Civilization: Call to Power
I've played a lot of Civilization. I had the original game when it came out on my Amiga. I liked it enough that I wrote a game play editor for it, to change the stats of units and terrain. When I saw civilization 2, I decided it was time to put my Amiga away and buy a clone. The Amiga scene had died by that time, and little software was being released for it. Civilization 2 was very nice, no need to write an editor for it though as the game was almost completely customizeable.
Now, 8 years later comes the third wave of Civilization. Call to power does a lot of things right in fixing what few problems there were with the originals. In the previous 2 games, the turns towards the end could drag on for nearly an hour, or so it seems anyway. You could turn cities over to advisors to run, but they often cranked out massive numbers of units which in turn took forever to move. In CTP you have build queues, which give you total control, you can even make queue lists to further reduce the time managing a city takes. There is also a nice city management window in CTP. It also eliminates the wierd one unit fights for an entire stack method of combat. I can envision now a stack of 8 units being decimated by a single artillery unit in the older Civilizations. In CTP every unit fights simultaneously in stack warfare, helping to eliviate some wierd combat results. This combat is divided into 4 rows of units, 2 on each side. Ranged units if you have any are placed in the rear and allowed to fire from relative safety. It's a great improvement over the two original Civilizations combat method.
In CTP instead of trying to support a massive army of settlers to build improvements, you have a pool of production called public works. This is taken like a tax from each cities production, and you can build terrain improvements from this national pool. Also in CTP military units are supported on a national basis rather than a city by city basis. These two things eliminate a lot of the drudgury and complication that was in the 2 earlier Civilization games. Also added are observation towers and radar, so that unrealistic surprise attacks in advanced technological periods is eliminated. The Graphics are a lot better than even Civilization 2. They are however drawn for a resolution of 1024 x 768. The graphics are on the large side though, so they are still readily visible even on a smaller monitor set to that resolution. If you change the resolution down from the default, to 800x600 fro instance the graphics start to look pixelated.
The wonders are different, the game is made Activision rather than by Microprose. So, I guess they couldn't copy the game exactly and get away with it. Production isn't represented by multiple icons, but rather by a single icon and a number in CTP. There are a lot of new units, and the technology tree goes a lot further. Some of the new units are a little strange, but mainly they expand the non combative warfare that nations practice upon one another. CTP does have a few bugs though. The game seems to take up a lot of ram, and my hard drive acts likes it's clearing caches for a minute or so after I exit, even though I have 96 megs of ram. The game is turned based like past Civilization games. But if you have view troop movement turned on you will often recieve control back before your screen is through updating all the enemy movement. Also, the momument and technology advance screens don't pause the main game screen, meaning a delayed combat could pop up while you are selecting a new technology to research. I am playing the initial unpatched release, and most of these issues are addressed as being solved in the forth coming patch from activision. However, if you try hard you can issue a lot of commands when it isn't really your turn yet, or these other screens are open. Until I learned to curb my desire to start issuing orders, I managed to crash the game a few times. The manual is on the pathetic side, following the current trend to try and force you to buy a strategy guide. They leave out important information like how many cities a government type can control before the populace starts becoming discontent. The tech tree is poster size as well, I presume they didn't want it to be photocopied, but it's a little unwieldly to try and read at your desk.
The gameplay is still great, and just as addictive as past Civilization games. Over all the game probably deserves a 10/10. But I'm going to give it a rating of 9/10 since the manual is lacking critical information, and the initial release has some fairly serious bugs that would have been easy to spot and remove, and shouldn't have made it into the release version.
Well a patch was released for this game. I doesn't really fix many of the bugs in the game from what I can see. It does require you to have the
cd in your computer 100% of the time you are playing the game though. This combined with a little more playing of the game leades me to reduce
my rating of it. to 7/10. The game is decent, the graphics are good, I just don't seem drawn to play it. And when a company places more restrictions
on a game it doesn't do much for me. Where's the generous spawning from companies like Blizzard.
-- Zathoros
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