I’m a huge Babylon 5 fan and the idea of playing a Master of Orion like 4X TBS Babylon 5 game has always been a dream of mine. The excellent Civ4 Babylon 5 mod is “a dream given form” but being a Civ2 guy I’ve always wanted to play a classic Civ2 Babylon 5 scenario.
Civ4 Babylon 5
Many many years ago the German Civ2 community produced several Babylon 5 scenarios but sadly they’ve been lost to time (if you have them PLEASE contact me!). Meanwhile back in the day Civ2 modding legend @kobayashi created some amazing scenarios covering some of the best scifi franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars and Stargate, but despite showing interest here, here & here he sadly never released a Babylon 5 one to go with them and I often wondered what it would be like if he had.
All was not lost though as back in the late 90s Paul Heron (who also made the cool Terminator scenario I remastered) made a big total conversion Babylon 5 scenario modpack on a big galactic map with cool story events back in the day but it suffered from rather simple cartoonish ‘windows paintbrushy’ graphics. I often thought about remastering his scenario over the years however I deemed it too difficult due to the lack of complete good quality Babylon 5 ship packs.
I've preserved Paul's original scenario to these places:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/28566/
https://www.moddb.com/games/civilization-ii/downloads/babylon5-modpack-scenario
https://archive.org/details/babylon5-modpack-scenario
However a few years go another modding legend John Valdez sent me a teaser WIP units file showing me that he was working on a Babylon 5 scenario. This image contained most of the known ships from Babylon 5 and in pretty decent quality with a rather a classic ‘Kobayashi style’. Sadly John hasn’t visited CivFanatics for a few years since but hopefully one day he’ll return with that finished B5 scenario! Since there’s a chance it’ll never happen though, this units file got me thinking why don’t I finally make my dreams of remastering Paul Heron’s Babylon 5 scenario a reality by using Johns units and Kobayashi’s terrain from his famous Star Wars and Star Trek scenarios along with some tweaks, additions and a custom GUI from me. There’s still a few units missing however thankfully talented Civ2 unit creators like @Broken_Erika , @Eyn & @temurleng have released some B5 unit packs for public use over the years and any remaining gaps I’ve filled myself.
While this is mostly a graphical remaster I’ve also added new units to better fill each races lineups and rebalanced most of the existing ones as Paul’s original attack and defence values were huge making some units unkillable. While I’ve done my best to scale back the crazy numbers I fear balancing issues still remain as I lack the time to properly playtest everything sorry as my limited free time is going into finishing my bigger Civ2 modding projects. I did however make the extra effort to add special race exclusion techs to ensure that factions can only build their own units instead of alien ones.
Oh and lastly Coolguy529 used Paul Heron’s modpack to make his own Babylon 5 Shadow War scenario back in the 90s too, so if people like what I’ve done here then I’ll remaster that too. See my changes list below for a full list of all the work I’ve done.
Changes List:
Comparison Screenshots:
Here's Paul's original Babylon 5 scenario:
And here's the remastered version looking at the same map spot:
Download:
Attached below!
Civ4 Babylon 5
Many many years ago the German Civ2 community produced several Babylon 5 scenarios but sadly they’ve been lost to time (if you have them PLEASE contact me!). Meanwhile back in the day Civ2 modding legend @kobayashi created some amazing scenarios covering some of the best scifi franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars and Stargate, but despite showing interest here, here & here he sadly never released a Babylon 5 one to go with them and I often wondered what it would be like if he had.
All was not lost though as back in the late 90s Paul Heron (who also made the cool Terminator scenario I remastered) made a big total conversion Babylon 5 scenario modpack on a big galactic map with cool story events back in the day but it suffered from rather simple cartoonish ‘windows paintbrushy’ graphics. I often thought about remastering his scenario over the years however I deemed it too difficult due to the lack of complete good quality Babylon 5 ship packs.
I've preserved Paul's original scenario to these places:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/resources/28566/
https://www.moddb.com/games/civilization-ii/downloads/babylon5-modpack-scenario
https://archive.org/details/babylon5-modpack-scenario
However a few years go another modding legend John Valdez sent me a teaser WIP units file showing me that he was working on a Babylon 5 scenario. This image contained most of the known ships from Babylon 5 and in pretty decent quality with a rather a classic ‘Kobayashi style’. Sadly John hasn’t visited CivFanatics for a few years since but hopefully one day he’ll return with that finished B5 scenario! Since there’s a chance it’ll never happen though, this units file got me thinking why don’t I finally make my dreams of remastering Paul Heron’s Babylon 5 scenario a reality by using Johns units and Kobayashi’s terrain from his famous Star Wars and Star Trek scenarios along with some tweaks, additions and a custom GUI from me. There’s still a few units missing however thankfully talented Civ2 unit creators like @Broken_Erika , @Eyn & @temurleng have released some B5 unit packs for public use over the years and any remaining gaps I’ve filled myself.
While this is mostly a graphical remaster I’ve also added new units to better fill each races lineups and rebalanced most of the existing ones as Paul’s original attack and defence values were huge making some units unkillable. While I’ve done my best to scale back the crazy numbers I fear balancing issues still remain as I lack the time to properly playtest everything sorry as my limited free time is going into finishing my bigger Civ2 modding projects. I did however make the extra effort to add special race exclusion techs to ensure that factions can only build their own units instead of alien ones.
Oh and lastly Coolguy529 used Paul Heron’s modpack to make his own Babylon 5 Shadow War scenario back in the 90s too, so if people like what I’ve done here then I’ll remaster that too. See my changes list below for a full list of all the work I’ve done.
Changes List:
Spoiler Click to expand :
Comparison Screenshots:
Here's Paul's original Babylon 5 scenario:
And here's the remastered version looking at the same map spot:
Download:
Attached below!
Last edited:
