As part of my ongoing scenario hunt for cool Civilization scenarios and mods relating to some of my favourite fantasy/scifi franchises I've been finding and testing all sorts of cool stuff lately.. things probably not seen for like 20 years in some cases haha.

One of the more interesting finds was a Civ1 mod for Civ2! Now I've seen everything lol.

John Valdez's Civilization 1 Graphics Modpack (which can be found 2/3 down on the CivFinatics Modpacks page) is a pretty cool & fun idea! Although the OCD and modder part of me is finding all sorts of flaws in his work so I'm tempted to have a play around with this and make it better. Cause you know it's not like I don't have enough Civ2 mod projects to finish up already! 

A lot of his unit and city shield/size boxes are badly located and chopped off, even the city square itself is misshaped and misaligned resulting in clipping. There's also weird mix of high res assets where he sort of upscaled/redrew something from Civ1 and simple blown up (sometimes not evenly resulting in a stretched look) low res Civ1 assets resulting in some areas looking blocky and others not. Upscaling all assets is too much work and wouldn't look as much like classic Civ1 anymore, but maybe making the high res stuff blockier would make it all match up better. His forests and jungles look weird too with lots of white stuff in them (I think it's because he accidentally used the transparent green your not supposed to use). I don't like the water either haha.. jeez I sound like I'm sh*tting all over John which I'm not, as I have HUGE respect for his talent. His name is all over the history of all the Civ sites due to his incredible total conversion mods, so friggin many of them too. So maybe this was one of his earlier projects before he became the guru everyone knew him to be, and I can see from his readme that he had a lot of troubles and nightmares with the conversion (eg palette differences and a dead copy of Civ1). However there's so much good stuff here, eg I LOVE his city screen background, I love how he's put in all the old resource icons and building pics, and the slightly retro GUI changes. It just needs some polishing which perhaps I'll have a go at (as it would be good practice for my Master of Magic ToT scenario remaster retro graphics 2D to 2.5D conversion plans). Also John even did some custom DLLs that presumably make Civ2 look even more like Civ1 however sadly they're not MGE compatible so maybe I can transfer his work over into MGE's DLLs.

We, the Silicoids, kinda like it! 


   

Heya Great Program,love it

my problem i have been unable to correct is i edited a hero and thi si what it shows when i open the spell book,i tried all settings in magic.exe/wizard.exe and all available settings save file(with this editor)

running mom community patch from gog

any suggestions?

An extremely annoying, and seemingly increasingly prevalent, verbal tic: ending nearly every sentence with "right?"

"Civ is a 4x game, right? And one of those Xs stands for exploration, right? So exploring the map is an important part of the game, right?"

This habit manages to combine the unpleasant low self esteem of the rising intonation that makes every sentence sound like a question (Hi? I'm Becca? Welcome to our restaurant? I'll be your server?) with the smarmy manipulation of a bad used car salesman or ambulance chasing lawyer who is trying to force you to agree with him.

Please visit https://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtop...8&t=104480 to participate!
Thank you for your support!

Due to personal reasons I will no longer be able to play any more civ4-games. Therefore I need someone to replace me in PB58. My position is middle of the pack, I'm in war with another player. I had hoped to end this war before I need someone to take over but I can no longer put my personal health and well-being behind the game. 

The position I'm in is definitely winnable and certainly enjoyable, though the game is far from a foregone conclusion and in fact there are many possible avenues to take. The other players are Jowy, SD, Ruff, AT and Tarkeel. 

If anyone want to take over so that game does not have to die, please let me know via PM or in my thread. I'll send the password and give an overview of important points and what the current goals have been (though there is no need to follow them at all of course).

Because I got this request a few times by now, I'm opening up this thread. If you want to help translate the mod into other language then you can find all the current translations here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...sp=sharing

Just give me a short post, when you updated something.

Some may ask why not put everything through google translate. The problem is that civ4 has very specific terminology in different languages, which google can't know.

Loving Caster of Magic, and please don't get me wrong with this post - it is overall much better.

However I cannot avoid mentioning these real issues with CoM in my opinion. I have played it repeatedly on several difficulties, realms, combos, races, everything. I hope these things can be considered for CoM II (which I have never played).


