Players who are inexperienced in managing an entire civilization may consult their ministers and advisors who will offer advice and make recommendations.

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The enhanced city management screen features automated mayors that help administrate the day-to-day operations of individual cities"

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New management features allow you to control your empire the way that you want. Manage the labor, production and economic situation in each of your cities, or leave the micromanagement to ministers and advisors while you concentrate on the most pressing affairs of your empire.

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(27 June 2000, 21:16 EST) It's been six weeks since the first installment, but today IGN updated their preview of Call To Power II, and it is paying for itself in dividends. With so much information to assimilate, we've broken it down into sub-sections which are but bottom-line excerpts from the extensive writeup. In each instance, IGN's Stephen Butts reports...

"The new game offers a revamped empire management screen. Here you can see your city influence spread out as you gain more and more people and put them to work more efficiently. Rather than placing your citizens on particular plots, you'll just assign various priorities and the game will take care of making it happen. The empire management screen also offers a detailed look at where your money is going. You can set wages as well as the tax rate for scientific progress and public works. "

"The science management screen offers data on your current research project. You can come here to see just how much is being spent on your own projects and, as long as you have the right embassies, you can see what each of your enemies is working on. Are the wily French about to get nuclear weapons? You better drop what you're doing and take them out."

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(27 September 2000, 1:10 EST) The Apolyton forums got a new Actisigner yesterday, actually the Lead Actisigner, Dave White :)
Here's a post from him on ICS and CTP2

"The problem is a pretty sneaky one and it seems like no matter what we do to prevent loopholes in the design, stuff like this crops up in every game. Hopefully we've considered all the angles for this one and we have it licked. One thing for certain is that there are a whole lot of you guys out there who will be trying to take advantage of every flaw and loophole in the game and just a handfull of us to try and catch them all before we ship that there's bound to be a couple. I just hope they're minor. =)

As for ICS, I think it would be good to describe how our City Growth system has changed as that has the greatest impact on this problem. The government city maximum are still there and have been reduced considerably but that's just a stop-gap and not really a solution itself.

Cities in CTP2 have an area of influence that they control. This area starts very small when a city is first built and gets larger as the city grows. Newly built cities can only control the 8 tiles immediately next to the city. The next size up goes two tiles out from the city and is the same shape as the standard city influence from CTP1. There are 3 more sizes beyond that so cities can get quite large.

Another significant change is that workers are no longer placed directly on the city tiles. All the resources from the tiles in the city radius are used to calculate what the city collects. I'll use numbers from the game to try to make this a bit more understandable.

The first influence level is used for cities from Size 1 to Size 6. All of the resources available within those 8 tiles are added up and divided by the number of Workers working the terrain. The number of Workers is calculated based on the number of Citizens in the city (based on City Size) not counting those Citizens that have been assigned as Specialists plus the number of Slaves. This is just a number used for the calculations, the Workers never actually have to be placed down. So, if you have only 1 Worker, for a Size 1 City, you will collect one-sixth of the total available resources from those 8 tiles around the city. 2 Workers collect one-third, etc until all the resources are being collected with 6 workers.

When a city reaches the next influence level the same thing happens with the newly controled tiles. You will continue to collect the maximum resources from the original influence area, unless there are less than 6 Workers assigned. The resources from the tile that the city is located on are always collected regardless of the number of Workers assigned.

The influence areas of different cities can never overlap. Tiles are claimed on a first come first served basis and cities can never be built within the influence of another city.

How will this affect ICS? Well, the closest you can build two cities to each other is with one tile seperating them and only the first city built will get the full resources. Any overlapping tiles of influence will be lost to the second city and will effect everything that city tries to do. Additionally as the cities grow and control greater areas of influence one of the cities will grow around the other further cutting it off from vital resources. This coupled with the government caps should help keep ICS from being an issue.

Initial city growth and empire expansion will always be a critical part of the inital strategies of the game but a point will be quickly reached where the empire that has larger cities will far outstrip the production levels and power of other empires."

Related forum thread

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Dave White on science and gold:
"As far as Science and Gold, we've adjusted the system so that stuff that effects Gold only effects Gold and stuff that effect Science only effects Science. To help clear up the issue we've changed the name of the resource that is collected from the terrain to Commerce. Commerce is the only thing that effects both Science and Gold. Only after Commerce has been split into Science and Gold are the Improvement/Wonder/Specialist modifiers added to their respective resources. Improvements like Bazaars, Banks, and Brokerages will only effect Gold, they can never increase the Science output. Likewise only Scientist give additional Science. Merchants give Gold directly and that's it. We have added a set of Tile Imporvements (like the Farms and Mines) that do increase Commerce. These Tile Improvements will effect both Science and Gold.

Hopefully, this change will make the game a bit more interesting and keep the balance correct between the different Improvements."

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(28 October 2000, 18:08 EST) GameSpot posted probably the biggest of the close-to-release previews for CTPII. 5 Full pages and 22 screenshots give a good look on the beta version of the game.
On Empire Management: "On the empire management screen, for example, you can set the daily ration for your citizens, which affects their overall happiness but also determines the amount of food that is stored throughout the empire. You can also select the length of their workday, which predictably affects the amount of production available across the land."

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(29 September 2000, 17:11 EST) Interesting title, no? Here are some more posts from Dave White, CTP2 Lead Designer

Are the goverments the same with CTP1?
Yeah, Governments have stayed basically the same. There's the same numbar and types of Governments with roughly the same functions. Though there has been some fine tuning to how they each work.
The biggest change you'll see is in the organization and comparison of goverments. When comparing Governments to decide which is better you get 9 attributes to compare instead of the 5 from CTP1. I've also tried to make the attributes more descriptive to give a better indication of how the Governments effect the various parts of the game.

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