Heroes of Might & Magic II - Civ2 Szenario

[Blake00]

Well after many weeks of working on the Civ2 episode of my big Civ video series and feeding in all the best scenarios and mods I've found or rescued over the last couple of years it's finally in a near finished position ready to have the final stuff inserted about my own scenarios...



So of course for that I actually need to friggin actually finish my scenarios lol.. so yes the time has finally come that I'm back working on my scenario projects and intend to get them all finished and released over the coming months if all goes well! The first one I want to finish is the biggest of them all, this Heroes of Might & Magic 2 scenario that MetroPolis and I started all the way back in 2019! One of the advantages of the 3 year delay is that I've learned a lot more about Civ2 modding allowing me to do some of the crazy stuff I posted in the previous dev diary and also look at better ways of redoing some of our old stuff. Starting with GUI and all the backgrounds! All of the old backgrounds I did were painstakingly edited down in quality to fit in the tiny original Civ2 dll files using GifX to keep things compatible with pre-MGE versions of Civ2. However next to no one plays those old versions anymore and some of our recent additions have broken support for them anyway. Civ2 MGE supports much bigger files in it's DLLs so we can do a way better job! Now don't get me wrong, I put a huge amount of work into carefully downsizing and colour reducing all those original background images but let's be honest, they didn't look good, so I've thought for years about redoing them. I also recently discovered how to do custom font colours in Civ2 which requires new colour palettes applied to all backgrounds so if I've gotta edit all the files anyway I may as well redo them!

To get things started I applied new custom font colours giving the primary and secondary headings a bright slightly golden yellow (similar to many HoMM2 GUI titles) ensuring they don't get as lost in our leafy marble HoMM2 GUI as much as the old grey ones did, I was going to make the regular info text bright too but that had some unwanted side effects, so I instead made it darker.
Secondly thanks to these new custom font colours, I was able to finally import the true HoMM2 brown GUI background (albeit a bit lighter still). For those who may wish to stick with the old cream one I've left it in a safe unused spot in the Icons file though.
Thirdly I decided to take on the city backgrounds as while they didn't suffer the dll limitation issues I still used rather simple conversion techniques resulting a huge amounts of colour and detail loss. So all city backgrounds have been redone too!

To demonstrate all these changes below is an old marketing shot I made up that shows some of the map, the GUI, a custom wonder video, the title and the city screen. You can see the old cream GUI window background, our headings getting lost in the marble leaves, and the lack of colour in the city background.

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And here's a brand new shot where you can see the true brown HoMM2 GUI window background, bright coloured headings for the city and map windows, and the city background has much more colour in it. As a fun side effect the custom yellow font colour has also changed the city building list and the flashing end of turn message!

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Next I started looking at Civ2's Intro.dll file to get things looking better in the main menu/title screen. Our original background was not good as the default Civ2 background lady statue with the scales etc was all brown making the file size so small forcing me to spend hours gradually taking so much detail and colour variety out of our custom background to fit in the dll that it just looked terrible! Plus its lack of quality was made even more obvious by the fact that Metropolis had crafted a beautiful custom intro video using this castle on the lake sequence and the transition between the two was quite jarring due to the huge quality difference!

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I also didn't know until I discovered Matt Dempsey's Game of Thrones scenario that you could put giant images on the Civ2 title screen and they would still nicely stay centered even if you're viewing resolution is smaller than the picture. So knowing that I not only created a better version of the HoMM2 castle title image (that looks similar to how it looks in Metro's intro video) but I also mounted it on a giant 1080P background image using the HoMM2 addon title screen image of the dark moody sunset battlefield. Naturally I've also gone through all the extra window image backgrounds that appear as you start a new game and redone them in much higher quality so you'll also notice the cobblestone street village image on the top left is also much better too! And of course the custom fonts and new GUI background are in play here now too!

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I then commenced upgrading all the advisor background images now that I'm free of the GifX pre-MGE leash on Civ2 dll image sizes. Previously we used fading and blurring whereas this time I simply used darkening on all images just enough to make the text in front of them still readable (yes I know I probably should have gone even darker but they're sooooo pretty lol).

