Civ2 MGE & ToT Scenario/Mod Preservation Project Log (378 Processed + 7 Super Collections)

Wow, amazing effort! I've been doing something like that on the Macintosh side of things; albeit at a much lower scale. So i know first-hand how much work and time is involved - kudos, Blake! Great to see that Civ II is not forgotten :)

Thank you! :)

Jeez finding Mac Civ2 scenarios would be a challenge. Earlier this year I did a huge Civ2 lost (& still living) websites cataloging project. I'll have to add your site to the list!
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civ-fanatics-civ2-information-thread.355722/#post-16071407

You probably already know these but I found loadable Internet Archive backups of a couple of Civ2 Macintosh fan sites, I'm not sure if their downloads were backed up though as that can be pretty hit and miss sadly! Think I saw Mac scenarios on some other sites in that list too but can't remember which as I found so many sites!
https://web.archive.org/web/20010512040857/http://homepage.mac.com:80/civ2/MainUS.html
https://web.archive.org/web/19971211061156/http://www.connix.com:80/~rrome/civII.html

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Hi, folks. I think most people will agree with this little gesture I want to make to @Blake00 :
Back in the old days, Poly used to hand out a thing called the Golden Fleece award for service to CIV2 communities.

In the spirit of that ancient award, I want to give an SL version of the Golden Fleece to Blake00, for his amazing
dedication to finding so many examples of CIV2 mod work, many of which were in danger of being lost for all time...
GF1b.png

I hope you'll all agree with this salute to a very excellent member of our crew.

Thanks dude!
And keep up the CIV archeology!
 
Wow! Thanks Curt! Through my archive search work I noticed there were lots of cool awards for great Civ2 work back in the classic years which I was sad to miss out on so it's nice to get one now! :) Searching, testing, and uploading so much stuff to 3 different websites with proper documentation takes so long, so nice moments like this gives me the fuel to push on and finish the last 15-20ish MGE stuff I've got left and I will have finally reached the end of a huge job that's taken so long. But of course then begins the ToT work haha! Then Civ3 later etc.. omg I'm never gonna play another game again haha! :lol:
 
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Hi, folks. I think most people will agree with this little gesture I want to make to @Blake00 :
Back in the old days, Poly used to hand out a thing called the Golden Fleece award for service to CIV2 communities.

In the spirit of that ancient award, I want to give an SL version of the Golden Fleece to Blake00, for his amazing
dedication to finding so many examples of CIV2 mod work, many of which were in danger of being lost for all time...
View attachment 617189
I hope you'll all agree with this salute to a very excellent member of our crew.

Thanks dude!
And keep up the CIV archeology!

I agree, Hard work preserving this treasures! congratulations my friend.
 
Wow! Thanks Curt! Through my archive search work I noticed there were lots of cool awards for great Civ2 work back in the classic years which I was sad to miss out on so it's nice to get one now! :) Uploading so much stuff to 3 different websites with proper documentation takes so long, so nice moments like this gives me the fuel to push on and finish the last 15-20ish MGE stuff I've got left and I will have finally reached the end of a huge job that's taken so long. But of course then begins the ToT work haha! Then Civ3 later etc.. omg I'm never gonna play another game again haha! :lol:

My pleasure, good man. The value of this preservation work is very great.
We might not have as many awards these days, but we can offer you our heartfelt thanks in this way. :)
 
My pleasure, good man. The value of this preservation work is very great.
We might not have as many awards these days, but we can offer you our heartfelt thanks in this way. :)

Many thanks again. :)

Can't wait for the ToT content:crazyeye:

Well don't get too excited about that part as most of my ToT preservation work will be more backup/mirroring work than presenting rarely seen rescue discoveries. The reason for the lack of surprises is that the SL guys have done a GREAT job of preserving the majority of ToT content on the SL wiki and forums, plus the good old Cradle of Civ ToT site was preserved here at CFC too. When I did my huge Civ2 website archive cataloging work I really didn't see much else out there in the way of dedicated ToT scenario hosting sites as sadly the great era where every man and his dog had a small backyard Civ2 fan page was coming to an end by 1999. That all being said I'll still have a few surprises for you guys as I've found a few ToT scenarios here and there. There's also a few ToT scenarios with broken download links on the SL wiki site I can fix, and finally just before he retired Gapetit surprised me with a whole bunch of ToT conversions (not in his thread) of some of my recent rarely seen MGE scenario rescues and naturally they are all to his usual high quality standard with nice graphic from Fairline so I'm looking forward to presenting them to the world on his behalf. :)

Anyway I'm pleased to announce that I have finished processing (testing, picturing, compressing, triple uploading) all of the last MGE scenarios I'd spent the last couple of years collecting. This is a moment I've been wanting to get to for a long time! And as predicted back at the start of this thread it's taken me over the 250 milestone too haha! :)

However it appears the MGE journey is not over after all as I remembered that I had not yet done a thorough look through of all the super collection archives I've found. Eg now that I have the Apolyton backups I can go through its collection way better than I ever could on the website version as I can now look inside all the zips and sure enough I'm already finding more cool scifi and fantasy scenarios (that I originally missed due to not having obvious names) that I can't resist processing. Also recently @Metro Polis has very very kindly donated his huge Civ2 scenario collection to me for my preservation work. His collection is pretty huge and similar in size to the other super collections I've uploaded so there will no doubt be some excellent MGE scenario discoveries in there I can not resist processing individually (and maybe some good ToT ones too) and naturally I'll include his entire collection in the super collections area too as they'll be plenty of scenarios that wont interest me which others will no doubt treasure. :) So in the end MGE might just take me to the 300 milestone mark after all haha!

Wow, amazing effort! I've been doing something like that on the Macintosh side of things; albeit at a much lower scale. So i know first-hand how much work and time is involved - kudos, Blake! Great to see that Civ II is not forgotten :)

On the topic of me having a closer look at the Apolyton super backup archive @SebastianP it might interest you to know that there are multiple Macintosh scenario folders inside there (one in the main Apolyton area and one in the FirstGreekCiv2 sub folder) with a whole bunch of mac scenarios in there that you may want to look at. :)

And finally on the topic of Metro kindly donating his Civ2 scenario collection to me. If anyone else wants to help add to the preservation project collections but don't want to fluff about with uploading individual scenarios then they are also very VERY welcome to donate their entire scenario collections to this project for me to sort out and preserve on these sites. I have setup some publicly accessible cloud storage with several gigabytes free that anyone can just drag and drop files into (literally it's that easy) so if you have an old CD or hard drive somewhere filled with scenarios from long gone websites and would like to donate please let me know and I'll PM you the link to my cloud. :)

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For those keeping score yes I know the total processed figures in this thread haven't changed for a while but that doesn't mean I haven't been busy heh. After recently chatting with Civ2 modding legend John Valdez @CivPartisan about my MGE modding projects, his MGE modding projects and the amazing ToTPP modding projects going on these days it got all those creative juices flowing again and I couldn't resist taking break from the preservation work to go do some more work on my & Metro's Heroes of Might & Magic 2 Civ2 mod trying to push the limits even further by changing video advisors, diplomacy backgrounds (with Knighttimes's help) and spaceship stuff resulting in barely anything left that we haven't touched haha. And back to John I should say he's definitely not retired and is actually still active and working on his Mars 2, Alpha Centauri mods and I hope he doesn't mind me dropping this little spoiler but he's also working on a number of new Civ2 projects I'm super excited about based Sid Meier's Colonization, Fallout, Babylon 5, Transport Tycoon, and even more mods I'm forgetting. Most of which literally fit right into the scifi/fantasy topics I'm covering in my video series and some of which fill a HUGE missing void (eg the Fallout one!!).

