Are there any mods to make Civ2 look like Civ1?

[Metro Polis]

I can't open your attachment Metro Polis. But hey, this is a great idea. The flags. The way it is now, the map is somehow crowded with colors, there is 8 for civilizations plus 4 colors for cities, and by 12 it is getting difficult to orientate on the map.

Dunno what's the problem. It's a zipped file using WinRar. Your WinZip should be able to handle that too.
You have to upload zipped gifs because unless you do, uploading them here will automatically revamp them and cause a lot of headache in-game.

 

[Kasius Klej]

Something wrong with the file or checksum, but never mind, I recreated the idea with little trial and error. Basically just measured how big the flag is and a position a city square could be without having edges chopped off. I was curious.
I like idea of 7 civs each having their original color and no fuss when industrial age and age of automobile happen. It's perhaps a step back in design, the empty city of Veii doesn't look like anything in civ1, but look, it's the Greeks from Athens that are coming, that is immediately obvious, the famous orange army.

 

[Metro Polis]

Yeah, that's what I was talking about. Some ideas to improve the design:
1. Draw the road lines right into the flags just to make them look more like Civ1 cities. Like gray for the Roman cities - but watch out not to paint the pixel for the cities' names and units' slots gray. It would look awkward having Romans using two different colours for cities and units' shields.
2. Empty cities could be painted gray or another colour that doesn't interfer. The flag will overlap that "empty" colour as soon as there is a unit inside the city.
3. Every cities' bottom corner on the right is empty. Well, you could put something in there, too. Or place the city size somewhat lower and simply fill the left space above and below it gray or black - something like that. Remember that city size can grow to numbers higher than nine. I guess they won't stay in shape and within the city walls then.

Edit: My zipped file looks fine - I can download and unzip/unrar it. We must sort that out, because we won't be able to exchange files if we don't.

 

[Metro Polis]

I fooled some more around. Tried to achieve something similar with the units' shields. This is the outcome:

As you can see the space where the unit's shield appears was left translucent, the rest is kept in John's original white. Maybe, if the unit was somewhat smaller, if the white frame was not as big as it is, it might work with the nation's colours, too. Yeah, I know, the settler unit doesn't really work as good as it could because it is pretty big and fills the whole square.

This is how it works, I turned the shield into a rectangle (the red one) again:

I'm a little annoyed that so many units appear more than once - I guess it's due to the barbarian units. We could do something about that I guess.

Don't try to use the image as it appears here as civfanatics' mechanic turn it on upload in a picture using more than the original 256 colours. That's why we have to upload and exchange zips instead. I hope to find a colour in the palette that will change into the nations' one, but I think that isn't possible. If it was, someone would have discovered it already a long time ago. Not sure people cared for that much, though, as normally everyone tries to make unique units and get rid of the shield, not enlarge it.

 

[Kasius Klej]

Here is the patch with modified technology tree.
rules.txt
description.txt
cities.gif

3 improvements that were mentioned yesterday about city colors were implemented.

combustion - makes barracks obsolete
industry & automobile - doesn't change the color of the cities

Changing the tech tree is not that difficult, but requires some testing, adding civiliopedia entries, and one has to be systematic. Perhaps one should also consider compatibility with saved games. In this case, we just needed a user defined tech called Industry (id U1), that would replace the old Industry (id Ind), so it worked out well.

I included a working version of cities.gif, which is an upgrade to John Valdez' gif. That should work with 7 distinct colors for each civilization for their cities instead of 4.



That is about all changes that I can find in txt files to improve the gameplay, to bring it as close to to civ1 mechanics that is. Most of the work has been done 20 years ago anyway, this battle mechanics for example, the configuration of hit points for each unit, this thing has been thought out by John, and is as close to civ1 as possible, of course you cannot get rid of the unit's health bar, but the battles are very close approximation to civ1 battles.

 

[Blake00]

For the record I had absolutely no problems downloading @Metro Polis 's file and unzipping it yesterday, so yeah whatever you're using @Kasius Klej it's time to get out of the dark ages and make the switch haha. 7zip is the number 1 program out there for compression (as it on max settings to can make files smaller then all the others) and also loads other stuff (eg winzip and winrar files) just fine. 7zip and winrar have the ability to make regular zip files more compressed too which can possibly trip over old versions of winzip.

