Customer Reviews

Call to Power 2

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I am sure a lot of players might disagree with this review but CTP 2 really has taken some steps in the right direction. If you liked CTP (1) game play interface then you will like this sequel.

The following are the major changes:

Combat - A very important change is the addition of an armor attribute to each unit. This means that the phalanx will no longer be able to stand toe to toe with a tank - it simply won't be able to do much damage even if it hits.

Stealth - Spies will let you see all approaching hidden units. While you'll still need the appropriate defense team to stop the approaching stealth unit

New units, Wonders, and Advances CTP 2 includes the City Planner, an advanced settler option that allows users to build cities that come with basic buildings already included and that have a higher population. The game also has loads of new sea units.

Diplomacy - This area is my favorite in the sequel. A completely new diplomatic model allows you to offer proposals and negotiate counter-proposals with other empires. React in friendly or hostile tones as you confront distinct opponents with more in-depth AI personalities for even more realism. Utilize all-new diplomatic options such as Borders to help define the geopolitical situation. For example, you could threaten to attack a country if they don't give you their maps.

Advances - The game will also include new Wonders of the World as well as new "Feats of Wonder." These are one time, temporary bonuses that you get for performing certain actions. For example, if you're the first person to circumnavigate the globe, you get a sea movement bonus for a few turns.

Other important changes in CTP2 are that the Space playing level has been completely removed and the game lasts from 4000BC to 2300AD (instead of 3000AD of CTP).

Overall, what are you waiting for?! Go get it...

Anjan

Personally, I feel ripped off for having wasted money on this product. Like Call to Power 1, the game has some interesting features, particularly the variety of stealth units. However, the game suffers from a number of MAJOR PROBLEMS. Not only does it appear that the designers never playtested this game, it's clear that they never went back and played the first Call to Power either; many glaring problems from the original are still here. The worst problems:

1. WAY TOO MANY BUGS: The game crashes often. Also, there's a problem with save game files being corrupted that gets progressively worse as the game progresses. -- I finally gave up after a game that I had spent 25 hours on would not reload, even though I had EIGHT seperate save game files from the last EIGHT turns. Every single one of them was corrupted.

There are also numerous less catastrophic, but more consistent flaws in the programming. For example, stealth units are supposed to be clandestined. When you are attacked by one, you don't know who sent it. The computer players, however, always do, and immediately declare war in response to any stealth attack by you.

2. BADLY WRITTEN DOCUMENTATION: Quite frankly, this is the worst rulebook I have ever seen. It's long winded and repetitive, yet still lacks many key pieces of information. As a result, you have to use trial and error to figure out how much of the game works. One example: the rules mention that you must have military units on hand to control your slaves, but never spells out how many. The right ratio turns out to be 1:3, but you wouldn't know that unless your read the rules to Call to Power #1.

3. WHOLE PARTS OF THE GAME DESIGN JUST DON'T WORK: While the stealth units are interesting, some of them are so badly designed that they just don't work. The Cleric, for example, is the chief weapon of the Theocracy, which uses it to go out and convert enemy cities to your faith. This is an expensive and risky operation. However, it is so ridiculously easy to undo this conversion (station a military unit in the city, endure one turn of mildly elevated unhapiness among the citizens) that no player (computer or human) ever allows a city to remain converted for more than one turn. So why bother having the cleric unit in the game in the first place? There are similar extreme problems with other parts of the game, many of them left over from Call to Power 1. Do these people ever playtest their own products?

4. CLUNKY INTERFACE: The interface is badly designed. Information that could easily be put on one screen gets spread out over two or three. For example, information on trade routes that you currently have and those that are still available are placed on different screens. So to compare them and figure out if you have the optimal set of routes requires endlessly flipping back and forth between two screens.

Overall, I just don't see how the designers could have played this game and still released it in the pathetic state that they did. This is the second game that I've bought from Activision which was released in an unplayable condition. Personally, I'm swearing off their products in the future.

Those interested in a good Civilization type game should probably try Civilization 2, or better still, Alpha Centauri.

Starting caveat: I am originally a Civ player although I picked up CTP/CTP2 in lieu of CivIII.

First of all, CTP2 is FAR superior to CTP. They definitely fixed alot of the balance problems. (Although they didn't get the trade mechanism figured out.)

