My purpose with this essay is to bring out what I believe to be some design flaws within the game of Civilization II, that limit the ability of players to play it in a truly flavorful. Limitations of the game’s design that could have been easily solved (and still can be easily solved) provide a much better use of decision-making within the game; without such, what game is there? Stagnancy is not a worthwhile part of any game; if no thought is put into it, and only the “greatest tactic” is ever put to use, then where is the true use of cunning that should be a part of any strategy game? There is no escape as it is now. These are the things I will elaborate on, and while it is quite long, I have attempted to provide evidence for everything I say so that you can follow along with my suggestions when I make them. Nothing stops you from just finding them in the text and seeing what they are, but I wouldn’t expect you to just accept them flat-out without an explanation. If you are interested in what I have to say, do take the time to read it, even if the only thing you end up doing is giving good evidence back to me showing why my reasoning is wrong. Discussion and disputation is always a good thing.
I would like to begin by overviewing the common game of Civilization 2. First I will look at it from the perspective of playing against computers, and then against humans. I will focus only on the gameplay relevant to city use and capture unless I have something else to say that is relevant.
So, a common game against computers, usually pretty simple. One builds fortresses in key places to block off enemy traffic, city walls are built in one’s cities to prevent the computer from ever taking any, some military progress may be made by the human early on, however once we reach the mid-game, the tendency is to tech heavily until late-game techs where the units such as howitzers and armor show up. At this point our military can defeat enemy cities and take over the map with ease. Of course, many games won’t run like this because there’s various ways to play - however, observation over alot of cases, and the general ease at which this particular system works, shows that it is certainly dominant among players.
EDIT: Insert - Terrapin has rightly pointed out that most players don't build City Walls in all their cities, and I have to assume he has said this to me because I didn't make this explicitly clear. My assumption is *NOT* that players build City Walls in every single city they have. Building City Walls in places that aren't threatened is of course a use of resources that could have served a better purpose. My focus here is only the placement of City Walls in critical areas where they are indisputably useful.
You probably already know why this system is the way it is, but let’s review it, anyways. City Walls triple a defender’s defence strength. Early in the game, the strongest unit available is the catapult, and the best defensive-strength unit has a value of 2. The veteran catapult will have a total attack of 9, whereas the defender with city walls will have a defence of 6, before veteran status is accounted for. The catapult, then, can attack and successfully take cities, but not without some effort. Early game, when dealing with city walls, this will be the best way one has of dealing with them (there are other ways, of course, but I will talk about those later). The problem, of course, is that early game doesn’t last very long.
At the second stage of the game, as some people have rightly pointed out, taking a city becomes virtually impossible. Musketeers are part of the problem, but it really kicks in at Riflemen, and especially Alpine Troops. Our unit of power at this stage is the Cavalry or the Cannon, both with strength 8, 12 at veteran status. A Rifleman behind a city wall will have 12 defence before veteran status is even accounted for. In this case, the defender unquestionably has the defensive advantage. This is usually the rationale for teching greatly at this point: First, the computer can’t take your cities for the same reason you can’t take his, and so you hardly need to worry about an invasion, and secondly, if you can’t take his cities, you have nothing better to do. Thus, one of the following strategies ends up being used if one wants to start dominating the planet.
1. Use of diplomats/spies to take out city walls. Of course, spies are going to do this more effectively than diplomats (if you can say that diplomats do this effectively at all), and it usually doesn’t take long for a spy to succeed, and so certainly this will open up the field for invasion. However, the technology for Tactics and the technology for spies are almost entirely distinct from one another, so “teching” is required for this method to succeed.
2. Use of Armor and Howitzers, but mostly Howitzers. Howitzers ignore city walls, and hence, eliminate any problem of defeating the defenders. But even more than the first scenario, much teching is required to achieve these, and so once again we’re on our route of defensive teching again.
