Ah, well ... I know, the AI was not good in CtP, at least that is what I was told. To be frank it was better than the AI from Civ 3 and Civ 4, I don't know 5 and 6 is still not on the same level, as I see it. BUT I don't want to discuss AI here.
I want to discuss ( not so much compare) concepts. Always remember: we are talking early nineties here.
Overall concepts:
CtP1 had 3 levels to settle on: Land, bottom of the Sea and then earth-near space. CtP had only the first two, but still one more than F-Civ. As both Alpha Centauri and Beyond Earth had at least a second option (Seasettling), I wonder, why the 'future' option in any F-Civ is missing? CtP handled this successfully and made a lot of Fun this way. Of course it could have been done better. But it was there.
Civs:
CtP started to implement Civs, which are, as per today, modern or counted as irreleveant. Such as Nicaragua. I still liked the idea, but this is being handled more and more well with the Firaxis-Series, too.
Civs in CtP ONLY differed in behaviour. No senseless UUs or Uwtfs as in Firaxis-Civ. Why was that even implemented? Anyway, I'd prefer ONLY behavioural differences between Civs but I can live with the approach of F(iraxis)-Civ, as it is. So this is a matter of 'taste'.
Units:
this was very special. The units of different 'ages' differed massively in strength, so no ridiculous combat outcomes as in CivIV. This is handled well enough in Civ6 now. But Units had a lot of special abilities, e.g. Hovertanks could use landtiles, but also coastal watertiles. Whole bunch of different strategies came up this way. The Civ6 - concept of landunits being able to water whenever whereever is more than questionable.
Special Units: CtP implemented special units with special capabilities. E.g. Slavers, Lawyers or Eco- and Nanoterrorists. Slavers where able to enslave beaten enemy units, including Barbarians and add them as workforce to cities. A workforce that used up less ressources as normal people-workers, but gave production value as normale people-workers. Handled properly this was a huge boon. You could even add slavers to your armies, to collect slaves for your early cities. Slaves also needed to be controlled with your military units, otherwiese cities could revolt. After a certain tech was developed, Slaves were freed, a Situation that needed close monitoring and handling. Lawywers where a big Fun-annoyance, as they were able to halt production in any city. Ecoterrorists released e.g. plagues in order to reduce the number of people in enemy cities. And, in the end, my best liked special unit: Nanoterrorists, which were able to fully eliminate enemy cities, wipe them from the map. Of course for all these stealth-special units there were countermeasures in place. And the AI knew how to use them. This made lots of fun.
Combat: up to today, CtP handled the combat situation better than ANY Civ-original game from 1 to 6. Think about this! You could assemble armies with up to, if I remember correctly 9 to 12 units. You had melee in front, ranged in back, you had flanking units and in the third row the special units (e.g. the slavers). Later units had several capabilities in one. So you had to manage your armies and had to put up a lot of a fight in order to fell enemy cities, even as they had no strength of themselves. And units where expensive. So no Stack of Doom or Carpet of Doom sh!te at all. I can't believe, that we are still not there with Civ 6.
Graphics, Terrain and Improvements:
the Mountains looked GREAT in CtP. AND they could be mined. AND passed. AND you could settle in them. Food you got from Peasants (food based specialist) and sometimes rivers, which increased overall yields and flew NOT between tiles but IN tiles. Hills were separated in yields based on base terrain feature. This is implemented since Civ4 only. There were several different Terraintypes, none of which were useless, also not Jungle, desert or swamp. There was no special resources but Luxury resources used for (a totally different) trade (system). All cities gave a certain amount of their production into one pool for infrastructure projects around cities, so no 'worker-units' were required. You could change terrains later on with the sufficient techs (flatten Hills for more food production e.g.).
Yields: there were not only yields from terrain, (which was not 'worked' but collected by citizens) but you were able to balance yield USE. E.g. you could decide if your citizens would use up 5 foodunits per person or, through several steps, up to 15 units per citizen, which had of course direct impact on e.g. happiness. And so on. And CtP1 had interesting Sci Fi concepts like the so called "Fleischtreibhaus" which was able to have food production always in the positive, with the downside of increasing pollution for each citizen fed by it. CtP2 on the other hand gave cities up to 5 tiles room.
Governments: There were LOTs of different governments beyond the usual ones, which had massive impact on overall gamebehaviour (yields, happiness, War, production, gold, science...). Only Civ6 managed to implement a good, but totally different way to govern.
Specialists: you did not have great persons but for all kinds of yields there were specialists. Also for food. Thus if you settled in desert mountain terrain (for giantic production yields) in order to get the city growing you needed to employ those food specialists in the beginning. Or enslave barbarians, which was lots of fun. Thus the barbarian raids really made fun to fight. Not as it is now...
Health and environment: huge production caused huge environmental problems. If you did not counteract it with special buildings and wonders, tiles would become 100% unusable and needed to be cleaned up in a costly way. The overall pollution could cause changing of terrain and loss of land due to greenhouse effect.
Diplomacy: you could have a lot of different treaties, also e.g an environmental pact, if you wanted to lower overall pollution. Of course the many options you had were counteracted by a not too good AI. But I see no difference to Civ6 on this behalf...
Atmosphere and Music: the overall atmosphere was increased a lot by having the possibility to tech far into the future as we see it coming. Lots of great sci fi concepts were implemented in a credible way. The Graphics and music added a LOT to this. I really miss the game.
There were of course a LOT of additional features, which are not mentioned here and were better than any of most of Civ 1- 6.