The game is incredibly deep. You could, potentially, spend far more time playing this game than any Civ. The stackability of units seems to be something Sid Meier is averse to. CTP also accepts some of the unseemlier sides of civilization like slavery, theocracy, totalitarianism and mass subversion while Civ sticks to the "clean" aspects of humanity. The single biggest concept I wish Civ would have adopted from CTP is the Corporate Branch unit. The idea that two nations, regardless of size, could fight legal/business wars with one another while completely at peace is a relatively young concept and CTP does a good job of extrapolating game concepts from sometimes tenuous real-life theories on civilization. The revolutions and creation of new civilizations is an interesting concept that I would have liked to see taken further.

The pro-Civers are not wrong at all, however. Sid Meier games feature a playability that's hard to define and nonexistent in other titles. Hours playing a Civ don't feel like hours. At first I was disappointed that CivIII seemed so similar to CivII but it really isn't. There is far more detail in the military simulations and the city management. Also, most importantly, is the concept of culture, totally new to this genre. Although it's not perfect it is really well done for a first attempt. CivIII acknowledges the reality that we all have unique cultural/racial heritages and that they affect us is subtle ways. For example, if you capture an enemy worker it will not work as efficiently as one of your own. (This is Civ's version of slavery but they never call it that.) Also, when you take an enemy city the citizen remain tied to their own culture and will assimilate to yours slowly. Until then they will be more likely to revolt against your regieme.

Essentially, I'd like to see CTP2 combined with CivIII. If someone did that I'd probably be a fool and pay any price for it.

While this game is getting a bit old (and thus, cheaper :-)), it remains one of the best simulation games that I've played. Activision does have a nasty habit of rushing games out the door and then posting patches online (get the patch!) but CtP II features solid gameplay for hours of enjoyment.

I gave this a 4 because it's missing a few features I'd like to see, such as different civilizations having different capabilities, and the AI could be better. Still, the first Call to Power was surprisingly addictive, and this one builds on Activision's previous success. If you like simulations, get this one.

I was really excited to get this game after I had beat CTP quite a few times. When I finally bought it I was very impressed about what Activision did in a short amount of time. The only big disappointment I had was the outer space part of the game being taken out. My favoite new thing is the Akimbo Scenario. I also like the new country borders because it helps me set my goals: to make my civ be big. Diplomacy is really easy in this game. When other countries reject my requests I threaten them by saying I'm going to destroy their capitol. When they still reject I use my eco-rangers (you don't want to know what happens). This game deserves 5 stars because once you get used to it you're hooked on the game. Civilization: Call to Power 2 is tied for first in my top 10 favorite computer games of all time, the other two tied for first being RollerCoaster Tycoon and Age of Empires 2.

If you have not played Sid Meier's original Civilization or Civilization II (without the Call to Power in the title) then you do not know how good this game use to be.

Civilization III is probably a few months away. Sid Meier actually has input in Civilization III which means it will most likely be a decent game. Firaxis is producing CIV III and Hasbro is publishing it.

If you feel the need to play Civilization, go find an old copy of Civilization II before it became Call to Power. Activision took away too many cool features. I bought this game and the most upsetting part of the game is that you cannot go past a number of cities without changing a form of government that does not exist yet.

Sid Meier's last game was Alpha Centouri. I have not played the game yet, but from what I read, it is the game I should have bought. Again, put your $50 away in an envelope, wait for CIV III to come out or buy Alpha Centouri instead. The only reason gave this game 3 stars is because it is based on the original game.

