comparing civ 2 and civ 4

[Nicol.Bolas]

Civ2 and Civ4 are the series parts I know the best.
Civ2 was my first game and I played it as a kid.
Didn't play Civ3 much.

I recently played few civ2 games and I had some fun. (my interest was stirred by the 10 year old game of civ2, which was also featured in the civ 2 gotm

I also play these scenarios for civ 2 recently:
age of dinosaurs, midgard, aliens, after the apocalypse, master of magic, new world

This is what I can say for civ2:
+ very fast gameplay compared to sluggish civ4 (meant in technology terms, since I have and old PC and not enough money for a new one)
+ simple gameplay (no GP, culture, borders, resources, improvements)
+ fun combat
+ unit placement in terrain does play a role due to zones of control
+ stack of doom is stack of the doomed (you can stack units, but whole stack is lost if the defender losses)
+ has dinosaurs
+ has fanatics and fundamentalism
+ does not have slavery
+ has crusaders
+ no spy specialists

this is what i didn´t like in civ 2:
- is too huge (even small map means hundreds of cities)
- infinite city sprawl is the best strategy
these two things make the game kinda boring and tiring to play
- bad micromanagement - and lots of it due to 2 above points

so I would like next series game to step back a bit and have fundamentalism and crusaders and dinosaurs


some more stuff:

felt more epic in civ2:
- building the spaceship (you could build various sizes of the ship, to affect capacity, speed, reliability and thus score)
- democracy/republic "civics" - big bonus, but you really had to "care" for them to keep them
- air combat - I never really got the taste for aircombat system which begin in civ3 and was followed to civ4

interesting, not necessarily better or worse:
- unit support system (unit supported from its home city by hammers, home city concept)
- caravan system
- war unhappyness - based on the home city concept, away units from that city makes citizens unhappy. (but could be abused via shakespeares theatre which does the same thing)

way better in civ 4:
- less grind
- due to no engineer transformation (aka terraforming), you have to work with the land you have, I like this. more variety in tile improvements
- AI, compared to civ4, civ2 feels like a sandbox game. AI was improved hugely in all aspects: combat, expansion etc. this might seem obvious, but is there as much improvement in AI from civ3 to civ5?
- diplomacy system , in civ2, AI sneak attacked any time one of its units met a weaker unit
- culture system, removal of troops before war.

 

[Drakarska]

Advisors. I want the drunk general back singing "no complaints Sire" during war time.

 

[TheMulattoMaker]

Advisors. I want the drunk general back singing "no complaints Sire" during war time.

And the foxy foreign affairs advisor who threw down her hat every time somebody pissed her off.

 

[Dida]

I agree that spy was handled poorly in civ4, the whole system seems contrived. Spy in civ5 was better.

 

[gps]

I really liked to play Civ 2 in it's time. When it was created it was a really good game. But compared to Civ 4 the AI is much worse, diplomacy is much worse, 2 has more silly exploits. And in 4 I don't have to constantly consider which city my new troops should feed on or how to get rid of silly AI troops blocking valuable city tiles. Whenever I try a game of Civ 2 nowadays it's those points that consistently put me off again...
That for me is the great thing about 4. It still feels and plays a lot like 1 and 2 did, but in generall improved the things I liked and removed what I didn't like. However 2 still has the best and most atmospheric wonder movies, advisors are a nice touch - and where are my fanatics? So annoying, but once they are gone, you instantly miss them...

 

[ChaosSlayer]

Civ2 was a good game in its time, and I enjoyed the custom scenarios and even made one myself. Custom graphics was very easy to make since it was all in flat pixels.
I too enjoyed to watch and laugh at the advisory council.

But compared to Civ4 its so horribly obsolete, I see no point of ever going back to it.
And today there are insane number of mods, scenarios and custom graphics for Civ4 too. Many times more than it ever were for Civ2.

 

[Funky]

I played Civ 2 ridiculously much, probably not as much as Civ 4, but definitely a lot more than one should. The last game I played lasted for many months. I played the Europe map and with save/reload I conquered the world with a single horseback rider till there was only one Civ left that didn't even have a city, because I pushed and trapped his settler on an ice tile, where it then stood forever.
That's when the actual game started; gradually I filled every gap with a city, using my atlas to give each one its correct name according to where it was on the map. With my legions of settlers I terraformed every single tile into grasland (including the entire Himalaya, the Sahara desert, and the Siberian tundra), and built farms everywhere. Eventually my 256 cities were all around size 40 and had every single building, and I was researching future tech 150 or something. My turns consisted of moving dozens of settlers to terraform the remaining non-grasland tiles, as had been the case for the last 1000 turns...