3. Shore bombardment from powerful vessels. In particular, one can only talk about Battleships for this, because Coastal Fortresses will make quick work of Cruisers. Even with Battleships, bringing down coastal cities with Fortresses is tedious and can take a bit of time to undo, especially when the computer player is reinforcing the city with forces because of railroads. You need a number of Battleships to pull this off in one turn and get it over with. However, once again, Battleships isn’t the simplest of techs: teching is required. Also, this method gives no indication of what you are to do for inland cities.
4. Just bribe places. No tech needed, but lots of money needed. But tech tends to help get money. On the other hand, Democracies can’t be bribed, and given my setup of the standard teching game, your human opponent will be a Democracy, so this isn’t going to work.
5. The final option is, of course, just to attack with an obscene amount of units and overwhelm the target city. This technically requires no teching, but instead requires a painful amount of production to pull off. I think the general consensus is that teching is just plain a better way to go.
The game then usually ends in some massive, singular use of one or a combination of these. Or just simply spaceship. Certainly, the high scores of many posted players prove that this is the case of how things work: the power graphs for opponents of the winner in question usually only converge to zero starting at some point around the 1900’s, sometimes earlier, sometimes later.
So, to recap, what we have is: early game general play (expansion, defence, and so on), mid-game teching, and end-game mass assault. In other words, the so-called amazing game of Civilization 2 seems, to me, to be horrible stale, uninteresting, and leaves no room for real thought for gameplay, because players are being forcefully guided by certain circumstances in the game to play in a certain way in order to win.
I will briefly overview human VS human play here as well. While on the one hand we can abuse the computers in one way, of course, another human won’t let us do quite the same thing. I hope that most of us are attuned to the quite normal strategy of landing a settler on your enemy’s island, building a city, and immediately speedbuilding City Walls with a few defensive forces. This can be quite a pain (but, mind you, a sabotage by a diplomat always works perfectly in this situation). Unlike when humans play against computers, humans playing against humans have a certain “competition” in mind. We play against computers to have fun, make the highest score, and so on. In playing against a human opponent, we’ll take the game with a higher degree of seriousness, and the “highest score” takes a back seat. What is also unlike the fight against a computer player is that we know fairly well when one side has won and the other has lost. The stronger of the two may not be able to take any cities at a particular time, but I sincerely doubt any of us would think that the stronger of the two would not eventually win, all other things being equal. The bigger empire will tech to Howitzers first - or whatever you like, and end it. Other things I’ve seen myself, and have done to others, simply involve not attacking a city, but rather, simply surrounding the enemy cities and preventing them from using their surrounding squares, and then just waiting the game out.
Someone might say to me, “Well, what’s the problem?” That is, one person wins, and one doesn’t, right? Well, it seems to me that that’s not all there is to it. Let’s back up a moment and take another look at competitive gaming. What are some of the things that people expect when they’re playing? Namely, things like anticipation of things to come, thwarting your enemy by deceit, good use of battle tactics, and certainly, the assumption that the guy in the back isn’t doomed when he is behind. What I am not claiming is that Civilization 2 is lacking these, but I will claim that there is a problem, and here it is.
Tell me, what real strategy is there in being forced to play a game in particular way, lest you lose? You must build city walls, you must expand in a particular way, and you virtually must tech at a certain point in the game to progress. I’m sorry to say it to you, but this doesn’t sound like much of a game to me. Any important use of
decision-making has vanished with the structure of the game, and you can tell this is so by just looking at the experience you get from playing it many times. What is one of the things to expect from a game where you seem to be losing, or your opponent seems to be winning? Many people would contend that it is honorable for the loser to stay and play to allow his opponent to gain his victory fairly, that surrendering defeats the point of the game somehow. I can sympathize with this, let’s take a look. First, the loser can use that time which he is busy getting beaten into submission to learn new things, decipher his opponent’s disposition of strategy, and so on. On the other hand, the winner can feel like he has truly won and accomplished the “entire” game, and can practice playing through the game in an offensive manner. All these things must be practiced.