As you can see things are looking much nicer now!

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I also decided that since we're already using HoMM2 Castle screen pictures for our city background images that we didn't really need to continue using them again in all those advisor backgrounds so I decided to boot up Heroes of Might & Magic 2 and take brand new screenshots of it's good old cutscenes to make new background images for many of the advisor screens! I also noticed that we never replaced the old Civ2 credits screen either so I changed the background and text for that too.

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I also found where Civ2 keeps that little miniature icon version of its main menu title image (lady with the scales) that appears on the start a new game and quitting windows. It's very small so I couldn't think of anything good from HoMM to put there, so for now I just stuck a Black Dragon & Crusader from our units file in there squaring off heh.



And lastly I successfully converted all the city sky view screen image files in the CV.dll file to support the custom fonts palette which stopped it cancelling out the custom fonts everywhere else whenever you looked at your cities. The city sky view itself doesn't look any different to what you've seen us post before though other than the city name being golden yellow and more obvious now.



That's it with the overhaul for now.. next I'm thinking about replacing Matt Dempsey's custom dragon breeding screen that we used to replace the Civ2 spaceship launch sequence in my previous post. His dragon is cool but it's not from HoMM and it needs to be a special dragon different from the regular dragons you can build as units in the game so I'm cooking up something fun and interesting I'll show you guys next time!

After that all that will be left to do is designing a cool map for the scenario, test playing it and then we can finally release this thing!

[Blake00]

Well it's time to talk about that Dragon breeding spaceship construction replacer I mentioned last time!

While I discovered through testing that I did not need to convert the palette for the SS.dll space ship images to work with the new custom font colours (that I showed you guys in the previous post), playing around with Matt Dempsey's Game of Thrones Civ2 Mod Dragon breeding spaceship replacement that I used in our mod still got me thinking about things. In that while yes I've credited him in our readme and yes many Civ scenarios contain elements & graphics from what has come before it still kind of annoyed me that I couldn't get his actual permission (as he's disappeared) resulting in this big chunk of the mod that Metro & I had not made ourselves other than changing the background image. Also in a game where there are buildable black dragon units you can take into combat it seemed kind of weird that you could just build this 'other' black dragon and magically win the game lol. So I started thinking about how I could make it my own plus also make it more HoMM lore friendly, and then the idea came. HoMM2 doesn't have any super dragons but in HoMM3 there is the mighty Azure Dragon, a huge blue super dragon that is far more powerful than any other dragon and that even just a mere handful of them can demolish entire armies of other units in the game. So I went hunting and found some pictures of them from HoMM3 to insert over the top of Matt's GoT black dragon. When I started testing my replacements I very quickly started coming up with more ideas (& more work lol) to improve things further. For example Matt's dragon only uses 5 frames (an egg, a tiny dragon, a small size dragon, a large dragon, & a full size dragon) repeated across the 24 growing SS Structural spaceship frames, and due to his dragon's wings being fully outstretched he also didn't really use the maximum area size available resulting in the his dragon looking a bit small even at full size.

Matt's black dragon with our HoMM background



So I decided to make all 24 frames look different despite only having a few source frames myself! I kept Matt's egg and made it slowly increase in size for the first 6 frames, then I created a egg hatching frame with broken pieces and a little blue head popping out, then I created 5 frames using a slowly growing version of the Azure dragon from the HoMM3 battle screen (the original image is small so it gives the dragon a nice adolescent hasn't taken flight yet look), and then to finish off I created 12 frames using a slowly growing version of a much bigger & cooler picture of a flying roaring Azure dragon which I think was from a HoMM3 addon or chronicles promotional shot. Sadly there is a limited amount of blue colours in the Civ2 Space Ship palette & I couldn't be bothered building a new palette for it so it's a bit faded compared to the HoMM3 original but it's still a pretty nice blue! I also worked out the maximum pixel area size available that you can use for each stage and put a pink border around it (that's indivisible in-game) should Civ2 modders wish to look at the images in dll file and use them as a template for their own work. Matt had also broken the OK and Launch buttons by putting some things out of order so I fixed them too.

