[C3C] Conquests of Might and Magic III (CoMM3 Epic)

[tom2050]

07-08-2017 V.1.0

A total revamp of the CoMM3 mod has been completed. Many new and unique features have been added, and gameplay has been adjusted to minimize game issues, and work with AI limitations.

CoMM3 General Game Concepts:
A Fantasy (technically Fantasy / Sci-Fi) mod based directly off of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. You are expanding your town in the land of Antagarich and will face off against other factions and Heroes. Primarily a battle / builder mod. Expect a lot of units and large battles. All victory conditions possible except for the Wonder victory. Build Armageddon's Blade to set the world on fire, fight to become the primary ruler of the continent, collect your armies to ravage the lands, or build powerful magic to subdue your enemies.

Features:
- Total makeover of City View and Palace View screens (when mod is placed in Conquests directory). View the world of Antagarich in the City View, and build your faction's town in the Palace View!
- Includes the Antal version 4 EXE patch, which includes some of the best patches available for the game.
- Many new and improved graphics (yet unreleased), from units, spells, and graphical interfaces.
- 10 unique civilizations, all with their own lineup of special improvements, units, and strengths and weaknesses. All creatures are able to be built as you progress through time, and you can recruit them as well through their creature dwellings.
- 7 levels of creatures, each with a basic and upgraded version. Each with special strengths and unique abilities. The civilopedia town screen will display all their information and requisites.
- Just like Armies, Heroes serve a special purpose. If you aim for only peace, you will miss out on some powerful structures as well, such as the Thieve's Guild and Taverns. Heroes will strengthen your forces as well as reinforce the front battle lines. The Hero can summon spells from the homeland directly to them, so they can instantly help defend and provide reinforcement as needed.
- Civilopedia is stock full of information, links, and full creature data, to ensure that you have all the information necessary to make vital decisions when engaging in war, and deciding on what to build.
- Difficulty information has been added to the World Setup screen, so you will be able to know how tough each difficulty level actually is.
- World play sizes are not maximized, but are set at the current C3C standards. This ensures that mod issues and crashes are minimized (that often happens on larger maps).
- A large variety of Spells are available, as well as "creature power boosts" that you can obtain throughout the game, to improve your weaker creatures. Special "Legion" units are available if those rare resources can be found and utilized. They provide unique units with special strengths. Special "Artifact" units can also be produced, which are King units that will be protected by all other units. If obtained, these can be used to great advantage.
- The recent discovery on Artillery and AI has been implemented. Certain "Legion" and "Artifact" units can construct catapult units during battle. These catapult units are unique, and the AI will actively use them.
- Very short plagues and volcanoes are active. This provides some graphical eye candy, as well as a bit of unexpected randomness. But the effects are generally minimal, so it won't impact gameplay in any considerable way. Pollution is about as low as it can get, but will appear occasionally with large metros.
- Settlers are built by the player, so expansion in the beginning of the game happens fairly quickly. This route was taken to give urgency and planning to the expansion phase.
- The single-era tech tree approach has been taken, which fits into one Era. This allowed 10 unique civilizations, all with different city graphics. Although there is less tech's to discover, you will still need to push the limits to discover them as fast as you can, and also to try to trade with neighbors. Research time is 8 turns minimum, and so new discoveries will happen regularly, which will keep the game at a nice flow. Make research a priority! Hint: The AI often pulls ahead early, but don't worry, there are always opportunities to 'catch up'!
- Should be 99% bug-free! Heavily tested to correct any errors/bugs.
- Highly Recommended Setting: noaipatrol=0 This setting in the conquests.ini (you may need to add it), will let the AI roam around, and also somewhat fixes Barbarians. It also has the benefit of somewhat diminishing the dreaded "Stacks of Death", and instead creates "Waves of Onslaught". I believe the benefits far outweigh any negatives!

*** This mod is considered 'fairly balanced'. But there is definite advantages and disadvantages that certain civilizations have in unit strengths depending on what units are available. For instance, the Stronghold and Inferno town are a bit on the weaker side defensively, until later in the game. But they get quite strong when they reach certain mid-level units. As a human player, you can try to make up for weakness in many ways (staying on defensive, creating more 'cheap' units, gifting to neighboring civ's until you increase your strength, etc).

