The Great Wall is back! On the bottom, notice that the radar map is minimized

Sketch art showing up in the installation process

The first recapturing of a lost city is a "Feat of Wonder". Recapturing cities that you lost also increase your score.

Sketch art showing up in the installation process

Great Library
Small iritatings things: if you walk into a ruin and you discover an advance, there is no link to the Great Library(GL). In a simillar manner, when you discover a science(the "normal" way) you do get a link to the GL of course, but it would be better if there was the info on what I get from it. Inside the GL, for some entries there is no historical info, yet the tab for it appears clickable. Also, the new "tech tree" tab shows the part of the technology tree which leads to the entry, but not for all the entries. But these are probably small things compared to new great additions: first, GL is searchable! Dont tell me that you want me to explain why this is good? The other really helpfull additions is the possibility to set goals. You simply select an entry in the GL and click on the "Set Goal" button. After this, when you get to choose what advance you will research, a star will appear next to the advances that you need to meet your goal!

Diplomacy Impressions
There are new characterizations for the AI. An example: idelogically aggressive academic! All I have to say is "WOW" :) I'll have to play ore to find out what exactly that means.... Other things: You can now actually declare war! Soounds riducullous, but it's true. There is also an "Embargo" button which i havent figured what it actually does yet. On the diplomacy screen the... smilies showing the other civs' stance towards you are now looking like ancient greek drama faces. Nice idea(what did you expect from a Greek?), but they not big enough on 1024x768. Good thing that there is on-mouse-over help from practically everything in the game.

As for the proposals, they are a step ahead SMAC, I could say. You get to form your proposal exactly as you want it, the combinations are uncounted(ok, you can count them if you're really bored and have nothing to do). You can even set the tone of your proposal. If rejected, you can threaten with war, embargo, or even the destruction of a specific city!

I think one should be carefull though with diplomacy, as it seems that actions towards one opponet have an effect on the regard of all the other nations. More "research" is needed on that...

Great Autosave!
Yes! At last ctp has an autosave feature that works just right. When I first saw the feature being checked by default, I thought about it for a while. In the game though, I never noticed that the computer was saving each turn! One thing I missed from SMAC was the ability to have autosaves from 5 or 10 turns ago. You only have one, of the last turn

32 Civs
It's only the first day, I only checked if the setting is there. Well, the userprofile.txt is there with the same and more options. I didnt try to do more than 8 though... Tomorrow

No Crash
I run the game for 3 hours, with Photoshop and Notepad(to which I changed often for screenshots and notes) also running, and I had no crash....


Enough for today, check again tomorrow!