Civilization Call to Power and Civ Series

[ATopic22]

Is Civilization: Call to Power related to the Sid Meier's Civ series. It doesnt have Sid Meiers name on Call to Power yet the gameplay is so much simmilar. Its not an early one either, the game has better graphics than Civilization 2.

 

[Proteus]

It is very similar and, in contrast to unmodded SM Civ games stretches into the far future, with cities that can be build on the seaground future weapon systems and lots of things more.

The combat system of CtP is (in the opinion of many players including myself) the best system ever used by civ games, as your army figths as a whole, with artillery and archers in the second/third line, infantry in the first line and cavalry making flanking attacks. This way it really encourages a combined arms approach
Another difference from normal Civ is, that you don´t use workers to build tile improvements. Instead your cities accumulate points for "public works" (you can set via sliders which percentage of the money earned by your cities go to public works and how much to research, money and the like) and you can buy tile improvements with these public work points.

There are also some nice mods out there, like "Ages of Man" which you might try as they do a lot to enhance the system.

(of course even CtP 2 however doesn´t have the nice graphics of Civ IV, after all it is several years old )

 

[cassembler]

Agreed. CTP had a lot of elements that many think improved the Civ universe... but AFAIK, CTP had nothing, commercially speaking, to do with SM:CIV. I would _love_ to see the public works system again...

 

[KhanIndustries]

Yeah I remember Call to Power. I think it had something to do when Sid left his old company to create his own Fir Axis company, however the old company still held some rights to the Civ series so they set out to create a version using their own team.

There were lots of things I really liked about Civ: CtP, the greatest thing ever in my opinion was the Public Works system. When your empire gets really big in Civ, nothing more annoying then telling 40+ workers what to do especially when railroad hits and you have to connect everything and railroad your mines for the extra production.

Another interesting thing is that Beyond the Sword kind of borrowed some stuff from Call to Power. Remember the invisible corporate guys in CtP? They didn't set up corporations like they do in BtS (I can't remember) but they were invisible and you send em to a rival's city and got lots of gold. There were the slavers and those ladies you can send and she'd yell "Break the Chains" to mess with somebody with lots of slaves. LoL my brother kept doing that to me in one game.

Call to Power had a really cool combat system too. I really liked the idea of leading armies and not have to move 100 billion units.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Civ series we have today and I'm glad they're using some new ideas. All in all though, Public Works for the win! I really miss that.

 

[ladiesman]

I've been really wishing for Civ to adopt alot of the stuff from CtP. It's so hard to play now, it's just so slow, but some of the concepts are awesome.

I absolutely, postively, loved the future age with sea-cities and space stations (the space elevator ruled...it actually WENT somewhere!) I was looking forward to BtS primarily for Next War, hoping it would add something like that....and was of course dissapointed to find out that it's the least extensive mod in BtS. Really upset me. I WANT MY FUTURE AGE, DAMN YOU!!! It was always fun to lead a civ from the stone age with one city, to an empire spanning half the world, the seas surrounding it, linked by giant roads going right over the ocean, and a huge metropolis in orbit.

The abstract units in CtP were brilliant. The Slaver, the Abolitionist, the Corporation, the Lawyer, the Evangelist, etc.

Some of the micromanagement stuff was great, like setting the work day and individual taxation. The Public Works system, of course.

I liked that certain government types had special stuff, such as the Fascist unit. I loved the amounts of governments, from Monarchy to Technocracy!

I LOVED CtP...i'm sad it died out.

 

[Joosty]

I greatly enjoyed playing CTP 2 before civ 3 came out, and I fully share the opinion that many features of CTP would greatly enhance the gameplay of civ. It just seemed as such a regression in civ 3 to go back to one-on-one combat again (except for armies, lame rip-off). The combined army, crude as it was, actually made a alot of sense, and also encouraged to fill up your army with various kinds of units to perform different functions.
I know civ 4 also encourages you to do this, but for a different reason. For offensive stacks, it's simply necessary to include some defensive counters for fear of your stack being wiped out by the one type of unit it is vulnerable to.

Also greatly missed are the diplomatic attitudes when in contact with leaders. I'll grant you that it was probably something which worked rather crappy, but I just loved the possibility to convey my opinion of my rival civs when in contact with them. Now only the AI gets to bully you or coddle you. I wonder if the AI actually ever considers what my opinion of it is... does it reckon that bombarding me with demands will sort of increase the chances that my army will pay their cities a visit soon?