Back then I was a nerdy teen (evidently), and though I apparently was hopelessly hooked on Civ 2, I doubt I would get much fun out of it now. Not that I've lost all my nerdiness, but after Civ 4 I assume Civ 2 would feel much too simple and old.

 

[TrentonC]

Sounds like you need a civ 4 mod

 

[Culture Bomb]

dinosaurs

Yeah!

I also liked the alien invasion scenario/mod.

 

[jjkrause84]

I agree that spy was handled poorly in civ4, the whole system seems contrived. Spy in civ5 was better.

In Civ 4 you could:

poison water
cause city revolt
pillage plots
destroy buildings
steal techs (if I recall)
undertake counter-spy activity
sabotage production


In Civ 5 you can steal techs, make city-states like you more ('rig elections'), do counter-spy....that's about it. The fact that you can't choose to invest more in spies (i.e. that everyone gets the same number) also means there's no joy in investing the time and resources into spying, with no guarantee of success, and launch an important sabotage campaign right be fore invasion (for example).

 

[jjkrause84]

Civ 2 is stil a game that gives me 'just one more turn' syndrom, BAD. It is the game that launched me into the Civ series, and into history, for that matter.

 

[SquirrelCensus]

In Civ2 I liked that you could set any size map and any amount of players.
I liked building Da Vinci's Workshop & Adam Smith's Bank.
I liked getting a "rank" after every save & quit.
I liked capturing barbarian leaders and getting the ransom.
I liked upgrading my throne room.

I miss these things, but these days, when I'm playing CivIV, I like the improved AI/diplomacy, resource management, and civics. It is what it is.

 

[jarhead_leif]

When was civ2 released? I wasn't born yet, I think.

 

[Drakarska]

When was civ2 released? I wasn't born yet, I think.

ROFL! considering that only 2 of my 4 boys remember Civ II, tyvm for whapping me upside the head with my age. I'm gonna go have some warm milk now... :wink:

 

[Nicol.Bolas]

I also think the stack system is good - stack units - if you like, but you lose the whole stack aka "26 units vere lost" pop up message

 

[nerdfighter13]

Civ 2 was the first I played, and it is my favorite. The scenarios were fantastic, and I liked how combat was more complex with zones of control and entire stack being destroyed if one unit was. It gave a purpose to forts that I don't think is there in civ 4.

 

[Nicol.Bolas]

I played Civ 2 ridiculously much, probably not as much as Civ 4, but definitely a lot more than one should. The last game I played lasted for many months. I played the Europe map and with save/reload I conquered the world with a single horseback rider till there was only one Civ left that didn't even have a city, because I pushed and trapped his settler on an ice tile, where it then stood forever.
That's when the actual game started; gradually I filled every gap with a city, using my atlas to give each one its correct name according to where it was on the map. With my legions of settlers I terraformed every single tile into grasland (including the entire Himalaya, the Sahara desert, and the Siberian tundra), and built farms everywhere. Eventually my 256 cities were all around size 40 and had every single building, and I was researching future tech 150 or something. My turns consisted of moving dozens of settlers to terraform the remaining non-grasland tiles, as had been the case for the last 1000 turns...

Back then I was a nerdy teen (evidently), and though I apparently was hopelessly hooked on Civ 2, I doubt I would get much fun out of it now. Not that I've lost all my nerdiness, but after Civ 4 I assume Civ 2 would feel much too simple and old.

i cant explain why, but i am playing civ2 now... yeah it is old and simple... i guess i will play a few games and then get bored but still... also the scenarios are fun..... although the horrible ai makes the senarios not so good....

i kinda view civ2 ai as barbarians in civ4

 

[stoferb]

I spent insane amounts of time playing civ2. It was fun in it's simplicity. Even if there was hundreds of cities I pretty much had the same build order in all of them and just kept several cities at the same stage of infrastructure (and it was mostly building caravans anyway). One game I tried to delay space and see just how big population you can get. Spent more time trying to calculate that (as the counter stops at 320 million) than actual playing and it was a nightmare of moving around food caravans. The micromanagement of a 100+ cities empire always became tedious. And individually moving around the 50 or so units you needed for a late-game full-scale war was a pain in the ass.

I do miss spying in civ 2 though. It's really the only thing civ4 failed to improve.

 

[Civking5]

There was one feature in civ2 that I liked a lot. The ability to transform tiles with engineers. Unfortunately this was removed in later civ games.

 

[Tatran]

The civ2 wonder movies + music were so good.
One of the reasons to go back and play a few games.

And the space win movie + music can't be better done.