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I have to admit... I was dissapointed...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: January 19, 2001
Author: Amazon User

After hearing so much about CTP 2, about the "great" campaigns it would include, and everything, I have to tell you, I am dissapointed in it. I had read in some site that CTP 2 would in include a World War campaign (don't remember if it was WWI or WWII) but anyways this was what I had been looking forwards to the most... Sadly there was no such campaign.... It is also still TOO similar to CTP 1, i mean I expected new units, a whole new things... If it was going to be like this, they should have just made an expansion for the first game and sold it cheaper. If you've never played CTP, I highly recommend it, but if you already own CTP, either wait until the price goes down or dont get it because its current price is NOT worth it since it's almost like playing CTP with only SLIGHT changes

turn based addiction

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: March 27, 2002
Author: Amazon User

CTP2 is most frequently compared to Sid Myer's celebrated civilation series, which I've never played but read many opinions of. The CTP2 competion frequently gets the better review, but if you notice, the reviewers were already loyal fans of the Sid's series and may have been biased toward their darling empire builder game and designer. Who has played CTP first, besides myself?

This turn based strategy game allows the empire builder to mull over the empire's statistics: units, cities, government, diplomacy, scientific research, and the ruler takes as long as required until there is enough cofidence to hit (end turn) thereby allowing the empire to advance a few more years. Your descisions will include focusing on scientific research, the need for a viable defense, or an aggressive offense, deciding wheather to negotiate with neighboring empires, descideing wheather to allocate resources to war units and research or building cities filled with effecient factories, universites driving sciense research, or happiness increasing shrines, theathers and clinics to keep the masses sustained.

I've played "real time" strategy games like Age of Empires, but much prefer this "turn based". If being rushed to constantly pick items as quickly as possible with your mouse, with speed being more vital than strategy to the games outcome, then this is not your cup of tea, however, if you enjoy strategic board games like chess or risk, well then you can expect that the computer can and will do GREAT WONDERS to the depth and richness of game play -- with thanks to games like CTP2. It really stirs the imagination of the gamer. And it does really consume LOT AND LOTS of time to play a single game (thousands of empire years will elapse, a few years at each turn, and there is lots of data for the perfectionest to ponder over before making the "everthings ready" decision to advance to the next few years.

AS I've said, I've never play Sid's famous civ series, as CTP was my first experience to this genra. I don't know how I would respond to playing CIV without the CTP2 interface and features that I've come to expect. Civ does NOT have, as I understand it:
1> unit stacking (more than one unit per tile, with direct, ranged, bombard, and flanking unit abilities)
2> The Empire manager (allows naming mayors for individual cities to focus on strategic goals without micromanagment, if desired) Gold & public works points shared accross the empire.
3> Public Works, allows for tile improvements using public works points without migrating settlers to those tiles.
4> a multi-player option, network or internet

I wish I could say that this is a FUNNER game than the Civ servies, since I am now such a loyal CTP2 fan. But being that I can't really compare the two, I won't say that. But I do wish I could get an oppinion from someone who played CTP first, and then CIV second (is Civ really superior?)

CTP2 is an excellant game. The game takes 30mintues strategy investment, then ADDICTION comes as the problem solving mandates you stick with it, to fix the current crisis or eminant danger. And then before you notice you've cancled your weekend to finish the game, and then you contemplate burning the software in a bonfire once the weekend is over and you sat infront of the CTP2 all that time.

Not part of the Civ series

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 5 / 10
Date: September 04, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Contrary to popular belief, this title is not part of the Civilization series. This is Activision's attempt at a Civ clone. In some areas it succeeds, but in most it fails. This game had no affiliation with Sid Meier, creator of CivI and II (the latter arguably the best pc strategy game ever).

Pros:

Good government selection. Some new governments are included, like Fascism, Technocracy, Theocracy, Ecology, Corporate Republic, etc.

Armies and Fleets. In CivII a stack of units could be killed in what attack. This is not so.

Automated Improvements. The government automatically does terrain improvements.

Diplomacy and Trade: Both are well planned and fairly extensive.

Cons:

Diplomacy and Trade: Neither are used to their full extent, and if you try, other civilizations refuse. There's all types of stuff, like trade embargoes, etc, but the AI never does them.