However, Civilization 2 leaves virtually no room for this. We can say, fairly, at some point, that one side has won. However, there is no means by which the winner can win quickly. Is one to wait 50 turns simply to have the right to do something to one’s opponent? This just seems boring. Our alternative, is of course, to surrender. But when waits are as long as this only to come to what we think is a foregone conclusion, we can end up with the standard jackass of an opponent deciding what our game is going to be for us. We’ve all heard about the guy who is losing making a comeback and winning. I once played a game and did exactly this, and I’ve had it done to me. On the other hand, I’ve played a game where it seemed I was losing, and my opponent wanted me to surrender. I didn’t think I was done for, yet, a comeback could be possible, and respectfully declined and kept playing. My opponent, with time, simply got angry with me, declared himself the winner, and quit. When a game gets as stale as this, that we cannot make any judgments at all on what the future rounds of the game may be like, there is a problem.
But, there is a solution to the problem. And what’s really neat is, it’s unimaginably simple. It hardly takes two lines to solve the problem. First, I will state what it is, and if you think it’s crazy, there’s plenty of rationale that shows it makes perfect sense. And the result of the change is indeed a game with much more flavor.
Change 1: Catapults, Cannons, and Artillery ignore City Walls.
Change 2: City Walls cost 250P to build, maintenance cost of 1.
I earlier mentioned that two of the methods of defeating an enemy city are to, first, overwhelm it, or secondly, surround it with forces and make it essentially useless. If we’re to ignore the units above, can we say that this makes sense? We can say that it can. What can City Walls do for us? Obviously, it prevents stuff from getting in. Ranged weapons, such as arrows, and rifles, if they do get over the wall, don’t necessarily hit anything. Need we be reminded of what happened at the end of the war of 1812 (I think this is the right war…
? The British came to help, made an attack, and lost a massive amount of troops, whereas the American defenders lost around 10 soldiers. Having something to block incoming crap, without question, increases your chances of surviving. However, Civilization 2, which is supposed to be a game based on history, mysteriously misses the ballpark completely when it comes to Catapults, Cannons, and Artillery.
Let us investigate why a Catapult should be able to win a battle against some unit inside a city defended by City Walls. Historically, catapults were used, mostly, for destroying such obstacles, and not so much for troop-killing, although the killing of troops was the end result. Even if our intention isn’t to hit the wall, a catapult lobs its fiery boulder…over the wall! The boulder is big, and it smashes things. It isn’t like a gun that shoots straight at the target, it can avoid the wall completely, and kill the thing that’s behind it. Or in other words, it seems obvious that it negates City Walls. Same so with Cannons and Artillery. Thus, the Catapult wins the day against the defended city. One could argue, of course, that the army inside the city, could exit the city to attack the catapult as it got in range - but this would imply exiting the city walls, and thus making said army vulnerable to attack, and hence, losing. Civilization 2 has no feature to represent this properly, but it would be properly represented by the catapult attacking and winning the combat.
Properly done, of course, in Civilization 2 our goal would be to defend our Catapults, Cannons, and Artillery, so they can reach the destination city. However, it is not necessary for us to be next to the city: without the city walls bonus, 2/3rds strength on one of these units is often enough to defeat the defenders in a city. That is - you can sit away a square, possibly in a fortress, or possibly unnoticed, and make your attack.
On a different note of bad game design, consider the Cannon and Cavalry. Cannon, without the negate city walls bonus, has the same attack as the Cavalry. But the Cavalry moves faster and has higher defence. What on earth would be the point of building a Cannon unless it had the negate city walls bonus? There doesn’t seem to be any. The feature of negate city walls on Catapults, Cannons, and Artillery, just seems to be an overlooked feature in the game. It makes no sense that it was not included.
