User-Generated Content for Civilization II

[freshfeeling]

The Civilization series has built an interesting sort of history (hah..?) with regards to user-generated content. Even in the original Civ, it was possible to pass save game files around like “puzzles” - given civs and units spread in some specific way, can you find means to win? Although I played the first Civilization game a lot at a young age, I wasn’t aware of its contemporary communities and can only speculate that this behaviour likely inspired the scenarios packed into all future games.

 

I really did play Civ at a young age. Like many of my early gaming ventures, it was my brother’s game and I saw him playing it and tried it out on my own. Though it interested me, I didn’t understand it at all the first time I played it and I just kept producing militia (warrior) units and moved them to the right every turn. After I had four militia who walked most of the way around the world someone effortlessly walked into my capital and it was game over!

That's not an image from my actual first game.
Don’t worry; I got better. Not good by any stretch, but better.

 

Civilization II introduced a lot of great features including scenarios, and this continued to be built upon in future releases, including Civilization III more openly supporting mods and Civilization IV embedding Python scripting for modding purposes and also packing fan-created mods in their official expansions. For me, though, the Civ game I tinkered with modding on the most was Civilization II… some time shortly after Civilization III would have released, in 2001 or so.

 

Around that time, the GBA Castlevania games were emerging and Symphony of the Night had been a favourite game of mine. A fan site called The Castlevania Dungeon was producing static content about the characters and timelines that I enjoyed and I was just generally a tad obsessed with the Castlevania series. Inspired by the Civilization II's packed-in alien invasion scenario (the one with the silly surfer dude-themed city names), I decided making a Castlevania scenario for Civilization II was both attainable and a good idea. One of my longtime IRC friends, Kevin, was very supportive of me in this venture.

 

I don’t think I have the files to salvage and show off - if I do, there will be some fun pictures here - but here’s what I remember doing:

• I made a reasonably-scoped map of Renaissance Europe.
• In the heart of Transylvania, the city of Castlevania was created, owned by the “Undead” civilization. I never play tested anything using the Undead, but I imagine like the alien invasion it just wouldn’t be the right play experience.
• Around Castlevania, I added some but not all of the towns from Castlevania II like Jova and Veros. I forget whether the civ was called Wallachia or Warakiya or Romania or Central Europe or what.
• I added a few other human civilizations around Europe as well.
• I modified the skill tree to remove all of the modern and futuristic technologies. I added some kind of “undead” technology as a prerequisite for some things that enabled strong undead enemies, allowing the undead to grow throughout the game.
• I also added lots of unique units for the undead, mostly replacing primitive, modern or futuristic units. I remember being very proud of some of my spriting efforts, especially the succubus.

The goal of the game, then, was for humans to survive and/or defeat the undead. They had options to ally, if that helped. There was somewhat of an additional difficulty toggle in that starting close to the city of Castlevania was pretty challenging.

 

Once again, I only had one person aware of my work and interested in it, so I didn’t have much distribution with this, and although it was mostly done I don’t think I ever fully playtested it. I am a bit bad with personal projects in general, often stopping once I establish “it can be done” without really being concerned with “it is done”. Given the lack of audience for this venture, that was probably okay.

I peeked around to see if I could find the files from this project and didn't end up finding anything, which is too bad. Would I try setting this up again? Probably not.

 

So, given that Civilization III was out, why did I choose to do this project for Civilization II? I was quite confident in my ability to make monstrous sprites but I didn’t think there was any chance I could make an animated 3D model like Civ 3 used. Honestly, by Civ 4 the general modding community was so robust that I could probably just find any monsters I need and hammer out a mod in this style fairly quickly and easily. Civilization IV has ended up being my favourite in this series by a lot anyway! Civilization II is probably my second favourite, likely in part due to my treasured memories of screwing around with scenarios and mods to see what I could make happen.