Personally I'm happy with things like the Civ2 earth map and keeping unit hitpoints etc since if you take away what makes Civ2 good and truly make it like Civ1 then you may as well just go play Civ1 haha. And yeah another change I was thinking about doing was either switching the Romans to the Russians or Switching the Greeks to the English as they start too close which means whichever AI doesn't get the city down first starts dancing around trying to find another spot and then one of them (usually the late starter) dies within the first like 50 turns haha. Better to space the AIs out more to allow them to grow. I know the Romans are popular player faction so maybe the Greeks are best suited to make the sacrifice lol.

Anyway yeah sorry guys I'll hand over my graphic files now and attach them to this post as I'm all finished and they should hopefully help you! In fact I'll essentially do a rushed full mod release right now as I'm gonna walk away from this now and get back to my other projects lol! I'll just label my release a simpler graphics mod demaster/demake of John's original mod and leave it at that. So if you guys wanna take my stuff and add it to John's plus your stuff and do something even bigger you can go right ahead with my blessings (as long as you include me in your credits if you use my graphics lol)!

Anyway as for my final changes I've re-imported all units at true 2x size to match everything else I've done which is still smaller than Johns stretched units meaning they fit quite nicely into the diamond and no more then say 10% of the larger units goes into the upper diamond area which should mean no more unit movement confusion. Keep in mind they're perfectly positioned to appear inside the grey fortification mode (eg like the Legion above Washington) and the white fortress (eg the one below New York) so if you guys start messing and changing their sizes etc then you may break that alignment. You'll also bring back the icky uneven stretching John had too unless you go the super small 1x size units I've seen you guys play with. John had the unit shield tucked into the top left corner of each unit cell and I've just left them there too (although he had some broken ones which I fixed). And yeah the multiple same duplicates units for different slots is a bit annoying so maybe some colour variations (eg Riflemen uniforms are black for partisan slot, green for marine slot, blue for traditional slot etc) might be a good way around that.

I'll also include my rules file however I know you've got your own rules file but merging won't be tricky as I've ONLY touched the special resource names section so if you just copy and paste that part into your file you'll be fine. If you don't do this you'll have incorrect names on some resources. As previously mentioned John appears to have locked out Farmland tech so you may wish to move my farmland cell graphic over into the irrigation cell to get the traditional Civ1 irrigation look.

17/07/2023 Replaced download at 171 hits. Updated with better documentation, added a link to a high quality Roland MT-32 Civ1 soundtrack youtube video, and added a new title image!

 

[Blake00]

oh wow.. it took me so long to type up my post and prepare the files (plus my internet went down for 2 hours grr) that you guys have posted all sorts of stuff since I last refreshed the thread haha. Nice job with the techs, and thats very clever what you've done with the cities! Oh well, hopefully my files will still be helpful.

 

[CurtSibling]

If this was in ToT, spritegen could be used to make the unit boxes the proper tribe colour, instead of blank white.

 

[Kasius Klej]

Hah, the same thing happened to me last time I was writing a rather lengthy post, trying to cover loose ends about the bugs in rules.txt.
Before I slowly posted a reply, there were new pixel precise ideas here.

I'm a little annoyed that so many units appear more than once - I guess it's due to the barbarian units. We could do something about that I guess.

Not much can be done, it is all because of barbarian units. On the other hand, if you make more duplicates, this is just an idea, if you cover all slots with appropriate corresponding units, (that is done with units.gif and rules.txt), you can make this mod compatible with almost any civ2 savegame.

As far as units are concerned, that is. As far as tech tree is compatible with any old savegames, I think I'll give it more thought to this later, as it is an interesting puzzle.

I like the new units graphics by the way, I think it's major improvement from what you had to work with from beginning, Blake. Didn't mention it before, because it is a shameful way to drive a tank, and Metro Polis already mentioned it, the navigation was difficult, the units were half in the air, when I drove a tank, made two quick moves already, spotted an enemy militia right in from of the tank, I though there would be a battle, a certain win for my tank, but no, no battle, I just drove right in front of an enemy militia. It wasn't a real game fortunately, just a testing game. Great job in graphics, mate. No more problems with navigation now, even fighters and bombers are just like another chess piece in civ1.