Now, on to the second claim, that City Walls cost should be increased. As you can see, its cost is the same as that as a small Wonder now. But is this unreasonable? Consider City Walls and a Bank. A Bank is a structure in a city. City Walls are built of stone (or whatever), and encompass the entire city. While on the one hand many real civilizations have made massive creations in short amounts of time (this is indeed what the speedbuild option is for), that doesn’t mean that their projects were any small work. City Walls are big projects. And in the game, they provide an incredible bonus: they make the city virtually immune to non-siege units. Why shouldn’t you pay a large sum for them? A single building ends up regulating your opponent’s entire military structure. This is NOT a small deal. Furthermore, something of that size does require maintenance. Rocks may not break down as fast as the materials of a Bank, but it would be a big stretch to say that they require no maintenance whatsoever. 1 is fair.
What are the results of this change? First, obviously, being a big project, City Walls would not be something to be taken lightly. The city building the structure would be essentially disabled for a while, so the construction must be worth it. Border cities would be the place to put it, as well as any places of importance outside the borders. Not manipulating construction of these properly would cause you to lag behind in the game because you could be doing better things. Furthermore, speedbuilding City Walls in new places makes sense as well. Tell me, when the new city of size 1 grows to size 2, and 3, and so on, does the wall simply inflate in size instantly, without any work done at all? No! This makes no sense. If you’re building a wall, you build it to protect what you intend it to protect. Civilization 2 has no option for prevent city growth if you wall off the city: we normally call this the Fortress improvement. If you’re going to sideswipe the Fortress issue in an area and you want something stronger, which, not to mention, can also produce forces and heal them, you should most certainly be paying a hefty price for its construction.
The last change I’ve made regarding this topic is to the Coastal Fortress, the price which I’ve set to 400 production points. Perhaps a bit much, but upon playing and testing with it, it seems alot more fair than the former value, which makes shore bombardment near-useless.
To sum up: The results of the changes are quite clear. The game does not need to be stale. You can tech if you want, you can be a military aggressor. What is important is that with these simple changes, you can be vulnerable at any point in the game, you need to keep your eye on the ball, because expansion alone won’t necessarily help you if your opponent’s expansion strategy is that of taking your cities. If there’s anything to point out, though, it’s that there’s no reason to cave in to how a game is set up, play it as it is, and live with it. There is a proper way of game design, and CivII’s original design hasn’t lived up to that. Fortunately, there’s a scenario editor that can be used to fix the problem, and the game’s far more interesting since I did.
1. The City Walls Problem
I would like to begin by overviewing the common game of Civilization 2. First I will look at it from the perspective of playing against computers, and then against humans. I will focus only on the gameplay relevant to city use and capture unless I have something else to say that is relevant.
So, a common game against computers, usually pretty simple. One builds fortresses in key places to block off enemy traffic, city walls are built in one’s cities to prevent the computer from ever taking any, some military progress may be made by the human early on, however once we reach the mid-game, the tendency is to tech heavily until late-game techs where the units such as howitzers and armor show up. At this point our military can defeat enemy cities and take over the map with ease. Of course, many games won’t run like this because there’s various ways to play - however, observation over alot of cases, and the general ease at which this particular system works, shows that it is certainly dominant among players.
EDIT: Insert - Terrapin has rightly pointed out that most players don't build City Walls in all their cities, and I have to assume he has said this to me because I didn't make this explicitly clear. My assumption is *NOT* that players build City Walls in every single city they have. Building City Walls in places that aren't threatened is of course a use of resources that could have served a better purpose. My focus here is only the placement of City Walls in critical areas where they are indisputably useful.
You probably already know why this system is the way it is, but let’s review it, anyways. City Walls triple a defender’s defence strength. Early in the game, the strongest unit available is the catapult, and the best defensive-strength unit has a value of 2. The veteran catapult will have a total attack of 9, whereas the defender with city walls will have a defence of 6, before veteran status is accounted for. The catapult, then, can attack and successfully take cities, but not without some effort. Early game, when dealing with city walls, this will be the best way one has of dealing with them (there are other ways, of course, but I will talk about those later). The problem, of course, is that early game doesn’t last very long.
