Civ3 Mars Scenario?

[Blake00]

Hey guys,

I asked this in a few other places and in some private convos with Civ3 gurus but haven't had much luck.

Does anyone know if there is a Mars Scenario for Civilization 3 out there somewhere?

I haven't had any luck finding one which surprises me since there's some awesome Mars colonization scenarios for Civ2, ToT, Civ4, Civ5, and they'll probably even be one for Civ6 sooner or later lol.

The only work I could find was Balthasar's amazing Mars terrain & map pack however running around Mars with half naked primitive warriors breaks immersion and does such gorgeous terrain an injustice so it would be really great to have a proper scifi mars scenario to play.



When I posted about this over at CivFinatics Balthasar himself posted and offered to make a scenario that uses his map however sadly he has recently passed away.

So I figure if there's no Civ3 mars scenario out there then maybe if I can get my hands on some other decent Civ3 scifi scenarios (pity there isn't an Alpha Centauri themed scenario for Civ3 as that would be perfect!) out there then maybe I could combine some of their stuff (with author's permission) with Balthasar's terrain & maps to make a simple but fun sandbox mars colonization scenario. I say simple as I'm a Civ2 modder not a Civ3 modder so I lack the skills to make some fancy scenario with story elements. However I've mucked around a bit with Civ3 mod files so I've got an okay grasp of moving files around, changing terrains and editing text files etc. Figured I'd put some Balthasar tribute stuff into the scenario too to pay my respects and also tip the hat to the Balthasar's Mars Scenario that could have been.

These are the Civ3 scifi scenarios I've gathered from helpers (but not tested yet) so far..

Alien Attack 1.7
Bigger Better Worlds
Dune
Escape of Zombie Island 2 - Remake
Fallout v1.13
H.G. Well's War of the worlds
Space Opera (probably too spacey though, need land based scifi stuff not space ships)
Stargate - The Battle of Antarctica
Stargate SG-1 - The Battle at Dakara Beta
X-COM - Alpha-Stadium


Anyone know of some other good ones?

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[Blake00]

Interesting update on this topic just posted at CivFinatics.. there was indeed a mars scenario for Civ3 being made back in the day 15yrs ago however sadly it's creator 'Smoking Mirror' never finished it. His last post talked about moving house and that was it.. he was gooooone..

He and his helpers had fleshed out a LOT of stuff and some it looked awesome. Such a shame! Some of the downloads still work so I've grabbed what I could!

Units (recovered):


Leaders (NOT recovered):

[Blake00]

Regarding Smoking Mirror's sadly unfinished scenario above I discovered he had another thread where he posted work in progress shots and that he did some of his own terrain too (although I think I prefer Balthasar's posted above, plus Balthasar actually made a map whereas I don't think Smoking mirror got that far).






However here's some other interesting news as this has got to be super rare! I've been asking around in other Civ forums to see if I get any bites on Mars stuff and sure enough someone's found something. Over at the Realms Beyond Civ forum a kind fellow there has given me a Russian Mars scenario! It has some custom mars units, buildings, techs, even terrain (although it doesn't look as good as Balthasar's or Smoking Mirror's, although that could be pcx colour errors). Only problem is its pedia and scenario text files are unreadable gibberish as my notepad can't read Russian and I suspect very bad things are going to happen when I try to run it in my english Civ3 haha. But still its units and buildings etc could be very useful. There's a word doc (which I've translated to English) containing an Author email I might try.

This seems to be the only mention of the scenario on a Russian Civ blog site here:
http://www.civ-blog.ru/civilization-3/mod/%d0%bc%d0%be%d0%b4-%d0%bc%d0%b0%d1%80%d1%81/

They've got a nice picture there though..


The resource gathering continues..

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