This is a small bonus project as I prepare to release my other bigger Civ2 mods to the world! I recently discovered John Valdez’s old mod and was massively impressed with the idea of making Civ2 look more like Civ1. I’d already been working on of a Test of Time graphics mod for Civilization 2 MGE (that nobody asked for lol) so I thought it would be fun to go the other way and ‘demake’ Civ2 to look even more like Civ1 than John had. All terrain, special resources, cities, terrain improvements, and units have been reimported from Civilization 1. More details coming soon!
First test shot!
Not many have done double sized assets in Civ2 before so I had no guides to go by and had to experiment endlessly as obviously diamond edges are not blocky double sized and neither is the raster making the terrain not join together very well. In the end even a 2x blocky raster didn't go well so I removed the raster all together as thankfully all Civ1 terrain is very green and has green edges that blend together quite well mostly removing the need for a raster (although deserts could use more work). I made sure the imported forests and jungles were nice and 'fluffy' with branches coming out over the top of the diamond to make them more 3D and get rid of the squashed flat look. As for rivers, hills, mountains and shorelines, to avoid the problems John had I simply grabbed Civ2's equivalents that looked most like Civ1's versions, I then downsized them to 50% and the put them back up to 100% again to deliberately make them more blockier to match the Civ1 assets. I then recoloured them to match Civ1 assets even more (eg green hills). As always shorelines were a bloody nightmare.. especially when you make them blockier haha. I reimported all special resources at 2x (as John's were unevenly stretched too) and then changed all the remaining Civ2 ones (Civ2 has twice as many as Civ1) to either use modified versions of Civ1 special resources (eg Ore & silk variants of gold & gems) or I created low colour blocky retro versions of Civ2 special resources (eg Whales, Wheat & Fur).
I've also imported 2x sized city square sprites which look better then the weird unevenly stretched ones in Johns original. Will work on terrain improvements next, and then units. All of johns units are unevenly resized so I'm gonna need to re-impoirt the whole lot from Civ1 as nice even 2x size actually fits in the Civ2 unit cells just fine. Will try to get them all comfortably fitting inside a Fortification graphic too.