At the second stage of the game, as some people have rightly pointed out, taking a city becomes virtually impossible. Musketeers are part of the problem, but it really kicks in at Riflemen, and especially Alpine Troops. Our unit of power at this stage is the Cavalry or the Cannon, both with strength 8, 12 at veteran status. A Rifleman behind a city wall will have 12 defence before veteran status is even accounted for. In this case, the defender unquestionably has the defensive advantage. This is usually the rationale for teching greatly at this point: First, the computer can’t take your cities for the same reason you can’t take his, and so you hardly need to worry about an invasion, and secondly, if you can’t take his cities, you have nothing better to do. Thus, one of the following strategies ends up being used if one wants to start dominating the planet.
1. Use of diplomats/spies to take out city walls. Of course, spies are going to do this more effectively than diplomats (if you can say that diplomats do this effectively at all), and it usually doesn’t take long for a spy to succeed, and so certainly this will open up the field for invasion. However, the technology for Tactics and the technology for spies are almost entirely distinct from one another, so “teching” is required for this method to succeed.
2. Use of Armor and Howitzers, but mostly Howitzers. Howitzers ignore city walls, and hence, eliminate any problem of defeating the defenders. But even more than the first scenario, much teching is required to achieve these, and so once again we’re on our route of defensive teching again.
3. Shore bombardment from powerful vessels. In particular, one can only talk about Battleships for this, because Coastal Fortresses will make quick work of Cruisers. Even with Battleships, bringing down coastal cities with Fortresses is tedious and can take a bit of time to undo, especially when the computer player is reinforcing the city with forces because of railroads. You need a number of Battleships to pull this off in one turn and get it over with. However, once again, Battleships isn’t the simplest of techs: teching is required. Also, this method gives no indication of what you are to do for inland cities.
4. Just bribe places. No tech needed, but lots of money needed. But tech tends to help get money. On the other hand, Democracies can’t be bribed, and given my setup of the standard teching game, your human opponent will be a Democracy, so this isn’t going to work.
5. The final option is, of course, just to attack with an obscene amount of units and overwhelm the target city. This technically requires no teching, but instead requires a painful amount of production to pull off. I think the general consensus is that teching is just plain a better way to go.
The game then usually ends in some massive, singular use of one or a combination of these. Or just simply spaceship. Certainly, the high scores of many posted players prove that this is the case of how things work: the power graphs for opponents of the winner in question usually only converge to zero starting at some point around the 1900’s, sometimes earlier, sometimes later.
So, to recap, what we have is: early game general play (expansion, defence, and so on), mid-game teching, and end-game mass assault. In other words, the so-called amazing game of Civilization 2 seems, to me, to be horrible stale, uninteresting, and leaves no room for real thought for gameplay, because players are being forcefully guided by certain circumstances in the game to play in a certain way in order to win.
I will briefly overview human VS human play here as well. While on the one hand we can abuse the computers in one way, of course, another human won’t let us do quite the same thing. I hope that most of us are attuned to the quite normal strategy of landing a settler on your enemy’s island, building a city, and immediately speedbuilding City Walls with a few defensive forces. This can be quite a pain (but, mind you, a sabotage by a diplomat always works perfectly in this situation). Unlike when humans play against computers, humans playing against humans have a certain “competition” in mind. We play against computers to have fun, make the highest score, and so on. In playing against a human opponent, we’ll take the game with a higher degree of seriousness, and the “highest score” takes a back seat. What is also unlike the fight against a computer player is that we know fairly well when one side has won and the other has lost. The stronger of the two may not be able to take any cities at a particular time, but I sincerely doubt any of us would think that the stronger of the two would not eventually win, all other things being equal. The bigger empire will tech to Howitzers first - or whatever you like, and end it. Other things I’ve seen myself, and have done to others, simply involve not attacking a city, but rather, simply surrounding the enemy cities and preventing them from using their surrounding squares, and then just waiting the game out.
