What's the closest game to Civ II after it?

[Giftless]

May I re-iterate how HORRIBLE that game was. I think the CD-Rom might still be rotting on my shelf, but certainly, if it's still there, it hasn't been installed for YEARS!

Nah, CTP had a lot of great features: No settler micro-management, not having to re-assign unit upkeep to particular cities, being able to group units, dynamic sliders for government overclocking, being able to save build-queue templates. Good stuff, but I'm guessing that most players didn't have the patience to really figure out the interface.

 

[Cassius Critzer]

In my opinion, after playing Civ 1, 2, 3, and 4...Civ 3 is superior to Civ 2. Civ 3 is vastly superior to Civ 4. Civ 4 is style over substance. The AI is very limited and there are more than twenty issues with Civ 2 which is detailed at this very forum. Civ 3 addressed that, has 31 nations which can be played on giant maps, has armies of diverse units, a better editor, but has a terrible issue with corruption...which honestly would be the case with global control of cities well beyond anything seen by the Romans, the Spanish,or the Ottoman empires.

Alpha Centuri has a remarkable dystopian storyline concerning every possible group through out human history then inflicting control systems like religion, economics, environmentalism, military occupation, etc on an alien planet. It featured a rather unique idea of building user configurable units as well...which is very open ended.

You should try playing it even though it came out so long ago.

 

[Patine]

In my opinion, after playing Civ 1, 2, 3, and 4...Civ 3 is superior to Civ 2. Civ 3 is vastly superior to Civ 4. Civ 4 is style over substance. The AI is very limited and there are more than twenty issues with Civ 2 which is detailed at this very forum. Civ 3 addressed that, has 31 nations which can be played on giant maps, has armies of diverse units, a better editor, but has a terrible issue with corruption...which honestly would be the case with global control of cities well beyond anything seen by the Romans, the Spanish,or the Ottoman empires.

Alpha Centuri has a remarkable dystopian storyline concerning every possible group through out human history then inflicting control systems like religion, economics, environmentalism, military occupation, etc on an alien planet. It featured a rather unique idea of building user configurable units as well...which is very open ended.

You should try playing it even though it came out so long ago.

I have tried both of them. The immense difficulty with editing the graphics and the lack of any kind of events or triggers mechanism for scenario building caused me to eventually lose interest and return to Civ2 (notably ToT).

 

[Cassius Critzer]

Not only that, but apparently in Civ 2 you can build submaps so you can battle it out off the main map. That feature was turned off for Civ 3.

Civ 3 has some very fine animations versus the static Civ 2 animations. And the Civ 3 library of unique units is huge by comparison.

Yes, a scripting language such that money can be added or units show up, or achievements are made by conquering a specific city is a unique feature of Civ 2.

The best aspect of Civ 3 was altering how long it took to gain specific tech levels and armies and composition of armies.

When Civ 4 came out, many of us were hugely disappointed. I had expected some tactical elements as a RTS and using terrain to actually fight with army composition. Instead it was greatly simplified ie dumbed down.

 

[Volcanon]

Civ 3 and 5 are both quite good with all of the expansions. The "base" versions are not quite so good (Civ 5 especially was released as essentially a beta).
Alpha Centauri is awesome.

 

[McMonkey]

I recently purchased a copy of an old strategy game on Steam called Hearts of Iron (possibly HoI 2 & the version with WWI campaigns included). The map is already divided up into regions, so there is no city founding like in Civ2, but you can improve your territories, develop new technologies, fiddle with the tax/science/luxury rate & build units. If you enjoy a large scale detailed strategic game then it's worth a go, especially due to it's cheap price.

For many years I had been interested in the hypothetical question of how Czechoslovakia would have fared in 1938 if France & Britain had not folded at Munich. Could the plucky Czechs have held onto their mountain fortresses for long enough for their allies to mobilise and march into Germany while the Wehrmacht was battling the Czech bunkers? With HoI I could try this out. I also had an excellent game building a WW1 - WW2 spanning Bulgarian Empire, fighting against the Serbs, Greeks, Turks, Romanians, French & British. Far fetched stuff, but really challenging & fun. The beauty of the game is that you can start from several different dates & play as any country in the world. When I next play I might try out the Austro-Hungarian Empire in WW1.

Of course it's not a patch on Civ2

 

[Cassius Critzer]

Medieval 2 Total War Kingdoms is configurable in every possible way, is both strategic and RTS, has an immense variability in battle maps, etc. However it is terribly limited in terms of available unit numbers and number of provinces. Subsequent incarnations are worse. The greatest aspect is actually applying tactics during battle where it is very possible for a much smaller force to use ambushes, loss of morale by killing the general, using elevation for defense and range of missile weapons, etc.

The best game would be Civ3 levels of units through technology on a Medieval 2 RTS engine.

The worst strategy games use nothing more than straight calculations based upon unit strength and terrain. That is nonsense. The history of war demonstrates that leadership and devotion of the soldiers, their morale, and fighting fitness are the main influences that affect outcomes. Not meaningless numbers.

 

[Patine]

Medieval 2 Total War Kingdoms is configurable in every possible way, is both strategic and RTS, has an immense variability in battle maps, etc. However it is terribly limited in terms of available unit numbers and number of provinces. Subsequent incarnations are worse. The greatest aspect is actually applying tactics during battle where it is very possible for a much smaller force to use ambushes, loss of morale by killing the general, using elevation for defense and range of missile weapons, etc.