Civilizations: Over 30 Civs to choose from, but there's really no difference in between them. Also, whenever I play, I'm always up against the same Civs: French, British, German, Irish, Scottish, American, and Native Americans. That gets boring very fast.

Slow: The interface is slow, even on a 128MB Ram P3 500mhz machine.

Scenarios: Only 4 of them, and none are any good.

NO CUSTOMIZATION OF UNITS OR CIVS: In Civ2 anyone could make their own units, terrains, technologies, scenarios, maps, etc. You can't do any of this in CTP2.

Conclusion: Civ3 should be out in the US within 2 months, it's coming to Mac, and to Europe. Civ3 has Sid Meier working on it. Civ3 has elaborate diplomacy and trade. Civ3 has culture points, great military leaders, many unit animations, civ specific units, new paths to victory, total customization of units, civs, techs, maps, etc, has better graphics, more realistic, more units, will ship with 12 scenarios, and so much more. The bottom line: save your cash for Civ3, it's just months away.

OK game if you really can't wait for Civ 3

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: June 02, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game with high expectations. I had ignored some less favourable reviews, because there are always some purists who complain about things being different from previous Civilization games. However, I was disappointed with this release. I should warn you now that I haven't played any Civ game since Test of Time, so some things I call "new" may not be new to you. Also, this is an Activision job, which is not "officially" Civilization. Civ 3, which is being worked on by Sid Meier at Firaxis, looks very promising but won't be out for a while.

Aside from the gameplay, the user interface has been simplified. It is much easier to keep track of what you're building, how much pollution each city puts out, and how happy people are. There is also an optional function to automate the management of cities, although such a thing seems to take half the fun and challenge out of playing a Civ game.

There are some good things about this game. You have national borders, so you won't have other players dumping cities right in the middle of your empire. If you have multiple units on a tile, opposing armies have to fight ALL of them, and not just one. The combat capabilities of units are improved, with new concepts like ranged attack and flanking, (eg artillery can fire from behind the front lines with ranged attack, and flankers like tanks can "gang up" on opposing units). Air power is a big asset in this game, since bombers can "bombard" enemy armies without being fired upon themselves, and because you can use air units to support a ground assault.

Units can no longer travel unlimited distances over a rail link. They can go much further, but not all the way across a map.

Trade is better, you don't have to push caravans around. You just build them and then use the trade manager to establish trade routes...each route you build commits a certain number of caravans. Beware that the trade advisor can't count and will not advise the best deals.

Tile improvements are done differently, you don't need settlers to build roads and such. Instead, you put a percentage of your production into a "public works" fund, which can be used to buy farms, roads, rail, and the rest (including some neat things like sonar buoys and radar stations). Oddly, you can save up the labour of your people over time, and spend it whenever you like.

Diplomacy is improved, you can make deals and offer trades. You can no longer trade units but you can offer such things as nuke reduction and pollution reduction. You can also have trade embargos. Beware that opponents will agree to proposals and then ignore them (especially pollution agreements).

Governments are good...each has a "max city" level so if you try to have a giant empire with a monarchy, citizens get unhappy and it falls apart. No government in the game allows more than 60 cities without unhappiness, so global domination is a tricky business.

OK, now for the downsides. The AI opponents are stupid. The computer players seem to constantly fight each other, and they do dumb things like building transport helicopters instead of fighters. Once I've come across an opponent who put battleships to sea, but usually the AI players sail only empty troopships and empty aircraft carriers. The AI also tends to build huge armies, but they rarely attack, even when they have an advantage. Instead they sit next to cities for my air forces to tear to shreds.

Pollution is another negative point for the game. The way pollution is modelled is better, polluted tiles no longer cause global warming by themselves, they just don't provide any food or production. When global pollution gets above a certain level (regardless of the number of dead tiles, it's the output of pollution that matters), both warming and ozone depletion can occur. You can enter into agreements with other nations, eg, they agree to keep pollution below 3000 units and you agree to keep yours below 4000 units. But, infuriatingly, the three page section on pollution in the manual doesn't tell you how to find your empire's pollution levels! In fact, the text doesn't mention it anywhere, so if you use the online manual you are stuck. The only clue is an illustration on page 14 of the original manual (you get it from the Empire tab on the Control Panel).

