Imperium

(Apologies for English)

Hi guys,

Some of you may recognise me from Celestial Heavens and Heroes Community (same username) as I’m a huge Heroes of Might & Magic fan and have been an active member of those communities for years.

I recently received a email newsletter from the guys working on the HoMM3 inspired game Fanstratics (terrible name lol) thanking a list of HoMM forum communities for their support and I saw all these places I didn’t know about filled with huge Heroes fans like me! So I couldn’t resist signing up! I’m Australian and I know this is not an English forum so hopefully it’s okay for me to still join up and post about my HoMM mod project. :)

As a kid growing up in the 1990s playing endless hours of HoMM and Civilization, I always wanted some sort hybrid game that gave me the beautiful HoMM experience but in the Civ sandbox world. Games like Master of Magic and Age of Wonders 2 sort of granted that wish however nothing truly answered my dream until a few years ago when I discovered a Heroes of Might & Magic 3 mod for Civilization 3 made by a CivFinatics user named Tom2050.

Link:
https://www.celestialheavens.com/forum/6/16914

Screenshot:
https://media.moddb.com/images/members/3/2712/2711371/profile/COMM3_2.jpg

He completely converted Civilization 3's UI, graphics, units, techs, factions etc to be in the Heroes of Might and Magic 3 universe. I've mucked around with a few Civ3 mods in my time and I've never seen so many elements changed so much. He even got HoMM3 unit upgrades in there too lol! Obviously being a Civ game there’s no zoomed in combat but his mod allows for some very fun situations eg being able to colonize/make new cities, farm the lands and expand all over huge worlds effectively carving out your own story. Basically a more sandboxy global HoMM3 haha!

Anyway I was so inspired by the awesomeness of his mod that I wanted to try and make a Heroes of Might & Magic 2 mod for Civilization 2 to compliment it, as while I'm useless at Civ3 modding I'm pretty good with Civ2 modding. I was still hesitant to try though as I knew it would be a big job. However then I hit the jackpot when I found someone by the name of Metropolis had already started my exact HoMM2 for Civ2 idea and had posted about it in a German Civ forum. I tracked him down and we started working together on finishing his vision with a bit of my vision mixed in with it. It's not going to be as amazing as that HoMM3 for Civ3 mod as that thing is friggin amazing lol and we're using an older Civ game but we'll do the best we can haha. We know that it's 20 years too late, no one will probably play it and people will wonder why we're wasting our time but we're having a ton of fun making it so meh, we're doing it anyway haha.

Link:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod

Screenshot:
https://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/44/43973/vlcsnap-2020-01-05-19h54m35s712.png

If the project is of interest to anyone, here are the first 3 dev diaries from the Heroes of Might & Magic 2 Mod for Civilization 2...

In the first dev diary we looked at importing HoMM2 castle/city graphics into Civ2.

HoMM2 Dev Diary 01 - Creating Cities For The Civilization 2 Heroes Of Might & Magic 2 Mod:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod/news/creating-cities

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In this second dev diary we looked at ‘HoMMafying’ all those Civ 2 advisor, city and event screens.

HoMM2 Dev Diary 02 - Creating Nice Backgrounds For The Civ2 Heroes Of Might & Magic 2 Mod:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod/news/creating-backgrounds

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In the third dev diary we looked at changing Civ2’s leader portraits used for diplomacy with HoMM2 heroes and make a bold attempt at replacing Civ2’s original wonder videos.

HoMM2 Dev Diary 03 - Creating Custom Leaders & Wonder Vids For The Civ2 Heroes Of Might & Magic 2 Mod:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod/news/creating-leaders-wonders

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Here's the next 3 Civilization 2 - Heroes of Might & Magic 2 mod dev diaries made over the last few months...

In the fourth dev diary we look at changing Civ2’s throne room with a HoMM2 castle jigsaw while completely replacing the title screen plus intro, diplomacy herald and wonder videos with cool HoMM2 content.

HoMM2 Dev Diary 04 – New Throne Room, Intro, Dip & Wonder Videos For The Civ2 Heroes Of Might & Magic 2 Mod:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod/news/new-throne-room-intro-dip-wonder-vids

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In the fifth dev diary we look at adding new HoMM2 themed victory and death sequences plus custom city screen backgrounds.

