All Civ2 links you'll ever need!

[Eivind IV]

Came across this link list on the net:

Many are probably dead now, but still, a pretty freaking extensive list!

http://dsquared.fiwh.com/civ2/links.html

[techumseh]

Ahh, Dustin Dunn's old site. He hosted my first scenarios. Still does, by the look of it.

[Boco]

Anyone ever tried a scenario from Shayworld.com? I once downloaded Sacrificial Blood but lost the password before I could play it.

[Arthedain]

Hmm, they weren't all that fun with randomised maps IMHO. There was one part of the mod with a real-world map though.

Anyways, speaking of sites and scens, I guess you all know Markus Eklund. On his old site there's a scen about Gustav Vasa. The unfortuneate thing is that it's not downloadable, and in fact I've never gotten a hold of this scenario. It's ot fair!

[Case]

That list is certainly a powerful reminded of the 'good old days' when Civ 2 was hot property!

Originally posted by Boco
Anyone ever tried a scenario from Shayworld.com? I once downloaded Sacrificial Blood but lost the password before I could play it.

I was going to play his Age of Piracy scenario, but by the time he emailed me the password (after, if I remember correctly, some kind of arcane initiation ceremony) I no longer cared enough to download it.

[Boco]

That password scheme probably did a lot to keep these scens from catching on more they did. Not the best game play either, eh? From the web site, it looks like they contain a several advanced tricks. I like what he did with the Amazon river.

[AGRICOLA]

Eivind, thanks a lot for all those links. My attempt to go through them ended abruptly when I tripped across Harlan Thompson's Lord of the Rings. Since then, the computer screen and my brain have had little else than Frodo and Sam on them. The following quotes are from HT's README file for LOTR.

This is not your ordinary scenario

Noooo, it sure ain't. HT has done things with units that I have never seen done elsewhere.

For one thing, it is very complicated.

Major understatement.

For another, it is very difficult.

Oh yessss! Try running an empire where your cities are in 3 major clusters and several minor ones, all lost in a sea of murderous monsters.

I've had people say it the most difficult they've ever done, but many also have said its the most favorite they're ever done, so hang in there.

Very perceptive individuals. The next time I play it, it will be at Chieftain level rather than Deity.

The point to this is that I would be very, very surprised if you won the first time you played this.

I second the motion.

You may need to play it a few times, have a few false starts, to "learn the ropes" before you have a fair chance of winning.

Only if you're good or lucky - preferably both.

You really need to READ THIS FILE!!!, wordy and long and complicated though it is, or you won't stand a chance of winning at all.

Exactleee! Think of yourself as Little Red Riding Hood who has just met a pack of starving wolves. The README just might save your little a** from being turned into lunchmeat.

Definitely a 3 scenario. Harlan deserves both ears and the tail.

[Arthedain]

That Lotr scen can be really hard even at Chieftain, especially when you end up doing just one silly thing like loosing a hero. Still it's one of the best out there.
I hope you found v4.1 Agricola.

[Stefan Härtel]

Just reading the list of links brings back so many memories...

[AGRICOLA]

Originally posted by Arthedain I hope you found v4.1 Agricola.

The following is from the top of my downloaded README file

LORD OF THE RINGS SCENARIO (VERSION 4, FOR FANTASTIC WORLDS CD-ROM)

I have no idea whether this is 4.0 or 4.1 . If there is a 4.1, do you know where to get it?

I'm much less thrilled about the scen than I was a few days ago when I was up to about turn 20. Now I definitely cannot agree with the common wisdom that it is one of the best.

HT has upgraded it from the previous version but seems to have missed a few things.
1. The scenario is 43 turns long - much too short to have any hope of achieving victory.

2. Unless one wants to have the scen blow up, it is critical that Frodo and the Ring reach Barad-dur safely. Not wanting to risk the direct path from Hobbiton to Minas Tirith through potentially hostile Isengard territory, I used the sea route to Dol Amoroth and then x-country through Gondor territory to Minas Tirith. The pair arrived during turn 26. On turn 32, the Ring nuked Barad-dur and Frodo captured it, thereby wiping out the 100+ Mordor units homed to the city. That leaves all of 11 turns to deal with a weakened Mordor (by this time, Gondor had captured all Mordor cities north of Mirkwood) as well as untouched Rhun, Harad and an unpredictable Isengard. Lotsa luck.

3. Four of the unit slots are taken up by more or less useless units.

A. The hero, Elrond, in Rivendell is a 1 turn Mv=3 bomber. It has never seen action and its range is too short to ever leave the city. Its 900 shield cost may act as bait for monster air units.

B. The two kinds of Ents are more useless than just useless, if that is possible. As Mv=1 8-turn bombers, they cannot reach any friendly city. They are kept busy preventing Isengard diplos from subverting Entwood and defending it against other monsters. Next time, I'm going to disband them to build useful units and try to rehome them.

C. Battering rams (A/D=8/1, Mv=2, HP/FP=1/1) are touted for their ability to ignore city walls.

README: "At the beginning of the game Gondor is starting to research Engineering, which will allow the building of very useful Battering Rams when Gondor takes the offensive."

They certainly can ignore walls but find that any but the weakest defenders are too much for them, even on plains or grassland. Cities with any kind of defensive bonus are hopeless. This leaves Gondor in the situation that attacks on most cities have to be made by heroes, dwarves or eagles. There is no way that

README: "Once Barad-dur is conquered you will most likely be able to go on the offensive everywhere, so hang in there until then."

