Civ 2 can be played on an Android system

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Dec 27, 2017
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I hardly expected it to be possible, but here is a general method by which any android capable tablet (even my old Nook HD which uses the oldest obsolete OS ice cream sandwich) can run Civ 2. I'm creating the topic as obviously many people have played Civ 2 (nearly a million in the fanbase) and would like to play it since it still is actually better than 99% of the current strategy games for the Android market. Which mean despite originally coming out in 1996, it is superior to strategy games today! Shocking,no?

Many techheads could use dos emulators as aps. This allows a base upon which to then load a free Windows 3.11 legacy OS. Then you load Civ 2 onto your system.

That has worked for several, but not for me.

The second way is to use one of the WINE emulators to create a windows environment, then load Civ 2. This was ridiculously simple to do. In ten minutes, I was playing a game, downloading new maps and scenarios, and using the built in editor to make my own scenario.

It is not necessary to "root" your android to do this. Even if you can't "sideload" aps, you still can do it. My Nook is a very low end device basically disabled from using anything outside of Google, but still I found free ways to make it work.

Additionally you can use a free Playstation 1 emulator and go that route too, but I have little knowledge on the methodology.

I have playing for two weeks, but along the way I had crashes. Recently I discovered that while the utilities on the forum don't work, you can use a memory ap to free up as much as possible, thus the system is now 99% stable. Looking around the forum, and elsewhere, it seems there are two culprits. First Civ 2 is a memory hog. Second, many old tablets had very little usable memory because they we designed to be running many basic aps in the background such that 75% of usable memory was already allocated.

If you do this as I have, you can even stream music while playing Civ 2 which makes up for the lack of music from the internet archive. You sacrifice five percent of stability doing this though.

Feel free to send me a pm if you want tips on how to do this for free. Civ 2 is now abandonware and even is hosted at the internet archive (but stripped down of music files).

The must frustrating thing is trying to what formerly was quite simple. There are lots of folks in the community who made unit graphics, and on a desktop or laptop system, it was easy to use Gimp and cut and paste from one unit.gif and into the original unit.gif...but this is very difficult in my opinion on an android tablet. I have not have any success getting any graphics programs to correctly cut and paste . Any ideas?

I created several units: a berserker from the Viking dark ages era, a samurai, a common early spearman in the early era, a spy satellite, and a nuclear sub capable of hauling around nukes (though I wonder if the AI will actually use it?). But the graphics are wrong since I'm using the original unit.gif file.

It was easy to adjust the tech tree, change the tech rate, create base cities for all the seven civs, add money, etc. It was no problem at all to make logical choices for unit stats, nor make the proper tech changes so units don't show up too early ( as the basic game is faulty).

Now if I could get the unit graphic correct, I would be quite happy.

Note by changing the rules.txt you can pick which seven civs show up, and I found the answer to configuring that right here on the forum as well as most of the details above.

If you do use a giant map, which I am for seven civilizations, then since they are quite isolated in the first several thousand years, then it may seem " glacial" in terms of genuine conflict, but allows the civs to get stronger eventually by building infrastructure. The biggest issue with giant map is there are only seven civilizations plus the barbarians (such as they are). Which means you could fill up continents with each civilization,but then their tech rate would be too fast from high income. Starting them with five or ten seems to work okay. I'm using the Sioux, the Aztecs, the Zulu, the Romans, the Vikings, the Chinese, and the Japanese. If you try putting them too close together then it doesn't work well for expansion, and futile conflict occurs due to the limited AI.

I would bet I have visited the forum every day for two weeks to download a map, look at other scenarios, look at tips on altering parameters in the rules.txt, to learn how to add additional city names, etc etc. The forum is very helpful. I never though I would playing such a venerable game on a tablet.

Note the download section for Civ 2 lacks a link from within the forum to Civ 2 modpacks. I tried to add those links but apparently lack enough access to add links yet even if they are from this very forum. Additionally I tried to link to Denis Kozhin's extra large map from this forum, but the system software thought it was spam. Too funny.

Sadly, while it is possible to run Civ 3 on some high end tablets, that is not free and would require buying a new tablet for me as well. So that is within the realm of possibility but 90% of folks would probably forego attempting this.
 
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While most of the utilities from the site won't run on the Android OS using the Wine emulator, like the Test of Time unofficial patch which repairs innumerable issues like the 255 city limit, Civ Unlimited will run on the Android to fix things like larger maps, more gold, more population, and more units. It runs and then launches the game just fine without crashing.

Which means that yes, you can play Civ 2 on your tablet but sadly you won't be playing a game with 800 cities on an accurate Earth map. The huge maps load fine but you're limited to using a third of the land mass based upon the imposed 255 city limit. Which of course will play havoc with the AI attempting to cross huge regions of ocean or land mass to get from say Scandanavia to China. I watched it work as Viking cav attacked Nanking but it took a long time for them to get there, and is random based upon whenever the threshold of 255 cities was met...which could happen by 1500 AD.

Official patches work. The map editor works in MGE.
 
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Just for the sake of completeness I will test the github Civ 2 patch for MGE. It is a parallel project that was updated as recently as 2016 and features many of the same changes as Civ Unlimited but includes the CPU throttle and hostility patch. It also addresses using new music by renaming mp3s into a foldfer so you can switch up music from time to time. It's really an unnecessary feature with multitasking as an mp3 player can run in the background. The github patch sadly doesn't fix the 255 city limit in MGE.

I'll report back after testing it. If you want to try it, here is the link.
https://github.com/vinceho/civ2patch

Here is a forum post he made a year ago on the site.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/mge-civ-2-patch-project.570939/

Back in 2005, there was a assembler programmer named Skyer who began making changes piecemeal in the exe.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/interesting-play-variant.194257/page-2#post-3478799
Post #27 purports to successfully alter the 255 city limit in MGE and it appears to be successful based upon later posts. I am dropping everything to test this as scenario on a huge map to see if it works. It so then Android players could alter the exe and then run Civ Unlimited and then it would fix many many bugs and then also the annoying 255 limit. It's unclear why the project was dropped, why it wasn't added as unofficial patches, why it isn't linked to, etc.

It follows a format of wish lists for alteration with Skyer making changes to the exe of either the MGE and ToT versions in separate posts. It takes the format of two hosted txt files which are named as .txt files but you have to change that to rar, which you then put in a single directory, then you unrar then to unpack to a new civ2.exe.

To test the new civ2.exe, you would begin a new game with a huge map so there is sufficient space available to support more cities, enable the cheat menu to rapidly create settlers in diverse places, reveal the total map, then try to create more than 255 new cities in your civilization. The end your turn. Otherwise you might have to play for hours and hours to get that many turns to find enough land and afford enough settlers.

Thus you test it. You couldn't use an old save game file however. That would be extremely unlikely to work. Then you would have to name all of the cities to see if they report in the City Adviser and in similar Advisers for Trade. There could be issues with reporting errors or trade errors. I finished a list of 75 generic indicators for all civs but I am working on an actual list in excess of 1700 names and this parallel project could then facilitate testing of the new exe.

Civ 2 was designed poorly with the entirely inadequate city.txt file, such that many civs will default to using the spare names so all seven civs that appear might create a "Naples". Without a new huge city.txt file, then incredible confusion would occur with only 400 cities when using go to commands,or airlifts for example.

Hypothetically the new huge maps like Kozhin's Earth map has three times the original limit so theoretically lets say that 255 x 3 =765 cities possible. If seven civs all have an equal number of cities and all are being played then each player would need 109 names. As there are 23 civilizations that are listed in the city.txt file, from which up to seven are chosen, then 2507 names need to be in it to ensure no repeats. It is coded strange as when a city is founded, then Civ 2 goes by default to the next available name on the list, but if you disregard it by immediately renaming it, it loses track of that one. If you rename it later, it doesn't lose track.

Example
  1. You are playing as the Chinese, and create a new city. The next name of Tsingtao but you immediately type Manhattan.
  2. First Tsingtao is lost as a name and will skip to the next one.
  3. Then if you are playing a civ that has Manhattan as a name, then it doesn't care and will ultimately use that name.
  4. It's better not to rename cities at first. When your civ runs out of names, then it switches to a generic list but all civs pull from that generic list too.
  5. Which is why the city list should always be larger than what is theoretically possible so no repeating occurs.

To be careful I would back up your original civ2.exe in another folder in case it is buggy, so you can switch back upon failure. The Holy Grail may have been found for MGE players. Curiously it is hosted on the site. If the patches were successive in later posts ie inclusive of prior patches in the topic, then basically this combination of Skyer's code and Civ Unlimited would result in a similar project to ToTPP but exclusively for MGE.

Lots of things can be missed over a twelve year period in a forum of this sort of longevity.

Edit
Okay, I did very preliminary testing by creating a scenario on a huge map with seven civs and created 265 cities with issues whatsoever. This was placing them somewhat haphazardly and switching back and forth using the cheat command to play all civilizations in turn and then switching back to one main one to save the scenario.

