlands are boring (and always get stuck if they're played by the AI) they were major colonizers.
  • This might be silly, but I would even be open to upgrade the Ottomans to a generic "Oriental" civ to represent major empires that resisted European colonization. They might get poor units but unique to each region (no idea how to do this, but I think there's a script to allow certain cities to build certain units) and have a long way to catch up with the Europeans, but it would be rewarding to play, say, a surviving Inca empire. With this idea, for example, the native empires would get hit by "barbarian" plague units, and would have be easy to conquer... unless, you as the player, managed to turn things back...
Any thoughts or recommendations? Keep in mind I'm very acquainted with the vanilla Civ2 editor, not so much with ToT or the whole LUA thing, but it looks exciting!
 
Welcome! :)

Eivind's Colonialism scenario is one of the best out there, and definitely one of the most beautiful looking MGE scenarios. A ToT conversion would be awesome! I like the sound of some of your enhancement ideas too.

I'm not aware of a existing ToT conversion of it but there may be one in the depths of @gapetit 's ToT conversions super thread. At some point when I kick off my ToT preservation work I plan to slowly go through every page of his thread as there's so much good stuff in there.

.
 
Hi, the conversion did exist at some point but was removed(?) from the downloads. Anyway, I happen to have it (I'm not the author though). AI doesn't play well in this one, it's probably due to all land masses having the same number (0). AI can only handle up to 63 different land masses in any Civilization 2 game and ignores or treats all others as 63th. This breaks many scenarios, not just this one, including Eivind's 2nd revision of this scenario for MGE from 2006 also suffered from the same "mistake".
 

Attachments

  • Eivind_ColonialismII_TOT.zip
    879.5 KB · Views: 26
Last edited:
Most of the scenarios passed to ToT when they were upgraded (In the Modified Scenarios Workshop I included them while modifying) were transferred to the Civ-2 - Scenario Creation sub-forum downloads. The latest version of John Ellis's Colonies IV (improved relatively recently) is directly on this site:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/colonies-iv-by-john-ellis-for-civ-2-tot.28159/

I don't know why most of the conversions weren't included on the Scenario League page, but when Blake hits Civ-2 ToT, I imagine they will be more well known and in more places.
 
Top Bottom