Blake's new Azure dragon growing


I decided to keep the same background image I'd used with Matt's dragon which is a HoMM2 campaign shot where evil Archibald had captured a dragon king. However like with the previously posted background changes above I've switched it from the old faded look to a darker background instead and I also changed the green dragon king into a blue one! Here's some in-game shots of the egg hatching and the final fully grown Azure dragon!



I've also successfully reintroduced the SS space ship parts back into the tech tree & city build list, renamed them to dragon ones, and given them custom icons. I've also replaced the spaceship construction sound with a dragon roaring heh.



Next it was time to create the Azure Dragon launch and victory video sequences ensuring that now every single video in Civ2 (there's a lot lol) has been fully replaced!

These dragon videos ended up being quite the challenge to make as...

• Some of the source HoMM2 videos Metro & I used in 2019 that we obtained from the internet had nasty glitches in the parts I needed so I had to boot up HoMM2 in dosbox and record some fresh new videos myself (thankfully I still had my old savegames from the 90s!).
• For these HoMM2 recordings I was unable to turn off the campaign video commentary voice track without turning off the video sound effects too (dragons flying & roaring etc) so I was forced to redo all sound effects myself. So I used in-game battle screen dragon flying and roaring sounds which worked out okay albeit a bit repetitive, so I've done my best to cover that with cool HoMM2 music!
• Then I had the problem of trying to make the green dragons in all the videos blue to match the Azure super dragon theme which I really struggled to sort out. However eventually I found some answers on the Shotcut video editor help forums where a girl was asking how to make her yellow dress red without ruining the surrounding stuff in the video. People's answers showed me some tricks with using multiple layers of the same video combined with cropping and chroma key colour hue replacement tricks. Which as you can see below successfully turned the green dragon blue! Although not quite perfectly, as the really light green bits on the wings wouldn't go blue and if I tried to put a lighter green into the chroma key it started messing up all the surrounding brown wall stuff, so that's about as good as it gets using this software.
• And lastly I had to go find all the Alpha Centauri spaceship text and change it to talk about your Azure Dragons destroying all who oppose them. I didn't think it was possible to change that but I recently noticed the old Atlantis scenario managed to do it for it's submarine spaceship replacement and sure enough all the text can be found in Game.txt.

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Lastly I also worked on adding a 7th faction city graphic into the cities file. Metro & I talked about doing this years ago but because the 7th city graphic slot is not usable in Civ2 MGE we didn't bother. However there's a chance that FoxAhead may grant my Civ2UIA wish list request to allow the use of it in MGE in the future, and if not then it's not a waste of time as I'll be able to use it in the Civ2 Test of Time conversion later as ToT allows the use of that city graphic slot! Heroes of Might & Magic 2 only has 6 factions however Sir Albe and the awesome guys behind the amazing HoMM2 style Succession Wars mod for HoMM3 (which I've been playing quite a bit of lately) have kindly given me permission to use their custom graphics for their special addon 7th desert Dervish race that uses many of HoMM2's existing neutral units similar to what we've already done in our mod so it was a perfect fit! The Dervish castle has been in their mod for years but their town graphic is not even released yet and will be in their next version (which is hopefully coming soon) so it was super kind of them to give me an early copy of it for use! They've also created a cool 8th swamp Witch faction (similar to HoMM3's swamp faction but with HoMM2 style graphics!) that I'd love to possibly use in the future ToT conversion too (maybe in the 8th CivBarb slot or as another creature spawner map object similar to the ones Metro has already created) so just for fun I converted that too while I was 'in the zone', however they've not granted permission to use that at this stage so this is just an experiment and it won't be used in our mod (and even if permission is given we're aaaaallll out of unit slots in Civ2 MGE lol so it would have to be the Civ2 ToT version later).

I converted all the original HoMM2 towns and castles into our mod waaaaaay back in 2019 so I was super rusty and it took many revisions before I was happy with the new conversions as the original castle graphics are more than 2x wider and 3x taller than a Civ2 city slot and of course don't fit in the useable diamond shape either so a lot of work was required to get them done and to ensure they were in a similar style as my 2019 cities but I think the result has turned out pretty good!



