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So Much To Do

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: December 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I'm not a big fan of turn based games, but I liked this one. It's kind of like an Age of Empires meets Sim City, I thought.

You build an empire up by building cities with settlers, then creating units and roads, making diplomatic decisions, arranging trade routes, researching technologies, gathering wealth, planting farms, altering the landscape. It starts from the primal ages and goes as far forward in time as you like, past the Pyramids with its stone working, the Middle Ages with feudalism and monarchy, the modern era with TV, all the way to a sci-fi future with units and upgrades to match, clones, nanobots, satellites, everything. It sounds complicated, but you can elect "mayors" to do local things automatically for you. You can be a whole bunch of civilizations, name and rename the cities you make and capture, and name the leader you are. There can be war, or there can be peace, there's things to do either way. There are "wonders" to build, everything from the Great Wall of China to the Empire State Building, and more abstract ones like the Internet. There's also the citizens to keep happy, and barbarians to fight against, and lawyers and spies...

So much in this game.

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.

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. ;-)

*The* simulation game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: January 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

While this game is getting a bit old (and thus, cheaper :-)), it remains one of the best simulation games that I've played. Activision does have a nasty habit of rushing games out the door and then posting patches online (get the patch!) but CtP II features solid gameplay for hours of enjoyment.

I gave this a 4 because it's missing a few features I'd like to see, such as different civilizations having different capabilities, and the AI could be better. Still, the first Call to Power was surprisingly addictive, and this one builds on Activision's previous success. If you like simulations, get this one.

It takes a while!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: September 28, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game about a year ago. I brought it home and played on it for a while however I lost intrest and that was that. Months later I got it out again and became addicted. The graphics are NOT brilliant but it is brilliant stratigic wise and lots of fun. I notice the other reviews contrast each other! I believe that the good reviews are done by the people who gave the game time and the bad ones are done by the people who gave up on the game as soon as they got it.
In conclusion to this I highly recomend this game and once you get it give it time to grow on you!!!

very good

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: June 30, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I liked CTP2 but there were things that I didn't like.I would like to give it 4 and a half stars but I couldn't. Another thing that was depressing was how long it takes for the trn to elapse. Maybe it's just my computer.

CTP vs. Civ

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: June 05, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Starting caveat: I am originally a Civ player although I picked up CTP/CTP2 in lieu of CivIII.

First of all, CTP2 is FAR superior to CTP. They definitely fixed alot of the balance problems. (Although they didn't get the trade mechanism figured out.)

The game is incredibly deep. You could, potentially, spend far more time playing this game than any Civ. The stackability of units seems to be something Sid Meier is averse to. CTP also accepts some of the unseemlier sides of civilization like slavery, theocracy, totalitarianism and mass subversion while Civ sticks to the "clean" aspects of humanity. The single biggest concept I wish Civ would have adopted from CTP is the Corporate Branch unit. The idea that two nations, regardless of size, could fight legal/business wars with one another while completely at peace is a relatively young concept and CTP does a good job of extrapolating game concepts from sometimes tenuous real-life theories on civilization. The revolutions and creation of new civilizations is an interesting concept that I would have liked to see taken further.

The pro-Civers are not wrong at all, however. Sid Meier games feature a playability that's hard to define and nonexistent in other titles. Hours playing a Civ don't feel like hours. At first I was disappointed that CivIII seemed so similar to CivII but it really isn't. There is far more detail in the military simulations and the city management. Also, most importantly, is the concept of culture, totally new to this genre. Although it's not perfect it is really well done for a first attempt. CivIII acknowledges the reality that we all have unique cultural/racial heritages and that they affect us is subtle ways. For example, if you capture an enemy worker it will not work as efficiently as one of your own. (This is Civ's version of slavery but they never call it that.) Also, when you take an enemy city the citizen remain tied to their own culture and will assimilate to yours slowly. Until then they will be more likely to revolt against your regieme.

Essentially, I'd like to see CTP2 combined with CivIII. If someone did that I'd probably be a fool and pay any price for it.

Dumb

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 8
Date: May 06, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I hated this game. it was hard to figure out how to play. I never liked it. it is an extremely stupid game. dont buy it. save yourselves.

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.

Just Fell Short

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: November 07, 2001
Author: Amazon User

While this is a fun game overall they managed to fall short of what most civ fans expect. The interface is not the best. The game is much too easy to master. Definately an improvement over Call to Power 1 but if your a devoted fan of this genre I would recommend getting Civilization III and staying away from the Call to Power series.

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