CTP (call to power) will give you a long game filled with many many choices. I will compare CTP with CIVIII. These games are very similar. They are almost exactly the same in how a city is managed. Each city has the 20 nearest squares from which to draw resources for its livelyhood. Buildings and units are built based on the amount of production harvested and the types of factories and power-plants used. Like CIVIII units in CTP wonder around a grided map and encounter each other on the terrian of the defending unit. Like CIVIII there are resources and techknodgies that enable the building of units, buildings, tile imporvements, wonders, and other stuff. In CTP there are more tile imporvements. There are three types of food boosting improvements each more expensive and higher tech than the last. Ther are also 3 types of production boasting improving imporvements. The method of imporving terrian in CTP is vastly superior in realism and ease. An infrastructure "tax rate" is set for the entire nation, from which production is siphened for the purpose of imporving the land. The tax is utilized when you select a tile to be improved. Thus the whole thing with dozens of "workers" having to be managed and moved is illiminated. The CTP combat is also superior to CIVIII. In CTP units do not simply go head to head, instead attacking units combin into a two layered force that has the effect of giving an advantage to the larger force. The first layer utilizes their attack/defense power against the opponent's attack/defense while the second layer exchanges ranged power attacks. Thus some types of armies are better than others. I found for instance that a efficient middle age force could be made of (x) pikeman (x/2, round up) musketeers and (x/2, round down) cannons. This force could defeat more expensive forces because it takes advantage of the cheapness of pikman while utilizing the ranged attack of musketeers and then of cannons. The chosen governemnt of your civilization has a much more profound effect, especily when combined with the ability to adjuest the wages, workday, and rations. The combination of these effects can cause your nation to focuse on growth, techknolodgy, production, war fighting or some combination of each. Ectopia for example is not great for production or growth but is great for science and war, combined with this you can adjust the food/wage/workday settings to stress growth, thech, or production further. My advise is to make sure that you are growing but also to maximise production above all other things.
In CTP you can garner many cities, i usualy acrue over 80 and often so many that i must abandon some. At about 110 cities you must abandon some our else be punished by a stupid feature of the game. But it is a mixed curse, managing 100 cities can make each turn take 30-60 min if you don't utilized efficiencies offered in the game (boring). It is thus essential to take advantage of the AI govonor, or the ability to line up a series of things to be build in every city, or to get a bunch of cities on the same path and treat them as a group. All these features are either not as good or lacking in CIVIII. On the other hand CIVIII's AI is much better as it has a much simpler game to manage and CIVIII games seldom get as boring as CTP games can. In CTP the AI does not emphesise tile imporvements enough and often fails to construct efficient formations. In CTP you are likely to command more units, more cities, have longer turns, and spend more time working adjusting tax rates and such. The way the game advantages larger armies creates a cascading effect in war. When you attack an enemy he brings his armies foward for the big several battles, you then win and stopm all over the rest of his nation because he is unable to garner a large contingent of troops at one spot. This of course adds to the realism but turns excitment in to despair or boredum. To make up for this CTP has a large number of non-combat units; lawyers, spys, cyber-spys, franchises and more. These units can do anything from plant nuclear weapons to free and capture slaves to steal production and wealth; they add a fun demention to the game although i wish that they could occupy the same space as an enemy combat unit as they are supposed to be stealth but are always discovered when they are bumped into, which is dumb on realism, i mean when was the last time a kinght slew a law firm? I digress. In short CTP is more complex and offers a better multiplayer expierence due to longer turns and multiple methods of attack. CTP is a great game for those who are hard-core strategy gamers, at the same time though the AI is not good enough to really challenge the hard-core gamer enough. CTP is great for those aspiring hard-core strategy folks out there, high school aged types. For a very challenging yet one dementional style of play i would chose CIVIII hands down. I enjoyed CTP alot until i discovered how to reliably whop the AI.
Hint: At the very begining of the game build a slaver in all your cities, of course defend you cities, then build little scouting parties of a few offensive units and a slaver, keep them close to home and kill all the puny units that come your way. With this method you will capture scores of slaves and be the most powerfull empire in the acient world hand down. I once played a game where i built every wonder out of 8 players.

Yes, this game is quite old now, however, I dig it out and play it every 3 months or so. I have also been able to get several friends into it... even recently! They didn't mind that the graphics look a bit out-dated, especially compared to the ("fisher-price" looking) Civilization 3.

I have played Civilization 3, and was severely disappointed that it was not multiplayer (CTP2 has always been multiplayer). The first expansion pack to Civ3; "Play the World" made the game multiplayer... and added some interesting variations (like not having to wait for other players to finish - something that was not implemented into CTP2). But at the end of the day, we did not enjoy it as much as a good old multiplayer game of Call to Power 2!

Also CTP2 you can eventually build under the sea, Civ3 can't! The technology in CTP2 is far more evil than the tame Civ3... it feels that CTP2 covers 3x more technology than Civ3. Also, armies can be configured to attack as one group, in Civ3 everything has to attack separately... This is only a taste of what is missing in Civ3, compared to abundantly featured CTP2!

Why play the latest game, if it is far less fun than the previous version?

Beware: In multiplayer; Once every 1-4 games or after about 20 hours of play, the game crashes, and you may have a challenge getting back the multiplayer (auto-save) game... really annoying after 15 hours of constant play to have to start it over, totally from scratch again! So _manually_ save often!

