By popular demand...
Here is my "review" of Ctp2:
I have never played the first version (ctp1) but I was immpressed with a lot of the things I heard on this board when ctp2 was in devellopment so I was very curious as to what it would offer. So, I went out and bought Call to Power 2 as soon as I could and got the chance to play a few games over Thansgiving.
I played it on a pentium 2 (400Mhz), about 70 Mb RAM, 46X CD-ROM, Voodoo video card, 15 Gb Hard drive etc... Maybe not top of the line but nothing to sneeze at either. Ctp2 installed without a glitch and played perfectly.
My first impressions as I opened the box was that of a kid on Christmas morning. I think you get the picture. I was very excited because I had a new strategy game to play with.
1) Gameplay
One of the most important elements of any civ game is: does the player have fun? I certainly had a lot of fun playing ctp2 so far. The animations are really cool. But most importantly, the game was not tedious and there was very little micromanagement.
2) Interface
I was very impressed with the interface. It is excellent. Once the player learns how to use it which does not take very long, controlling your civ is very easy. The interface really is done to reduce micromanagement and tedious operations. For example, the national manager screen lets you review all your cities at once. You can see at a glance if a city's build queue is empty, and you just need to click on that city to change the build queue. You can select several cities at once and add/insert/append an item in all those cities at once. It is a great feature if you need to add something to many cities at once without having to actually go to each city individually. There is a panel on the bottom on the screen which lets you see your overall empire statistics, your cities current build queue, units, messages and tiles. You can cycle through your cities to see what they are doing, and click a button to go directly to that cities build queue if you want to change something. The build queues are well done. For example, you can add anything you want to the end of the queue, or insert it anywhere in the queue you need.
There is also a unit screen which shows you how many units you have, what they are, important stats, military readiness etc... I particularly like the fact that the screen tells you the percentage of each type of unit. I can see the composition of my army. For example, do I have mostly defensive or offensive units?
I also really apreciate the fact that it tells me the % of my production that is going into support. This is extremelly useful to know just how much of a burden your army actually is.
There is an army manager also which specifically lets you create stacks of units and shift units around. It is very useful. I love how Ctp2 handles stacks by putting them into "armies". It eliminates the tedious operation of moving every single unit and gives a great feeling of actually conducting a military campaign.
Ctp2 makes it much easier to control build queues and move units around thus improving the 2 basic areas in civ which I believe have in the past created the most micromanagement.
3) Diplomacy.
Ctp2's diplomacy is really good. I like how you can see the other civs regard toward you. And, the civs regard and trust actually play a part in diplomacy. AI civs are no longer as fikle as in civ2, declaring war one turn, asking a peace treaty the next. You have to build longe term relationships with the civ and some just have a personality that will make it near impossible. I really like the various proposals and ability to offer counter proposals. I was pleasantly surprised when the AI actually made me a fairly intellingent counterproposal. I also was pleased that the civ responds immediately. In BOTF, you had to wait a full turn to see the AI's response to your proposal. This might not sound like a big deal but it is.
4) Combat
I was very skeptical at first about the idea of the battle screen. I thought it would detract from the main game. But, ctp2's battle screen is actually a lot of fun to watch. I loved to see my sub sink the destroyer and watch the cool animations and sounds. When you have a huge stack fighting an enemy stack, watching the battle is lots of fun! I was pleased to see that the battle screen does not come up when the battle is between a military unit and a non-military unit (like a settler). This is good because if the screen were to come up in this particular case, it would definitely distract from the main game.
Last, I found that the outcomes were fairly realistic. I did not see any crazy "hoplite kills tank" kind of situation.
The "retreat" button is a nice addition. The only problem that I see with it is that it can be seriously abused by the human player. There is less of a chance of attacking a stack that overpowers you since you always retreat if you attacked an enemy stack that was stronger than you anticipated.
5) Cities
Well, ctp2 introduces some brand new features in the civ genre when it comes to cities. First is how cities collect ressources. You no longer place workers on tiles to produce ressources. Instead, a city produces a fraction of the total city radius based on the number of workers. I do believe that the basic idea of getting rid of workers on tiles was excellent, but I think it was not quite implemented in the best way. It is a lot harder to determine why your city is collecting the amount of ressources that it is. I had cities with tons of farms that had excellent production and other cities with lots of mines with poor production. I still am not 100% sure why.
Also, city radiuses expand when the pop reaches a certain amount. The idea was really cool but I am a little skeptical as to its benefits. I am not quite sure it improves the game. For one, it increases the total amount of ressources that a city can collect thus it caused cities to grow much easier than before. Furthermore, it causes the cities's efficiency to fluctuate which makes things less intuitive.
The public works system is excellent though. It allows the player to build tile improvements in a much less tedious way. The player no longer has to build tile improvements with settlers. Instead, you get PW points by setting a tax on your overall production. Each tile improvement costs a certain amount of PW points. You simply select a tile improvement and choose the tile to build it when you have enough PW's.
6) AI
I only played on medium difficulty so I don't know about the higher levels. On medium, I found the AI to be fairly decent. It behaved fairly well. The AI diplomacy acted pretty realistically in most situations. The city model does make city growth a lot easier so the enemy civs's cities were better developped than usual. The combat AI was ok. The main problem that I have with it is that it tends to play defense way too much. Even aggressive civs play defense. It is very difficult to take an AI city if you attack it head on. The AI does know how to stack lots of good defensive units including artillery to give its city a tough defensive position. The problem with playing defense is that against a good human player, it is just delaying the inevitable. Sooner or later, you will break the defense. So, the AI is not bad just too defensive.
7) Miscellaneous
The tech tree is ok. I have a serious problem with "theology" being a prerequesite for "fascism" (I think that is the one). But the tech tree can't be perfect. Overall, the future techs are cool. I have to admit that I really missed the civ2 wonders and units. I guess it is a question of copyrights. Ctp2 just like ctp1 changed many wonders from civ2 as well as several units. So you do have to get use to some new "stuff" and accept it. Ctp2 is definitely its own kind of civ game and should not be compared with civ2!
Conclusion:
1) Ctp2 is a very solid strategy game. Lots of fun!
2) It is not a civ2 sequel! It is its own game. Civ players who love the civ2 units, wonders and such and are looking for the sequel, be warned, ctp2 might dissapoint you. As I mentionned ctp2 changes some pretty fundamental features of the civ genre (like city model for ex) so again, some civ2 players might be dissapointed.
But compared on its own merits, like I said, ctp2 is excellent. I give it 8.5/10
If I forgot anything big that you want to know about, please ask.
I hope you find this review useful and worthwhile.
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No permanent enemies, no permanent friends.