Opening the Trade Adviser reported supply and demand for these. Opening up the city adviser wasn't an issue.

Probably it would take at least a week testing to see how stable it is.

At this post Agricola did a review of the patch at apolyton, but of course that link is dead as it is 12 years old.
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/interesting-play-variant.194257/page-5#post-3675840

So it appears to defeat the 255 barrier without initial issues.

Then using Civ Unlimited you can have up to 2 billion people worldwide. You essentially have no limit on gold. You essentially have no game end date. You have essentially no limit on units. You have a built in no CD fix. Etc. I think it fixes the CPU throttling issue. I don't believe it fixes the AI hostility bug.

This is all for MGE only. He was working on ToT as well and was communicating with several people who had discussions about ToTPP too like Catfish and Mercator. Maybe they would know more?

There may have been some controversy about directly hexediting the exe and making changes versus leaving that pristine and doing memory edits. Maybe that is why the apolyton link is dead or why it isn't discussed???
 
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Okay, this is confusing.

In 2005, Skyer made some discoveries in the exe after looking at the code. He made changes which bypassed the 255 limit. I detailed this above, and by using a version on Civ Unlimited to bootstrap Skyer's fix then I was able to play with 265 cities with no issues.

However when I did more checking, in 2007 Catfish uploaded a version of Civ Unlimited in post #68.
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-ii-unlimited.205794/page-4#post-8059083
This is version 20070213 of Civ Unlimited, works on both MGE and ToT, and by itself fixes the city limit from 255 to 768, more gold, more units, more events, a no cd check, etc. But earlier I had a version of Civ Unlimited which had a max population of 2 billion (not that this matters) but this 20070213 version has a cap at 1 billion. So there are multiple versions floating around but not documented or linked very well.

So basically this was a pre-ToTPP patch in 2007.

Far later about 72 different things were patched in the ToTPP (which won't run on my machine plus that is exclusively for ToT not MGE.

I tested Skyer's patch and a different version on Civ Unlimited for about twelve hours and it didn't fault on me and I was trying to make it screw up. I was switching in cheat/editor mode and trying every possible thing like switching civs, creating cities on the fly, altering terrain in the midde of a game, airlifts, go to commands for the extra cities, etc. It seemed to work.

Edit
Civ Unlimited tried to bypass the 255 city limit, but some problem arose where any units made by those cities in excess of 255 got assigned the home city from earlier cities. Which isn't great but not a deal breaker as long as they are the correct cities belonging to the civilization. Because the higher the number indicates later cities started and technically should be more able to support those units. You would have to keep an eye on it.

So they reverted to the one in post #40 which I will link to later. That's why there are more versions. Catfish's site links to this version.

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-ii-unlimited.205794/page-2#post-5101371
However I am still testing Skyer's patch to see if that fixes it or duplicates the above issue.
 
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Created the 256th city. It worked and the trade adviser worked. I created a barracks and in the trade adviser it noted the maintenance cost and what that city supplied and demanded. But when I used the cheat command to create a unit, that unit had no home city but the defense adviser noted the maintenance cost. Prior to doing that the capitol was supporting nine, but after creation, the newly created unit with no home city didn't increment the support costs at the capitol either.

Not only did the unit not have a home city, but the unit couldn't set the home city. Just as when a cheat command to create a unit instantly, the unit gets labelled "NON" to indicate it has no assigned home city.

So it may be that while the costs for units report, but they aren't subtracted, so any unit costs from cities above the 255 limit have free upkeep. Possibly?

The unit still recognized that the 256th city existed which means you could issue go to command to get there. Airlifting would most likely work.

Now what happens when a caravan or freight is created at the 256th city? Does it generate income? Or similarly does the 256th city actually generate taxes?

The defense adviser knows that these units from higher that 255 cities are created and notes them in statistics so I'll wager they can still be utilized in battle but likely the limitation is in assets and liabilities on the balance sheet.

Like I said earlier, it would take a week to evaluate the ramifications of more than 255 cities.

Humorously this is rather like practically all governments using deficit spending!

Edit
When I created the 257th city, I noted the income and expenses in the Trade Adviser. The city IS generating income and expenses. When I created the next unit then it assigned the 2nd city in my civilization as the automatic home city for that unit, and this can't be changed or overridden. That assigned home city is seeing a support cost so it isn't deficit spending. Based upon how many cities a civilization creates then it could create support cost issues as the defense burden is on established older cities based upon when the order of inception.

