MODPACK OR SCENARIO: WHICH ONE IS IT? 

BY 

JOHN VALDEZ 
 

A lot of  people ask me questions about the difference between a Modpack (Modification PACKage) and a Scenario. I think there are some players out there who play both modpacks and scenarios and may not know for sure or even care about the difference. Still, there is a distinction to note, and the boundaries are actually quite clear.  

THE BEGINNING OF MODPACKS 

First of all, a modpack is just that-- it modifies files, and it is a radical approach to changing the Civilization II environment. A basic modpack generally alters the rules.txt file and units.gif file. In short, units are added or subtracted from the game, or the game rules are altered in some way. In a sense, Microprose actually designed the game to be the player’s own personal modpack. There were extra unit positions incorporated into the game and a short blurb (hardly instructions at all) for getting risky modpack authors started. Early modpack writers relied on the the rules.txt and units.gif files quite heavily, but they later found that certain things didn’t make sense or were outright annoying.  

For instance, if you designed a new diplomat, and say you called him an “Ambassador,” then each time you discover WRITING a little box pops up and says:  
 

You’ve discovered the art of WRITING. You may now commission DIPLOMATS and establish embassies with other nations. You may also use these DIPLOMATS to spy on your neighbors. 
 

Sounds great, except if you were the modpack author and you deleted the diplomat unit and replaced it with the ambassador placing the graphic in another slot. It’s even worse if you designed the unit to become available when the player  discovers a newly invented TECHNOLOGY such as: FOREIGN LANGUAGES. It would be the case that the info box for the old diplomat unit would continue to pop up every time and annoy the player, informing him that he could build diplomat units which in fact, he could not.1 

As a result, modpack authors started to explore the files searching for some solution and they found it in the game.txt. Despite warnings at the top of the text file not to alter it, modpack authors were adventurous enough to build a bigger, better modpack. As the story goes, the need to fix things sort of got out of hand and some authors have simply left no text or GIF file unopened. Essentially, modpack authors have started to strive for the perfect modpack. Quite frankly, I’ve seen some mods so improved over the original Civ that going back to the original game would be like playing another modpack. I would cite Steven Strayer’s Fascist Patch as being among the early mods that has been streamlined to such a point it is somewhat of an upgrade to use it. Its current version significantly meets the historical challenges of WWII and effectively applies the appropriate technologies that produce the “correct” units in Strayer’s eyes. Scenario authors have even written WWII scenarios that are meant to be used with the Fascist patch. Truly, Fascism should have been there to begin with and I can’t imagine wanting to play Civ II with Fundamentalism. Honestly, I haven’t since 1998.2  

Graphics 

But what about the graphics and sound changes? When did that begin? Certainly, throughout this process came the need to make more radical changes. Modpacks were simply limited to the graphics that came with the game until the first person, whom we owe a great debt of course, drew, scanned, cut and pasted the first non-Microprose graphic for use in a modpack. Unknowingly, they changed the world of Civ forever. The production of new graphics caught the attention of various artists who happened to play the game and they simply had a hay day so to speak. The greatest single contributor to early terrain graphics is probably Frederic Meunie whose Tour de Eiffe website has downloads for new and original terrains. Meunie, who is best known for his “Moonland” and “Stonehenge” modpacks, opened up a whole new world of modpack creation. His work inspired other artists and soon there were new units, people, cities, city screens, terrains, and icons.3  

I have to credit Harlan Thompson and St. Leo for their outstanding contributions by providing several complete graphics collections. Harlan Thompson has contributed his “Extreme Collection of Units” (over 2000) along with other files that have extreme collections of icons and cities as well. St. Leo is probably best known for his “rip-off” graphics from other games such as Age of Empires, Transport Tycoon, etc. all reformatted to fit the Civ II environment. Of course, there are many other collections that have been added, most can be found in the downloads section of Civilization Fanatics Center, Civil Ziggurat, Scenario League, and The Great Icon Library.4 

Icons have been and continue to be an after thought for many authors. Icons are the little pictures that come up in the city screen of the game. You could easily build a modpack and never change an icon. You could even give the icon a completely unrelated name to what it is and I think most people would agree that as long as you could get the desired effect, it doesn’t matter if the Water Storage looks like an aqueduct because it still allows your city to grow beyond a size of 8. Lately , I have noticed a renewed interest in making the icons accurate. Once again, I believe it is part of the goal to make the perfect modpack.

