Master of Orion 2 isn’t “civilization” but very well regarded in the “4x” genre (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate).
More recently, Civilization IV is considered by many to be the best of the series (you’ll want the complete pack with “Beyond the Sword”) and is closer to Civ 2 than Civ V is. Civilization V had sort of a rough start with fans but most seem to agree that it’s vastly improved with the Gods & Kings and Brave New World expansions. Unless you find a good sale (or wait for one) Civ V Complete is pretty expensive though.
If the new Civ games are not your bag (Civ V is a mixed bag - with the latest expansions it’s become a pretty good game, but the AI leaves something to be desired and some old fans still don’t dig its designs choices. Civ IV with expansions is still the golden standard though) : Alpha Centauri is great if you can stomach its graphics. They, and its interface, have not aged gracefully. But the lore of the game and its gameplay have yet to be equalled.
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Galactic Civilizations II* is also very good, although made and sold by a terrible asshole and some of the mechanics are very unintuitive. The last expansion (Twilight of the Arnor) is a mixed bag : on the one hand it makes every race very distinctive with their unique tech trees, the rebalance and UI tweaks are good. On the other hand, the unique tech trees and the leader personalities for each race broke 3/4th of the AIs, who simply don’t know how to play any more and will sit in their corner and be terrible. There’s a mod out there to fix that by basically giving every race the working personalities.
C-evo is the closest thing to open-source Civ 2, and some of its player-made AIs can be terrifying.
For city builders, I’ve never had more fun than with the Caesar line of games by Impressions. Emperor : Rise of the Middle Kingdom is never far from my hard drive. I have heard bad things about Immortal Cities:Children of the Nile though. If you’re on an Egyptian kick, *Pharaoh/Cleopatra *is pretty good.
The latest *SimCities *and *CitiesXL *are a bit soulless IMO.
*Tropico 4 *is amusing and they’ve rolled back some of the wonk from 3, but it does get a bit old in that while ostensibly it’s a whacky banana dictator game with various ways to achieve your goals, in practice being a fair democratic educated liberal economy > everything else. Which I guess is true to life, but that’s not what I was sold on when I bought the game, dammit !
The *Anno *series is pretty good too, though for some reason the latest one (Anno 2070) chugs like a motherfucker on my machine even though it runs very graphically intensive games without issues. Not sure what’s up with that. Anno 1404 worked fine, and I like its synergistic mechanics. It can get a bit samey after a while.
I’ve been playing Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, and consider it a decent fantasy 4X title.
That said, C-evo and FreeCiv are good suggestions. They’re clones of Civ II and free, so if one doesn’t work for whatever reason, little is lost. Interesting to see that FreeCiv plays in a browser now.
I suppose :). It was really more of a comment on how I tried to get back to it recently and just couldn’t deal with all the right-click menus to do anything. I uninstalled it 30 minutes later, and somehow it made me feel like a terrible shallow person.
Perhaps because the drones needed me. They looked up to me :(.
DosBox is an emulator for older windows games. It’s not easy to install though, it takes a little bit of skill and since you can’t make autoexec.bat files, you have to type ~5-10 commands each time you want to play a game.
OK, you still have no idea what we’re talking about :).
DosBox is a program that creates a fake DOS (you do remember DOS right ? Abort, retry, fail ? Config.sys and Autoexec.bat ?) “front” on your PC for old programs to communicate with the way they’re used to. Then DosBox turns around and tells your newfangled Windows “all right, kid, I know it’s old timey gibberish to you, but what *this *program is saying is…”. So that Win 8.1 can interpret commands given by DOS programs, and thus run old games.
Additionally, DosBox deliberately tones down your (modern) computer’s computation speed and clock to old timey settings, so your old games don’t run at 256x their normal speed because computers are massively more efficient today than they were when* X-Com* or Master of Magic came out.
I’m not sure if you can do an autoexec per se, but you can make another .bat file in the directory that is the harddrive of your imaginary 386 that does everything you need to run the game. Then the only commands you need are to mount the drive and run the .bat file, and I’m fairly sure you can make it do that automatically through modifying the shortcut.
Tried, in the dosbox I have, there’s no way to do .bat’s in the virtual drive.
The issue was the virtual drive only exists in dosbox, so you can’t access it from windows. In the virtual drive, there’s no “type” command, so you can’t make a text file. I also tried “copy,” but I don’t believe that command is available either. Dosbox only has like 4 available commands. I even tried copying copy.exe to dosbox, but it can’t do that either.
It’s been a while since I used it, but isn’t the general idea that you just pick a directory on your computer and then mount it as the C: drive and then have another one you mount as your floppy, CD-rom, etc? I recall having a big list of commands to get it to work, but I think I was able to mostly automate it.
But, yeah, more generally I’ve never had particularly good luck with DosBox and games going into the 486/CD-Rom era, which IIRC Civ II is. I guess it’s a little less of an issue with a turn based game. The FMV advisers might not work right, though!
