New SciFi Game for Civ2 ToT

[Civinator]

Galactic Conquests Mod (GCM) for Civ 2 ToT- Betatest Version

"Captain, sensors reading a battlewaggon coming out of hyperspace behind us."

"Relax ensign, this is a battlestar of the Lost Colonies, they are on our side. At least they were, when we contacted them the last time. Close up the Enterprise to firing range against the Kilrathi Ralari"

"What´s that - fireballs coming out from the Kilrathi ship!"
"Th - that was the Excelsior, captain"

"My god, the cats have plasma weapons - and behind us a bioterminator is on his devastating way to Sagitaria. Full speed ahead to the whormhole back to our galaxy."
(Reminiscence to CGW "Hanging from Orion´s Belt")



Galactic Conquests Mod (GCM) is a non-commercial spacemod to replace the Science Fiction Game in Civ 2 ToT, playing on two linked Kobayashi-maps (the galaxy Milkyway and the galaxy Andromeda) and randomized starting positions. There are 12 playable Civilizations, each with its own specific spaceships, assisted by a bundle of common spaceships that are available to all civs. This mod has animated units with attack and death animations as seen in the intro-image, done with Mercator´s CivSprite.

The Galactic Conquests Mod is dedicated to all civers who did boldly go, where no civer has gone before. A big thank you to the members of the Civ 2 Scenario League and here especially to Kobayashi and Catfish who told me a lot about modding Civ 2, the first one with his tutorials and scenarios about ten years ago, the other one with his friendly help in answering the questions I had, when finishing that mod these days. Another big thank you to the people of the SOC-Site who are kindly hosting this mod and to Mercator who created the tool CivSprite. The biggest thank you to all the artists, that made these beautiful units I used for the animations and other graphics that are used in this mod. As I started to do most parts of this mod about ten years ago, I can´t remember all of their names, but if you see a piece of your work here, I will do my best to give you the proper credit for your work.

Some free days around eastern were not enough to fine-tune every aspect of the mod, that I started long ago. So with your help, reports and hints I will do a revised version of this mod when my time allows it.


The mod can be downloaded here:

Edit: Download at present not longer available, as the hosting site was closed.

About installing this mod:

1. Rename the standard Civ 2 ToT Scifi-game to SciFi-old (or something like this), so you can simply replay it, when renaming this mod and giving back the old name to the standard SciFi-game.

2. Unzip this SciFi-mod in the Test of Time folder, so it appears as the new SciFi-folder.

3. Rename your Intro.dll to intro-1.dll (or something like that)and paste the Intro.dll of this SciFi-mod in the Test of Time folder. You can reuse your old file by renaming it and there is a reserve file of the original dll-file in your GCM-download-files.

Do the same with your Tiles.dll and the Credits-file (the last one is needed to show in game a mini-image from the new Tiles.dll about the SciFi-Techtree when clicking the Techtree-Button (replacing the " About Test of Time"-Button).

About starting the new SciFi game:

1. Start a Single Player Game

2. Start the Science Fiction Game

3. Start on Pre-Made Universe

This is important, otherwise the mod will be unplayable!

4. Load the map Milkyway contained in that mod.

This is a modified Kobayashi-map, based nearly complete on ground terrain. Only the suns are sea-terrain.

5. Click "No" to the question about randomized artefacts of the Mysterious.

This is important, otherwise it can happen that you won´t be seeing the suns in this mod (based on fish and whales resource graphics).

6. Select Dificulty level: Great Administrator or Cosmocrat are recommended.

7. Play with 7 Civilizations.

8. Select level of Alien Activity: Restless Tribes.

9. Use Standard Rules for randomized appearance of other civilizations or customize rules if you want to play with special other civilizations.

10. Select gender if you want to play with a male or female leader.

11. Select your own civilization you want to play. For the other civs in the game: Only one of the civs in the horizontal column of the following screenshot can appear (so for an example in the same game there can´t appear the Federation and the Terran Solar Empire).

12. Enter the name of your leader.

13. Click on one of the city graphics. They are all set to transparency, so here you can only see the graphic of the planetary force shield.

14. Select map 2 for the game.

15. Here select the galaxy Andromeda.

This is another modification of a Kobayashi-map, based nearly complete on ground terrain, too. Only the suns are sea-terrain. Remember: Without this map the mod will be unplayable!

16. When you did all right, you will see the following startscreen. When you change the starting civ after quitting a SCiFi game, there is a chance, that the game can collapse. In this case relaunch Civ2 ToT and restart the SciFi game.

Some hints about gameplay:

1) Don´t forget: This game plays on two fixed maps with random starting positions and random civilizations. Both maps are "ground maps", meaning the only "water-terrain" on these maps are suns and all units (with the exception of some wormholes given by an event)are ground- or air-units.