For those who only want news relating to this thread then fear not, work on Preservation project has continued (albeit slowly) and I have finally finished my big manual one by one search through all the files in the Poly, CFC, Walnut, PC Gamer, PC Master, & MetroPolis super collections. Sure enough I've found a whole bunch of extra stuff of interest to me and I'll be processing one by one soon. As expected this final batch of scenarios will take me well over the 300 mark as there's a good 50ish MGE scenarios here I've marked out for processing. Once done I can finally do my videos, release my mods, and move on to ToT! I also found a quite a lot of missing extra sound download files for a bunch of scenarios already added to the preservation collection. The reason they were originally missed was usually due to them having stupid file names ensuring they were nowhere near the location of their core scenario files but after painstakingly matching up the sound file creation dates and times with the main scenarios I was able to match up even the hardest ones. If you downloaded these from CFC then you would have already got a notification about me updating the download but if you used one of the other download you wouldn't have so here's the list of scenarios I've uploaded the downloads for with the missing sound files:

Star Wars: Dark Side Modpack (CiC)
Star Wars (Tatooine) Scenario (MGE)
Star Trek AT WAR Modpack (CiC)
The Battle For Middle Earth Scenario (FW)

Star Wars - Hoth Battle Scenario (CiC)

Mad Max Scenario (CiC) was also updated however it wasn't sounds.. it'd been bugging me for months that the only Mad Max scenario in existence for Civ2 had no custom graphics so I gave it's terrain a quick and dirty overhaul.
Before / After
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As part of this final work I have also finished processing the awesome collection Metropolis donated to the preservation project. His collection contains just over three hundred interesting MGE and ToT mods and scenarios collected over the last 20 years including some rare German & other foreign language ones not found here (not to mention yet another scenario from my super lost scenario list search thread which I'll be posting about there soon too)! I've added English titles to his category folders, recompressed in 7zip and like with the other super collections uploaded it here to CFC and Internet Archive for everyone to enjoy! :)

Metro Polis Civilization 2 Collection
Changes made: Collection repacked in 7zip, added English folder names.
Download: CivFanatics and Internet Archive
Screenshot & thumb:


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It's funny.. today I was going to make a big announcement here and @The_J was even going to kindly share it on the main page. I had passed the big 300 individual scenarios processed mark and had finally come to an end of the MGE era part of this preservation project. I would be taking a long break from this project thread and getting to work on finishing my own mods and my video series.

HOWEVER plans have changed haha! A day or so ago just as I was processing the final MGE scenario into this collection I was contacted anonymously and offered the holy grail. The one thing I wanted more than anything which if you've been following my super lost scenarios thread you'll already know what it is.. a copy of Dustin Dunn's DSquared The Zandanian League Civilization 2 website collection that covered a huge range of rarely seen scenarios (not hosted at Apolyton or CFC) from lots of small private sites. I've successfully got the files from the donor and the collection is massive.. possibly even bigger than the Poly and CFC atomic super collections previously posted in this thread.. literally hundreds and hundreds of scenarios and mods. But of course the jewel in this collection is Dustin's stuff that I have tried for countless hours over the last couple of years to find out there and had no luck. If you guys were to look at my super lost thread scenario list and ask me which ones in that list I wanted to find more than anything else I'd tell you the 2 Final Fantasy ones, the Starcraft one, the 3 Dune ones, and the Dawn of the Dead one. Well sure enough I've checked the files and they're ALL here!! my most wanted are all here!!! and maybe I'll even find some of the other from that super lost list in here too. I can't believe it.. I can't friggin believe it.. I didn't think this would happen.. I've have some great luck and a lot of help over the last couple of years but I didn't think I'd ever score the grand jewel which is Dustin's collection. :) :)

However the downside of this great moment that it means I'm not finished so the big announcement saying so is cancelled lol.. there's a lot to go through here and my work leave is coming to an end so it's safe to say its going to be a while yet before I can return to my mod projects, make my videos, and move on to ToT. So it's actually quite a bittersweet moment haha. My dream came true but it means more work haha!

Naturally once I'm done plucking out individual scenarios of interest to me for processing I will upload the entire collection with everything else in there and add it to the super collections. Surely with the Apolyton CFC Atomic, DSquared, and the other CDC/DVD/Private collections we can now say with decent confidence that the vast majority of Civ2 scenarios have been found and preserved with triple redundancy.

