What really was Call to Power?

I have a friend who thinks Call to Power is much better than Civ3 not PTW but the original. I've looked up some stuff about Call to Power and many people never really liked it, heck it was a total rip off of Civ 2 and made the ancient era of Rome and Greece a blip in history and WWII and the modern times plus the a whole future era turned into the history of the world. My other friends say you could just skip building swordsmen and what a little longer for tanks.

What was this thing really though? I would love to know the details.

To me, it was as you said... a rip-off of Civ...

IIRC, there was a riff between Sid and the game manufacturers that resulted in the dropping of the word "Civilization" from the game title. My understanding is that CivIII had his full blessing/support, though. I twould figure as CivIII is far superior to any version of II. Although I'll admit, I did log a good number of hours on II, but mainly because I had gotten old. My hours on III have totaled I and II though, and in only two years...

I have Call to Power (I and II). Want to buy them? Heck, I'll give them away.

I thought they were great games, but that was before I had heard about this Civilization series. Haven't played Civ I or II, but Civ III is far superior to the Call to Power series. I only bought Civ3 because I saw the word 'Civilization' and thought it was a sequel to my other games (I don't really follow gaming news much, as I'm more of a person that buys games based on what is written on the box....). I just liked Call to Power at that time simply because it was the 'type' of game I liked (building an empire, turn-based, etc.).

Call to Power did have a few good ideas, but many bad ideas. The lawyers, clerics, televangelists, slavers, etc. were very annoying. Diplomacy-Imagine my reaction the first time I spoke to an AI civ in Civ3 compared to what I was used to in Call to Power.

My other friends say you could just skip building swordsmen and what a little longer for tanks.

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For Call to Power, I would agree. Learning techs every 2 or 3 turns (or was it possible to get 1 turn-don't remember), then you might as just wait for tanks and roll over everyone and not lose a single unit.

Call to Power had too many useless units, techs, improvements, confusing trading system (I still don't totally understand it), battle system that too heavily favored those with a slight tech lead), annoying revolutions (empire splits), crappy (near non-existant) diplomacy, stupid penalty for too many cities (for every new city you got you gained 1 unhappy person in ALL your other cities). There's more, but it's been so long since I played Call to Power.

Originally posted by superslug
IIRC, there was a riff between Sid and the game manufacturers that resulted in the dropping of the word "Civilization" from the game title. My understanding is that CivIII had his full blessing/support, though. I twould figure as CivIII is far superior to any version of II. Although I'll admit, I did log a good number of hours on II, but mainly because I had gotten old. My hours on III have totaled I and II though, and in only two years...

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It wasn't a "riff". Activision made CTP, not Sid. But they called it "Civilization - Call To Power". Sid (& Microprose) sued Activision and forced them to drop the *Civ* from the title. Which is why CTP2 is *just* CTP2 - no "Civilization".

I got into civ because, I saw CTP1 at wallmart for $9.99, and became addicted, tehn i orderned ctp2 online, it would take three weeks to come in somehow, so i played vanilla civ3 until it came it, then it came in and i quit civ3 and played ctp2(lots of great treaites, like lets both destory 20% of our nukes) but when PTW came out I got hooked on civ3 and its been that way ever since.
All in all ctp/ctp2 are good but civ is better

Originally posted by Padma
It wasn't a "riff". Activision made CTP, not Sid. But they called it "Civilization - Call To Power". Sid (& Microprose) sued Activision and forced them to drop the *Civ* from the title. Which is why CTP2 is *just* CTP2 - no "Civilization".

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I stand corrected, thanks Padma!

Well, I only got CTP1 and for Mac back then.
Actually I thought it was the newest Civilization title (because of "civilization" which was actually misleading.

It had some very interesting ideas but there were too many of them and the AI could not follow. Kind of we put all our ideas together without careful planning and implementation.
Since I was on Mac I failed to get the Civ2 MP and adds-on (some looked pretty good) so CTP was not too bad for a change.
I heard CTP2 was much better for the AI and it was easily moddable. But it was not up to the Civ standards, albeit vanilla Civ3 was a real disappointment at first.

But I am grateful it was created since it probably gave ideas and emulation to the Civ team. Actually I think more of these ideas should have been used with modifications for Civ3. The advantages (now people would need to agree on what are these advanatges) of both could make a great game.
Among these I believe I liked most the small window for battles (as usual not greatly implemented for the AI was not so good at putting troops together and the fights line by line were too repetitive after a while) : they could represent real battles rather than one on one fight/skirmishes. If it had been closer to Caesar2 style where ou could direct your troops it would have been much better. Slavers (in battle especially), trade system, religion, diplomatic options had some very good ideas too but poorly implemented.

My 2 cents

Call to Power had a few good ideas. Its main flaw was that after you figured it out u could play the highest level and win all the time. The paratrooper was a cool unit that showed a graphic of
plane that dropped the unit..Slavers and spies were also cool, stealth units, invisible to all but other of the same ilk. Someone said they did not like lawyers ect. but i thought they were ok, u could just abuse them a bit was the only problem.
Trade routes were shown as lines with the luxery floating along them. Sea cities and space cities for later era's were nice but space cities never really got going to well. As a matter of fact, the future tech units kind of suxed because it kind of turned into a fanatasy rather than a historical- based game. The water graphics (terrain) were nice -like snoopy's modded terrrain- with three d water levels-
It was not a bad rip off- looked better than civ2 and i think civ3 probably took some ideas from it- but civ3/ptw is superior in many ways- but i hear Conquests is REALLY good from the ol beta folk-They could have taken the Slaver and Lawyer or Corporate Branch units from Call to Power and made them hyper expensive to limit the number of them to add an economic non military unit aspect to the game- someone said they were annoying-yes- i think that was the point -

Those stealth units were extremely annoying. AI knew where all your cities were, which ones did and did not have walls. You could count on a slaver or cleric showing up wherever you were weakest guaranteed, if not that, a mass attack on your most weakly garrisoned city. AI was BAD, constant trespassing for no reason, even if you were able to wipe out the other civ in 2 turns.
After signing peace treaties you could expect a barrage of unconventional attacks, after awhile I just threw up my hands and attacked anything that dared to come within 5-10 tiles of my cities. Diplo screen was terrible, leaders with incorrect names vs pictures, limited negotiations.