HoMM2 Dev Diary 05 – Creating Victory/Death & City Backgrounds For The Civ2 Heroes Of Might & Magic 2 Mod:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod/news/creating-victory-death-city-backgrounds

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In the sixth dev diary we answer fan demands to show units while also showing off all city buildings and some small touch-ups to the city sky view.

HoMM2 Dev Diary 06 – Heroes, Units & City Buildings In The Civ2 Heroes Of Might & Magic 2 Mod:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod/news/heroes-units-city-buildings

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Hey guys,

Time for another update.. a way overdue one! Firstly I must be honest and say that not a huge amount of work has been done on this project since my last post as I've been busy working on my Command & Conquer and Red Alert 2 Civ2 scenarios getting them towards a near release position. However MetroPolis & I did a bit more work on this project such as finalising the sounds for all the units (and a few other things ;) ), making some more unit special ability balance adjustments, and I also finished work on testing technologies (making sure you can research from start to finish with no glitches) and giving them all custom graphics.

Speaking of technologies that's something we haven't really talked about much so far, so lets do it now. MetroPolis has painstakingly designed an awesome custom tech tree for this mod where all units, buildings and magical range weapons are obtained via 8 schools of research (mostly inspired by HoMM2 hero secondary skills) with 7 levels in each school. Default Civ2 only has 5 schools however thankfully they have 4 levels with different icons which meant I had access to more than 5 slots allowing me to make the required 8 icons thankfully.
https://forums.civfanatics.com/attachments/upload_2020-6-26_20-58-32-png.581308/

So here’s the final product! Some icons are from the spell tree while other ones are custom ones I made where I cut a hero skill icon out from it's blue marble background and pasted it over a spell scroll background to match the other spell icons. Also the military one is actually a combination of 3 different HoMM2 spell icons!
https://forums.civfanatics.com/attachments/techschools2-png.581309/

So where are things at? Well all that's left to do now is creating a map & decorating it, final testing, writing up documentation, and then a tour video. Then it shall be released. But how long you ask..?

Hmm well.. I hope I don't regret this as I suck at meeting deadlines and I don’t wanna be one of the endless people making false promises on this forum about their projects lol, but I believe now I'm at a stage with all my projects that I can say that this project will hopefully be finished and released within the next 3 months. If I fail to meet this deadline you can all kick my ass lol.

Oh and I've had a few people ask me about our planned Civ HoMM2 map since Civ maps are so different (& less interactive) compared to HoMMs. Well the plan is to try to make it as interactive as possible using a few tricks. Eg monsters (assigned to Civ barb faction) fortified in various places and on top of nice things (I believe barb units fortified in forts don't wander around the map as I've seen the trick used in other Civ scenarios so I intend to user that). Metro has also setup some cool event driven unit spawning buildings on the map too (Dragon city baby!). Plus if players don't like my map and want to use this just as a mod for their own random Civ2 maps then metros spawners will still appear which is cool (I'll write a guide to help people get all the events working on their maps).

Well so much for finishing in 3 months haha. Sorry this is taking so long guys. As mentioned in my previous post I spent quite a bit of time working on my other Command & Conquer and Red Alert 2 scenarios for Sid Meier's Civilization 2 resulting in things looking pretty good with them now.

I then took a bit of a break from all my Civilization 2 modding projects to work on preserving other peoples Civ2 scenarios & mods across multiple sites (CivFanatics, ModDB & Internet Archive) as it became pretty apparent that so much great work had been lost over the last 20+ years and someone needed to do something to stop the rot. It's taken me most of 2021 but I've rescued collections containing thousands of old scenarios so hopefully most of what was lost is safe now! There's still plenty more out there I'm trying to find and rescue though.

Because it was recently the 30th anniversary celebration of Sid Meier's Civilization 1 I also took some time to release my Civilization 1 mods to the world along with some videos that show people how they can play Civ1 in HD with mods & scenarios on modern machines using a VM. These Civ1 videos kick off a huge video series I've been working on for years that will show fans how they can play all the classic Civ1-2-3etc/Col/MoM/CtP/AlphaC games in HD with some of the best mods and scenarios out there.

I didn't create dev diaries for these mods as they're pretty simple compared to the Civ2 HoMM2 posts in this thread but I have done some info & release articles on ModDB. I very much look forward to the day this year I do my final release post in this thread haha.