Moderator Action: Broken downloads updated

Full Package Downloads:
COMM3.7z (630MB) - V1.00 (includes BIQ & PediaIcons patch)
COMM3.rar (813MB) - V1.00 (includes BIQ)
COMM3.zip (919MB) - V1.00 (includes BIQ)
*7zip files compress greater than rar, rar files compress greater than zip, but all have the same contents (except for the 7z which contains the PediaIcons patch).
Unzip/Unrar the file, and proceed with below instructions.

Patches:
PediaIconsCorrection for CoMM3 V1.00.7z


FULL Installation (overwrites your Main Conquests directory):
This is required for best game experience, and to view the City View, and Palace View screens.
See Post #7 for an improved and easier way of doing the FULL Installation.
********************************************************************************
1) Make a BACKUP
a) Navigate to your Civilization III\Conquests directory.
b) Create a folder called CONQUESTS_ORIGINAL_FILES
c) Copy the Art, Text, and sounds folders, and Paste them into your CONQUESTS_ORIGINAL_FILES folder.
d) Also copy the conquests.biq file and paste that into your CONQUESTS_ORIGINAL_FILES folder.

2) Transferring the COMM3 files to your Main Conquests directory.
a) Copy the Art, Text, and sounds folders from the COMM3 directory and Paste them into your Civilization III\Conquests directory. Click Yes to overwrite any files.
b) Also copy the conquests.biq and Civ3Conquests_p4 COMM3.exe file, and paste them into your Civilization III\Conquests directory.

Double-click the Civ3Conquests_p4 COMM3.exe file to start the game, and select New Game!

Palace View Instructions:
** Depending on the civilization that you play, you will need to copy and paste the appropriate Palace View files. The civs are Castle, Conflux, Dungeon, Fortress, Inferno, Necropolis, Rampart, Stronghold, and Tower.
I will use the Castle civ as an example.
1) Go to your COMM3 folder, and open the _CASTLE PalaceView folder.
2) Copy the Art folder.
3) Navigate back to your Civilization III\Conquests directory, and paste the Art folder here. Click Yes to overwrite any files.
Game can be running to do this, and graphics will update.
4) Repeat this procedure for any other civilization, to update to their specific Palace View graphics.

To return to your regular Conquests files:
1) Go to your Civilization III\Conquests directory.
2) Delete the Art, sounds, and Text folders.
3) Go to your CONQUESTS_ORIGINAL_FILES folder, and copy the Art, sounds, and Text folders (and the conquests.biq).
4) Copy these to your Civilization III\Conquests directory.
Done!

Note: Please be careful doing this! I am not responsible for any mishaps!
********************************************************************************


Regular Installation:
Intro video, City View, Palace View, and other extras will not be available.
1) Place the COMM3 directory into your Civilization III\Conquests\Scenarios directory.
2) Place the ConquestsOfMightMagic3_V1.00.biq into your Civilization III\Conquests\Scenarios directory.
3) Copy the Civ3Conquests_p4 COMM3.exe into your Civilization III\Conquests directory.
Should look similar to below:

Double-click the Civ3Conquests_p4 COMM3.exe file to start the game, and select Civ-Content to start the game.



Update your conquests.ini (Highly Recommended)
1) Go to your Civilization III\Conquests directory.
2) Double-click the conquests.ini file to open (with notepad).
3) If not there, add the line noaipatrol=0 below the [Conquests] entry.
4) If you have the line noaipatrol=1, change the 1 to a 0.
5) Save and exit.
This improves barbarian activity, lets the AI roam, and diminishes Stacks of Death (AI will move more in 'waves')

Steam Users
If your Steam edition of the game is crashing or shows messed up labels when playing mods, you may need to insert the line "Unknown" between the lines "ping" and "host" in your labels.txt file (located in your Civilization III\Conquests\Text folder).

 

[tom2050]

CoMM3 game previews!



World Setup Screen

Player Setup Screen

Check the difficulty settings prior to starting the game in the Game Limits screen.

Tech Tree

If you decide to play with the Full Installation, you can enjoy building your town palace throughout the game. All 10 towns have their own town graphics and palace views. Partially built Castle, Tower, and Fortress town palace views are shown below.