So my question is: why is Firaxis ignoring this?
And: whom would one need to speak to to get a Call to Power 3 concepted?
I want to discuss ( not so much compare) concepts. Always remember: we are talking early nineties here.
Overall concepts:
CtP1 had 3 levels to settle on: Land, bottom of the Sea and then earth-near space. CtP had only the first two, but still one more than F-Civ. As both Alpha Centauri and Beyond Earth had at least a second option (Seasettling), I wonder, why the 'future' option in any F-Civ is missing? CtP handled this successfully and made a lot of Fun this way. Of course it could have been done better. But it was there.
Civs:
CtP started to implement Civs, which are, as per today, modern or counted as irreleveant. Such as Nicaragua. I still liked the idea, but this is being handled more and more well with the Firaxis-Series, too.
Civs in CtP ONLY differed in behaviour. No senseless UUs or Uwtfs as in Firaxis-Civ. Why was that even implemented? Anyway, I'd prefer ONLY behavioural differences between Civs but I can live with the approach of F(iraxis)-Civ, as it is. So this is a matter of 'taste'.
Units:
this was very special. The units of different 'ages' differed massively in strength, so no ridiculous combat outcomes as in CivIV. This is handled well enough in Civ6 now. But Units had a lot of special abilities, e.g. Hovertanks could use landtiles, but also coastal watertiles. Whole bunch of different strategies came up this way. The Civ6 - concept of landunits being able to water whenever whereever is more than questionable.
Special Units: CtP implemented special units with special capabilities. E.g. Slavers, Lawyers or Eco- and Nanoterrorists. Slavers where able to enslave beaten enemy units, including Barbarians and add them as workforce to cities. A workforce that used up less ressources as normal people-workers, but gave production value as normale people-workers. Handled properly this was a huge boon. You could even add slavers to your armies, to collect slaves for your early cities. Slaves also needed to be controlled with your military units, otherwiese cities could revolt. After a certain tech was developed, Slaves were freed, a Situation that needed close monitoring and handling. Lawywers where a big Fun-annoyance, as they were able to halt production in any city. Ecoterrorists released e.g. plagues in order to reduce the number of people in enemy cities. And, in the end, my best liked special unit: Nanoterrorists, which were able to fully eliminate enemy cities, wipe them from the map. Of course for all these stealth-special units there were countermeasures in place. And the AI knew how to use them. This made lots of fun.
Combat: up to today, CtP handled the combat situation better than ANY Civ-original game from 1 to 6. Think about this! You could assemble armies with up to, if I remember correctly 9 to 12 units. You had melee in front, ranged in back, you had flanking units and in the third row the special units (e.g. the slavers). Later units had several capabilities in one. So you had to manage your armies and had to put up a lot of a fight in order to fell enemy cities, even as they had no strength of themselves. And units where expensive. So no Stack of Doom or Carpet of Doom sh!te at all. I can't believe, that we are still not there with Civ 6.
Graphics, Terrain and Improvements:
the Mountains looked GREAT in CtP. AND they could be mined. AND passed. AND you could settle in them. Food you got from Peasants (food based specialist) and sometimes rivers, which increased overall yields and flew NOT between tiles but IN tiles. Hills were separated in yields based on base terrain feature. This is implemented since Civ4 only. There were several different Terraintypes, none of which were useless, also not Jungle, desert or swamp. There was no special resources but Luxury resources used for (a totally different) trade (system). All cities gave a certain amount of their production into one pool for infrastructure projects around cities, so no 'worker-units' were required. You could change terrains later on with the sufficient techs (flatten Hills for more food production e.g.).
Yields: there were not only yields from terrain, (which was not 'worked' but collected by citizens) but you were able to balance yield USE. E.g. you could decide if your citizens would use up 5 foodunits per person or, through several steps, up to 15 units per citizen, which had of course direct impact on e.g. happiness. And so on. And CtP1 had interesting Sci Fi concepts like the so called "Fleischtreibhaus" which was able to have food production always in the positive, with the downside of increasing pollution for each citizen fed by it. CtP2 on the other hand gave cities up to 5 tiles room.
Governments: There were LOTs of different governments beyond the usual ones, which had massive impact on overall gamebehaviour (yields, happiness, War, production, gold, science...). Only Civ6 managed to implement a good, but totally different way to govern.
Specialists: you did not have great persons but for all kinds of yields there were specialists. Also for food. Thus if you settled in desert mountain terrain (for giantic production yields) in order to get the city growing you needed to employ those food specialists in the beginning. Or enslave barbarians, which was lots of fun. Thus the barbarian raids really made fun to fight. Not as it is now...
Health and environment: huge production caused huge environmental problems. If you did not counteract it with special buildings and wonders, tiles would become 100% unusable and needed to be cleaned up in a costly way. The overall pollution could cause changing of terrain and loss of land due to greenhouse effect.
Diplomacy: you could have a lot of different treaties, also e.g an environmental pact, if you wanted to lower overall pollution. Of course the many options you had were counteracted by a not too good AI. But I see no difference to Civ6 on this behalf...
Atmosphere and Music: the overall atmosphere was increased a lot by having the possibility to tech far into the future as we see it coming. Lots of great sci fi concepts were implemented in a credible way. The Graphics and music added a LOT to this. I really miss the game.
There were of course a LOT of additional features, which are not mentioned here and were better than any of most of Civ 1- 6.
So my question is: why is Firaxis ignoring this?
And: whom would one need to speak to to get a Call to Power 3 concepted?
