Civilization ii gold iso

Having just wrapped up involvement with the Alpha Centauri beta program only a week or so before receiving my copy of Civ2 Gold for this review, I found it impossible not to compare the two in great detail.

While this is supposed to be a review of Civ2 Gold and not a preview or review of Alpha Centauri , I'll warn you right now that I don't think I'll be able to discuss Civ2 Gold without mentioning the game that many people think of as "Civilization 3".

In the end, though, there are no real losers in this comparison - it's a great blessing to strategy gamers everywhere and perhaps a big problem for their employers and spouses that both of these games hold up so very well. Having heard plenty of words like "ugly" and "fiasco" and several not fit for a family publication used to describe the original CivNet multiplayer adaptation, I was a little concerned when I popped open my copy of Civilization 2 Multiplayer Gold.

Loyal Civ2 fans need not worry, however - in addition to the full single-player game and both expansion packs, Civ2 Gold contains a very stable and playable multiplayer component. I'll try to focus on the multiplayer aspects, since Civ2 Gold in single-player mode is essentially still just a very clean and very complete version of the strategy game that GDR's strategy editor Tim Chown once called "the best PC strategy game that money can buy".

Two years later it's still an excellent bargain. Far and away most important thing to note about the Civ2 Gold Multiplayer edition is that it is still very much a turn-based game. When you play a game of multiplayer Civ2 , you will take turns in fullest sense: there will be a period of time when you are not able to move your units because you are waiting for the other players to move theirs. Any changes you make won't take effect until later, however, because in your empire things only really happen on your turn.

Somewhat surprisingly, this works out pretty well. I played a large number of multiplayer games on a LAN and found that for three players or fewer you rarely find yourself watching the timer and waiting for your turn. Before long you grow accustomed to moving your units during your turn and handling everything else - including diplomacy - during someone else's.

Civilization is such a complex game world that there is almost always something useful to look at or do while you are waiting. It's a slightly different story as you add more human competitors - with four players you may start to find yourself idle for a few seconds between your turns at bat, and with a full seven human players the game may seem a little slow depending on the time limit for the impatient gamers among us.

When I did find myself becoming a little restless I usually came to the conclusion that, well. I could really find something worthwhile to do like spending a little extra time in the Civilopedia to figure out what sorts of research would get me to that next crucial Wonder of the world.

In a challenging game filled with human players, every moment you spend in planning between turns usually pays off. All in all, the turn system works well enough that it's renewing my interest in the multiplayer aspects of Heroes of Might and Magic III , which is allegedly going to have a turn-based system very similar to the one found in Civ2 Gold.

When I say that Civilization is a complex game world, though, it's definitely a relative sort of complexity. Victory in Civ2 sometimes involves the launch of a spaceship - a spaceship that in some senses flies right out of your game of Civilization 2 and right into a game of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. While Alpha Centauri bears a family resemblance to its predecessor and may not represent a four light-year leap beyond the gameplay found in Civ2 Gold , it is a substantial evolutionary leap indeed.

Anyone who doesn't believe me should spend some time in the Alpha Centauri system and then try a return trip to planet Earth - you'll realize just how much you've changed since you've been away. In some respects Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri is one of the most ambitious multiplayer strategy games ever released.

Unlike Civ2 Gold , Alpha Centauri was built from the ground up to be a multiplayer game. It offers up a host of gameplay enhancements and a wide variety of fresh design elements while at the same time allowing all players to take their turns simultaneously. This is somewhat similar to the simultaneous-turn mode employed in Warlords III. So even the though the game is considerably more complex than Civilization 2 - you'll find yourself dealing with 3D terrain, a complex sociological model and custom unit designs, among other things - you'll find yourself waiting even less in multiplayer mode than you would in a game of Civ2 Gold.

I can only imagine how much more intricate the programming model must be for a game design of this complexity. After playing many hours of Alpha Centauri , Civilization2 Gold Multiplayer seems a little bit like "strategy lite".

Lite or not, though, Civilization 2 in multiplayer mode is still a lot of fun. The multiplayer-specific portions of the interface are pretty basic, but they are solid and they work right out of the box. Saving and loading works for multiplayer games, and if the host crashes then the AI takes over the player slot and server duties are passed on to someone else. You can also re-load the game at any time and swap a human in for AI players, which means that someone who crashes and has the AI take over for him has a chance to join back in right away.

Considering the included expansion packs and the excellent single-player value, though, that's still worth the price of admission. Internet play is sponsored on the MSN Gaming Zone - I haven't played on the net but when I checked the site it was midnight west coast, USA and there were at least 20 people still playing. Experienced players do, however, place great emphasis on gaining the innocuous sounding Woman's Suffrage development, as it's a big help in a democracy.

Having this wonder enables the men to go off to war while the women continue to work in the factories without missing their home comforts. Fundamentalism seems a silly thing to get into, but if you use it in the later stages when you have already made lots of scientific advances it can make for a powerful strategy.

With this form of rule you can fight a very effective war against all the other governments and steal their technology. Fanatic armies aided by fast railways can overwhelm democracies because of the rate at which they can produce armaments. Once you have reduced the opposition to a manageable size, you can sell off your defensive structures and use the cash to dispense bread and circuses.

This will cheer up the proletariat on your inevitable return to the democracy, and this is important because you'll need it to get into the space race. It is a truism that "Diplomacy is war carried on by other means".

It's essential that you exchange diplomats with your opponents as this will enable you to examine the opposition's cities, find out how powerfully they are defended, and locate the sites of any wonders. You may be a peace-loving democracy, but should you decide that it's in your interest to take a big leap forward by acquiring a wonder without paying for it, then you'll want to know where to strike.

You can also spot most of the big wonders by selecting the 'Top 5 Cities' option and seeing what's built there. The second oldest profession is that of the Spy. Diplomats and Spies are two of the more powerful pieces on the board, and when used wisely they can save you stacks of time and money.

When you consider how long it takes to acquire certain technology, it's obvious that it can be much more profitable to simply send in one of these unscrupulous characters to steal the work of others. Of course, there's a good chance that you'll suffer retribution, but if you're secure behind walls and cold steel it's usually worth the risk.

Be aware that it's as easy to lose knowledge as it is to gain it. One particularly sickening way for the stinger to get stung is by seizing an enemy city which you do not have the strength to retain. Should the enemy counter-attack and regain the city, you'll find that they will also grab a piece of your technology.

A moment's greed on your part could be a costly mistake. The speed by which you can move goods and troops around the map can mean the difference between winning and losing. Continents tend to be awkward shapes bisected by frustrating blobs of water which slow everything down.

However, there are two straight and uninterrupted strips of polar ice which straddle your world, and these are custom-made to take high-speed railway lines. It's a cunning strategy to construct a railway track around the polar strip with suitable junction points down into strategic continents. Place factory cities near the junctions and you will be able to construct and transport men and goods at high speed around the world.

So how are you going to play it? Are you going to take your mother's advice and study, work hard, and get your reward in heaven?

Or are you going to lie, cheat and steal so you can end up on the Queen's Birthday Honours List? Heed the Troubleshooter's motto: "Go for it. For when you die, the bastard with the most money wins! It's slow-paced. It's devoid of any action. It's plain as far as graphics go.

What is it? Only the finest turn-based strategy game ever to hit the PC in this writer's humble opinion. Civilization II has won countless awards from the PC press and is generally considered one of the best computer games period, strategy or otherwise. Now, PlayStation owners will be treated to a console version that thankfully, isn't dummied down in the least bit.

Civ II is an empire-building game of epic proportions. You start in the year B. Once this capital city is in place, you can choose what resources its inhabitants will work on, based on the surrounding environments mountains are good for mining, oceans are good for fishing, grasslands are good for growing food, etc.

While keeping your populace happy and fed, you'll also have to worry about expanding your empire beyond that initial city, while keeping a strong military presence and making sure you're keeping up with the rest of the world in terms of scientific know-how. This scientific know-how will prevent your empire from falling by the wayside in the game's ultimate goal: to either conquer all of civilized Earth or to be the first nation to colonize another planet.

In the beginning, you will start with some basic knowledge to keep your primitive society alive, such as irrigation to help grow food or pottery to help build granaries to store food. In the end, you will have to take your civilization through more than 6, years of scientific advances, ranging from discovery of the wheel to bronze and iron working to reading and writing to gunpowder to steam power to gasoline combustion to solar and nuclear power.

These discoveries will allow you to build special structures, including certain "Wonders of the World" like the Great Wall of China or something less grand, like a simple temple for people to worship at or a sewer system to help keep your cities clean or a SAM missile battery to keep the skies friendly. You will also learn to create military units ranging from the chain-mailed pikemen to musketeers to modern-day stealth bombers. Overall, you will be working with a knowledge tree of close to 90 branches of science, each allowing you access to a multitude of different structures and units.

Like we said: epic. You can play Civilization II any number of ways. You can expand quietly, making peace with the other CPU-controlled civilizations, or you can overrun them with brute force. Just make sure you don't fall too far behind in the scientific race. Civilization II will not sell as well in the action-oriented console market as it did on the PC side, but that doesn't mean it's not a game worth checking out.

If you're the patient, thinking type and you're into strategy games, you owe it to yourself to check out this masterpiece. Even the kick-ass music is intact. It's looking good so far. But where's the little box that shows how close you are to completing a unit or building?

What a silly little oversight by the developers. And what's up with the instant advice? It isn't very helpful. Why is it telling me I should build a temple to make my people content, when they are already content? All the marvelous and epic gameplay from the PC title is obviously intact but if you own the PC version, you have zero reason to get this one I've discovered gunpowder and my musketeers are making their way toward my enemies to the south.

Unfortunately, the Al "thinking" times are getting really long. I have to go to work. But I haven't slept or showered Ah, maybe I'll take a sick day and go to sleep now. Sure, just after a few more turns This is the perfect evangelist product for this kind of game on consoles. It may not have much superficial glitz or eye-candy, but the gameplay is absorbing and addictive and probably has more longevity than any other game on the system.

If you've ever wanted to get into more cerebral strategy gaming, try this. You'll lose days of your life. Don't be intimidated by the sizable manual, the detailed charts and the words "strategy game. Civ II is grand: You start out in ancient, primitive times with nothing and advance through the ages until you've learned space flight.

Taking a nation through the paces of civilized history is something you just can't do in your average video game. Patient gamers should check it out. I'm totally exhausted.

I've played Civilization II every day for this past month and I still get amazed by the inner complexities of the societies created. I was a moderate fan of the first game, but the attention to the computer's Al is so much better now. Your actions have deep impact over the cultures you encounter.

It should be said you'll need to invest a lot of time into this game, but your patience will be rewarded. Civilization II took strategy gaming by storm earlier this year, and now MicroProse is back with an add-on disc jammed with intriguing new scenarios. The original Civ II challenged gamers to take on the role ot the ruler of an empire, managing its politics, sciences, and social structure with the ultimate goal of taking over the world. Civ II Scenarios loads you up with 20 new plots, including the Iranian hostage crisis, the American Civil War, a futuristic holocaust and alien invasion, and the rampages of Alexander the Great and Napoleon.

Activision has converted the award-winning PC game to the PlayStation platform. Most of us have devoted hours sitting in front of the PC trying to build up our empire and enticing our subjects to give us a better throne room. But those days were dealt a death blow years ago by real-time strategy games like Warcraft , Starcraft and Age of Empires.

After the cities have grown to a reasonable size, it takes what seems like forever for the computer to complete its moves. I recommend having a book handy so that you can finish a chapter or two before it becomes your turn again. I found the graphical interface extremely clunky. Once a unit was selected, the only way I could get it unselected so that I could move to other areas was to bring up the map view and then dismiss it. It would have been nice if the game didn't make you perform two operations for something that should only take one.

The PlayStation paddle comes equipped with enough buttons that this should be uncalled for. The game also seems to screech with glee each time it thwarts your attempts to move around and view the layout of the enemy cities and troops. Eventually I got so tired of trying to scope out the area that I just moved my troops in the general direction of where I thought I remembered seeing the enemy. The reason Civilization II on the PC became the number one selling game in history was because of the rich choices of civilizations, troops and strategy you have at your fingertips.

The game tests your ability to manage numerous troops. Civilization II does take a whopping 10 blocks of memory per game, which I suppose can be attributed to all the statistics it has to hold. I have a pretty large TV, or at least it felt that way when my brother and I carried it in. But I obviously should have invested in a movie theatre-sized screen if I wanted to play this game. The graphics are too small, the user interface is clunky, and Activision missed a golden opportunity to take the best-selling game of all time to the next level.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it took a while, but Civilization II is finally out. And yes, most of the neat little improvements, bells, and whistles that were promised are in the final version. However, that may not be as many as you are expecting. While Civ II is indeed a wonderful game, it is important that it be presented as simply the next generation of Civilization , not a radically new product. Microprose has presented it as such, and to coin a phrase, if you liked the original you will love the sequel.

Oh, what's Civilization , you ask? In case you have been in solitary confinement or were raised by wolves, Civ is quite possibly the best game of its genre of all time. In it, you are in charge of the management of a civilization hence the name , deciding how to expand, develop and progress. At first thought, it sounds kind of like history homework. However, if you give it a chance, it really grows on you as millions of Civ addicts undoubtedly know.

In fact, I was amazed at the number of sleepless nights I spent trying to develop gunpowder or secure the Arabian peninsula. In fact, I don't remember ever telling myself "just five more minutes This is where Civ II really delivers. While there may be flaws in its execution, in general buying Civ II for a Civ or SimCity junkie is like passing bootleg around at the local AA meeting.

It is quite addictive. Again, this depends on the type of game you like. If you prefer a warm shotgun over an Aegis cruiser or would rather study the finer points of using the BFG than negotiate with Mongol tribes, this game may not be for you.

But then again, it just might. If you have at least a passive interest in simulation, development, strategy, history or the like, I recommend this game.

For discussions please civit the Civ2 modding forum , and for other scenarios, please also check the Scenario League , another section of the forum devoted to scenarios. Civ2 Gold lets you play nearly all the scenarios in the collection. The categories below are the outdated old download database. Not all items have been transferred to the current download database.