Okay Civ gamers, what’s your favourite and why?
Personally, I like Civ II best. I’ve only been playing CTP (Mac edition) for 2 months, and I find that every game, I struglle around the bottom of the pack until 1000 AD or so, then rise steadily until 1500 AD, when I wind up in first place, and from then on its a cake walk. This is on Deity level.
Thoughts, comments?
I felt Civ 2 was a great improvement upon Civ (which was a great game in and of itself).
CTP just, well, sucked. In order to be “Not Civlization 3”, they threw out all of the standard Wonders to replace them with not-so-standard Wonders, many of which were of dubious quality at best (and I’m not talking about gameplay-wise; I’m talking about the difference between the grandeur of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon vs. the “why is that a Wonder?” of Birth Control.)
Add in how the units were very culture specific yet supposed to be cross-cultural. (I’m Roman. Where the hell did I get so many Native Americans and Samurai?) Add in how random and non-sensical the random maps were. (So, giant polar wastes in the middle of the equator. This is logical, how?)
The worst part is, the centralization of the game (making it more “running an empire” than “running lots of little cities”) was something I liked. But the rest of the game just seemed, well, too much like a game and unrealistic and contrived.
That, and the worst ending I’ve ever seen. 3000 years to get to the science ending, and you get a little pop-up menu that basically says “You’ve won!” and you’re done. Bleh.
Oh my god, I thought the centralization of CTP absolutely ruined the game. I LOVE micromanagement, it opens up such interesting possibilities. I played CTP exactly once before I gave it away. Yuck.
By far my favorite of this series is/are Alpha Centauri / Alien Crossfire. Giving each society unique advantages and disadvantages makes it even more fascinating to see which sociaety you can win with. Very fun.
On the whole, I’d have to say that I liked CII most of the bunch. Nothing like telling one of your friends, “Hey, look, I’m about to build the Cure for Cancer.”
CTP wasn’t really bad in my eyes, just different. Neater stuff for the most part, but I think the game was just too big. Too many units, which, while cool, made things more confusing. Same with the space cities and undersea cities. Honestly, if you could keep people at bay for a while, you could build an entire empire on a 1/4 of the world.
And I’m with you on the wonders, John. Some of them weren’t so bad, like the Emancipation Proclamation, but I was always under the impression that spending time and resources building a goddam Wonder should provide benefits. Aritficial Intelligence fucked me like a tall dog in the weeds the first time I built it. “Hey, I just spent 20 turns and a bunch of resources building a PC that just turned half my country into chip-slaves! Hell, that’s a steal at twice the price!” That, to say the least upset me. All the more so because I make it a goal to build/conquer all the Wonders when I play.
Alpha Centauri (SMAC) if you count that - I think it was just the logical extension of the series. They were able to do a lot better job with balance and all, IMO, without all of the historical constraints to follow. That said, though, I’ll still fire up Civ2 every once in a while 'cause rewriting history does have a bit more appeal than exploring new worlds and such. Though I still think SMAC is a better game. It’s also nice to have leaders with personalities - really makes the game different depending on who you are, and it allows for better anecdotes - what the Spanish of Germans do can be semi-random, but you know exactly what the Believers or the Morganites are working towards.
Never played CtP, so I can’t comment on that (Isn’t CtP2 coming out soon or something?) And I think that while Civ1 deserves many kudos for its place in gaming history, the sequel enhanced on it in almost every way. (I miss the summary of advancements though)
Also, who here can’t wait for the real Civ3? Sid Meier’s company, Firaxis, and Microprose (!) are jointly working on this project as part of their “Sweep of Time” series or something. It should be sweet.
So much for poorfeading. That should be improved on it in almost every way.
Civ II is without a doubt one of the best computer games of all time, and Sid Meier is an absolute gaming genius. Civ II has never left my hard drive since the day it went on sale, and likely never will. I wish he would remake one of his earlier hits, Pirates. What a great game.
I’ve got Alpha Centauri, but I’ve never invested the time to play it, since it was so much like Civ II. Has anyone ever played it multiplayer? Can you even do so? I tried multiplayer on Civ, but it wasted too much time waiting for the opponent to move.