There are other annoying bugs, too, for example surface ships can travel along undersea tunnels as if they were roads for boats. And the music gets stuck on the same track (the CD is required to play, so my advice is to rip the tracks, compress them to MP3 and play them through another application).

Overall, I think the main drawback is the stupidity of the AI. Even on hard they are stupid (though you might try very hard and impossible difficulty...but this will make everything harder and not just the enemies), and it's not much of a challenge to defeat them in combat. They make pitiful enemies and useless allies. Not much of an improvement over the older games. But this version has full multiplayer support, if you'd care to test your wits against human opponents.

I bought Civ3 and went back to CTP2!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: June 22, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Yes, this game is quite old now, however, I dig it out and play it every 3 months or so. I have also been able to get several friends into it... even recently! They didn't mind that the graphics look a bit out-dated, especially compared to the ("fisher-price" looking) Civilization 3.

I have played Civilization 3, and was severely disappointed that it was not multiplayer (CTP2 has always been multiplayer). The first expansion pack to Civ3; "Play the World" made the game multiplayer... and added some interesting variations (like not having to wait for other players to finish - something that was not implemented into CTP2). But at the end of the day, we did not enjoy it as much as a good old multiplayer game of Call to Power 2!

Also CTP2 you can eventually build under the sea, Civ3 can't! The technology in CTP2 is far more evil than the tame Civ3... it feels that CTP2 covers 3x more technology than Civ3. Also, armies can be configured to attack as one group, in Civ3 everything has to attack separately... This is only a taste of what is missing in Civ3, compared to abundantly featured CTP2!

Why play the latest game, if it is far less fun than the previous version?

Beware: In multiplayer; Once every 1-4 games or after about 20 hours of play, the game crashes, and you may have a challenge getting back the multiplayer (auto-save) game... really annoying after 15 hours of constant play to have to start it over, totally from scratch again! So _manually_ save often!

Buy this for $10 or so, then hire Civ3 and be glad you saved your $60... you'll see what I mean. ;-)

CTP and CIVIII

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: March 12, 2005
Author: Amazon User