By comparison, the Mordor battering ram "The Grond" (A/D=20/10, Mv=2, HP/FP=3/2) really is an irresistible monster.


Aragorn: "My kingdom for an Airfield"
Gondor has a fair number of air and helicopter type units but their effectiveness is surprisingly limited by the lack of an Airfield improvement. If the good ol' heroic wiz, Gandalf, gets himself badly crocked up, it takes the old boy 5 to 6+ turns of bed rest to get back into fighting trim. A number of Airfields (how about calling them Wizards' Guild and Aviary) scattered in various cities would help a lot. Otherwise, there is a tendency not to use the flyboys unless things are really desperate.

[Mercator]

Originally posted by AGRICOLA
I have no idea whether this is 4.0 or 4.1 . If there is a 4.1, do you know where to get it?

It's available here: http://www.civgaming.net/mercator/legacy/scen.htm

It looks like it's the only place to download it again.

A. The hero, Elrond, in Rivendell is a 1 turn Mv=3 bomber. It has never seen action and its range is too short to ever leave the city. Its 900 shield cost may act as bait for monster air units.

B. The two kinds of Ents are more useless than just useless, if that is possible. As Mv=1 8-turn bombers, they cannot reach any friendly city. They are kept busy preventing Isengard diplos from subverting Entwood and defending it against other monsters. Next time, I'm going to disband them to build useful units and try to rehome them.

That was intentional. In LOTR, Elrond never left Rivendell, except when he left Middle-earth. His strength represents Rivendell's position as a stronghold and safe haven. The high cost was necessary to prevent him being bribed.

Similarly, the Ents never left their neck of the woods. After all, the only thing they did in the LOTR was attack Isengard.

I think Harlan mainly used flying units to limit their movement, exactly because in the book their movement was limited.

It's still a scenario based on the book after all.

[Boco]

Thanks, ex-mod.

The only change to Harlan's limitations that I played with was to put an airport in one city (Minas Tirith, IIRC) and extend the time limit. Multiple airports risk air transits. Harlan had a tough task balancing hero quest and largescale war. In the books, the heroes pretty much led in every victory, so I don't begrudge the weakness of non-hero units.

If you want ents and elves to lead the charge into Mordor, just play with the ranges. You pose a classic 'fun-vs-accuracy' balance, Agri. Frodo freaks, like history nuts in nonfiction scens, think the limitations are fun. Free spirit gamers chafe under the restriction. Nice thing about C2 scens is that you can make your own mod of the scen.

I haven't played this one for a long time, but I recall one key to victory was to wipe out Osgiliath (after the destruction of the ring). IIRC, you could use hero after hero to reduce the city population until it was razed. One more hero then finished off the remaining units (>100) with a stack elimination. Took a lot of planning to blaze the route to Osgiliath and yet have enough units to finish the job.

The sea route for Frodo was a favored choice, but I don't think Harlan liked it. Later unfinished versions prevented this option.

We should start a petition to demand that Catfish finish his ToT version.

[AGRICOLA]

@Boco
Nice to see that, at least in part, our thinking was similar on both game duration and airports. The use of airports for anything other than quicker healing could be prevented by a house rule. The length of the scen I have arbitrarily changed to 100 turns.

IIRC from reading the books very many years ago, they end when Frodo manages to deliver the ring. There is nothing about a continuing campaign of conquest. To adhere to the book, LOTR would be a very good ~30 turn scen where delivery of the ring is the only criterion for victory. IMHO, the number of units and their parameters are excellent for this part of the scen but inadequate for subsequently conquering Middle Earth in a short time.

Sadly, the Osgiliath gambit won’t do much in my game. The city supports only the 4 units which garrison it, probably as a result of steady attrition of units along that side of the river. I took a look at Mordor cities and the best of them support less than 20 units. However, the capture of Barag-dur decreases the Mordor nose count from ~460 to ~230.

My biggest disappointment was that the very nasty Nozgul unit functions as a bomber but occupies the stealth fighter slot (30) in RULES rather than the bomber slot (28). I’ve used the very succesful tactic of blocking bombers from returning to base to destroy a lot of airplanes in other scens. IIRC, in Dictator 5, the Soviets lost 40+ aircraft while still at peace with the Germans. The tactic appears to only work for units in slots 28 and 31 (stealth bomber). Bummer.


@Mercator
Sorry to say, but I seem to be unable to download from your site. I was using WinZip 8.1 when I ran into problems and figured that your zips might require a later version. After downloading and installing an evaluation version of WinZip 10.0, I still could not download anything. I kept getting an error messages such as:

“Cannot open file: it does not appear to be a valid archive”
“End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not a Zip file, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part Zip file.”

As a check, I tried downloading scens from Poly, SL, CFC and Evo. All of them downloaded perfectly. Is it possible that WinZip does not like nested archives?

[curtsibling]

Reading through that list of scenario authors brings a tear of nostalgia to my eyes...
I noticed that there was a sites by legends like Giant Squid and Erwan there...And even
though half of them do not work...Seeing the names makes me remember the good old days!

These links are getting saved and checked out now!

[Mercator]

Originally posted by AGRICOLA
@Mercator
Sorry to say, but I seem to be unable to download from your site.

Crap! WinZip version is not an issue. It can open all of 'em. It's not working for me either.

And it looks like all of the downloads on my site are affected. That probably means it's been like that for ages too... Ah! If only people e-mailed me.

Right... I'll have to fix it later this week.