So watch this space (or more precisely watch the earlier posts on page 1 of this thread which I use/recycle to list each scenario added to the collection in) as some more seriously cool rarely seen long lost stuff is coming! :)

EDIT: I just did a rough count and there appears to be over 700 scenarios/mods along with around 200 maps in the DSquared collection. Heaps of supplementary stuff like utilities, sounds, graphics, & guides too.. This is definitely bigger than the other super collections. :O

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I'm done!!!! I'M FINALLY DONE!!! I have finished processing the last of the MGE scenarios I took interest in from Dustin's collection including my most wanted long lost ones I spoke of above (will post more details about them over in my long lost scenario search thread soon) and sure enough it's taken me over the 350 milestone and pushed me quite a close to the 400! Which I'll of course hit pretty quickly in the future when I eventually return to this project for 'part 2' where I preserve a whole lot of ToT stuff. Thankfully that will be nowhere near as much work as there's far less ToT scenarios than the thousands of MGE ones and most are not lost thanks to the efforts of the Scenario League team! In the end I used up all my reserved posts and every other post of mine on page 1 of this thread to list all the scenarios and their pictures so I guess the Part 2 ToT stuff will have to happen here on page 2! The part 2 ToT stuff is going to be a little while away though as now that I'm done with my MGE preservation work I really really REALLY want to get back to my scenario mod projects and finish them all once and for all! :) While at the same time I want finish my Civ2 videos and get them out too as they were actually what kicked off ALL of this! It's going to be fun being creative again as the last couple of years doing all this preservation work has been rewarding but quite tiring as it kinda felt like I was coming home from RL work to do more work at home lol! The treasure hunt is addictive and exciting but processing all that treasure is less so haha! I should say however that this may not truly be the end as there are two roads to more MGE scenarios being rescued in the future though in that maybe more private collectors will come forward with stuff none one else had, or maybe someone will come forward with a backup of the last big missing super Civ2 site out there... SidGames!

Back in the day 20+ years ago I never knew about CFC and I used to do a bit on Apolyton but not much as SidGames as that was my home. I spent a lot of time there in their Star Trek Birth of the Federation, Civilization, SMAC and Off Topic forums. SidGames was a huge site and similar to Apolyton it had it's own Civ2 scenarios area but also hosted a whole lot of satellite Civ2 websites like Civ2 Ziggurat, Jorrit's Civ2 Site, Markus's Ultimate/Planet Civ2, and Civ2 Scifilization which all had their own scenario collections with quite a few rarities that never made it to Poly or CFC, and they hosted some other cool sites related to SMAC & CTP too, so it's quite the tragedy that it all disappeared without a trace one day with no warning. From what I can tell none of them survived Sidgames's rather sudden disappearance and webarchive didn't backup any of the downloads. Now that we've got Apolyton (& it's satellites), CivFanatics Atomic, and Dustin Dunns DSquared Zandanian League site it means SidGames (& it's satellites) really is the last super site missing from the Civ2 preservation project.
sidgames.png


Interestingly if you look at the SidGames staff list our resident Scenario League legend @St. Leo held a staff position there so maybe he knows more about what went wrong, however so far every time I've messaged him about lost scenarios or anything else I haven't heard anything back sadly (which made his recent shock appearance in my HoMM2 mod thread even more surprising lol). Speaking of mysterious legendary characters SidGames's owner and creator Whistler (Kunal Shah) was an interesting character who was great at networking and building things but always seemed to be at war with someone over something and used the old ban hammer a LOT lol. I always got along with him but I was just a loyal forum peon who never stood in his way, whereas those of high standing at Poly (dunno about CFC) seemed to be on 'not so friendly' terms with him (to the point where he was perma-banned from Poly and someone even made a comical scenario about him invading the Civ world lol). Speaking of invasions I remember there were several into SidGames by angry former members, one of which was from a gaming site forum community called ACOL, and when I joined up over there to 'fight back' I ended up becoming a refugee there when SidGames collapsed and disappeared. Eventually ACOL had its own rebellion against their admin and many ended up at a forum community called CounterGlow that still exists to this day! Anyway I don't know what happened to Whistler and why his huge empire of Civ sites all disappeared one night but it was a huge loss and sadly none of the scenarios across all his sites were backed up by WebArchive, so you can look, but you can't touch. For someone to come along and offer me a backup of Dustin Dunn's amazing long lost Civ2 site collection was the fluke of the century and I really don't expect it to happen again with SidGames and it's satellite sites so that's why I really think this is the end of the MGE preservation project. But that's okay, as it's been a hell of a ride, and I think it's safe to say we've now preserved around 80-85% of the history of Civ2 scenarios with the thousands of scenarios spread across these super collections (although we'll never truly know the % ).