Rampart forces are battling the Conflux and their Elemental creatures. New border graphics are filled with obstacles and stake fortifications, slowing enemies down when they cross over into their territory.

A large variety of creatures engaged in war in the desert sands.

Various factions on the southern shores of Antagarich.

A variety of different images in the game:

The basic and upgraded units of each town. Spells and special units not shown below.

More images:

 

[tom2050]

Credits and Gameplay Tips / Tricks

Credits:
Graphics, ideas, and assistance: Plotinus, embryodead, Kinboat, Kindred72, Aaglo, Yaniv, Kreyten, Aluminum, CamJH, CivGeneral, NavyDawg, Vuldacon, Kyriakos, CivArmy s. 1994, Shirokobbure, Drift, Grandraem, Bebro, Orthanc, Jewmpaloompa, LizardmenRule!, utahjazz7, Dogmouse, Balam-Agab, capman, Kyriakos, Pounder, bluebox, Bjornlo, Wyrmshadow, Ares de Borg, DFBATTLER, Eclipse4449, nick0515, General 666, Grandraem, Roland Ironfist, elenar, Wolfhart, Supa, Steph, Pounder, and all others I may have missed.
Special thanks to Quintillus and his amazing editor, which was used to revamp the original CoMM3 mod into the current version.
Special thanks to Steph and the great work he has put into his editors, which was used on the original CoMM3 biq's.
Finally, to Firaxis for Civ 3, and to New World Computing for HoMM3.

Apologies if I missed providing credit to anyone (which pretty much goes to the entire Civ 3 community)!

Faction Names:
The Noun's / Adjectives are a little diffferent than the Civ nouns. This may be a bit confusing. I may try to fix this in some way. Here is a list of differences you may see in the game verbiage.
Castle - Erathia
Stronghold - Krewlod
Tower - Bracadia
Necropolis - Deyja
Rampart - Avlee
Inferno - Eeofol (Kreegans)
Fortress - Tatalia
Dungeon - Nighon

Gameplay Tips / Tricks:
Early Game
Although the expansion phase is usually fast and furious, be sure to build plenty of units. The AI in CoMM3 sometimes is very confident early on, and will attack without mercy. Without a sufficient defense force, you will suffer losses. Avoid this frustration, and have many cities focus on building military as well, to protect your out-most cities.

Build the Fort. The Fort is the main improvement that allows many other improvements to be built. Once you have enough some defense, the Fort will expand your cultural borders, provide some extra defense and auto-production, and allow you to build things like Creature Dwellings.

Build Creature Dwellings early, which provide a steady flow of creatures over various lengths of time. Although these shouldn't necessarily be the primary focus, they will help in the long run. The AI does build them all when it can, and it makes a huge difference in the 'power' ability of a civilization.

Make research a priority. It is often a good idea to aim for these on the tech tree first. Mage Guild's allow increased science research. These will ensure you keep up with the AI in tech.

 

[Pounder]

Wow, epic is right. And you wasted no time getting it done.

I will definitely be giving it a go.

 

[Nathiri]

Downloaded. Will give it a go.

 

[Civinator]

Wow that´s great! I´m downloading now.

Now the option to easy switch between different C3C mainfiles becomes even more sense:

b) Change between different files mods for the mainfiles.

This is possible with the same methode described in a). In the installation image you can see additional folders called Art-CCM1, Text-CCM1 and sounds-CCM1. By renaming the -CCM1 folders to folders without that suffix and adding the suffix -CCM2 to the current folders Art, Text and sounds and renaming the Conquest biq the same way, I was able to switch easily between playing CCM1 or CCM2 as the Epic C3C game.

Now soon I can switch between the new version of my mod and CoMM3.

 

[tom2050]

Thank you Pounder and Nathiri, I hope you find it enjoyable!

Civinator, that is a great idea!!
It got me thinking (and someone may have done it before, in fact this may have been what you already did Civinator, but I am not for sure.. so I will outline it here for clarity).

Another idea to along with that, 3 Steps which should make it super easy to run mods from the Main Conquests directory! I tested and indeed it works perfectly.

1) Make a backup of Conquests files first (Art, sounds, Text folders, and conquests.biq). I put them in a folder in my Conquests directory called _ConquestsOrigFiles.
2) Make a backup of your PTW files (Art, Sounds, and Text folders). I put them in a folder in my PTW directory called PTW Original FILES.