Other graphics that have come onto the scene have been the city screen and people graphics. Radical changes in the city screen have been done by people to enhance their modpack. The changing of the people.gif has brought about a lot of new ideas. What makes the challenge of the people.gif so difficult is that you really only have a very tiny area of screen to work with. The area for a single face is only 810 sq. pixels which is roughly an area that is about 3/8 in x 7/16 in. You could draw a bigger face on your fingernail. I put together probably the largest collection of people graphics to date.5 

Sounds 

I would like to take a moment to say that sounds didn’t catch up with the creation of graphics for modpacks until recently. Mostly, I have to credit Kevin Gilbert for his outstanding presentation of his Star Trek modpack which used a large assortment of new sounds. Although Gilbert’s graphics were not the same quality as other Civ graphics, it was the new wav files that created the exceptional atmosphere of the modpack. Gilbert’s contribution was a landmark for creativity and change that began to be a part of modpack writing as a standard. Of course, other modpack writers most certainly used sounds before Gilbert, but none of them placed the emphasis on ‘game play’ with the support of these sounds. Star Trek simply wouldn’t be Star Trek without the sounds. 

Tools 

The modpack writer eventually became armed with a variety of tools, including the GIF extractor written by Rune Berge for modifying the .dll files. The dlls are the files that contain other pictures in Civ II such as the intro slides, kings, and other graphics. A veteran modpack author can completely re-work the original version of Civ II to look entirely different—ask Tim F. Smith, author of the Hi-Res modpack. He actually obtained photos of units, terrains and everything else you can think of. He scanned them, and integrated them into a modpack. Now, you can have photo resolution Civ II. Hats off to Tim.  

The Modpack Manager 

Matt Mcleod did modpack players and writers a favor and developed the Modpack Manager. As a result, I for one know that you can change, test and enhance any modpack much faster using the modpack manager because you can keep track of your work along with other mods without filling your hard drive with redundant copies of Civ II in a hundred different folders.  

THE FIRST SCENARIOS  

So now that you’ve read this entire treatise on modpacks, where does the part about scenarios come in? Well, scenarios started in much the same way as modpacks did. Very early on simultaneously, scenarios were almost a little better than the saved games we used to play on the original version of Civilization. Most people just kept trying to redo the second world war and the Roman empire as a scenario. Eventually, authors of scenarios decided those two scenarios were about as old and played out as one could get.  

Scenario authors started to try different maps and as a result they began to design entirely new themes to play. So, new scenarios started to pop up—the Civil War, American Revolution, Vietnam, Korea, WWI, WWIII, the Gulf War, and eventually, even these scenarios became overplayed. Something was still missing and Civ II players were getting anxious with anticipation. Scenario authors found modpacks useful when writing a scenario, such as the Fascism patch. Writing a scenario for a modpack opened up new possibilities. It showed both modpack makers and scenario authors that there were other ways to change the attributes of the game which meant that scenarios could be enhanced tremendously. 

Paul Cauldwell put a few units and sounds from Star Wars together and built the Star Wars scenario back in 1998. Caldwell and many others had started a new era in the production of scenarios. Not only were people using maps to build scenarios, but now they were using modpack building techniques to modify the rest of the game. Scenarios had become transformed into a cross between mods and scenarios.  

THE DIFFERENCE AND THE BOUNDARIES 

Earlier, I had mentioned that the boundaries between modpack and scenario were quite clear. It seems that scenarios have started to overlap beyond their limits and they may appear almost  as if they are a modpack. Many of the high quality scenarios modify the units, sounds, people, terrains, and icons. They even modify the rules.txt, game.txt, advice.txt, tutorial.txt, labels.txt, and city.txt. All this is in addition to the events.txt (if you have Conflicts in Civilizations version or higher). There are more modifications in some scenarios than a lot of modpacks on the net. Yet, there is still a very significant difference between modpacks and scenarios. Modpacks do not have a scenario file.6  

Modpacks are meant to be played with game generated maps, premade maps or as a base for someone else’s scenario. If you install a modpack and run it, you just get the modified version of Civ II. In contrast, most scenarios can only be useful in as much as the scenario played. In most cases, you can not use it to generate new games effectively. All that a scenario is designed to do is play out a story or history and after a specified number of turns it ends. So, what about all those modified files I told you about earlier in scenarios? A player might say to me—“I don’t have a modpack manager thingy. I just copied all the files for your Anarctica patch into my main Civ II directory and when I’m not playing the scenario, everything in any new game I start is like a Antarctica modpack.” Well, yes. Technically, scenario writers are actually writing a modpack, then a scenario to go with it these days. Highly modified scenarios for Classic Civ II are actually in short supply. Only a few truly good ones are available because newer versions of Civ II have more scenario editing tools.  

