Playsoneasy
Chieftain
Others have highlighted the key differences. It's still a fun game, in a stripped-down, simplified way. I don't know if they were able to preserve the wonder videos and advisers in the console version.
Can confirm. As someone who played the PS1 version of Civ2 extensively, the advisor council and wonder vids were things that added some real flavour to the game.
Stack death -- kill one unit, kill them all -- makes Civ 2 resemble Civ 5, after a fashion.
Yes, the potential to lose a whole stack of units all at once forced one to consider unit stacks and unit spread. The one exception (in the PS1 version anyway) was if a stack of units was occupying a fort; they would be protected from the "kill one kill all" rule inside a fort.
The term ICS "Infinite City Sprawl" was invented for Civ 2, since it is a viable strategy.
I think there was a limit to how many cities that could be at any one time, something like 255 cities (at least in the PS1 version)? Not sure how many exactly though.
One Civ2 feature which hasn't been replicated elsewhere in the franchise is the tech tree choices: one doesn't always get free rein to choose from all the available techs to pick, but even more intriguing is the linkage of trade commerce and science.
I still have my physical copy of PS1 Civ2, complete with tech tree poster, and yes there are a lot of techs the discovery of which is dependent on other prerequisite techs being discovered.
One can build *units* for trade (caravans early on, freight later) and when each one arrives, it gives you a lump sum boost in both gold *AND* beakers. Some Civ2 master players found a way to exploit this, resulting in an extreme trade economy and super-early spaceship launch dates... say, 1AD. One needed to keep bribing the AI to keep them from attacking, and gifts of tech usually worked.
Freight (and caravans IIRC) was also useful for helping to rush-build wonders. One thing I miss in later Civs is the ability to spam freight to quick-build wonders.