Anyway, back to CTP. The public works system, once used to it (as it works quite different from the worker system), really is nice and easy. As others said before, having to instruct all your workers to do what is obvious to anything but an automated worker just gets tedious.

CTP also had several units which I think are sort of missing in the civ game. Many non-combat units of course, but also things like the industrial age transport ship. Now we have to keep using galleons until we have transports.

Final feature which I really liked, but I know that many civ players also want none of it, were the future eras, the genetic and diamond age I think. I don't mind if civ goes a bit off the wall and into the what-if. For the same reason that I would like to see ethnically diverse units being extended into later eras (or are canons only ever operated by white, presumably european people?), I like adding a bit of sci-fi with future buildings and units. The next-war mod is a joke. It's broken on all sides and really doesn't include that much new content. There's this genetic era mod which is quite cool, but I think that the BtS expansion could have done with a scenario less, and a more extensive future eras mod instead, allowing you to play from the stone age to the diamond age.

 

[Colee]

There's a pretty good summary of the history of the civ series at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_(series)

The Call to Power games were not designed by Sid Meier, they were the products of legal limbo over the civ license.

Also, check out http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1523/the_history_of_civilization.php - interesting article on the history of civilization

 

[GodBen]

I actually upgraded my PC at the time in order to play CtP because I was enthralled by all the previews for it. I ended up being utterly disappointed by it, and not only because the Irish civ's second city was set to be Blarney. (Blarney is a small town in real life!) I was especially upset by just how basic and nonsensical diplomacy was, and how completely pointless space exploration was. When I heard of CtP2 I vowed not to buy it, which was a big decision for me as it would be the first "Civ" game I wouldn't buy.

Then someone bought it for me and I felt I should check it out. It was actually very good, and I was completely shocked by how much they had improved diplomacy. To my memory it was the best diplomacy system of any Civ game. Public works made more sense than settlers making all the improvements (Civ III had yet to come out so worker units had yet to be created) and increasing the maximum number of units in an army from 9 to 12 made that system far better, I feel (although limiting you to only 12 units on a tile was infinitely frustrating). Space flight and cities were removed, which was good as they were pointless, and the introduction of national borders, though its implementation was basic, was something I wanted for a long time.

Once Civ III came out I played that more than CtP2, but I did miss an awful lot of the features from CtP like armies and public works. To me, CtP was awful, but CtP2 was better than Civ III and only slightly worse than Civ IV. It's certainly something you should play to get a feeling of how the "proper" Civ series could have gone.

 

[MrWhereItsAt]

From memory, Activision acquired the rights to the Civilization name, and used it in this game and CTP2. At some points the rights were reacquired by the Firaxis team. Don't quote me on all that though - I was only just looking at Apolyton to get Civ2 scenarios at the time.

Although buying it fairly recently, I never played CTP2. CTP came out shortly before I got SMAC, so I didn't play it for long, but some of the concepts were fresh and neat, and I loved the futuristic stuff too. Orbital Bombers hurling asteroids at your enemies' cities - awesome.

However I HATED the Public Works system. I could no longer build a worker and start improving my cities straight away, I had to either suffer in tech whilst devoting my treasury to building up enough of a pool of PW points to clear a jungle or build a farm, or wait for dozens and dozens of turns until I had enough cities and pop with enough gold coming in to spend on something whilst still advancing in science. My most hated CTP innovation. The trade routes, which cris-crossed the world, cities, rivers etc were neat, but kinda clogged the screen after a while.

 

[Lurking Liu]

Public Works were a pain in the ass... Nor did I like the generic resource system. The "rare" resources were actually worse than the common ones! They may have given more of a benefit to the tile (even then, no resource gave very much) but you got more money for trading multiple instances of the same resource. It was a lot easier to get a bunch of common resources than rare ones. The armies... Eh. But you know you can use Stack Attack in Civ 4, right? It's there in the options.

Also have to point out, play CtP2, build 12 Tanks. No combined arms necessary there. The whole idea of flank attacks were messed up, since if you made an entire army of flankers, every unit would attack every turn, thus defeating the entire purpose of front line/back line stuff.



I loved sea cities, though, have to be perfectly honest there. Those were brilliant. I just didn't like the generic nature of their terrain.

 

[mjs0]

Public works, combat and diplomacy were definitely high points for me.

Some other things I always remember from CTP
1. Cities always worked all tiles within their economic radius (which was determined by city population) not just the FAT cross. So a city that had population 32+ was working well over 50 tiles!
2. The information screens (equiv. of advisors) were small font, very densely populated and full of useful info.
3. The system for managing city build queues was very powerful.
4. The on screen trade routes and the fact that you could dedicate multiple caravans to a route for more income was nice.