Speaking of super collections since they're currently spread out across this forum thread and a single tiny link in the OP I thought I'd make them more obvious and add a new expandable section to the bottom of the Original Post in this thread for easy access.

And of course now it's time to add the final addition (maybe) to that super collection section which is the amazing Dustin Dunn's DSquared collection that I'm sure a few of you are eager to get your hands on it as like I said in my last message it's a huge collection bigger than all the others with hundreds and hundreds of scenarios/mods and supplementary stuff like utilities, sounds, graphics, & guides too for MGE and even a bit for ToT too. So here it is.. I'm now making it available to the public and preserving it across multiple sites of course! Enjoy!! :)

DSquared Civilization 2 Collection
Changes made: Collection repacked in 7zip, reorganised some folders for easier navigation.
Download: CivFanatics and Internet Archive
Screenshot & thumb:


Oh and there's also been a few more changes to existing scenarios in the collection too..

Found updated versions for:
The Ascendance of Europe Scenario v2.3 by Nick Holzapfel (FW)
Sengoku Jidai Scenario v3.0 by DarthVeda (MGE)

Found missing sounds for:
Slash & Burn Scenario by Dan Scheltema (FW)

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Red Alert! Another collection donation has arrived! The anonymous donor has delivered again with some more stuff he found on old CDs! This collection is not a huge one but it looks like it contains St Leo's Star Trek 7 of 9 scenario I've been trying to find for years but had seemingly disappeared off the face of the planet! So I've finally got it! Will be interesting to see if there's another gems in here! Will get it processed and uploaded to here in the near future! :)
 
Interestingly if you look at the SidGames staff list our resident Scenario League legend @St. Leo held a staff position there so maybe he knows more about what went wrong
Sure. I started the Imperialism II fansite over at SidGames, as well as running the forums there. Midway through the existence of SidGames, one of the people with the admin access to the site went rogue and ran a delete command over FTP which wiped out a good number of the sites. Since everyone involved was a teenager, there were no backups and much of the content was created by live editing the production site. Things that were deleted stayed deleted.

After that, I pivoted and created the Civ2 Ziggurat (web archive link) at SidGames as a repository of various scenarios and resources. That was a fun little project. I rolled my own CMS for it, probably using the wonders of Macromedia Cold Fusion.

SidGames came to an end when Kunal disappeared. I think he may have gotten into some kind of a family tiff.

At that point I volunteered to take over the Scenario League. I recall the League was originally created by BlackClove who retired from the community. I rolled my own CMS again, possibly in PHP. Rolling your own CMS is fun but also tremendously impractical. The only layer of security was obscurity.

After I started using MediaWiki (the Wikipedia software) professionally, I decided to migrate Scenario League to run on it and it has used that since. I'm pretty sure I was not involved in the SLeague move from Apolyton to CivFanatics, so kudos to the heroes behind that.

As an aside, the Ziggurat was actually not my first Civ2 site. That honour goes to SimParliament on Geocities (web archive link). SimParliament hosted a WWI scenario I made early on.
 