I have another idea of improving the civ1 mod. I'll write more about it later. It's about bringing random map generator of civ2 closer to civ1 random map generator, about tweaking the resources, changing the @terrain section of rules to do so, but before I do that I have to finish some measurements and actually write down the observed numbers in to Excel on a say 40 by 40 map. I already know the two numbers, it's 0% if there were no resources on a newly generated map (that don't happen), and it's approximately 100% on a civ1 generated map (how much in detail I will know later), and then on a civ2 random map, the observations will again show, let's say 142%. Then I'll have this third number 142% and I'll bring it down to about 100%. I think I have some ideas how to do that with Excel.
At the same time it's not just a question about the abunddancy of the resources, but also of diversity or how they are dispersed. Some random map generator algorithm might disperse more evenly than the other. We don't know exactly which one does what, but matching and unifying the resources from both sets would do the trick here, I think, to bring both algorithms closer to civ1 random generator.
I'll try to solve both of these question at the same time.
It's been great working on this game. So many ideas.

 

[Metro Polis]

If this was in ToT, spritegen could be used to make the unit boxes the proper tribe colour, instead of blank white.

Isn't there a colour that works like the units' shields and simply turns into a nation's colour in the units' slots?
I don't know of any and If there was one someone would have already found out over the past years, I guess. Well, I know that modders usually try to make shields as small as possible or even hide them completely. But it would be cool and come in handy here.
It is neither the red in the shield's slot nor the green in the frame - those simply turn into weird colours.
Therefore, if somebody knows anything about such a thing: don't hold back.

 

[Kasius Klej]

Played around with a map generator. Not the part that generates most of the map, just the part that generates resources.
Went to some lengths for this last modification of rules, because with a hybrid game like this one, here you can't miss, even if you're not very precise, and will attach some numbers in details in case you're interested in differences of civ1 and civ2 map generators. Don't take the numbers too precisely, as many of them are just out a feeble memory. Since only the terrain part of rules is redefined, this upgrade doesn't affect the gameplay as such, it is aiming to change the average terrain difficulty of a newly generated map by it's 2,10 %. Civ2 map generator was mainly more generous in shields it turns out.

rules.txt
terrain1.gif
units.gif
cities.gif

These are new files with which I will be taking a break from this project as well. If anybody is interested on continuing the topic, feel free to use any files compiled here.
I have to do some gaming and then some computer upgrading, and will probably will not be coming with any improvements to this mod very soon. And if I do it will probably with some crazy idea like "ah look, they forgot to port the civilopedia".

 

[Metro Polis]

What's left to do anyways? I'm still trying to find a way to have some kind of proper national colour around the units. But I don't think there's much to do else if your files should work fine.

 

[Metro Polis]

There are a lot of unit slots still unused and some very repetitive. We could use those to have different national colours, at least for the units that don't get obsolete in the endgame. The repetitive ones are there just because of the barbarians - but who really cares if those appear in a white frame or any other different colour as long as you can have uniquely coloured units? 5 units could bei unique, maybe six: let's say all defensive or offensive units. Even more in TOT actually.
What do you think about that?

 

[Kasius Klej]

There are a lot of unit slots still unused and some very repetitive. We could use those to have different national colours, at least for the units that don't get obsolete in the endgame. The repetitive ones are there just because of the barbarians - but who really cares if those appear in a white frame or any other different colour as long as you can have uniquely coloured units? 5 units could bei unique, maybe six: let's say all defensive or offensive units. Even more in TOT actually.
What do you think about that?

Yes, but wouldn't you need 7 unit slots just to make a phalanx in 7 colors? if I'm understanding this right, there are not that many unused unit slots available. About 20 there are, that fits 3x6=18, that's 3 colorful units only. Most of the units would still be white?