It also means that exploration is much quicker and the threat of attacks is much stronger than in normal civ games. Additionally you have to take care of the "third dimension" as big invasions can happen from the other galaxy by new-built wormholes, done by construction ships.

2) Any civilization that reaches Transcendancy (Future tech 7) wins the game; this is the "pure research" method of winning.

3) You cannot talk with other civilizations until you (or they) have researched Translators.

4) At the start of the game you should try to capture/destroy as many barbarian pirateships as possible, as each of them gives you 50 credits when you did attack them.

5) By all circumstances, take care of your construction ship. It is an unique unit, given you by an event that allows you to build wormholes for direct connection to the other galaxy. You only have one of them and you don´t get another one. If you loose your construction ship you are handicaped to use wormholes done by other civilizations or to wait until you have ships with intergalactic drive, that are strong enough to conquer a planet in the other galaxy where you can build a dimensional portal for a direct connection between the both galaxies.

6) You can win without beeing "Master of Orion". But why don´t take it, if it´s possible?

 

[Tanelorn]

Just downloaded, looks great. Kudos man!

 

[Harry Tuttle]

Very nice! I'll have to check this out.

 

[Palaiologos2]

I'll sure check this out.

 

[Blake00]

@Civinator Just wanted to say I hope you consider re-releasing this one day mate. Yes I know the whole land carriers AI issue and the 2 way battle animation issue ruined the original dream for ya but it seemed like you did so much other cool work with this... and I know you're keeping it in a safe place just in case progress is made with some of these issues but that may never happen and if you get hit by a bus or something then your awesome work will be lost forever!

Either way I'm gonna give your work an honourable mention in my next giant scifi & fantasy scenario search, rescue & cataloging project thread update as this shouldn't be forgotten about!

I never released my old Star Wars - Battle of Hoth MGE scenario I made in 1999 due to a similar land carrier AI issue and really regret that now, so I intend to release it soon in all it's imperfect glory haha which after over 2 decades of frustration should finally give me some closure on it! Hope you consider doing the same one day.

 

[Hemrawc]

Can this be downloaded anywhere? I know the original hosting site closed.

 

[Civinator]

Thank you all for your kind words , so at present nearly nothing can be seen about the Galactic Conquests Mod, as I had to delete all the old screenshot links leading to the closed SOC site and therefore going into the nirvana. Until now I was able to take care of those murderous busses.

The idea of that mod was simple. What happens when different scifi civs meet in the same universe, per example when the Klingons meet the Cylons or Darth Vader battles against the Kilrathi ? And of course I wanted to have the Solar Empire of Perry Rhodan (at least at that time the biggest SciFi novel series in the world) in such a game, too. I not only wanted to read about them, but play them in action and all these civs should have their own characteristic capital ships in the game, accompanied by several units that are available for all civs, as the there was only the place for 80 units.

The idea I had about 20 years ago for such a concept was simple: At that time the ships for SciFi mostly fall into two big classes: Ships for the "torpedo-races" (Star Trek) and ships for the "fighter-races" (Battlestar Galactica, Perry Rhodan and Star Wars). Around that core of torpedo- and fighter-races I created the following complex techtree (the magenta boxes show the core ship techs):

I made an ingame help for that techtree in Civ 2ToT, but one must have very sharp eyes to use it without knowledge of the techtree so it still can be useful for seeing the bigger direction of the research after longer breaks from the game:

For the graphical techtree I used a windows document by ERIN T. RYAN, "shamrock". As I haven´t seen it at CFC I reflect about uploading it at CFC.

The races for this mod are arranged, so civs of the same "SciFi group" can all be selected for a game, but of course "mixes" of them are possible - and wanted (so per example the game could be played in a Star Trek setting with Klingons, Romulans, Federation, Ferengi and Cardassians, also meeting the Lost Colonies and the Galactic Empire):

The game in my eyes provides a lot of fun as the expansion of the civs is very fast, due to the land terrain maps. Combat and strategy are brutal, due to the option of direct big invasions from the map of the "other galaxy". Here is a screenshot about such a game, showing an artificial wormhole between the galaxies Milky Way and Andromeda created by a construction ship, some settled planets with transparent city graphics and the planets Vulcan and Cosmara having also a planetary defense shield, a colonizer at work, two early Cylon base stars and a more modern base star, a Barbarian fast patrol cruiser (from Raumpatrouille Orion), a Kilrathi ship and a cruiser of the city class coming from the Solar empire. The starting points of the civs on each of both maps are completely flexible, only the map where those civs appear, are fixed. Therefore this mod has a very big value of replayability.

