Good video, I enjoyed that (loved the fans fighting meme lol) even if you are mostly tearing my beloved game a new one haha as I am definitely one of the "masochists" in your words lol. I saw you hint in comments that you may do more videos to talk about the ToT scenarios you're playing in the video which I'd definitely like to see too! You're covering some great stuff lately and similar to what I said on your Civ4 Fall From Heaven video I'm working on a full tour videos for Civ2 and ToT too covering many of their awesome mods but am taking forever as unlike you can't restrict myself to 9mins sadly.. I MUST COVER ALL THE THINGS!!!
Heh you're kind of stepping into a mine field here as it's not just Civ2 vs Civ3 differences in play in this video but also regular Civ2 up to Gold Edition (which most people played) vs Test of Time differences. You don't mention MGE vs ToT verbally but as you point out in your video description you're playing vanilla Test of Time while discussing the advantages/disadvantages of Civ2 in general which creates a whole other problem as Test of Time made a number of changes that many Civ2 fans didn't like back in the day. Throne room, City Sky view, High Council advisors, Animating diplomacy heralds and the all mighty wonder videos were removed, compatibility for hundreds of scenarios was dropped for a new format, and the graphics were overhauled with much darker blurry misaligned (as you noted with that ironclad) graphics that many didn't like (although I quite liked the dark moody look). Being yet another re-release of a 4 year old game and put in stores against SMAC & CTP in 1999, ToT was not very popular and it's low sales were another nail in Microprose's coffin. However all that being said most modders and players here actually prefer ToT these days and love it, but only because it's been heavily modified for people to enjoy it's advantages over MGE without tripping over too many of the disadvantages eg throne room, sky view, and some of the video stuff is back, LUA coding support is added and fans have made custom graphics packs as well as some brilliant scenarios for it. So here you won't cop much flak for presenting ToT as the representation of Civ2 but out there in the youtube comments.. oh boy lol!
Speaking of modifying a game to make it more enjoyable I've gotta say I was one of the Civ2 folks posting angry stuff on the old Firaxis forums when Civ3 came out 20 yrs back. The savegame corruption bug in v1.0 was the worst (I lost 2 games to that bug grr) and I hated it's chunky GUI and drab graphics. Everything is so creamy brown and devoid of colour and everything was too big (compared to civ2) on the smaller low res screens we had in those days... I hated it lol! At the end of your video when you take that 'Civ3 tranquility break' it had the opposite effect on me.. yuck lol!!! I must admit after all the patches and addons I did quite enjoy playing a few games of the final Complete edition of Civ3, but the graphics still turned me off so bad and that was it for me really. I never played Civ3 again until a few years ago when I discovered all the amazing stuff going on the CivFanatics Civ3 modding community that's quite similar to some the amazing overhaul stuff done in our Civ2 community too. GUI replacements, full terrain overhauls (Rhye's Greener, Ronnings terrain, and the stunning Ares terrain being my favs), some utterly brilliant total conversion mods/scenarios (Conquests of Might & Magic, Master of Myrror, Star Trek Dominion War, Star Wars Mod Awakens, and Fallout Rebirth to name a few of my favs), and the game's larger assets looks much nicer/smaller on modern HD screens. Totally turned me around on the game, as now that I'm not looking at an eye sore I can actually start to appreciate it's gameplay mechanics and improved graphics engine (when properly used lol). You should have a go at C-evo some time as
I tried it out recently and did a video on it as it's an interesting Frankenstein mishmash of mostly Civ2 mechanics mixed in with SMAC & Civ3 systems shoved in, quite enjoyed it.