CTP (call to power) will give you a long game filled with many many choices. I will compare CTP with CIVIII. These games are very similar. They are almost exactly the same in how a city is managed. Each city has the 20 nearest squares from which to draw resources for its livelyhood. Buildings and units are built based on the amount of production harvested and the types of factories and power-plants used. Like CIVIII units in CTP wonder around a grided map and encounter each other on the terrian of the defending unit. Like CIVIII there are resources and techknodgies that enable the building of units, buildings, tile imporvements, wonders, and other stuff. In CTP there are more tile imporvements. There are three types of food boosting improvements each more expensive and higher tech than the last. Ther are also 3 types of production boasting improving imporvements. The method of imporving terrian in CTP is vastly superior in realism and ease. An infrastructure "tax rate" is set for the entire nation, from which production is siphened for the purpose of imporving the land. The tax is utilized when you select a tile to be improved. Thus the whole thing with dozens of "workers" having to be managed and moved is illiminated. The CTP combat is also superior to CIVIII. In CTP units do not simply go head to head, instead attacking units combin into a two layered force that has the effect of giving an advantage to the larger force. The first layer utilizes their attack/defense power against the opponent's attack/defense while the second layer exchanges ranged power attacks. Thus some types of armies are better than others. I found for instance that a efficient middle age force could be made of (x) pikeman (x/2, round up) musketeers and (x/2, round down) cannons. This force could defeat more expensive forces because it takes advantage of the cheapness of pikman while utilizing the ranged attack of musketeers and then of cannons. The chosen governemnt of your civilization has a much more profound effect, especily when combined with the ability to adjuest the wages, workday, and rations. The combination of these effects can cause your nation to focuse on growth, techknolodgy, production, war fighting or some combination of each. Ectopia for example is not great for production or growth but is great for science and war, combined with this you can adjust the food/wage/workday settings to stress growth, thech, or production further. My advise is to make sure that you are growing but also to maximise production above all other things.
In CTP you can garner many cities, i usualy acrue over 80 and often so many that i must abandon some. At about 110 cities you must abandon some our else be punished by a stupid feature of the game. But it is a mixed curse, managing 100 cities can make each turn take 30-60 min if you don't utilized efficiencies offered in the game (boring). It is thus essential to take advantage of the AI govonor, or the ability to line up a series of things to be build in every city, or to get a bunch of cities on the same path and treat them as a group. All these features are either not as good or lacking in CIVIII. On the other hand CIVIII's AI is much better as it has a much simpler game to manage and CIVIII games seldom get as boring as CTP games can. In CTP the AI does not emphesise tile imporvements enough and often fails to construct efficient formations. In CTP you are likely to command more units, more cities, have longer turns, and spend more time working adjusting tax rates and such. The way the game advantages larger armies creates a cascading effect in war. When you attack an enemy he brings his armies foward for the big several battles, you then win and stopm all over the rest of his nation because he is unable to garner a large contingent of troops at one spot. This of course adds to the realism but turns excitment in to despair or boredum. To make up for this CTP has a large number of non-combat units; lawyers, spys, cyber-spys, franchises and more. These units can do anything from plant nuclear weapons to free and capture slaves to steal production and wealth; they add a fun demention to the game although i wish that they could occupy the same space as an enemy combat unit as they are supposed to be stealth but are always discovered when they are bumped into, which is dumb on realism, i mean when was the last time a kinght slew a law firm? I digress. In short CTP is more complex and offers a better multiplayer expierence due to longer turns and multiple methods of attack. CTP is a great game for those who are hard-core strategy gamers, at the same time though the AI is not good enough to really challenge the hard-core gamer enough. CTP is great for those aspiring hard-core strategy folks out there, high school aged types. For a very challenging yet one dementional style of play i would chose CIVIII hands down. I enjoyed CTP alot until i discovered how to reliably whop the AI.
Hint: At the very begining of the game build a slaver in all your cities, of course defend you cities, then build little scouting parties of a few offensive units and a slaver, keep them close to home and kill all the puny units that come your way. With this method you will capture scores of slaves and be the most powerfull empire in the acient world hand down. I once played a game where i built every wonder out of 8 players.

Fun, but with a twist

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: December 15, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Okay, here's the game, you build a country and defend it, sound fun?? Well theres more. Along with the building you need to form an army, and so on and so forth. I give it a 4 start because the game gets old within a month or so.... But if you are a strategy simulation game goo-roo, i would reccomend it!

it's the AI

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 4
Date: January 03, 2001
Author: Amazon User

hi

i bought this game hoping for a really improved civ2 type of game.I have to be honest the AI of your passive computer opponents is absolutely horrible.Once you fortify your cites the computer opponents just lay back and wait for you to attack and that's it. The diplomacy in the game has many options but they usually have the same pat answers for everything. activision has promised some text to come out on how to tweak the ai but no mention of a patch for this.

can't recommend this game. try alpha centauri instead.

tom

Good enough - but not as fun as Civilization II

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: December 21, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I have a real problem with this game. In all honesty, it's the game Activision should have released a year and a half ago, in version 1. Nothing has changed all that much, other than fixing the much maligned bugs and quirks of version 1. The interface is essentially the same, as is the feel of the game, which is less than enjoyable. I'm a big Civ fan, but I must admit a certain disappointment that the Civ II engine seems to be more fun and interesting than any of the new Civ releases like Call to Power, or Alpha Centauri, even though it was developed over five years ago. If your a Civ fan and want to have fun, pick up a copy of Civ II: Test of Time. The engine is the same as Civ II, but you can automate settlers, autobuild cities, and have a choice between classic, extended, science fiction and fantasy variants of the game. Sadly, I'm sure you'll be much happier with Test of Time than you would be with Call to Power II.

Great with one exception

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: December 30, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This game is great. You will spend hours upon hours building an empire while battling real tough or easy enemies. The only problem is that once you get to the 1900s or so, you'll only be concerned with your own nation in that all the others no longer posit any threat. In the beginning, being located near another nation can be really tough, however, once you get stuff like tanks, the other nations can be destoyed completely within an hour, even on the highest difficulty, and they never attack you so its really just a game of infastructure. If you like to win, then pick this game.

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