Someone might say to me, “Well, what’s the problem?” That is, one person wins, and one doesn’t, right? Well, it seems to me that that’s not all there is to it. Let’s back up a moment and take another look at competitive gaming. What are some of the things that people expect when they’re playing? Namely, things like anticipation of things to come, thwarting your enemy by deceit, good use of battle tactics, and certainly, the assumption that the guy in the back isn’t doomed when he is behind. What I am not claiming is that Civilization 2 is lacking these, but I will claim that there is a problem, and here it is.
Tell me, what real strategy is there in being forced to play a game in particular way, lest you lose? You must build city walls, you must expand in a particular way, and you virtually must tech at a certain point in the game to progress. I’m sorry to say it to you, but this doesn’t sound like much of a game to me. Any important use of
decision-making has vanished with the structure of the game, and you can tell this is so by just looking at the experience you get from playing it many times. What is one of the things to expect from a game where you seem to be losing, or your opponent seems to be winning? Many people would contend that it is honorable for the loser to stay and play to allow his opponent to gain his victory fairly, that surrendering defeats the point of the game somehow. I can sympathize with this, let’s take a look. First, the loser can use that time which he is busy getting beaten into submission to learn new things, decipher his opponent’s disposition of strategy, and so on. On the other hand, the winner can feel like he has truly won and accomplished the “entire” game, and can practice playing through the game in an offensive manner. All these things must be practiced.
However, Civilization 2 leaves virtually no room for this. We can say, fairly, at some point, that one side has won. However, there is no means by which the winner can win quickly. Is one to wait 50 turns simply to have the right to do something to one’s opponent? This just seems boring. Our alternative, is of course, to surrender. But when waits are as long as this only to come to what we think is a foregone conclusion, we can end up with the standard jackass of an opponent deciding what our game is going to be for us. We’ve all heard about the guy who is losing making a comeback and winning. I once played a game and did exactly this, and I’ve had it done to me. On the other hand, I’ve played a game where it seemed I was losing, and my opponent wanted me to surrender. I didn’t think I was done for, yet, a comeback could be possible, and respectfully declined and kept playing. My opponent, with time, simply got angry with me, declared himself the winner, and quit. When a game gets as stale as this, that we cannot make any judgments at all on what the future rounds of the game may be like, there is a problem.
But, there is a solution to the problem. And what’s really neat is, it’s unimaginably simple. It hardly takes two lines to solve the problem. First, I will state what it is, and if you think it’s crazy, there’s plenty of rationale that shows it makes perfect sense. And the result of the change is indeed a game with much more flavor.
Change 1: Catapults, Cannons, and Artillery ignore City Walls.
Change 2: City Walls cost 250P to build, maintenance cost of 1.
I earlier mentioned that two of the methods of defeating an enemy city are to, first, overwhelm it, or secondly, surround it with forces and make it essentially useless. If we’re to ignore the units above, can we say that this makes sense? We can say that it can. What can City Walls do for us? Obviously, it prevents stuff from getting in. Ranged weapons, such as arrows, and rifles, if they do get over the wall, don’t necessarily hit anything. Need we be reminded of what happened at the end of the war of 1812 (I think this is the right war…
? The British came to help, made an attack, and lost a massive amount of troops, whereas the American defenders lost around 10 soldiers. Having something to block incoming crap, without question, increases your chances of surviving. However, Civilization 2, which is supposed to be a game based on history, mysteriously misses the ballpark completely when it comes to Catapults, Cannons, and Artillery.Let us investigate why a Catapult should be able to win a battle against some unit inside a city defended by City Walls. Historically, catapults were used, mostly, for destroying such obstacles, and not so much for troop-killing, although the killing of troops was the end result. Even if our intention isn’t to hit the wall, a catapult lobs its fiery boulder…over the wall! The boulder is big, and it smashes things. It isn’t like a gun that shoots straight at the target, it can avoid the wall completely, and kill the thing that’s behind it. Or in other words, it seems obvious that it negates City Walls. Same so with Cannons and Artillery. Thus, the Catapult wins the day against the defended city. One could argue, of course, that the army inside the city, could exit the city to attack the catapult as it got in range - but this would imply exiting the city walls, and thus making said army vulnerable to attack, and hence, losing. Civilization 2 has no feature to represent this properly, but it would be properly represented by the catapult attacking and winning the combat.