I created a unit in the 257th city and then airlifted it to its automatically assigned home city. It worked. When it got there officially and was active on the subsequent turn, I tried to assign a home city in the cheat menu for the 257th and it wouldn't change.

I created a freight that the 257th city desired (gems) then airlifted it. On the next turn it officially arrived and I drove it out of the city and then back in and it established a trade route and made 380 gold.

So while it isn't correct in terms of specific unit costs for support from the correct home city, it still is being paid for ultimately by taxes and by trade in the end result by the balance sheet.

I think what happens is when you use this unofficial patch, since the value isn't correct but overridden, the rest of the code on executing the end of the turn then updates subsequently to try to rectify the abnormality.

Edit 2
It won't work. I recommend not using the Civ Unlimited patch 20070213 that tried to increase the maximum cities to 768 (versus 255). It would be alright and workable if it only affected the civilization that was creating units in cities above 255, but I poked around and found that one Japanese city had a higher support cost than I expected and in the left box which shows which units are being mustered in the field, there was a Zulu legion! So when the unit is created it can and might assign a home city outside of an ai or human player's civ.

Back to the drawing board. I can try Skyer's unofficial patch which specifically bypasses the city limit and the known working version of Civ Unlimited which doesn't try to bypass the city limit and see if that combination will remedy the 255 limit in actuality, but my last 48 hours of beta testing has been frustrating.

As it stands now, either ToT or MGE will run on an Android. ToTPP which is the unofficial patch for ToT won't run on my emulator (but it might on yours) thus the 255 city limit hasn't been rectified. On the other hand the main other issues in MGE have been addressed except for the 255 city limit with Civ Unlimited's known working patch which is labeled Civ Unlimited Dev (but not the 20070213 version). That one has been downloaded 2264 times.

Basically this is only an issue on huge maps. If you were playing a scenario where you are not creating cities, only attacking others and defending your own as the cities are already created and the settler or engineer function to create new ones is turned off, then you still could run that scenario.

Otherwise what happens on a huge map is the limit is reached, the opponents can be far away (that's how I set my test scenario up since it's a representation of global world war) and thus they have to field units and send them far away to gain new territory by occupying existing cities.
 
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Okay, it was faster to beta test it since I knew where the problem was in attributing support costs for units that exceed the 255 city limit. Using Skyer's discovery in the exe and coupled with Civ Unlimited Dev version, when I rigorously tested it, it assigned other civ unit costs to other civ cities based upon the order of founding when above the upper limit of 255.

So, no joy. It works to allow more cities, trade, airlifts, go to assignments, etc BUT has a major malfunction that is a deal breaker as the flaw when troop assignment costs can be erroneously assigned to another civ. It calculates the cost just fine, but since the memory address exceeds the method of calculation and assignment, then it glitches out badly.

Humorously, in testing, I had an aircraft carrier fully loaded with stealth fighters, but the maintenance costs were assigned to another civ, and they canceled paying for them (I sure would too!), and they disappeared. Surely that's one of the funniest things I've ever seen happen in Civ 2, 3, or 4.

Civ Unlimited Dev is an essential patch for MGE. It bypasses the limit on population, gold, number of events ( which is vital for scripting and for historical events), the limit on total number of units is huge so that allows fielding huge armies, it has a no cd check, it allows huge map sizes which allow realistic land and ocean masses so the distance between these approaches normality (which affects every movement rate say like properly calculating how long is the ultimate range of an ICBM or a nuclear sub). So you absolutely must use it to launch the civ2.exe file as it greatly enhances the game, but means looking at the military unit parameters to see if they need boosting to be historically accurate.
 
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This is n interesting development. I don't think I would play Civ2 properly on a tablet, but it might be fun to have a go at the vanilla game to pass the time while travelling. I have never tried anything like this with a tablet. Would it be possible to give a point by point HOW TO guide for beginners (IE morons like me)?
 
This is n interesting development. I don't think I would play Civ2 properly on a tablet, but it might be fun to have a go at the vanilla game to pass the time while travelling. I have never tried anything like this with a tablet. Would it be possible to give a point by point HOW TO guide for beginners (IE morons like me)?
I know, right? I was thrilled as I had spent countless hours playing Civ 2.

Okay. So you have a tablet. Is it Android based for sure or an ipad?
 
