Babylon 5 Civlization IV Space Mod

[Blake00]

Has anyone here played the Babylon 5 total conversion space mod for Civilization 4? I decided to give it a go a month ago and have been COMPLETELY addicted since lol! Was so blown away I made the 2 part video below for people who may not know about it. For a turn based strategy gamer like me who’s always wanted to play a sandbox game as the Earth alliance colonising planets and conquering the galaxy with Hyperions, Omegas & Warlocks it’s just a dream come true!! The creator has plans to add huge battle scenarios (separate to the sandbox game much like the Star Trek Civ 4 mod), and he wants to have playable shadows & Vorlons too. Unfortunately he’s the only one left working on the project now and he has limited C++ coding/graphics skills so progress is slow. Hopefully he doesn't abandon it!

Mod located here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=261551

Part 1


Part 2

 

[Looney]

Those are great. Thanks for sharing Blake00. :thumbsup:

 

[KoshFan]

Welcome to B5TV, Blake, and thanks for sharing this. I always loved Civ 2 and Civ 3, despite being a fairly mediocre player. I've never picked up Civ 4, though -- but this may persuade me. This and the Final Frontier mod in general, which is fairly intriguing all by itself. I'd never heard of such a thing.

 

[Blake00]

Welcome to B5TV, Blake, and thanks for sharing this. I always loved Civ 2 and Civ 3, despite being a fairly mediocre player. I've never picked up Civ 4, though -- but this may persuade me. This and the Final Frontier mod in general, which is fairly intriguing all by itself. I'd never heard of such a thing.

Thanks Koshfan, yeah I was the same as you. I'd spent my youth playing Civ 1, 2 and bit of 3 but had just never got around to playing Civ 4 all these years. Then I found out about the Star Trek & Babylon 5 mods and just couldn't resist checking them out. I still haven't played a game of vanilla Civ4 haha, completely addicted to the B5 mod instead lol!

Looking forward to playing the Star Trek mod next too as I wanna have a Borg game where everyone hates you so you have to fight to survive in the early game so that you can get to the freaky late game super Borg cubes and then just kick everyone's butts lol! But I want to complete the B5 mod first. Nearly there though.. I'm getting the final techs now and am flying around the galaxy with Warlocks kicking Drakh ass. Might do a 3rd video at some point to show people what the cool end game looks like. I'm stuck at the moment trying to build Babylon 5. Think there might be a bug with it as I haven't had much luck with that one yet.

 

[KoshFan]

Not being able to build B5 in a B5-mod game would be a bit of a bug, yeah.

 

[Looney]

Not being able to build B5 in a B5-mod game would be a bit of a bug, yeah.

Yeah what would be the point if you can't build B5?! As a matter of fact how did you get as far as the Drakh without it?

I would LOVE it if there was a way to do a virtual tour of the entire station. Then again that would take away from all the possible angles to tell stories. I think some of what is lost in the show is how truly large a five mile long structure is. There were so many possibilities for stories that could have taken place inside the structure that we never saw; so many buildings and rooms and corridors left unexplored. (Sorry, sidetrack rambling over.)

 

[Blake00]

lol yeah it was a bit of a disappointment however I wasn't too disheartened as I'd already spent weeks playing the mod due to it being so much fun. I guess that proves just how rich JMS's B5 universe is as you can have an awesome B5 game without B5 lol!


grrr photobucket turned off external image usage and asked its members to upgrade for $400 to turn it back on. Wasn't that nice of them lol. Can't seem to edit my original post to fix the thumbnails either so I'll just stick them here lol..

Part 1


Part 2

 

[Looney]

Are you saying you don't just have $400 laying around?! . . . . What a ridiculous world we live in?! That is how everything is now a days. 'Here use this. Okay now you are enjoying using it pay us some ridiculous sum of money if you want to keep using it.' Everything has to have a scam attached. I know they are providing a service, but there should be reasonable charges for the service. And no they should not be subscription fees. We are all going to be ruined by subscription fees; and here in Illinois taxes added to subscription fees. :scream: :brickwall: :scream:

 

[Blake00]

Yeah it's ridiculous. People ave been telling me to jump ship to imgur for years as photobucket is slow, rams popup adds down your throat and now they've dropped external image use so its safe to say they're a sinking ship and their attempts to save themselves are only making things worse. Was annoying as I had to copy all my images to imgur and then go back through 8 years of forum posts to fix all my links lol. And some forums like this one don't allow long term editing so there was nothing I could do to fix them.

Oh well I finally finished my game the other day and must say that while the mod may not be perfect it's pretty bloody good. The fact that you can enjoy a Babylon 5 game that doesn't have Babylon 5 in it just shows how large, rich and amazing JMS's B5 universe really is. To be able to play a turn based sandbox galaxy conquest game in the Babylon 5 universe was just a dream come true! I was completely and utterly addicted for like 2 months there lol.

The developer hasn't been getting any help (I have no programming or artist skills so I can't help him either) and it sounds like he's had enough of working on it alone so this may be it for this B5 mod sadly.

The 2 previous videos ended up being quite popular on Youtube so I decided to do a special part 3 bonus episode showing some of the cool end game techs and ships in battle (Omegas, Warlocks, Drakh, Shadows, Whitestars & ISA Victory etc). Gave a few final thoughts on the mod too.

 

[Blake00]

Forgot to post here some of the screenshots I took from my big game. Just looking at them now years later makes me want to go play the mod again but it's too much of an addictive time suck haha.


Hyperion Cruiser Blasting Raiders

System View (Each Planet Has Its Own Build List)

ISA Victory Stopping a Drakh Attack

B5 Technologies (Planet Killers!)

Galactic View (my Earth Alliance is expanding in all directions! )

 

[Looney]

WOW!!!! Those display much larger for me on this site than JMS news. Weird. Why has there never been an all out full throttle mainstream B5 video game? Someone give me a refresher on why JMS himself has never gone down this avenue to any great extent?

 

[Springer]

WOW!!!! Those display much larger for me on this site than JMS news. Weird. Why has there never been an all out full throttle mainstream B5 video game? Someone give me a refresher on why JMS himself has never gone down this avenue to any great extent?

There actually was going to be one, called Into the Fire. It was going to be a flight-sim shoot-em up game, I think. Chris Franke did music for it that you can find on YouTube, and the cast shot cut-scenes for it. As far as I understand, it was almost fully developed and ready when it suddenly got cancelled at the last minute following some corporate reorganisation at the developers.

https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Babylon_5:_Into_the_Fire_(Game)

And to the music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hAtD3zqJMU