Of course after putting in all that work to get 'back in the zone' with city conversions I started thinking about taking advantage of the situation and doing some more conversions. Years ago I talked with Metro about doing a special Heroes of Might & Magic 1 addon for our HoMM2 mod that converts most of the graphics to HoMM1 style. We sort of laughed it off as something I'll probably never get to lol, and maybe I still won't! However the greatest hurdle with that addon mod would be having to sit there converting all the HoMM1 castles and towns over so I figured why not give it a shot while I'm in the zone otherwise it would have probably never happened. Sure enough I kinda flew through it and got them all done within a day! HoMM1 castles are thankfully not quite as tall as HoMM2 ones which made the downsizing a bit easier, although their front gates are off to the right hand side which was not so easy due to the Civ2 diamond issue but I was able to move them over a bit! There was only 4 factions in HoMM1 so that also made the job quicker too haha! Don't worry though guys, I'm probably not going to do any more work on the addon until after the main mod is released so no more time will be wasted.



So that's pretty much it for graphics now, everything I planned to do (and more lol) is done! All that's left now is looking at the unit balancing again (as I'm not happy with some of my 2020 special ability choices), then design a cool map for the scenario and then play a test game while writing up the documentation. These final things are going to take while so the updates will slow down a bit again. However once these final jobs are done, this whole thing will be finished and ready for public release finally after all these years!
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[Blake00]

Since my last post I've been busy building and testing a rather fun scenario map for the HoMM2 mod! I've hit a few bugs to sort out, and I've been finding lots more text in the game files needing replacing, but overall things are going well and I'm currently building my Azure super dragon to win the game! So over the weeks to come I'll be writing up the documentation, making a tour video & some other promotional stuff, and cleaning all the WIP junk out of the scenario folder and packaging it for release!

In the meantime I thought I'd post some more pics to show people some of the map and the faction staring locations I made and have been polishing and balancing out since. All land masses are connected by land bridges and there are many dangers lurking in the badlands between each factions homeland ensuring they have 'some' protection from each other to begin with. You'll notice that we've pretty much used all the tricks in the book to heavily pack decoration into every area making it feel more like a HoMM map, and that each faction starts in a different looking area that suits their theme (ie often the kinds of lands they'd occupy in original HoMM maps). Metro & I originally talked about making every single terrain type in the game produce the same amount of resources so that we could create truly different lands for each faction much like how they are in the HoMM games. However I noticed he never got around to doing it years ago, and while I thought about recently doing it myself I realised that I'd be taking away one of the big gameplay strategic parts of the Civ experience which is to find the perfect spots for your cities and give each city a sense of specialness and individuality, whereas if everything is worth the same then all that almost means nothing. Also I've noticed in some Civ2 MGE scenarios I've played over the years that the AI seems to beeline it straight for grassland slot areas even when there's better custom terrain using other slots so I guess grassland slot hunting is hardcoded into the AI behaviour or something. So I decided for better or worse to try and have a bit of both words (which knowing my luck will probably manage to annoy both the Civ fans & the HoMM fans at the same time lol) and give every factions starting location a decent amount of grassland slots inbetween their factions usual associated terrain and make most of these other terrains similar in resource yield (especially after they've been irrigated).

So lets start with the good guys first!

The Sorceress faction occupy fertile grasslands filled with lakes, rivers and dense magical forests much like in HoMM. The forests will give them a production advantage over other factions but they will eventually inhibit growth as they must be cleared to make more farmland which can take time. The Sorceresses can field multiple flying* units giving them the ability to quickly expand and explore. If they can survive long enough to obtain their extra fast top tier Phoenixes, they may become unstoppable.



Next comes the Knight faction who in HoMM usually occupy similar terrain to the Sorceress, so to make them different in Civ2 I gave them a lot of dirt/plains terrain. Which gives their lands a look of a similar fertile paradise to the Sorcerers but clearly the those naughty humans have been clearing lots of the forests. As in HoMM the Knight's can grow quickly and some of their units are cheaper but they lack some of the special powers and abilities that the other races get (eg flying* creatures). Strong growth and overwhelming numbers of their strongest units like the Crusader will be key to their success.