It's one of these Amazon ones. Amazon Fire 7. I have checked and it says:

As usual, the Fire 7 runs a re-tooled version of the Android operating system called Fire OS
Read more at http://www.trustedreviews.com/revie...re-and-performance-page-2#CTYO2l2jAfhG6d5m.99

I got it as a Christmas present and I'm looking for a good use for it as I normally use my gaming desktop or smart tv at home or laptop & smartphone when I'm out. I think I will mostly use it for entertainment when travelling, so having Civ2 would be great, but if it's not compatible then it's not the end of the world.
 
Okay cool.

So what you can do is either of the following. The list is only long because of multiple methods

1. The Free Way
  • Load Dosbox on your Android. There are several clones. They are on Google Play.
  • Next download Win 3.11 as it is the public domain. It can be found on Microsoft sites.
  • Then you can install Civ 2 on your computer and then dump it on your Android.
This way you could run any Dos or Windows 3.11 game. Doom 2 anyone?
Civ 2 pops up and you can load a scenario and you are good to go.

If that fails...
2. Use an emulator.
  • If you can "side load programs ie load apps outside of Google Play
  • Then look for a free windows emulator like Wine
  • Then run that.
  • Then dump the Civ 2 from your computer to your tablet
  • And you are good to go
If these free ways fail.
3. Use ExaGear
  • Not everyone can sideload apps but must use Google Play
  • Download ExaGear
  • Load Civ 2 to your computer and then dump to the Android
  • You are good to go. It is the easiest way but only works for three days. But after three days, if you don't mind resetting your tablet (so dump data to Google Drive first) then it costs to keep using it. A bit pricey in my opinion.
Next consider what you will load.
4 Using MGE
  • Download the Civ Unlimited patch
  • Copy the program and the dll to the same directory where MGE resides
  • Boot Civ Unlimited
  • Play any scenario
  • I recommend a huge map as I enjoy that versus what the program will allow to be created. There are some on site.
5. ToT
  • I have had zero luck getting the unofficial patch ToTPP to run. Maybe it will work for you?
  • So load ToT
  • Try downloading the newest ToTPP
For me, ToT loads and runs just fine. The problem is all the screwed up things like map size, gold, population, etc.

ToTPP fixes everything
Civ Unlimited on MGE fixes most of the main issues BUT not more than 255 cities


Your Android is newer. You might be able to run Civ 3 under a Wine emulator or running it under ExaGear which is a port of the Wine Emulator.

If all else fails, go to Google Play and run the PS1 emulator and then you can run the Civ2 PS1 version. It is not as good and you would have no patches....so all of the annoying aspects of the game.

Good luck and report your success as it might help the next person.

There is a video on doing loading Win 3.11 on the Android that is pretty good.

The main problem is the small screen and trying to select choices especially if you are a big guy with big hands. Moving units is no problem and works well. If you were designing a scenario, then the drop down menus can sometimes be frustrating.
 
