Bloodlust or Space Race (why not both?) (Civilization 2 (PC))

Member Name: alocin

Product:	Civilization 2 (PC)
Date:	27/04/03 (340 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Completely abrosbing, Take over the world!, Give your cities silly names

Disadvantages: Annoying music, but it can be turned off, Distracts me from revision

This game is just so absorbing you can spend hours and hours and hours playing it - it becomes most tempting when you should be doing something else (eg revision) and you find yourself planning world conquest at the most inconvenient times (eg in exams!). It might look quite old-fashioned now, compared to later editions of the same game and PS2/X-Box/Gamecube console games, but it still offers challenging gameplay and you get to be ruler of the world! Take that Tony Hawk/Mario Sunshine!

The complexity of this game is summed up in the manual - not an instruction leaflet, a 200-page book! If you are new to the game it is sensible to try and read at least some of the book first, or like me and everyone else you can jump in and muddle through. You will take ten times as long to work out how to do things and probably return, admit defeat, and read the start-up tutorial section of the book. Everything then becomes a lot clearer!

Civ is a "God Game" - you control the fate of a civilization from its beginning to when, if you are a success, it covers the earth and you as leader are all powerful. This game appeals to the military dictator in all of us! War is not the only way to win – you can either wipe out all other civilizations or you can try and beat them into space and send colonists to Alpha Centuri to found a new world. You can go for a world the computer sets up for you or you can design your own – down to map creation, nationalities of your opponents, whether the climate is warm or temperate…you get a very unique game to your specification.

In Civ you start out with one little settler (If you are very lucky you might start out with two) with which to found your first city. You can either go with the suggested city name or create your own. Thus I ended up with my capital being named Bobtown (I must not listen to my sister’s suggestions). She has had an entire civilization with all the cities being named aft
er Salmon – Salmontown, Salmonville, Salmonia, New Salmon, Los Salmon. As she demonstrates your madness can be directly transferred to your civilization. You need several cities to really get started and you can end up with hundreds depending on how much you expand.

Cities use the surrounding terrain to generate money, food to grow and “shields” with which to build things. You can build units such as settlers to produce more cities and improve your land, or military units like archers and, as your technology develops, nuclear weapons! You can also build city improvements such as walls to protect yourself, factories to improve production, temples to make your citizens happy. Finally you can build Wonders. These are big, expensive projects but they are very useful. They have different effects – the Great Wall of China makes other civilizations always offer peace in negotiations, the Hoover Dam gives every city a hydro plant, Leonardo’s Workshop updates your units as technology develops, Cure for Cancer makes your citizens happy. Wonders are an aid to a civilization’s development and give you extra points at the end.

You can spend hours and hours watching your cities grow and your territory expand, fighting wars with your neighbours and maybe then building a space ship to take to the stars. You can set levels of hardness – on the easiest you get given advice and your people are generally happy. On harder levels there are roving tribes of barbarians, your people are hard to please and neighbouring civilizations are stronger and cleverer. You can of course take the cowards way out and cheat. Once you cheat you can alter the land around your cities, create units from thin air, destroy competing civilizations and cheat technology advances. Your final score will be a lot lower as a result of cheating, and it is not as much fun as doing it yourself but it is an option.

This game is one of my favourites. It
shows that you do not need flashy graphics if you have a strong idea and good gameplay. The maps may look a bit boring and old fashioned but once you have built an empire from scratch over several days on it you don’t really care. This gives hours of challenging fun and leaves you feeling both that you have achieved something, and that you can take over the world. Not many games leave you with that feeling when you win (except maybe Monopoly). Now if only they produced a version of Civ where you accumulate paper money and little cards with your city names on them…

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