Imperial Ambition Scenario v1.5 by St Leo (MGE)
Issues found: None! Successfully tested in Civ2 MGE.
Changes made: Mod files repacked in 7zip (Mirror copies only).
Main download: Scenario League at CivFanatics and CivFanatics Downloads Area
Mirror 1 download: ModDB
Mirror 2 download: Internet Archive
HD screenshot & thumb:
Thanks for preserving all these scenarios!

An issue with Imperial Ambition that I realized much later is that the AI is incapable of founding new cities in it. This is because I never ran the Check Map function in the map editor when making it, so the fertility value is wrong for the terrain. Basically the AI thinks that all the tiles are ocean. I think there's a way of fixing this with CivTweak or another utility
 
Sure. I started the Imperialism II fansite over at SidGames, as well as running the forums there. Midway through the existence of SidGames, one of the people with the admin access to the site went rogue and ran a delete command over FTP which wiped out a good number of the sites. Since everyone involved was a teenager, there were no backups and much of the content was created by live editing the production site. Things that were deleted stayed deleted.

After that, I pivoted and created the Civ2 Ziggurat (web archive link) at SidGames as a repository of various scenarios and resources. That was a fun little project. I rolled my own CMS for it, probably using the wonders of Macromedia Cold Fusion.

SidGames came to an end when Kunal disappeared. I think he may have gotten into some kind of a family tiff.

At that point I volunteered to take over the Scenario League. I recall the League was originally created by BlackClove who retired from the community. I rolled my own CMS again, possibly in PHP. Rolling your own CMS is fun but also tremendously impractical. The only layer of security was obscurity.

After I started using MediaWiki (the Wikipedia software) professionally, I decided to migrate Scenario League to run on it and it has used that since. I'm pretty sure I was not involved in the SLeague move from Apolyton to CivFanatics, so kudos to the heroes behind that.

As an aside, the Ziggurat was actually not my first Civ2 site. That honour goes to SimParliament on Geocities (web archive link). SimParliament hosted a WWI scenario I made early on.
Oh wow! Another Civ2 modding & SL legend appears! Great to see you here St Leo! :)

Thank you for answering my queries about the old Sidgames era and your Ziggurat site there, such a shame so much was lost (twice by the sound of things lol!!!) as Kunals 'empire' of hosted sites really is the last of piece of the lost Civ2 scenarios puzzle I tried to solve in this thread. Wow so even the staff/people he was hosting don't really know for sure what on earth happened to him and why it all came crashing down that final day. Family tiff is certainly a good possibility, that guy seemed to be arguing with every one at some point so why not family too lol! Strange that he never reappeared in other communities over the years since though (or if he did he did it under another alias).

Ah yes speaking of your time running the SL and webarchive backups you might enjoy this thread where I did a history tour of the eras of SL starting with Blackclove's era and then going into yours and then into the modern ones:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/history-of-the-scenario-league-their-backups.670870/

Speaking Blackclove, similar to with you I pestered him with PMs for a few years lol and he reappeared not so long ago in my lost scenario search thread here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...n-dustin-dunns-civ2-site.669203/post-16112896

And speaking of webarchive civ site backups you may find this other thread interesting where in support of this threads preservation project I went digging through endless backups of old Civ2 websites looking at their link lists to find more building a huge list of the sites from the glory days (yes I even found your Civ2 Fora site heh) here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civ-fanatics-civ2-information-thread.355722/post-16071407

An issue with Imperial Ambition that I realized much later is that the AI is incapable of founding new cities in it. This is because I never ran the Check Map function in the map editor when making it, so the fertility value is wrong for the terrain. Basically the AI thinks that all the tiles are ocean. I think there's a way of fixing this with CivTweak or another utility
Darn, that's a shame.. it's such an impressive looking scenario. I checked CivTweak and it sadly doesn't seem to have any map related options so it must be one of the other ones. Maybe @Prof. Garfield , @Civinator , @Knighttime , @JPetroski or one of the other gurus here might know which.

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Oh and for anyone following this thread I'm still focused on finishing and releasing some of my own mod projects at the moment so all the preservation work is on hold and I haven't gotten to going through the recent donations yet. Hopefully I'll get to it in the coming months! :)
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