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  1. Internet browsing the site is a trifle unstable on my Android tablet. Chrome out of the box is terrible and the latest patch only marginally better. Firefox which is dated works but crashes. The best and most stable is Dolphin browser.
  2. The very best terrain replacement, in my opinion...in terms of natural aesthetics can be found in the America2013 mod. I ported over a hybrid and may release a mod or scenario that is a Civ2 MGE generic replacement. The designer of the terrain is a genius. The label on the terrain files is Eivind Andre` Evensen. They are 10-20x better. These look awesome on the huge map and so realistic but I am lacking jungle terrain that looks realistic. I need better tundra. The extreme poles are very limited so few glaciers.
  3. The ideal terrain would come from Google Earth mapping.
  4. In the download section is a very good compilation units.gif. I have added various artillery, SpecOps, RPG, Aurora Project, NuclearSub (capable of torpedos or carrying mixed ballistic or nukes, Predator Drone, you get the idea. There were effectively ten unused slots and I am trying to compile new UNITS.gif which could be generically added based upon the time window for starting a new game. So right now it is one from 4,000 BC to present day.
  5. The next one would fill in unit gaps like Mongol Horse Archers, Viking Raiders, Flamethrowers in WW1, the potatomasher version of grenediers in WW1, zeppelins, etc. Otherwise there is a long gap with a lack of units which were significant advancements in military history.
  6. I am working on two city.txt files. The first has generic names by civilization up to 75. The second has historical names within reason without being persnickity. As 255 is the max, then this ends up being 36.4 cities asa base average over each seven civilizations. But balancing it may result in departing from that idea. RusCom and ChiCom might immediately be at odds. The Islamic Caliphate in India and Pakistan might immediately pose a threat to RusCom and ChiCom.
  7. I am working another personalized scenario that is called ideology. The current nations dissolve as the People realize how flawed politics are. Instead seven new ideological civilizations exist, all diverse, and spread out as cities joined by ideology, and populations shifted accordingly. They lose the ability to change their government, so they are locked in.
  8. I really dislike how vanilla the original Civ 2 was with nearly no depiction of ethnicity. I am looking for a noncaricature based people.gif so that it is ethnically balanced. I have not found a replacement that I like. Aesthetically drawing ethnic caricatures is grotesque typically. Ethnic and caricature just has no business existing in 2018. Civ 3 has some horrible examples of that but at least your population reflected some ethnicity albeit very imperfectly.
  9. NatIso are the nationalist isolationists who hate military adventurism but actually have the largest numbers of veteran soldiers who relocated to those cities. Minorities make up 44% of the US military and I am trying to make the units reflect this. They are a republic. So they just trying to hold on to what they have and defend it, but as others expand, they must wear themselves out impotently. Then they might expand into weakened cities and restore the shattered American Union under a republic. It's a new civil war.
  10. Green Fishes are Environmentalists Libertarians and many former EU cities and parts of Canada join this. They are a democracy.
  11. Indigenous Alliance are a mixed diverse group Hawaiians, Alaskans, Australians, Irish, Hispanic, Canadian and American Indigenous, etc who feel ignored by Western Civilization. They are a democracy. Some diverse Asian indigenous want to join and kick out the ChiCom.
  12. Fugees began as Africans were irritated by being marginalized by failed programs based on historical injustices. But now it is spreading across the Northern half of the Mediterrean based upon migration. They are a democracy.
  13. Islamic Caliphate is a global phenomena that began in the Middle East, spread to India, to parts of North America and the former EU, Indonesia, and a horrific war in the Phillipines. They are fundamentalists under Sharia.
  14. ChiCom are Chinese communists who took over Korea and unified it, took Japan, expanded into Vietnam, but wore itself out by intense battles. They established a foothold on the West Coast of the USA. Will they see the same problems as the USA as Koreans and Japanese dissidents refuse to be under their aegis? They are very concerned about the Phillipines.
  15. RusCom unified much of the former USSR and has the largest military force and could easily win without alliances from the others. They established a foothold on the Atlantic Seaboard in the USA. They feel it is their destiny to spread out into the misguided Green Fish territory. And RusCom always felt the ChiCom were not true proletarians.
  16. So there are 255 cities but of course some will be crushed in the intense fighting over politics and religion. I'm trying to make some appropriate diverse religions plus nonreligious places in these cities like Buddhist temples, Atheist conference centers, mosques, orthodox christianity in Russia as practically a state religion, etc.
  17. No one wants to use nukes due to poisoning the food chain effectively forever. Limited EMP destroyed the utilities and ruined transportation so large scale city agriculture is vital or huge hunger issues happen. After the limited EMP weapon exchanges, thought to merely disempower other prexisting nations, instead places with a high usage of nuclear reactors melted down like the Fukashima incident, and poisoned the soil with radioactive isotopes. No new nuclear fission utilities are being built, and solar is difficulty city wide, so a race exists to get working nuclear fusion but has a strong public distrust based on sour pragmatism.
  18. But ballistic missiles can happen. Chemical weapons might happen too.
  19. The mod was influenced by Children of Men, a great grimdark dystopian view of a shattered world torn apart by hunger, disease, refugees, and infertility based upon pollution into the food chain.
  20. You can strip out most units but the settler and engineer and the barbarian leader and the fanatics and standard partisans. So 90% could be postmodern units with maybe five being dystopian partisans using personal vehicles, watercraft, airplanes, you get the idea. The postmodern units could be mixed versions for seven civs,but in my opinion given the limited number of slots, only generic postmodern units should be utilized for the bulk(so exNATO), then with Chinese and Russian units and then based upon them being represented by strengths and weaknesses of attributes. Only if some civ has a better tank, a better plane, a better naval vessel, etc then it should be represented. If the attributes are equal, and slots are limited, then why bother? ToT has many more slots and can afford more diverse representation of infantry for example.
 
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Things learned in the last few months...

Most of the utilities do not run under Exagear which is the Wine emulator that allows Android devices to run old Windows programs. That means that extremely helpful design tools for scenario creation do not work and so you have to meticulously alter the map, the terrain, the units, etc all by hand.

Which utilities do work
The no hostility patch called attitude.exe is absolutely crucial for making Civ2 MGE playable as otherwise the other AI kingdoms are wantonly hostile.