3) Right-click and "Cut" all the regular Main Civilization III\Conquests files (Art, sounds, and Text folders), and Paste (overwrite) into your Civilization III\Civ3PTW directory.

4) DONE!
The beauty is that nothing is lost. Firaxis updated some files, but you can safely overwrite any old PTW files, since they are obsolete to the new Conquests files. If you still play "PTW", then you may not want to do this.

Now your Civilization III\Conquests directory will look like this. Notice there is no Art, sounds, or Text folder!!

If you run the game, you can still play like normal, and the game will not crash. Why? Because the game searches game folders in a certain order for needed files (mod files first if BIQ specifies, then Conquests, then PTW, then Civilization III directories). All needed files are in the Civilization III and PTW directories now.

The Conquests directory is now open for mod files just as Civinator pointed out. Before, you would need to 'merge' the mod files with the Conquests files (otherwise game would crash if it cannot find the conquests files). Now you don't have to.

For COMM3, you can just copy the COMM3 Art, sounds, Text files (and it's conquests.biq) to the Civilization III\Conquests and play. And it will work perfect.
Finished playing it? Either just delete them, or rename as Civinator pointed out.

And for CCM, you could just copy the CCM Art, sounds, Text files (and the conquests.biq) to the Civilization III\Conquests and play. And it will work perfect.
Finished playing it? Either just delete them, or rename as Civinator pointed out.


"But why do we want to run mods from the Main Conquests directory? It sounds like a lot of trouble."
Many reasons!
- Only takes maybe 10 minutes to follow the steps to do this. Easy to do.
- You have access to the City View and Palace View screens. Provides a lot of cool modding possibilities.
- The game runs faster! Yes, it definitely runs faster. Especially on larger mods, I think because it doesn't search through extra directories, or some kind of coding issues, it does speed loading times up.
- Less bugs and less crashes. There is indeed seem to be less issues with getting the crash error, strange errors appearing when the intro video is loading which makes it so you can't click out of it, Space Race crash errors, etc... The game is definitely more stable.
- It's a better way. The game came out in 2003. 14 years later, it is easy to do and makes for a better game experience! Modder's can push awesome limits even further!
- And any and all past C3C BIQ's will still work this way. Even if they have a path set in the BIQ, it won't matter (the game ignores it if it doesn't exist - I tested). Just rename the .biq to conquests.biq and stick that in the Conquests directory (along with it's Art, sounds, and Text files) and start New Game!

Downsides: The little "I" to bring back up the mod intro information popup is no longer there, but that information can easily be added to a top entry in the Civilopedia.

 

[Samez]

Just wanted to test it for a few turns ... three hours later I realize that the "just one more turn" hit me hard - Great mod thank you

 

[register]

Downloaded and played a bit and I think is great. The atmosphere in the game is really like in HMM! It's amaze me how you cloned entire game and designed another one which looks like original HMM. It was my favor game years ago. Nice reminder, I will keep this mod for long time. I like city and palace views very much, that feature makes all game much more interesting and I was missing it in CivConquest.

I was trying to copy this idea to my mod and use default city/palace views but in game nothing is changing. Did you add some line of text to pedia.txt? I bet you didn't copy and paste just two folders? I should be possible also to add with your system RankView feature I don't know if you tried it before.

 

[Samez]

I get a repeatable crash to desktop when running windows media player in the background - not a big issue as shutting down WMP did solve the problem.

 

[tom2050]

Samez, I am glad you enjoy it! I have not heard of Civ 3 crashing when running another background application (WMP in your instance). I also run WMP from time to time. I will search and see if I can find any info on such an error.

register, thank you. I tried to keep the theme of the original classic alive. I am glad you enjoy it.
I know that as long as you run/change those files from the main Conquests directory, they will be changed. For the City View, it requires the PediaIcons and BIQ PRTO settings to be in a specific order (with the same PRTO names and settings as the original game). But for the Palace View, the only thing is the graphics in the Art/PalaceView folder, and one for each culture. So depending on which culture you are playing, is the graphics that will show. Of course, I believe in regular game, it lets you mix and match all 5 culture Palace View graphics anyways. There was a PalaceView.txt in the Civilization III/text directory, but I didn't alter any of that.