Civilization 1 For Windows - Soundtrack Overhaul Mod Release!
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civwin-complete-soundtrack-overhaul-mod/news/civilization-1-for-windows-complete-soundtrack-overhaul-mod-release

Civilization 1 – Play As Barbarians Scenario release!
https://www.moddb.com/mods/attilas-conquest-1-play-as-barbarians-scenario/news/civ1-play-as-barbarians-scenario-release

Now that my Civ1 work is done, my Civ2 preservation work almost finished, and my Civ2 videos are almost ready for release I can finally come back to finishing and releasing my Civ2 mods in the next few months (I won't put a number/date on that again though for obvious reasons haha). :)

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Well after so long since the last project update I guess it's time to finally post a new one!

In this new much delayed seventh dev diary we take on the 3 final frontiers of Civ2 editing and change the diplomacy screen background, spaceship construction sequence, and grand council video advisors with cool HoMM2 content. In the case of the council I had to create animating versions of HoMM2 hero portraits!

Dev Diary 07 - New Diplomacy, Dragon Launch & Animating High Council For The Civ2 Heroes Of Might & Magic 2 Mod:
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod/news/diplomacy-dragon-launch-high-council

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As for the portraits' animations: that's some impressive work (on top of a lot of truly remarkable effort put into the mod as a whole!), and it looks great. But have you considered using character portraits from M&M6? There'd be at least two advantages to such a move: these are in-universe so the association is there, and they have most necessary animations, which probably could have saved you a bit of time. Or did you consider them too far removed from the Heroes 2 artstyle to be eligible for use in the project?

Side note: I have never played Civ2 myself (only having experience with the fifth installment of the series... and tried out Civ1 for a short while not long ago) but as someone who has played Heroes II and enjoyed it a lot, I really admire your work nonetheless. It looks fantastic! And true to the source material :)

Ah, and last but not least, a little nitpick — the last time I checked, Dimitri was a Knight, not a Barbarian (and Crodo was a Warlock rather than a Wizard, though that makes somewhat less of a difference) :)

Hayven

As for the portraits' animations: that's some impressive work (on top of a lot of truly remarkable effort put into the mod as a whole!), and it looks great. But have you considered using character portraits from M&M6? There'd be at least two advantages to such a move: these are in-universe so the association is there, and they have most necessary animations, which probably could have saved you a bit of time. Or did you consider them too far removed from the Heroes 2 artstyle to be eligible for use in the project?

Side note: I have never played Civ2 myself (only having experience with the fifth installment of the series... and tried out Civ1 for a short while not long ago) but as someone who has played Heroes II and enjoyed it a lot, I really admire your work nonetheless. It looks fantastic! And true to the source material :)

Ah, and last but not least, a little nitpick — the last time I checked, Dimitri was a Knight, not a Barbarian (and Crodo was a Warlock rather than a Wizard, though that makes somewhat less of a difference) :)

Thank you! :)

I'm a big fan of M&M6 but I haven't played it in many years let alone have all of its extracted assets sitting around ready for use so it never crossed my mind. And yes the mod is based on HoMM2 so I'm trying to base everything off that where I can. Too late now anyway as the work is already done haha.

Opps I thought I double checked their original hero types/factions before writing the post but apparently I did not and managed to remember wrong sorry lol!

Anyway a new eighth dev diary is finally here, this time we add custom font colours into Civ2 and completely overhaul all the ugly old GUI backgrounds.

Dev Diary 08 - New Font Colours & Better Backgrounds For The Civ2 Heroes Of Might & Magic 2 Mod
https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod/news/font-colours-better-backgrounds

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Dev Diary 09 - New Azure Dragon, Neutral City & H1 Addon For The Civ2 Heroes Of Might & Magic 2 Mod:

In this ninth dev diary we replace Matt's dragon with a mighty HoMM3 Azure dragon, add a 7th neutral faction city, and do some preliminary work on a future HoMM1 addon.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod/news/azure-dragon-neutral-city-h1-addon

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Final Dev Diary 10 - World Map, Factions & Extra Graphics For The Civ2 Heroes Of Might & Magic 2 Mod

In this final tenth dev diary before release we finish up by showing some of the scenario world map, the factions, and some special alternative graphic sets.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/civilization-2-heroes-of-might-and-magic-2-mod/news/world-map-factions-extra-graphics
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