 

[Kasius Klej]

You'd have to zoom in on this picture full screen, because this is quite a zoom out. I played Romans on autopilot, so the Greeks destroyed Rome, and two thousand years later, after thousand of years of war with Carthaginians from Mongolia, here we are in city of Antium with 280.000 population. Romans live on Danube river, have no trade routes, no embassies, but we have legionaries in Hungary and catapults in Romania. Romans are a small city state living in dark ages, a buffer zone state between two empires. When I stopped the auto pilot (set no human player), to save the situation for Romans, because our triremes were constantly being sunked by peaceful Americans whom we had no contact with, this is the map I had to look at. Quite happy about how things are readable at this zoom level for now.

There is a trireme waiting in a city, settlers are being built, will Ceasar finally sail to the Black sea?

 

[Metro Polis]

1. It's not only the empty slots, but the repetitive ones as well. I'll have a look at it at the weekend.

Edit: Some units, especially the small ones, will look good with a coloured shields, the Buffer ones, Like the settlers an chariot, should be in frame.

2. posted picture: the cities' didn't all have gray roads in Civ1 - that was only the white player. I guess you draw the roads in the city slots instead of coloured roads right into the flag slots.

 

[Blake00]

Hah, the same thing happened to me last time I was writing a rather lengthy post, trying to cover loose ends about the bugs in rules.txt.
Before I slowly posted a reply, there were new pixel precise ideas here.

Not much can be done, it is all because of barbarian units. On the other hand, if you make more duplicates, this is just an idea, if you cover all slots with appropriate corresponding units, (that is done with units.gif and rules.txt), you can make this mod compatible with almost any civ2 savegame.

As far as units are concerned, that is. As far as tech tree is compatible with any old savegames, I think I'll give it more thought to this later, as it is an interesting puzzle.

I like the new units graphics by the way, I think it's major improvement from what you had to work with from beginning, Blake. Didn't mention it before, because it is a shameful way to drive a tank, and Metro Polis already mentioned it, the navigation was difficult, the units were half in the air, when I drove a tank, made two quick moves already, spotted an enemy militia right in from of the tank, I though there would be a battle, a certain win for my tank, but no, no battle, I just drove right in front of an enemy militia. It wasn't a real game fortunately, just a testing game. Great job in graphics, mate. No more problems with navigation now, even fighters and bombers are just like another chess piece in civ1.

I have another idea of improving the civ1 mod. I'll write more about it later. It's about bringing random map generator of civ2 closer to civ1 random map generator, about tweaking the resources, changing the @terrain section of rules to do so, but before I do that I have to finish some measurements and actually write down the observed numbers in to Excel on a say 40 by 40 map. I already know the two numbers, it's 0% if there were no resources on a newly generated map (that don't happen), and it's approximately 100% on a civ1 generated map (how much in detail I will know later), and then on a civ2 random map, the observations will again show, let's say 142%. Then I'll have this third number 142% and I'll bring it down to about 100%. I think I have some ideas how to do that with Excel.
At the same time it's not just a question about the abunddancy of the resources, but also of diversity or how they are dispersed. Some random map generator algorithm might disperse more evenly than the other. We don't know exactly which one does what, but matching and unifying the resources from both sets would do the trick here, I think, to bring both algorithms closer to civ1 random generator.
I'll try to solve both of these question at the same time.
It's been great working on this game. So many ideas.

Thanks Kasius! I'm glad you liked my graphics.

Yeah replacing all Civ2 units with different coloured copies of Civ1 units is certainly one way of making the mod more compatible with regular Civ2 gameplay and save games. Could be an interesting alternative option!

Played around with a map generator. Not the part that generates most of the map, just the part that generates resources.
Went to some lengths for this last modification of rules, because with a hybrid game like this one, here you can't miss, even if you're not very precise, and will attach some numbers in details in case you're interested in differences of civ1 and civ2 map generators. Don't take the numbers too precisely, as many of them are just out a feeble memory. Since only the terrain part of rules is redefined, this upgrade doesn't affect the gameplay as such, it is aiming to change the average terrain difficulty of a newly generated map by it's 2,10 %. Civ2 map generator was mainly more generous in shields it turns out.

rules.txt
terrain1.gif
units.gif
cities.gif

These are new files with which I will be taking a break from this project as well. If anybody is interested on continuing the topic, feel free to use any files compiled here.
I have to do some gaming and then some computer upgrading, and will probably will not be coming with any improvements to this mod very soon. And if I do it will probably with some crazy idea like "ah look, they forgot to port the civilopedia".