Plus side: terrain graphics were very nice, I would use them if someone converted the tileset for use in civ3. Other nice aspects, laborer specialists (I got some unbelievable production out of some bigger cities), variable maintenance costs for units, a very good aspect of the gameplay early on. I would like to see the better features of CTP in civ4.

I liked CTP. Although I agree with many of the responders above. Especially with the comment that once you "learned" the game, you could play at the highest level and still win. But when I quit CTP for Civ3, I won in CTP at the highest level but it was still a challenge.

I tell you the thing I liked best about CTP: The sea cities. You could use the entire map. Sea power is important in that game. Sea power in CTP is virtually useless. I rarely build harbors until late in the game.

I think bamspeedy's a bit rough on the game. The lawyers, televangelists, etc., were great for keeping a rivil civ down, in preparation for attack.

Anyway, I played that game a long time ago, and obviously, overall, I like this Civ series better, although there are, in my view, certain aspects of CTW that could make Civ a better game. JMO.

Call to Power never existed.

Remember that when you post here.

I liked barbarian cities and auto bombard. At least with auto bombard, even if the AI doesnt know how to use artillery, they'll return fire instead of sitting there useless.

I played CTP quite a bit, still do sometimes when Im CIVed out.

The biggest problem, besides the pollution that the AI never seemed to worry about, was that once you had a couple of stacks of War Walkers you would just rock up to a city, bombard the %&*$ out of it and walk in. In the late stages it became to repetitive and boring.

The invisble units are annoying but they do put some spice in the game. I dont know how many times I had Knights running round and round cities looking for that elusive slaver or emancipator, and a slaver in every stack in the begining of the game was essential. Kill the barbs and get lots of slaves. Just make sure that you were the first with the Emancipation Act.

Yeah, barbs were a real benefit.
Adding a slaver to a patroling army was a guarantee for free labour. Not only that I could gain slaves by attacking barbs, my army could then also detect enemy slavers. Since the ai constantly sends them in, I placed an army at some point the ai slavers had to pass and attacked those crooks, making a slave out of a slaver. A slave would work w/o consuming food!!
I also like that 'franchising' concept. Theoretically liked it, that is, because it was as buggy as so many features in CTP. In CTP1, the stolen shields were supposed to add *somehow* [] to your shields (production, public works, military support???), but they just vanished by magic. CTP2 explicitely mentioned these shields would be used for military support, but that didn't work either. At least when you compared the statisics about support before/after successful franchising. Then again, the statistic screens were buggy as well. 20% of say 1000 spt for public works could be "interpreted" as 175 spt by the game engine's mythematical calculator. Some (patch?) readme file did explain that "these errors could occur because of rounding while everything would actually be calculated in the right way in the background", but that explanation was just crap.
The ai was very lame and the game was totally unballanced (wonders!). Some included stuff (e.g. some unit type, space city) was worth a sh*t. Diplo was a joke (e.g. why sign that enviro-protecting agreement when the ai would not care at all), some gov type seem to have been just a rediculous concept that was forgotten to be thrown away after beta-testing. Then again, I doubt that the game was tested at all...
Btw, I didn't like the 'hidden' working tile concept in CTP2. On another side note, the city radius expansion feature of CTP2 let me thought that Civ3 uses that feature as well: Before starting the first Civ3 game, I just gathered some info about 'city borders expand at some point', guess about my anti-ICS style then...I was France and the freaking Zulus plopped their cities in the middle of my empire (I did not read the manual before starting and thought the traditional fat X was history...).

I never took many slaves. Then you had to worry abut Abolitionists, and the Emancipation Act. Call To Power was too easy to beat - I once conquered the world, using stacks of subneural ads with carrier based fighters as escorts where necessary. I turned every enemy city barbarian through mass advertising.

I had actually bought CIV and CTP. I started with CIV.
The CTP CD is still lying there somewhere, untouched...

i find civ3 to be much more interesting then ctp.

After getting hooked on Civ1 and CivII, I thought CTP was refreshing but not perfect. I liked that you could syphon other civs production and gold to your own and the fact that future techs actually meant something unlike in Civilization. However, the above comments about tech pace and wonders are spot on. The wonders were so unbalancing and easily built that I would end up building them all and win with no challenge. It was a breath of fresh air, but lasted just as long.

I found this features good to be brought to CIV (which I consider superior and realistic... no space or water cities for me):
1.- Different civs (more than just the usual ones), with better info on city names and leaders
2.- More trade goods (although the system was annoying, all those lines around, taking memory)
3.- The invisible units, although very annoying, were interesting to have, making more exciting the game... (could add more difficulty to a game)
4.- The fact that you could actually get sources from the sea
5.- Some nice graphs for units...
6.- There were some techs and wonders that could actually fit CIV (Abolition is a good one)

What I hope CIV never exports, is the futuristic stuff... leave that to a different game...