[an error occurred while processing this directive] Preview: Day One


Intelligence screen. Here you see information about your enemies

Exchanging maps is one of the many combinations you can create withthe new diplomatic proposal system

If a proposal of yours is rejected, you can use threats, as accurate as naming a city you promise to destroy. Of course you should know when to make threats...

Sketch art showing up in the installation process
Ok, it's finally here! CTP2 is in our hands(well, ok, mine and Dan's hands) :) But first a disclaimer for the following and for the rest of what you will read in these in the next days:

The following is strictly the personal opinions of Markos Giannopoulos and Daniel Quick. We wont try to express the average fan of civ2, ctp1, smac or quake ;) here. Just ourselves. There is no guarantee that what we think of the game will be anything like your own opinion if you choose to purchase this game. If you want to get an idea of our other previews, you can check the ctp1 preview

And a final note: if the following doesn't look consistent, it's because it is simply impressions of a few hours, and not part of a normal preview(wait for "Part 2")

Installation, System Requirements
And now to more pleasant stuff. I got the cd and a copy of the manual(which has a "not final" note on the front page) this morning. Many thanks to Lt John btw, for geting us the copies. Installation took 7-8 minutes. I did the full installation which takes 550MB. But here are the exact system requirements

Pentium 166Mhz (233Mhz recommended)
Windows 95/98/ME/2000
64MB RAM
320 or 550MB of hard disk(depending on your choice)
150MB of virtual memory
16bit, 4MB video card
16bit sound card
4x speed CD
DirectX 7.0a(included in the CD)

By the way, my system is an Athlon at 600Mhz, with 128MB RAM, a Riva TNT, 8MB video card, Soundblaster Live! sound card, and a 8x DVD, running Windows 2000

Difficulty Levels, Screen Resolutions
The first surprise came when I went to start a new game. The diffculty levels are no longer the classic ones: begginer, easy, medium, hard, very hard, impossible! Luckily, the names of the levels are in a text file... ;)

The second surprise came when I saw the possible resolutions: up to 1280x1204! I chose 1024x768, but I'll definately try the others too in the coming days

Moving Units
Inside the actual game, the first thing you will notice is the changed system for moving the units. No more point, click and it goes there. You actually drag-and-drop to set the route of the unit(or of course use the keyboard, for which btw there are much more default combinations than in ctp1). This means the end of wrong movement orders, although it will take some time to adopt by an experienced ctp1 user. I myself, had learned not to make mistakes and the new system requires extra effort. Still, it is now much easier to change the route of a unit, and generally things feel like they are under your total control in this area.

Right-click Menus
When you right-click a unit, you get a menu with all the commands. It's reallly great, to the point of making the buttons on the units tab of the "control panel" worthless(for me) One problem is that they are not "context sensitive". If my unit is not on a trade route, there is no reason why i should see the pirate command, is there? Still, an improvment over CTP1

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