Dev Diary 06 - Units & Other Final Graphics for the Civilization 2 - C&C Red Alert 2 Scenario news

Intro

In this sixth dev diary we're finally in the home stretch as the title loading screen plus all units, technologies, base improvements are completed for the Civilization 2 - Red Alert 2 Siege of New York Scenario!

Background

While working with Metropolis on the Civilization 2 - Heroes of Might and Magic 2 Mod I started thinking about how cool it would be to play a C&C2 style dark and moody scenario along with a city siege Red Alert 2 style Civ2 scenario with towering capturable buildings as I'm a huge Command & Conquer and Red Alert fan (so much that I run a retro C&C tribute website). The Red Alert 2 city idea seemed too hard at the time so I figured I'd continue working on the HoMM2 scenario and start work on a fun Command & Conquer 2 Africa Campaign Scenario as training first. Well now after months working on those projects I feel I have the confidence and experience to try and attempt this rather crazy idea of mine to change Civ2's well known world battle map style into a beautiful sprawling urban metropolis of endless tall buildings and streets for your tanks and bombers to fight over, all somehow within the limitations of the old Civ2 MGE engine of course! It's 20 years too late but I'm doing it anyway haha!

Dev Diary

I'm pleased to say I have FINISHED all unit imports (along with stat balancing and costing), custom technologies, base improvement buildings and all theirs icons for the Red Alert 2 scenario! So how about I show you guys some of this recent work...

Firstly I've created a loading splash screen for the scenario based on the original Allied New York mission loading screen from Red Alert 2 but has some soviet stuff added to make it more general.

Next comes the big stuff! I'm finally at the stage where I think the scenario is good enough to make a picture to use in videos and other promotional materials, which those who've been following my work will know is the reason I needed to get this far before returning to finishing and releasing my other projects as I wanted to advertise each project while making videos of the others so I needed to make something good enough to use! It's a very nice feeling to know that all my scenarios are now in the final stages requiring only a bit of sound design and testing before being ready for release! :) Anyway this promotional shot will be often displayed as a thumbnail so to ensure items are clear and visible I've gone with a zoomed in shot that'll look a bit weird here in full screen HD but it will look great in smaller thumbnails. Because a zoomed in shot cuts off a lot of good content from the map I used the track enemy movement windows to show off other cool areas. You can see a lot of my finished units in this shot! :)

"Well that's annoying.. I want the zoomed out 1:1 shot!" you're thinking? Well alright lol.. Here's a nice zoomed out shot that shows a lot of the Soviet side of the map! As you can see I've also chosen a background for the city screen too. Those with a keen eye will spot some of the newly imported base improvement buildings and of course even more of the new units in this screen which I'll be showing next.

Below is the full imported unit line up for the scenario! All stats and abilities have been completed as well, which took ages as ensuring balancing but keeping faction uniqueness is not an easy thing lol! As for the graphics, well unlike the custom high res C&C assets that gave me no end of problems and converted pretty badly into my C&C Africa scenario these RA2 unit assets were actually very similarly sized to Civ2 ones so I was able to do nice 1:1 conversions of most of the units resulting in a better looking lineup. In cases where downsizing was required I did my best to make it as small a reduction as possible. Probably the only units that required a nasty 50% reduction were the Kirov, Aircraft Carrier and Dreadnought units but I changed their angle slightly to gain more room in the sprite cell ensuring as much detail was kept as possible. The Red Alert 2 colour palette also converted very easily into Civ2 MGE's limited one so all that was left to do was some recolouring of the team colours to make the red and blue more pronounced (so they stand out on a huge map). Just for fun I also stuck all the build icons/photos from RA2 plus a couple from some of the excellent RA2 fan mods out there (credited in image notes) into this picture and even made a few of my own (only seasoned RA2 players will probably spot the fakes though haha).

And to finish off I figured I'd post another nice promotional screenshot I intend to use around places. Here's a standard zoom 1:1 shot showing some of the allied side of the map which was heavily inspired by the original RA2 New York Mission map.

If you like my work please feel free to check out my other mod projects such as my & Metropolis's Civ2 - Heroes of Might & Magic 2 scenario, my Civ2 - Red Alert 2 Siege of NYC scenario, my Civ2 - Command & Conquer scenario remaster, my Civ2 - Terminator Future War scenario remaster, my Civ2 - Civ1 Graphics mod demaster, my Civ2ToT - Master of Magic Jr scenario remaster, my Civ2 - Deadworld Reborn scenario remaster, my Civ2 - Starcraft scenario addon, my Civ2 - Better Terrain Graphics mod, my Civ2 - Playstation Graphics mod remaster, my Civ2 - ToT Graphics mod remaster, my Civ2 - Alpha Centauri scenario remaster, my Attila's Conquest - Play as Barbarians in every Civ game scenario series, my old Civ2 - Star Wars scenario, and my Civ1 - Soundtrack Overhaul mod. I'm also the creator of the popular GZDoom - Star Trek TNG Doom and GZDoom - Quest For Glory IV 3D Hexen mods.