Unfortunately (for me at least) the parts were better than the whole and despite the many interesting innovations the game as a whole just didn't feel right.
To this day I really couldn't say why.

 

[Proteus]

Also have to point out, play CtP2, build 12 Tanks. No combined arms necessary there. The whole idea of flank attacks were messed up, since if you made an entire army of flankers, every unit would attack every turn, thus defeating the entire purpose of front line/back line stuff.

But there are thousands of years till you get tanks
and even then it is nice to have specialized artillery-units (or artillery mechs) in your rear ranks

And I doubt that the stack attack of Civ IV can even remotely be compared to the system in CtP
(although I admit that it is a step forward from the system used in Civ III)

 

[Proteus]

...
Space flight and cities were removed, which was good as they were pointless, ...

Interesting, for me it was the other way round. I liked the space layer in CtP (the only thing I didn´t like was, that moving units in it was very slow) and found it sad that they removed it in CtP 2.
I nevertheless began to play only CtP 2 when it came out as, despite the missing space layer, the game was superior to CtP 1.

 

[Lurking Liu]

But there are thousands of years till you get tanks
and even then it is nice to have specialized artillery-units (or artillery mechs) in your rear ranks

And I doubt that the stack attack of Civ IV can even remotely be compared to the system in CtP
(although I admit that it is a step forward from the system used in Civ III)

Aside from the graphics and the flank attackers, it really isn't that different. In CTP, each unit would be matched against another unit and fight to the death. If it survived, it would then be matched up against another unit once all current matches had been resolved. That's really a lot like the current system in Civ4, except that you have a greater amount of control in that each "round" is a full turn, so while you can't totally overwhelm ten defenders with one unit (Leviathan! I'll admit it, I loved that bit of the CTP series...) you also aren't forced to watch your grand army slowly disappear into the meatgrinder, either.

 

[Duuk]

I loved CtP2. It's a shame that Firaxis didn't learn from some of the cool stuff that CtP2 offered (slavers, abolitionists, corporations, armies vs units, public works).

 

[JavalTigar]

Chalk me up for a Public Works fan.

I loved being able to totally revitalise newly conqured territory quickly and within 10-15 turns have it completely intergrated into your empire.

I also enjoyed being able to rush buy from the empire manager screen [F1]. (you can sort of do that now) but it was more intuitive. I also remeber being able to highlight key cities, tell them to build something, rush buy, and then next turn they would go right back to the queue.

I liked the future eras as well but wasn't a fan of the space layer. The water cities were great though.

 

[jkp1187]

You know what I miss the most from Call to Power?

The B-52 as a modern bomber unit.

I still say it should be the American UU....

 

[meatwad4289]

the first Civ game i played was Call to Power. IT was ahead of its time ,and by far one of the best Civ games. in most aspects CTP was better than Civ4. I never even tried CTP2, because by the time i found out there was another one i had already gotten Civ3.

If my CTP city hadnt been broken during a move, id prolly be playing it today.

I mean come one, the game was multiplayer and it took Civ3 to get an expansion pack to do that. and the multiplayer on civ3 wasnt that great

 

[Draknith]

I loved CTP. It's nice to see a lot of the ideas starting to be translated into BTS. Pirateing trades routes was always fun, and speaking of trade routes, you actually had to set them up... The battle mechanism was awesome, and actually made you build armies, not just hard-core units. I always enjoyed bombing someone with 8 (CTP) or 12 (CTP2) bombers in one of those huge squadrons. Plus the system that was mentioned above about city radius'. I really enjoyed that concept. It seemed more realistic. After all, when big cities like Chicago need to expand they would annex other towns/neighborhoods around itself and expand. There wasn't a certain size it could reach before you had to build another city, you could just let it keep expanding... overall a great game, and a great problem for getting school work done.

 

[GodBen]

Interesting, for me it was the other way round. I liked the space layer in CtP (the only thing I didn´t like was, that moving units in it was very slow) and found it sad that they removed it in CtP 2.
I nevertheless began to play only CtP 2 when it came out as, despite the missing space layer, the game was superior to CtP 1.

I liked the idea of it, and it was probably the thing I was most looking forward to before I got the game, but I found that in execution it was rather boring. It was just a white layer above the Earth. It was too basic for my liking, so I was glad that it was taken out in CtP2. But to each their own.