Lastly comes the Wizard faction who in HoMM2 occupied dry cracked terrain so naturally they do so in our mod too. Wizards players will need to capitalise on the fertile lands around the rivers until they can irrigate the cracked lands. They have access to flying* units and some very powerful units like the mighty titan which has more hitpoints & firepower than most other top tier units. In my test game they were the dominant AI faction.



Next up below I'll do the bad guys and neutrals!

But speaking of the neutrals, this little moment made me laugh, heh my enemies diplomats have been hypnotized! We can thank MetroPolis for that idea.



Now let's get to the bad guys!

Starting with the powerful Warlock faction, who just like in HoMM2 favour the dark volcanic wastelands. These starting lands give them a harder start than the other factions, so they will need to rely on the fertile river lands while cultivating the volcanic lands. Where the Warlock's really excel is in powerful flying* units, so if they can survive their rough start and establish a good economy then they will be able to quickly expand and overwhelm their neighbours. If they survive long enough to reach the deadliest unit in the game, their mighty Black dragon, the world will be theirs! They also start quite near the legendary Dragon City which if conquered offers great rewards.



Next comes the Barbarian faction, who normally occupied desert, cracked and dirt/plains areas of HoMM2 however since those terrain types are used by other factions and the Barbarian castle screen has more of a cold tundra look I've given them lands that are a mix of cold snow, damp swamp, dirt/plains and grasslands. Similar to the Knights the Barbarians lack flying* units and special abilities, however their lands are quite fertile and their units are cheap, so quick growth and a strong economy will allow them to field large numbers of their strongest units like the Cyclops.



Then comes the last of the original 6 factions, the evil Necromancer faction. The Necromancer's live in the dark swamp regions where many an unfortunate soul has wandered into and never returned. While their castle screen looks more volcanic I felt they'd better suit the swamps on the map due to it's dead trees and graveyards! The Necromancer's starting units are not the strongest however it's lands are quite large so if they can survive long enough to get to their multiple high tier flying* units like the Bone Dragon then they will become a force to be reckoned with.



Lastly comes our special bonus 7th Civ, the Neutrals faction. The Neutrals are an alliance of previously unaligned creatures that the other expanding factions have pushed out of their homelands into the hostile desert regions. While seemingly an odd match-up of creatures they are united in their cause of pushing back against the other factions and reclaiming their homes. The neutrals are in a rather central location on the map meaning they're surrounded by other factions which can make them tough to play as. However if you survive off the fertile rivers & oasis's while you work the lands into something better and start to expand out into the even wilder savage desert lands to the south, then you can build up a large empire that can hold it's ground until you gain access to their deadly flying* top tier Genie unit!
As previously posted, this special 7th bonus faction is heavily inspired by the desert Dervish faction in the utterly brilliant Succession Wars mod for Heroes of Might & Magic 3 that converts HoMM3 into a HoMM2 like experience but also adds cool new factions containing many of the neutral creatures from HoMM2, all with a HoMM2 art style. The Neutrals Anglo Saxon style hero comes from the excellent Palm Kingdoms 2 PC & Mobile game that is very HoMM2 like! Many thanks to both the SW (Dervish castle & village map graphics as well as their gorgeous desert Dervish castle screen graphics for the city window background) and PK2 teams (custom Heroes) for allowing us use of their graphics!

Note: As previously mentioned sadly Civ2 MGE does not allow access to the 7th city castle map graphic slot so they will not appear like this in-game (this will be fixed in a later Test of Time version) unless you manually swap the Barbarian & Neutrals art slots around in the cities graphics file.


(* flying creatures in this mod do not use the Civ2 flight mechanic which is reserved for magic spells. Instead flying units have increased movement and treat all squares as roads special ability.)