Civ Unlimited allows huge maps, huge numbers of units, huge numbers of citizens, and huge numbers of gold to be accumulated. The default Civ2 engine has a bizare exponential increase in the number of citizens. So just ignore this weird flaw.

It may be you can get the Civ Tweak and CPU Throttle to work on your Android systems, but I have had zero luck achieving this. The former is one way to speed up scenario creation. The latter removes the ridiculous CPU on crack problems. Most of the time it runs the Civ2 program just fine. The main issue is it seriously seizes hold of all available system resources on your Android when you use the cheat functions or the scenario editor...and these are cumulative. Thus you might have to save each series of actions or risk losing the changes to a crash.

Example:
Say you are building a scenario and setting up cities with multiple buildings and roads and terrain changes from agricultural reforms by engineers. Well you might be able to set up ten such cities, and then severe lagging occurs as the Civ2 engine seizes the system resources of your CPU. Save frequently.

I found that trying to create new wav files from converting royalty-free mp3s tobe a total waste of my time. My plan was to include at least ten music files that would run every ten turns in the event editor and thus add a mood to the mod. The problem is the conversion to the old wav format used way back when is part of the problem and it would only be a peculiar workaround that would make running Civ2 on an Android even buggier. Civ2 is designed to either run the mp3s on the CD or run the wav files. Vince Ho built a program to work around this design flaw but getting that front end to work with the other programs like Civ Unlimited and the Attitude patch seemed like too much work.

Rather, the best way is to use Google Music which multitasks just fine while Exagear runs also. Thus you can listen to anything, and it doesn't crash, and requires no changes, and saves the hassle of uploading special rather large sound files.

ES File Explorer is used by many Android users and while it does also play mp3s and multitasks, it doesn't work well with Civ2 running under Exagear.

For transferring files being built piecemeal during scenario creation, Google Drive is extremely helpful as it serves as a dedicated spot for all my work without having to physically hook up to the USB of a computer.

I have not found a single image editor that works on the Android Linux platform that works well with Civ2 MGE. This is a real shame as what would ordinarily take minutes to edit under Paint Shop Pro or GIMP is nigh impossible. You likely will have to run the units.gif or units.bmp through a windows computer, and then upload them to Google Drive and then download them to your Android.

That said, there are a remarkable number of older unit.gif files in the download section and chances are high you can find one that will work.

For scenario creation, if you find an excellent map in an existing scenario, then save the turn. Now open it in the Civ2 MGE map editor. Now you can save that as a map file, make changes, whatever, then use that to build upon in your own scenario. There are two large world maps in the download section that are well suited for Civ unlimited.

I have found the AI tribe editor to best work when the tribe is set to rational militaristic perfectionist when running a scenario with pre-built cities. Otherwise the AI takes ridiculous unneccesary gambits that only serve to sabotage the game mechanics and enjoyment.

When playing a new game with seven civilizations on a giant map, then while it is a hassle, spend an hour creating a scenario with the AI having about ten cities for each tribe with a proper infrastructure and economically balanced. Then play THAT versus the vanilla game. The former is enjoyable. The latter is not. Yes, that is 70 cities but it doesn't take longer than an hour as you can use the cheat command to copy the improvements, say from the capital. What takes time is building roads and irrigation even mines. With the 255 city limit in Civ2, that makes things very stable when 70 cities are prebuilt versus starting from scratch in 4000 BC.

For regular players not interested in scenario creation
I suggest using the Memory Optimizer program which is free from Goggle Play. Even my old tablet with very limited memory can run Exagear plus Civ2 plus Google Music at the same time...and for hours without a crash.
 
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Still no luck getting ToTTP to work on android?
Nope. ToT(TestofTime) runs but ToTTP (the new patch made which remediates many existing issues) does not. And since many ToT scenarios utilize various versions of ToTTP, then it is of little use to load ToT on my Android tablet.

But if anyone likes Test of Time better, then they could run it on their tablets.

This is a peculiar issue as the designer of ToTTP actually uses Wine as a Windows emulator. I use Exagear Strategies which is an apk written for the Android that is based upon the Wine emulator.

There is an alternative. When you own an Android tablet, you cannot "sideload" apks but have to go through Google Play. However if you turn on the developer options for loading via USB, then you can load an apk directly to your pc. Then hook up your tablet via USB to that computer, and supposedly you then can load the apk from your computer. Why would you do this? Then rather than buy Exagear Strategies, then you could run Wine directly via their website, which is well maintained and has been so for YEARS. Their users have spent thousands of hours trying and succeeding in getting Windows games to run. There is a huge database of whether it works or not.
https://www.winehq.org/

As newer computers will not run older games, then Wine can be utilized to run them or allow the android devices (phones and tablets) to run them. Special effort was spent getting Civ3 to operate using Wine.