Buy this for $10 or so, then hire Civ3 and be glad you saved your $60... you'll see what I mean. ;-)

I bought this game about a year ago. I brought it home and played on it for a while however I lost intrest and that was that. Months later I got it out again and became addicted. The graphics are NOT brilliant but it is brilliant stratigic wise and lots of fun. I notice the other reviews contrast each other! I believe that the good reviews are done by the people who gave the game time and the bad ones are done by the people who gave up on the game as soon as they got it.
In conclusion to this I highly recomend this game and once you get it give it time to grow on you!!!

I bought this game with high expectations. I had ignored some less favourable reviews, because there are always some purists who complain about things being different from previous Civilization games. However, I was disappointed with this release. I should warn you now that I haven't played any Civ game since Test of Time, so some things I call "new" may not be new to you. Also, this is an Activision job, which is not "officially" Civilization. Civ 3, which is being worked on by Sid Meier at Firaxis, looks very promising but won't be out for a while.

Aside from the gameplay, the user interface has been simplified. It is much easier to keep track of what you're building, how much pollution each city puts out, and how happy people are. There is also an optional function to automate the management of cities, although such a thing seems to take half the fun and challenge out of playing a Civ game.

There are some good things about this game. You have national borders, so you won't have other players dumping cities right in the middle of your empire. If you have multiple units on a tile, opposing armies have to fight ALL of them, and not just one. The combat capabilities of units are improved, with new concepts like ranged attack and flanking, (eg artillery can fire from behind the front lines with ranged attack, and flankers like tanks can "gang up" on opposing units). Air power is a big asset in this game, since bombers can "bombard" enemy armies without being fired upon themselves, and because you can use air units to support a ground assault.

Units can no longer travel unlimited distances over a rail link. They can go much further, but not all the way across a map.

Trade is better, you don't have to push caravans around. You just build them and then use the trade manager to establish trade routes...each route you build commits a certain number of caravans. Beware that the trade advisor can't count and will not advise the best deals.

Tile improvements are done differently, you don't need settlers to build roads and such. Instead, you put a percentage of your production into a "public works" fund, which can be used to buy farms, roads, rail, and the rest (including some neat things like sonar buoys and radar stations). Oddly, you can save up the labour of your people over time, and spend it whenever you like.

Diplomacy is improved, you can make deals and offer trades. You can no longer trade units but you can offer such things as nuke reduction and pollution reduction. You can also have trade embargos. Beware that opponents will agree to proposals and then ignore them (especially pollution agreements).

Governments are good...each has a "max city" level so if you try to have a giant empire with a monarchy, citizens get unhappy and it falls apart. No government in the game allows more than 60 cities without unhappiness, so global domination is a tricky business.

OK, now for the downsides. The AI opponents are stupid. The computer players seem to constantly fight each other, and they do dumb things like building transport helicopters instead of fighters. Once I've come across an opponent who put battleships to sea, but usually the AI players sail only empty troopships and empty aircraft carriers. The AI also tends to build huge armies, but they rarely attack, even when they have an advantage. Instead they sit next to cities for my air forces to tear to shreds.

Pollution is another negative point for the game. The way pollution is modelled is better, polluted tiles no longer cause global warming by themselves, they just don't provide any food or production. When global pollution gets above a certain level (regardless of the number of dead tiles, it's the output of pollution that matters), both warming and ozone depletion can occur. You can enter into agreements with other nations, eg, they agree to keep pollution below 3000 units and you agree to keep yours below 4000 units. But, infuriatingly, the three page section on pollution in the manual doesn't tell you how to find your empire's pollution levels! In fact, the text doesn't mention it anywhere, so if you use the online manual you are stuck. The only clue is an illustration on page 14 of the original manual (you get it from the Empire tab on the Control Panel).

There are other annoying bugs, too, for example surface ships can travel along undersea tunnels as if they were roads for boats. And the music gets stuck on the same track (the CD is required to play, so my advice is to rip the tracks, compress them to MP3 and play them through another application).

Overall, I think the main drawback is the stupidity of the AI. Even on hard they are stupid (though you might try very hard and impossible difficulty...but this will make everything harder and not just the enemies), and it's not much of a challenge to defeat them in combat. They make pitiful enemies and useless allies. Not much of an improvement over the older games. But this version has full multiplayer support, if you'd care to test your wits against human opponents.