I totally forgot about the RankView feature! I did not update that. Thank you for mentioning it! I might just have to make one now

 

[Nathiri]

Played some today. Very atmospheric mod. As with many mods, takes some looking around to play ideally.

 

[tom2050]

Thank you Nathiri, I am glad you have enjoyed it.

Here is a screenshot of a portion of the new Rank View screen. This is right before the bulbs begin to go up during the smash animation. I am currently finishing the new bulb placement and shapes to fit the tower (after a magical burst), but have the background, and the new RankView unit (a mighty Vindicator knight) animations finished. This civ 3 unit is completed also (but I believe I have not released it yet).

Once the Rank View is finished, I will release this in a patch. I will release an updated PalaceView patch afterwards, since some exciting enhancements have been found.

 

[register]

Tom, how long it takes you to make a palette for the image as above?

 

[tom2050]

Well, a palette for each image is required, as well as the animation storyboards. In general, not too long for PCX files, since they aren't too complicated (some require magenta/green transparency colors at certain spots). Units have civ colors, shadows, and 'fog' transparency. But once you have made them for a while, a few seconds to sometimes 10+ minutes I would say depending on complexity. Photoshop/Gimp pretty much makes most of the palette for you, based on a type of selective algorithm to get nearest colors.

When I did recolors, those sometimes took longer than a new unit, since you have to try to separate the palette to recolor certain portions, then apply a new palette.

 

[register]

Palace views enabled inspired me a bit and I want to make a few views my own I feel the jazz again. What I never was good at is a palette creation. Something doesn't want to click in my brain. I tired few tutorials from here even gwendoline and vuldacon made me one but I couldn't do it right. Would you mind to record your screen while you doing your palette, so I could follow your mouse pointer and see it how is it done in Photoshop or Gimp? Or maybe you could help me with images when I finish it?

 

[Civinator]

Sorry for the delay in answering about changing the C3C mainfiles. Your idea about switching the mainfiles is much more sophisticated than it is mine. I arranged the art- , text and sounds folders in this way:

Two CCM2 betatesters (elephantium and Jersey Joe) wrote a batch file, that simply let you switch between normal C3C files and the files of my mod with only one press of a button..May be such a batch file can be written to change between standard C3C, CCM2, COMM3 and some other mods, that now will use the additional possibilities of the C3C mainfile. With the cut and paste job there is the danger, that not so experienced civers can do harm or create chaos to their files.

 

[tom2050]

The problem, is that the game will crash from 'missing files' if you only do that, because the game will not find all the original Conquests files as well. COMM3 and CCM have not modified/duplicated all the Conquests files, so you must still first 'merge/overwrite' those mod files into the original Conquests files (as well as make a backup if you wish to revert to regular Conquests files). To do this with all main-file mods will create a huge amount of hard drive space needed.

This is the benefit of simply cutting and pasting all Conquests Art, sounds, and Text and overwrite those in the PTW folder (good sense to make backup of mainfiles anyways). That way you only need to copy the mod art, sounds, text folders to the conquests directory without duplicating the main files, or overwriting anything ever again. Then you can use name conventions as you have shown above for any conquests mod ever made..


Anyone not familiar enough with doing these things, of course should proceed with caution.. or get assistance from others to help. At worst, a reinstall of civ 3 is needed, but things like save games will not be deleted if that happens.

 

[tom2050]

Palace views enabled inspired me a bit and I want to make a few views my own I feel the jazz again. What I never was good at is a palette creation. Something doesn't want to click in my brain. I tired few tutorials from here even gwendoline and vuldacon made me one but I couldn't do it right. Would you mind to record your screen while you doing your palette, so I could follow your mouse scroll and see it how is it done in Photoshop or Gimp? Or maybe you could help me with images when I finish it?

Hi register, to make a tutorial video, I haven't really done much of that, but I could attempt and upload to youtube maybe if need be. Do you have both Photoshop and gimp? I have Gimp also, but I am not as familiar with using it, as I am with my older photoshop version.

 

[register]

No Photoshop is good enough. The tutorial is a big thing and time consuming. I was thinking only about recording your screen in hi res while you working, that's it.