Civ2 vs CTP

[Genghis Al]

Hey, yes this is a Call to Power thread. But the CTP strategy area is like a waste land. No one responds to anything.

The reason I put this here is so all you people can see the pros/cons of CTP from me. In case you want to buy it an liven up the strategy so I can get some HELP!

What I don't like most about CTP is the lack of caravans. Sure there is still trade but the caravans are gone. When you build one it says you have one in another menue. Then you tell it to trade that with this city. Sure much less anoying then moving a real caravan around the world. BUT! You can't use then to rush buy wonders! As far as I have learned (I could be wrong, remeber there is 0 info on the strategy of this game) there is no way to speed wonder production except for buying. Which makes wonder races much less exciting.

Another thing that is not good: lack of barracks. Yeah there are no barracks, you can't build vets. Again I might be wrong. Units can only become vets after victory. This gives the aggresive player who would build a barracks and attack no more power then the defender that build no barracks.

This game is not all bad though. They made the city improvement so much more simple! You have a recsource called public works. It is like a tax rate you can set, it comes out of you production. This is used to build Farms, roads, mines, and all the other goodies with out a settle to control. Saves lots of micro managment.

Then for the early warmonger they added the slaver. He takes slaves (any unit your army kills) and makes them a worker in a city. It really helps boost production.

I say this is a very good game. It's lack od Sid Mier means nothing. It is almost the same game but longer and prettier. So go buy it and HELP ME on the strategy post down in CTP!

Alex v5.7

P.S. sorry about my spelling.

[Seeker]

I also wasted money on CTP.

It's best to cry, wipe away the tears, and then try your best to forget.

[Genghis Al]

No no, don't get me wrong I love the game. I just have unanswered questions.

ALEX v5.7

[Gatekeeper]

Genghis Al, et al.:

Just like Seeker, I wasted my *time* with C:TP — fortunately, it didn't cost money as I got it in return for assisting in de-bugging Civ II Gold for the Macintosh.

I made the mistake of thinking C:TP would be something like Civ II. Boy, was I wrong. I am currently praying that TPTB decide to port Civ III over to the Macintosh. I understand that title, since it has Sid Meir's name on it, will be high quality and, hopefully, like Civ II on mega-steroids.

CYBERAmazon

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Resistance is futile. Lower your shields and disable your weapons. You will be assimilated into the Borg Collective.

[Genghis Al]

I don't think people get me, I like the game alot. Sid Meier is not magical. A game can be good without him.

[Steve Clark]

http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum3/HTML/001108.html

[Civ-wrecked]

Genghis,
The reason the CTP forum is a wasteland and why people have ignored your plea that you DO like the game is probably because most everybody else hates it .

Not only that I bought the CTP game I also had to buy a brand new computer in order to get it to work so nobody can blame me not to give it a fair shake . But after playing it, I found it as exciting as washing the dishes. I can spend days on it I have no feeling of accomplishing anything worth while.

Its most serious design flaws:

- WoWs expire so soon it's much better to use the resources to build troops to invade other Civs and forget about WoW altogether.
- lack of caravans & lack of importance of WoW remove all excitement in getting any wonders built. [Building WOW is the main thing in CivII, apparently, as most people complain about getting bored after around the 16th century when most of WoWs have been built. Also, people always compare WOWs against each others in CivII and AC, not in CTP.].
- It takes what people consider most annoying in CivII: friendly AI units which keep insisting on standing on your squares and requiring you to tell them to go back time after time, and turn it into full-blown features for the purpose of annoying human players: clerics, trade priracy, tele-angelists, settler expulsion (even when my settler is closer to my cities than the AI cities), roving bands of trespassers, etc.
- Its mouse interface and its decision not to center on the active unit are horrid. It takes me a while each time to trace down the wriggly yellow/green line to figure which unit I'm supposed to be controlling curently. Many times I made an unintentional click and after that I just had no idea which unit I just sent all the way around the world, even trying to cross oceans on foot sometimes.
- When it is the AI's turn then I can have a battle and get all my units killed without even knowing which units and where the battle happened since the program thinks it's a waste of computer cycles to show the fight.
- It tries its best to remove all the tricks that people can use to get an advantage: using caravans for WoWs, reopening huts, replaying battles, putting invading troops in a fort, etc. Somehow I just had a feeling that the game designers just spent too much time reading newsgroup (to fix the problem of Civ II ?) and too little time to figure out how to create an enjoyable game. It gives off an impression of tidbit programmings without an overall design.
- It leaves a lot of room for mistakes (sending my units across the universe with no way of stopping them as mentioned earlier) but then does not have automatic save to replay the turn and fix the mistake. When something absolutely stupid happened and the only way to fix it is to quit the game then I just had to quit it and swear I would never tried this piece of !*(#*(@(# again.
- Big, math-like numbers to build everything and the unfathomable system of "wheel" production makes it far detached from the human player. In CivII, people may compare that HG takes 200 shields and KRC takes 300 shields, etc. and so which should be a better value over which (similarly for unit comparison). Do anybody remember or care how many "wheels" all the crappy WoWs in CTP take to build ?
- Did I forget about the diplomacy ? Probably because it's best be forgotten.

I never had the patience to finish a single CTP game even when I dominated and was way above the AIs and only needed to wrap up. The more I play then the more frustration and the sense of stupidly wasting my time just build up until I give up and find something more sensible to spend time on.

BTW, to answer your question on veteran status. There's no such thing in CTP, instead there's a Menu where you can select on how much gold you want to pay for your units to get them to be in a more war-ready status. I don't have the program but there are three levels, roughly named by me: Peace-time, War-prepared, and Warmonger levels. The more you pay to upgrade your unit level, the better the units fight.

I also liked PW and the use of slavers in battle (not when sneakily stealing workers). The stacked-up unit fighting is also cool although some people do not like it. Those are the few good ideas in CTP. Everything else is simply horrible.

[Genghis Al]

Wow you almost conviced me. But I don't think this game should compared to Civ in such a critical manner. I know that is the title of the thread but Civ is the best, hand down. CTP is more, and I like the new graphics the new wonders. I know the expire fast and lack of caravans make wonder races less dramatic but it is still a good game. Al the stealth units I think are a great idea. It is a way of going to war without going to war. You convert his people and make franshises. Fun stuff.

[Matthew]

For all of you camel haters out there. Just remember. Civ II without camels is just CTP. And not just because of the wonder building advantage.

[Civ-wrecked]

BTW, I realized I goofed about the veteran status in CTP. Units do get veteran status after winning battles as Genghis said. The reason it is so forgetable is that in a stack of 9 units, you don't really care if you have 1, 2, 3, or 5 veteran units in there because the effect becomes diluted. When you lose them then you lose them all, veterans or not. I have never got a whole stack of veterans before the units become obsolete anyway so I can't compare a stack of veterans against a stack of non-veterans. In Civ II, if you have a veteran and a non-veteran in a duel then the difference is plainly obvious and so vet status becomes a lot more important.
Yes, the graphic is nice but there's nothing in CTP that will give you the feeling of exhilaration "Yeah !! I beat the by a hair on this WoW". There are very little long term vs. short term plannings (like "What am I going to do with the next Civ II camel ? Build the WoW or set up a trade route ?" or "Should I switch the government right now in the middle of this WoW rush ?"). The only thing you do in CTP is to build units, stack them up and slug it out. If I want to play a fighting stategy game, I would much prefer RTS games such as Warcraft, Starcraft, etc. At least then the real-time constraint would give a adrenalin rush.