Properly done, of course, in Civilization 2 our goal would be to defend our Catapults, Cannons, and Artillery, so they can reach the destination city. However, it is not necessary for us to be next to the city: without the city walls bonus, 2/3rds strength on one of these units is often enough to defeat the defenders in a city. That is - you can sit away a square, possibly in a fortress, or possibly unnoticed, and make your attack.
On a different note of bad game design, consider the Cannon and Cavalry. Cannon, without the negate city walls bonus, has the same attack as the Cavalry. But the Cavalry moves faster and has higher defence. What on earth would be the point of building a Cannon unless it had the negate city walls bonus? There doesn’t seem to be any. The feature of negate city walls on Catapults, Cannons, and Artillery, just seems to be an overlooked feature in the game. It makes no sense that it was not included.
Now, on to the second claim, that City Walls cost should be increased. As you can see, its cost is the same as that as a small Wonder now. But is this unreasonable? Consider City Walls and a Bank. A Bank is a structure in a city. City Walls are built of stone (or whatever), and encompass the entire city. While on the one hand many real civilizations have made massive creations in short amounts of time (this is indeed what the speedbuild option is for), that doesn’t mean that their projects were any small work. City Walls are big projects. And in the game, they provide an incredible bonus: they make the city virtually immune to non-siege units. Why shouldn’t you pay a large sum for them? A single building ends up regulating your opponent’s entire military structure. This is NOT a small deal. Furthermore, something of that size does require maintenance. Rocks may not break down as fast as the materials of a Bank, but it would be a big stretch to say that they require no maintenance whatsoever. 1 is fair.
What are the results of this change? First, obviously, being a big project, City Walls would not be something to be taken lightly. The city building the structure would be essentially disabled for a while, so the construction must be worth it. Border cities would be the place to put it, as well as any places of importance outside the borders. Not manipulating construction of these properly would cause you to lag behind in the game because you could be doing better things. Furthermore, speedbuilding City Walls in new places makes sense as well. Tell me, when the new city of size 1 grows to size 2, and 3, and so on, does the wall simply inflate in size instantly, without any work done at all? No! This makes no sense. If you’re building a wall, you build it to protect what you intend it to protect. Civilization 2 has no option for prevent city growth if you wall off the city: we normally call this the Fortress improvement. If you’re going to sideswipe the Fortress issue in an area and you want something stronger, which, not to mention, can also produce forces and heal them, you should most certainly be paying a hefty price for its construction.
The last change I’ve made regarding this topic is to the Coastal Fortress, the price which I’ve set to 400 production points. Perhaps a bit much, but upon playing and testing with it, it seems alot more fair than the former value, which makes shore bombardment near-useless.
To sum up: The results of the changes are quite clear. The game does not need to be stale. You can tech if you want, you can be a military aggressor. What is important is that with these simple changes, you can be vulnerable at any point in the game, you need to keep your eye on the ball, because expansion alone won’t necessarily help you if your opponent’s expansion strategy is that of taking your cities. If there’s anything to point out, though, it’s that there’s no reason to cave in to how a game is set up, play it as it is, and live with it. There is a proper way of game design, and CivII’s original design hasn’t lived up to that. Fortunately, there’s a scenario editor that can be used to fix the problem, and the game’s far more interesting since I did.