Wow.. you know how to hack the game's random map generator? You're knowledge would be useful over in the Opensource rebuild of Civ2 thread here if you're good at getting into Civ2's internal workings!

1. It's not only the empty slots, but the repetitive ones as well. I'll have a look at it at the weekend.

Edit: Some units, especially the small ones, will look good with a coloured shields, the Buffer ones, Like the settlers an chariot, should be in frame.

2. posted picture: the cities' didn't all have gray roads in Civ1 - that was only the white player. I guess you draw the roads in the city slots instead of coloured roads right into the flag slots.

Yeah Metro is right about the coloured internal roads. If you look at each city graphic in the Cities file that I made I used the original technique where each Civ uses a light and dark colour for the city and it's little internal roads. It's similar to the 2 colour system the Civ2 'city occupied by units' flags you replaced use in that they use a light and dark colour from their respective Civ.

That big screenshot looks pretty epic though!!! Like I said in an earlier post it's probably better to replace either the Romans or the Greeks with another faction from their slot as one of them just dies so fast when they're forced to start so close.
.

 

[Metro Polis]

Epic screenshot. I still have got one or two ideas as there doesn't seem to be a colour we could use to replace the white frames.
What do you think about placing the unit shields under and not above the units! This way the health bar would disappear behind the units' graphics. Only the colour will hold - as a triangle because of the diamond shape, I suppose.

Edit: Or the bottom left frame maybe - this would be only a decent change and still indicate to whom the unit belongs.

 

[Kasius Klej]

Greeks and Romans indeed start close together. That should not be the case in every game though. The game on Earth is meant to start this way:
Player selects:
- start on premade world
- selects world.mp
- selects his tribe, Russians, for example
- selects 6 opponents
- don't randomize starting locations
- and computer will pick his 6 opponents out of 19 possible opponents (21 minus Romans and Celts)

That's nearly equal as playing civ1 EARTH, except here it will be more combinations of who plays. There will be awkward situations like Greeks and Romans starting too close in some games. In the games where Japan plays, that's an awkward start, too, as Japan won't expand.

It is possible to predefine an exact starting 7 positions and exact 7 civs. That is done with a scenario. Scenario would eliminate all awkwardness, but then, you wouldn't have all the combinations.
You probably have a scenario that was included in John Valdez's zip. I have it and I use it for playtesting. It's not the best one however, and that is mainly because of Japan is not from civ1. If Zulus or Babylonians would replace Japan then it would be much better starting scenario.
I was thinking of including this file in a project, just renaming John's file to "Start on EARTH.scn". But it was too buggy. You couldn't start as Russians, the map was not an exact civ1 clone, and so on...

I put some leftover ideas on a list, for a future reference, but much of this is unimportant for the game.
Except for this shield. Yep. This could be done. Shields are in uniform locations. The health bar could be hidden.
I think I could do some playtesting and this next.
What can't be done is 7 or 8 identical tech trees. We all wish the game would just load 7 units gifs instead of one, but as it looks to me, if you want to pursue the idea of 7 colors for units, the thing is I think, a scenario, a conversion to ToT, and then work from there.

A list of some leftover ideas...
todo:
- playtesting
- fundamentalism out of menu
- include civ1 like world map or play on Earth scenario
- issue of heraldry being the same with women leaders. solution - rename 21 women to men?
- icons.gif
- terrain.gif - for irrigation take farmland icon
- rework resources so that the order is the same as in civ1, remove or rename silk as well
- units.gif - shield below unit
- rework industy and automobile, because they don't recolor cities anymore, can bring those 2 back
- port civilopedia
- port spaceship
- port throne room
- release
- city.gif bug
- scenario icon bug
- scenario version for ToT?

 

[Metro Polis]

Remember that you probably have to slow down research, because there are less techs in the tech trees. That can be done in the rules.txt file, too, If I'm not mistaken.