I didn’t care much for Alpha Centauri at all - I didn’t like the story, the technological advancements didn’t mean as much as they did in CivII, and it lacked a lot in realism (I have to research boats???). Civilization II is my favorite.
CTP is not a Civ game! It’s poison! :mad:
I’d go into further detail, but it would take too long.
Civ II would have to be the best of the Civ games. Cool wonders, logical tech, enough units (but not too many), and thoroughly engrossing. I could spend an entire weekend doing nothing but playing Civ II without regret. Definitely a five-star game.
Alpha Centauri’s neat too. The tech is kinda neat, and so are most of the secret projects. The only beef I have with it is once you get to the end of the tech tree, you have major eco-damage problems unless you have a planet rating of +5 or more and no factories or mining sattelites. Otherwise, I really like the little quotes with each tech advance, how you get to set socio-economic policies, and how you can screw with the icecaps :D.
Civilization - Call to Power was a very poor effort, exactly what one would expect when one tries to replicate the work of a genius with people who aren’t geniuses. What is too bad about CTP is that some of the ideas in the game were great, especially the economic ones, which made way more sense than the ones in Civilizaion or Civilization II. The really depressing part to CTP is the klunky interface, which forces so many mouse clicks that it gets really annoying when you don’t quite click where you wanted and your unit starts taking off using the path you never intended to set while trying to open a menu…
Civ II is the game I go back to over and over. I just finished off a deity-level game that took me a week to complete, and this after having just finished before that a deity level game on a large map that took me almost a month (I REALLY micro-manage cities; you HAVE to at Deity level!). And the scenarios are a lot of fun to play, especially Midgaard and Atlantis.
Alpha Centauri and Alien Crossfire, the true extensions of Civ by Brian Reynolds (working under Sid Meier), are great games, too, though I think they had real balance troubles with Alien Crossfire. The graphics make the game quite enjoyable, and with Crossfire the ability to randomize factions, or custom create factions is fun; of course I had learned how to do this with Civ II in the Rules file long ago, but then you have to keep seperate versions around depending on what civilizations you want to use! Also, the fact that playing a different faction has consequences for how you play the game is a real advantage over the simple approach in Civ II, where all that changes is the look of your Herald and the names of your cities. If SMAC has a downside, I think it is the fact that there are a couple of wonders that, once you complete them, it is Katy bar the door time, most notably the Cloning Vats when on any large map with, say, 30+ cities. People = resources, resources = winning the game.
I, too, can’t wait for the true Civ III, though I hope to god that it doesn’t end up being like Star Wars - Episode I. I might even give up my Everquest time… 
Mm, I dunno.
CtP is a crock. It’s poison. I bought it in a heartbeat solely because of the connection to Civ. I played it for a few nights, struggling through the god-awful mouse interface, determined to enjoy it. There were a few interesting ideas, but for god’s sake, LET ME USE THE KEYPAD TO MOVE MY UNITS! seethe seethe
SMAC is fun. As previous folks have said, you always know what the Morganites et al are driving towards, which (to an extent) limits replay value, but the addition of elevation was interesting. I like it, and still play it occasionally.
Rationally speaking, Civ2 is probably the best. It improves on Civ1 in a lot of ways, and adds a good deal more, and doesn’t cripple the game like CtP did … but I just can’t say that with my heart. I resisted buying it for several years because I felt that it couldn’t improve on Civ1, and that’s tainted my enjoyment of it - I didn’t enjoy it because I didn’t want to enjoy it. The only thing about it that I can honestly say I dislike is the isometric point of view. Give me a nice, pure, simple interface. Civ1 had that down straight. (Yes, it did come out in 1991, and had no other option.) I don’t need an angled viewpoint.
Sigh.
But I’m going to go home and play some more Civ2 tonight, that’s fer shure.
CivII man here - liked Civ 1, then got into II. Great game, and real addictive.
Don’t see why ANY man would not find birth control a wonder 