I doubt this will work since you also were supposed to be able to download an apk to Google Drive and then load the apk to your tablet, and that does not work. Allegedly this has to do with which version of Android OS you have. I have an earlier tablet and thus cannot use the latest OS.

Otherwise if you "root" your Android tablet, then you can run Windows or Linux directly and run both apks via Google Play, independent apks, or run Windows or Linux programs directly. It's quite a hassle to do so.

The vanilla ToT is actually an inferior version of Civ2 with ugly graphics and less tools for scenario design. However the community liked its potential with scripting and maps, and made it shine with scenarios...but using ToTTP.

So as it stands, a casual user of Civ2 MGE can run any scenario designed for MGE. They also could run vanilla ToT and use replacement graphics designed by the community but could not use most of the better scenarios for ToT since those use ToTTP.

I am explaining this as succinctly but thororughly as possible because a lot of people are following this topic and find it by googling "run Civ2 on an Android". There are thousands of Android users running old legacy games out of nostalgia like Diablo, Commandos, Fallout, etc. The average Android user does not want to go through the hassle. It took me months to figure all of this out.

However there are some hard core gamers who utilizing Dosbox (and the various clones) to run old Dos games and Exagear Strategies and RPG to run Windows games.

Another alternative for newer Androids is the Limbo emulator.
 
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https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/mge-diplomacy-ai-attitude-patch.573000/
There are a series of no hostility patches but the one I am aware of was written by Skylar and when unrared is called attitude.exe. If you upload this to Google Drive, it reports it as a virus when using Chrome as the front end, but will allow you to still download it. When you have it on your Android, it will allow you to upload it to Google Drive's direct app but refuses to allow you to redownload it.

The way Google Drive operates it will allow you use it directly as an app, but only if you have a newer system as Google Play had a patch in April, and so some Android users cannot download Google Drive directly while they fix that. Meanwhile you can launch Chrome, go to Google Play's url, then go to apps, then click on the icon for general apps, and then get to your Google Drive that way. That is a bit funky as it will easily allow downloads as a mobile URL but you have to switch to desktop version to access the upload menu. Weird, right?

The point is the non-hostility patch is essential for Civ2 MGE but not easily redownloaded if using Goggle Drive(as an enormous number of users are).
 
Meanwhile Exagear is no longer directly available from Google Play. This means you missed the window of opportunity to have Civ 2 work easily on Android systems.

To date there are no Android paint programs that will easily work to edit the terrain, icons, or units. If layers are involved like the irrigation/mining/farm upgrades, there is no way to edit these completely...just slightly modify them.
 
With Exagear no longer available on Google Play, your best bet is to try to use Dosbox. Dosbox works well and is very stable on Android tablets. Then since Windows 3.11 was made available by Microsoft as a legacy OS, many people have got that loaded as a non demanding partition. Then you could side load Civ 2 onto that Windows 3.11 partition.

I'm considering that again. I got it to work once. The benefit for modders would be easily using either MS Paint or an old archived Paint Shop Pro to properly edit the gif terrain and icons and people and unit files. Truly it's only vital with layers for the terrain.

It's not as stable for modding because there is a slight hesitation using paint editing, however you could the use many of the Civ2 utilities that the community created for map editing and programs like CivTweak.

In Google Play, whenever you tried a program even once, it resides in a library unless you remove it. So while Exagear does NOT show up as being available, it still is IF you tried it once.

Trying to use Civ 2 under Windows 3.11 on a partion in Android would work fine just to play it, but if say modding and adding 255 cities and the 21 grid tile for each, would likely be jittery due to the hesitation.

This is why a case can be made for having both Exagear and a Windows 3.11 partion.

Limbo is supposed to be great as an emulator but needs a later Linux OS (not ice cream sandwich).

The old and frequently updated WINE program would be absolutely fine on a laptop and will allow Civ 2 to run as well as Civ 3.
 
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If you use a good resource editor to manage memory, and leave the wifi working, then using Spotify is somewhat stable while running Civ 2 under Exagear on Android tablets. However, the problem is that when the wifi is on, all the Google aps will try to run again. Spotify has a huge database of legal music streaming.

In my opinion, it's better to close the wifi and just play mp3 files on the tablet while running Civ 2. If you try to run wav files, you likely will either hang up the CPU or terminate the sound playback within Civ 2.
 
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