The best game would be Civ3 levels of units through technology on a Medieval 2 RTS engine.

The worst strategy games use nothing more than straight calculations based upon unit strength and terrain. That is nonsense. The history of war demonstrates that leadership and devotion of the soldiers, their morale, and fighting fitness are the main influences that affect outcomes. Not meaningless numbers.

I loath the Total War games and their maker, Electronic Arts. I gave Civ3 a very good try (I still own the disks - the game's just not installed at the moment), and I also tried Call to Power. Neither at all stuck with me. I quite like Alpha Centauri and even bought a GoG version of the game, but it's scope is quite limited, except for much greater civ/faction customization than Civ2 without going overboard.

 

[Cassius Critzer]

As dated as the graphics are in Civ 2, as far as I know, it is the very best strategy game that will run under emulation on an Android tablet.

I don't get the hate on Shogun Total War 1, Rome Total War 1, and M2TW. These three games are among the finest PC games ever made and are scored that way due to strategy plus RTS tactics. On top of which they are designed to be modded. Then characters can gain and lose attributes by your actions and inactions and are not essentially immortal and vanilla as they are in Civ 2 and 3.

If I could play those five games on my tablet, I seriously doubt there would be much need to buy other games except for a space strategy/RTS game like Sins of the Solar Empire.

Galactic Civilizations 2, in all its versions like Twilight of the Arnor, reminds me of Civ2.

 

[Cassius Critzer]

The antecedents for the original Civ1 go back to the seventies with board wargames largely played by veterans. You know, Avalon Hill games like Blitzkrieg and Diplomacy. Diplomacy was simplistic but marked by a string of broken promises as you relied upon the ships of others to rapidly transport your armies. Then they would renege and leave your hapless armies stranded.

That led to SSI (Strategic Simulations Inc) releasing true turn based strategy games with tiny runs of 50,000 or less copies sold to that niche of veterans. You know how difficult it is to get four married husbands together to play multiplayer? Well the same was true for military board games lasting 12+ hours and often leaving the board untouched until the next time everyone could play. SSI had the first computer opponents.

The Civ series normalized the genre as teenagers and ladies and previously uninterested folks were daunted by mixing with unknown soldiers.

Some of theses SSI games were Dos and Windows 3.1 and Win 95 so I'll wager you could play them on Android tablets and Ipads. You would use dosbox or exagear or Wine's emulator to get them running.

 

[Patine]

The antecedents for the original Civ1 go back to the seventies with board wargames largely played by veterans. You know, Avalon Hill games like Blitzkrieg and Diplomacy. Diplomacy was simplistic but marked by a string of broken promises as you relied upon the ships of others to rapidly transport your armies. Then they would renege and leave your hapless armies stranded.

That led to SSI (Strategic Simulations Inc) releasing true turn based strategy games with tiny runs of 50,000 or less copies sold to that niche of veterans. You know how difficult it is to get four married husbands together to play multiplayer? Well the same was true for military board games lasting 12+ hours and often leaving the board untouched until the next time everyone could play. SSI had the first computer opponents.

The Civ series normalized the genre as teenagers and ladies and previously uninterested folks were daunted by mixing with unknown soldiers.

Some of theses SSI games were Dos and Windows 3.1 and Win 95 so I'll wager you could play them on Android tablets and Ipads. You would use dosbox or exagear or Wine's emulator to get them running.

Oh, I know about those old monster chit-and-hex games. I used to own a few by SSI when I was younger, and ones on very similar models by GDW and Victory Games. I could never get anyone willing to actually play with me though, and ended up selling them to a local used games, comics, and collectibles store.

 

[Cassius Critzer]

Gal Civ 2 is sort of like Civ 2. What ends up happening is establishing colonies on various planets and since few are perfect, then you have to terraform them in order to achieve the most production. This means churning out endless types of ships to colonize new worlds, mine asteroids, transport colonists, fight in orbit to protect the planet, starships exploring, troop ships to invade worlds, and galaxy class warships. It is made to be modable and so right away a Star Trek mod was made with the Klingons, Cardassians, Borg, Romulans, Ferengi, Federation, etc. All had ship designs that were meticulously made to duplicate Star Trek canon. I would bet a lot of folks who like Civ 2 and 3 would enjoy it. It seems overpriced at Gog since it dates back to 2007. You probably could pick it up cheap.

 

[Cassius Critzer]

Only the game designers of Gal Civ2 would know for sure, but what it appears they did was take the best features of Alpha Centari's open ended unit design coupled with Civ2 standard tech tree progression. Then rather than a simplistic animation, the player may choose to watch the battle unfold between units on open space, in orbit, or in a land invasion.

In the above modded version of Gal Civ2, playing as the Borg you could devise some wickedly complex fully armored and shielded assault cube with a blistering array of more than five weapon types.

Sins of the Solar Empire evolved into complex animations showing huge space battles which are largely just animations without the player actually doing anything more than developing the ships and deploying the ships in formations.

In my opinion the Civ franchise both built up the user base to support turn based strategy games for a wide audience and then laid the ground work for all the games that followed the trail that had been blazed.