These are causing me to burn out on CoM
1. The difficulty is too high. I wouldn't care except for #2 below.
2. You have tied attributes of the game to difficulty, such as Myrran choosing, and I'm not sure what else. This pressures me to play on "Fair" or higher, because I feel like I want to get the experience you envisioned for this game. The problem is even "Fair" is actually too difficult to enjoy. I get the feeling no one developing this is actually sitting there playing entire games anymore, because honestly this is extremely frustrating to play. It's just wave after wave of monsters, with AI magically knowing every single empty spot to settle. Alliance is broken and you are totally destroyed by them in 2 turns. Endless corruption and volcanoes. It just seems like no matter what you do, the AI has figured out how to counter you and does so. But not in a difficult, challenging way - instead, it's in a very annoying, frustrating way. Non-hostile wizards kill all your units again and again and again, take your nodes, conquer you completely. Then when they take a city suddenly they "hate" you. Never have I seen so many "reduced to ruins" or "has been completely destroyed" messages. It's actually not fun to play. It reminds me of the feeling of "Impossible" on older patches. Another reason I keep trying "Fair" is because #3 below.
3. When I play Normal, I get almost no rewards from conquering even the entirety of both planes. At most I may get one or 2 spell books or so. Because I can only occasionally managed to win on Fair, I no longer have a way to play this game and feel like I've maxed out my spell books and retorts. This was one of the best things about MoM and now it's simply gone for me. I miss it. So now I can play an extremely frustrating difficulty in which the AI simply covers the entire map with units and conquers everything, and hope to squeak out a win, or I can play Normal and feel like my fun potential is being capped.
4. I know I mentioned this elsewhere but honestly I would rather just remove all wizard conversations entirely then have to go through another
"please sign a wizard pact! hey you have some unit near me! hey you have some unit near me! hey you have some unit near me! I'm angry forget this wizard pact! please sign a wizard pact!" with multiple wizards over and over again. I actually miss when all wizards couldn't contact me. Honestly with them constantly trying to offer me "Summon Hero" for my "Armageddon" or whatever, and how they will just suddenly go from Alliance to all out war, I don't really care what they say anyway. Perhaps an option: "Ignore all wizards." Also I believe nearly all times I've managed to win on Fair were those times I took on this strategy: immediately attack all wizards with everything you have. Just ignore all diplomacy and kill everything you can asap.
5. Making AI select Myrran when I do means that there is never any strategic advantage to doing so, essentially. While this may be the direction you continue to go, seems like it should just be a choice like flag color at this point, rather than a retort. It's not an advantage, just a change of terrain and races essentially. I only choose it when I play "Normal," but then it's a bit too powerful with cost 1. When I play "Fair" there simply is very little reason to choose it, because there will always be one lucky AI player skyrocketing to power on Arcanus.
6. This is more MoM's fault than CoM's but I have to mention it. CoM is much more about casting spells. With dispel waves, it's frustrating to figure out which units need which spells. City spells are annoying to track, etc. I just hope there can be some improvement in CoM II, because I spend way too much time clicking around trying to figure out which units need which spells in CoM (again, I am aware this is MoM's fault).


It's strange to feel these two things at the same time:
1. This game is in so many ways way better than MoM.
2. For the first time since MoM has come out, I quite often get the feeling I don't want to play this game anymore. The AI, difficulty settings and restrictions are at times just too annoying. I just want to play a moderate difficulty and be able to experience all the benefits of the game, like maxing out my wizard and conquering both planes. That really feels missing to me. I'm stuck between a crippled version of the game that's I can win or lose, and a version that offers more rewards that I can win about 10% of the time, and the AI plays so annoyingly that it's like playing a computer in chess mode that's way too high a setting.

I know I'm rambling but anyway those are my biggest complaints about this current version. I am considering going back to MoM at this point because I simply cannot feel fulfilled in CoM 6.07. Hope to see CoM II soon because I think having the source is really going to be great for the project. Thanks again.

Hey folks, I hope you don't mind me posting this here but I've started recording a Caster of Magic Let's Play for 4X gaming specialist site eXplorminate over at youtube.

I think CoM finally makes MoM the game it was meant to be, and I'm trying to expose it to a bigger audience. I'm not the best player so you hardcore lot here might not find it massively exciting and I won't apologise for sub-optimal play, but I think I know the game well enough to be able to show it off to new players at least.

Thanks to Seravy and everybody else involved in making this incredible mod, it's brought me many hours of pleasure. eXplorminate have just rated Master of Magic (with CoM mod) as the 4th best 4X game of all time in an upcoming article. I don't think that the base game, as it is now, would have scored quite as high but CoM is a work of art and no mistake.

For anybody interested, here's the series:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...rcOPxWt8_k

As the title says, i also didnt look very deep into old posts as im curious what people now think are pretty decent anime to watch. I, will only watch Dubbed... but other than that if you have an anime that you think others might enjoy, post below!


Assassination Classroom.
Overlord.
The Familiar of Zero.

to name a few