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CIVILIZATION:CTP PREVIEW
IMPRESSIONS: DAN Q'S DAY ONE

  • Customizable world types give you more control over how you want your planet to look, more possibilities!
  • When your Settler is active and are looking for a place to found a new city, the "what-will-be" city radius from the Settler's present position is helpful. Along the same line is pathing --- now you don't have to necessarily move every unit in your empire every turn and, as a result, getting from point A to B is never simplier!
  • The Build Queue in each of your cities is a handy feature that will no doubt save time handsomely as the game progresses and more micromanagement is required. You can even save your queues as templates to use later in that or other games in the future.
  • The battle view is refreshing, in the sense that you get to see the conflict up close.
  • Still getting used to it, but the fact that some units cannot travel across particular types of terrain (eg. Horsemen and Mountains don't mix) increases the realism of the gaming experience.
  • When you select an advance to research, it lets you know how many turns it will take to discover it. (Imagine if you could do that in real life!)
  • Interface is revolutionarly simplistic... everything you need to manage your civilizations is only a click away from an easily-accessible and/or viewable (by default) menu.
  • As you probably already know, it is easy to get lost in the diversity of the Wonders available to you -- 35 in all!
  • An alternative to pop-ups which you must go through to continue: messages! They alert you to important events during the course of the game. Boxes containing the messages drop down the left side on the screen. You can even save these messages for later reference (!), and the different pictures on the boxes help tell you what the message is about.
  • Now with three ways to colonize: land, water and space, potential growth of your culture is greater then ever!
  • The concept of Global and Local Settings is a pleasant though challenging aspect new to the Civilization series (in effect, the equivalent of water pipes from the original SimCity to SimCity 2000).
      For the former, the three things that impact most on your people's happiness is how much they work (workday), how much they eat (rations), and how much they are paid (wages).
      For the latter, Public Works (PW) is the biggie. Thy represent raw materials, resources, and labour necessary to construct title improvements. Haven't you wondered just WHERE these came from in previous titles?
  • Although I've only played around 500 years worth [to date], the different branches of science discovery are either coming into play or I can see the groundwork being laid for them already (physical, flight, construction, defensive, sea, aggressive, cultural, mechanical, electricity, medical, and economic). Add a full-colour tech poster to boot, you've got all the help you need in making informed decisions in this department!
  • OK, so this is a comment on the early version of the manual, but you've gotta love the Terminology explanations under the Screen Appendix section... that is, those interface features that are used throughout CTP.
  • Working Workers
    Right click on a city and you get a windows showing on which tiles your workers, well, work

    Production Queue
    Building a production queue(which can be saved)

    Battle View screen

    The Dutch diplomat responds

    Choosing a new advance to research

    Back to Preview Index
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