In the Civfanatics forum, I started a thread about modpacks and scenarios.7 Patrick Choo (Kobayashi), author of the recent hit, Star Trek: Dominion Wars (2001),  brought up some interesting points: 

For someone who generally plays and builds scenarios with higher versions of Civilization such as Fantastic Worlds or MGE, this is the general approach to  modpacks, and probably a good one. As I see it, modpacks are for Classic Civ II players. It is really a Classic Civ II dilemma: Players of Classic Civ II can't get the same scenario play with units and graphics unless they use it as a modpack. That is why I recommend the Modpack Manager to Classic Civ II users. It does the same thing for them just as Fantastic Worlds or MGE would for users of scenarios, and you get everything from the Modpack and possibly a compatible scenario if one happens to be included! 

If you have the Fantastic Worlds add-on or MGE (which integrates a modpack manager, graphics editing tools, and events editor) then you can play all these specialized “modpack-like” scenarios but not enjoy the benefits of  the “residual” modpack when the scenario is not in play. Most people don’t even miss the menu, the music or city screen, because if they have never played Classic Civ II, so there is no way they would know about it. 

Generally, these ‘new’ modified scenarios are meant to be played with Conflicts in Civilization, Fantastic Worlds, or Civilization II Multiplayer Gold Edition anyway. Classic Civilization II versions 1.08 - 2.42 are really best suited to modpacks and I suggest using the modpack manager. Scenarios are alright for those versions, but you miss out on the benefits of ‘events’ that can be programmed into the scenario. Events add substantially to a scenario, and most scenarios wouldn’t work well without them. You really cannot play a modpack on anything higher than 2.42 without a little trouble. I’ve found that most modpacks are written for Classic Civ II and higher versions sometimes crash for whatever reason. Veteran modpack writers are often able to write modpacks with various solutions for each game version and some will even include a “start scenario” (a scenario that is a started game and saved as a scenario) so that higher versions can play the modpack without complication. 

Also, here is another thing to think about. There are some scenarios out there that simply wouldn't make sense to be modpacks. Scenarios that mirror a specific story or graphic display might be too difficult to use. Let’s take Eyn's "Mafia" scenario which is a good one. However, if you try to load it up as a modpack, you can't generate a sensible map. You would have to play the map from the scenario every single time because the graphics won't work. 

I have run into this problem on a couple of ideas that players have given me for a modpack; I'd love to make a Robocop or Simcity modpack. However, these ideas are probably best suited to a scenario because a story line and map can be developed better. 

According to another answer I received in the forum by Erehwon (oryx): 

THE OTHER THINGS TO KNOW 

I would also like to point out that a lot of great scenarios are far more plentiful for higher versions of Civ II as well.8 Still, a lot of really good modpacks continue to become available for Classic Civ II that players of higher civ versions may tend not to play much. Your preference, if you have any, will most likely depend on the version of Civ II that you have. There may even be some modpacks out there that have such uniqueness, a separate essay would have to be written on it. Sacrificial Blood v1.0 and v2.0 by Shay Yates Roberts is one that comes to mind. It is in its own category and likely to be the subject of a separate commentary. Let me just say that if you download Sacrificial Blood, treat it entirely as an new gaming experience.  

In sum, modpacks are just a theme. They change the atmosphere of Civilization II to be some particular environment whether it’s historical, modern, fantasy, sci-fi or some other great idea. Scenarios are a story that you play out. They can be a book, a movie, a historical event or even a cartoon. I strongly encourage everyone to try both, mostly because I think that either can be fun. There are a number of what I call “transitional” modpacks that include an actual scenario with it too or packages that may include files for all versions. The Ocean Earth Modpack by Anonymous Author, the Modern Modpack by Jeff Head, and the Star Trek Modpack by Kevin Gilbert are all likely to fall into this category.9 Whatever your choice to play, whether it is a modpack or scenario, you can be sure that your gaming experience will be enhanced. The best part about modpacks and scenarios is that you can download them for free.10 

If you would like to comment on this publication or add something that you think has been left out, please contact John Valdez via email: 

JValdezToo@yahoo.com 

© 2001 John Valdez