The problem of immortal leaders in epic games of the civ series has a proper solution in this mod, provided by the Perry Rhodan series:

Here are some screenshots of the intro, when starting this mod:

This screenshot shows one of the Jedi knights on the move. Civ 2 Diplomats and agents in my eyes are the best base units for Jedi knights in the complete Civ series, as they have the power (to bribe ).

The next screenshot shows the earliest connection between both maps, provided by a wonder when an old hidden intact ring ship of the Mysterious with an intergalactic drive is found, that also holds the event given flexible random coordinates of some natural wormholes connecting both galaxies:

And here are two screenshots about some of the "buildings" in that mod, using a method to eliminate the small building icons inside the big building icons of Civ 2 ToT:

The Dimensional Portal:

The Babylon 5 Station:

In times when Civ 2 ToT had no combat animations, I created "light" animated sprites for the units to give them at least some kind of animation for their combats. Now with TOTPP providing the "light" Civ 2 combat animations to Civ 2 ToT, the "light" sprite animations have no special use any longer. For improved animations unfortunately even TOTPP doesn´t hold a proper solution.

I wish I would have the time to adjust the story of the Mysterious more deeply in this mod, to give some features and descriptions better names and to adjust better the Dark Side of the Force, but at present my free modding time is completely filled out with the new options that the Flintlock patch provides to Civ 3. The Flintlock patch is a similar revolution in modding Civ 3 as it is TOTPP for modding Civ 2 ToT.

So at present this mod is not yet available for download.

 

[Blake00]

oh wow.. man.. way to make us all even hungrier for your work hahaha. Hope you release this bad boy into the world again one day mate. Seriously cool stuff!

 

[Civinator]

O.k. I can show some more screenshots of this mod:

Astrogation Center:

Galactic Coreworld:

Orbital Factory:

Medicenter:

Psi Corps:

Nulltime Deformer:

Master of Orion:

True Master of Orion:

Homeworld:

Cursor and Map Grid:

 

[Hemrawc]

@Civinator This looks amazing! Hopefully, it will be made available in the near future. Best wishes on your mod venture!

 

[Civinator]

Hemrawc, thank you very much for your kind words and this post gives me the opportunity to attache some more screenshots:

The Automaton Droid Works:

The Jedi Ordre:

The units of this mod:

And here is one of the many events, providing more atmosphere to the game and giving a nice ship:

Edit: When looking at the texts, I note that some of those texts need additional work, too.
Is launched at San Francisco Yards ? I always have big problems with all those small English words.

 

[Blake00]

Oh man.. somehow I hadn't noticed from the above screenshots that you've included Babylon 5 stuff in your mod too (but now I see the Omega Destroyer & B5 shots there). Only noticed this when you linked to your pedia building image experiments thread from a decade ago and I saw that big beautiful Babylon 5 station of yours!

Man I wish I could play your mod and cover it in my eventual ToT video. Funny timing too as I'm actually working on finishing up the big MGE video atm and have just got up to covering the B5 mods for that!

 

[Civinator]

Blake00, thank you very much for your kind words about GCM. Concerning Babylon 5 the Babylon 5 station is the only part of that series in this mod. The limitation to only 80 units made it not possible to include Babylon 5 civs more deeply in that mod. Now with TOTPP there would be much more slots for units and may be the Centauri or the Narn could be included here.

In GCM I included many parts of prominent science fiction work connected by the idea, that this is all happening in the same universe.

 

[Blake00]

lol yeah while I'm 10 years late to the party I think I've officially become this projects number 1 stalker fan.

Yeah I figured from your unit list shots above that B5 just had a small part but even that is way better than nothing, which is how things currently are for B5 on ToT (I also really wish there was a B5 Civ3 mod too with animating ships). Modding legend John Valdez @CivPartisan sent me a teaser the other day that he's working on a brand new Babylon 5 mod, I'm not sure if it's for MGE or ToT yet but the units he showed looked way better than any of the existing MGE B5 mods which were cool but very cartoonish. Super excited about that one so fingers crossed he gets it finished along with the 10 thousand other utterly awesome ongoing Civ2 projects he has going on (he's as bad as I am as I'm already cooking up another project I don't have time for to go with all my other unreleased ones haha).

Speaking of me fan boying over stuff, imagine if uber artist @Fairline had done a Babylon 5 and a Star Trek unit set in the style and quality of his Star Wars ones back in the day. @gapetit would have been able to do enhanced ToT conversions of all the awesome Trek (eg Kobyashi's) & Babylon 5 MGE scenarios just like he did with so many Star Wars ones. And you could have used them in your scenario too of course. Oh well.. too late now but it's nice to dream about lol!