And now it's time for the final thing I wanted to show you guys. Back in the early days when MetroPolis and I were making this HoMM2 mod together we pretty much had the same ideas for nearly everything, which is why we worked so well together and were able to do so many crazy things to Civ2 fueled by our shared dream of a true total conversion experience. However there were a couple of small areas where we did have different ideas...

Irrigation & farmland:
As a kid playing HoMM I always wanted to work the lands and make farms around the castles so I was eager go in a more 'Civilization like' direction for our mod and have irrigation & farmland around our cities with some HoMM2 cottages, houses & wells added in to still keep the HoMM feel. MetroPolis wanted more of a traditional HoMM look on the map with just some wells and houses giving things a cleaner and less cluttered look.

Unit/creature borders:
I wanted to keep the HoMM2 units as they were and not change them in any way, whereas MetroPolis felt they were getting a bit lost in the map and he always quite liked the bright glowing yellow borders on selected units during the HoMM2 tactical battle screen and decided to replicate that affect on our units painstakingly drawing borders around all of them.

Originally MetroPolis was most gracious and was happy to go in my direction resulting in his ideas almost being lost and forgotten about. However I didn't forget and I recently decided to go digging through our giant CivFanatics PM convo history (100s of messages over 40 pages lol) and I found his old alternative files. Due to the huge amount of changes we'd made over the years since Metro's old files were no longer compatible at all with the current mod, however I decided out of respect for my old co-creator and because I can see (as I'm sure others will) the benefits of his less cluttered map graphics that I would convert his alternative assets over to the latest version of our mod and include them in the release! Ironically there were quite a number of new units we'd added since his old file, so I had to sit there drawing yellow borders around all of them too lol! While my ones remain the defaults these alternative files will sit in a ALT_FILES folder I'm including in the mod where players can also find all the different city background alternatives depending on which faction they choose. Some people may even want to mix and match (eg my units and his farms or visversa) which they are welcome to do! This is pretty much the last update I've got for you guys before release as there isn't much left to do on the mod now, I'm just finishing up documentation and some of the marketing stuff (eg videos and website). Shouldn't be too long now!

Comparison shots, Left = Blake's defaults, Right = Metro's alternatives:

[v33l3dn3M]

I'm not a Civ 2 player (got started with Civ 4 / Heroes 3 respectively), but this is really impressive.
Warlock is Volcanic and not Swamp? (I would have expected Undead on Plains)

[Blake00]

I'm not a Civ 2 player (got started with Civ 4 / Heroes 3 respectively), but this is really impressive.
Warlock is Volcanic and not Swamp? (I would have expected Undead on Plains)

Thank you very much sir! It is very close to release now!

Yes I'm sure some will not be happy with some of my faction terrain choices. However I needed to match up 7 different factions to a limited amount of terrain in Civ2 and I kept hitting design problems forcing me to make hard decisions.

I put the Sorcerers in the grasslands so I needed to put Knights somewhere else and they often appeared in dirt/plains areas in Heroes 1&2 and their Heroes 2 castle screen was rather plains looking so I put them there. Bonus Dervish race took the deserts as that matched their theme, and Wizards took the cracked as that matched their Heroes 2 theme. Barbarians were often desert in Heroes1&2 but that was taken and their homeland did contain some snow in Heroes 1 so I kinda gave them a weird cold snow, dirt and tundra area. That just left me with Volcanic and Swamps remaining with Warlock and Undead needing homes on them.

Originally I was going to put Warlock in Swamp and Undead in Volcanic since that's how their castle screens look. However while making the swamp terrain for Civ2 I also needed decorations for the 2 special resource slots and there wasn't much swampy stuff in Heroes 2 I could use other than some rotting trees and graveyards. Then when I saw the swampy area in my scenario filled with graveyards and evil rotting trees I just knew I had to put Undead there. Also despite the castle screen being swampy Warlock castles often appeared in volcanic areas on maps in early Heroes games eg in Heroes 1 the homeland of the Warlocks was volcanic and in Heroes 2 Archibalds final home castle was in volcanic terrain too. So that's how I justified the dodgy swap, but yeah.. I'm sure some will hate it haha.