(P)Reviews

Thanks to the brilliant insight of some of Activision's (former) game developers, the most distinctive feature about the Call to Power games is without a doubt their customizability. Of course, now that the source code has been released, this has feature has become infinitely stronger than it already was. The community that has been modmaking and customizing these two games and that has lobbied for the release of the code has a history going back 5 years. But only a handful of people have been regulars at Apolyton since the site's inception, so many people are probably not aware of some or most of this history. In this article I will dive into the deepest corners of my mind to try and tell the tale of the CtP modmaking community, and how the release of the source code came to be. (I apologize in advance for leaving out any important people, mods, events, etc -- my memory has more holes than Swiss cheese, so I probably didn't mean to.)

First things first:
I have a Cyrix 300 (225mhz) with 64mb of ram and a Voodoo 3 2000. One of the major complaints after the original CTP release was how slow it ran even on extremely powerfull machines, well with CTP 2 there is no such problem. Even on my weak Cyrix computer

OK here you can find my thoughts during my first CTP2 game.

I have a celeron 400 with 192 RAM and Voodoo 3000 16 RAM. I bought 128 RAM during the game so I compared 64 to 192 RAM:
64: Load= 32 sec next turn= 25 sec at turn 407 (year 1732)
192: Load= 25 sec next turn= 22 sec ...

The huge difference was after playing for 5 hours continuously. With 64 RAM loading a game took about 2 min and next turn 1 min15 sec, whereas after I upgraded there was no difference at all no matter how long I played. The game didn't crash at all although I didn't try any scenario or the cheat options.

Hey civilization fans, four months ago I told you I would not buy Call to Power . Two months ago I could still be found heckling the game on the Apolyton Civilization Site forums. Two weeks ago I announced I would buy the game in lieu of a review. Time has an interesting effect on everyone and everything. The same seems to be true of Call to Power II.

When Activision left us civer's with what seemed like Call to Power version 5000 last year, for all the patching effort, many gamers still felt cheated of their money. Many felt that they had bought a good game that showed promise. I made little room for ambiguity about where I stood on the issue. I hated Civilization: Call to Power, and I expected to hate Call to Power II. I was offended that they had even announced the game.

So far I've won one game on Medium with a high score victory, and lost a second game on Hard to my ally's high score victory (I came in 2nd place). Grifman was annoyed that I didn't mention any good things in my last post so I'll start out with the positive aspects.

After Day 6, the final Day 7...

Editor Documentation
There is currently no readme for the map/editor. It seems that there wont be anything "in the box" as well. Activision is working on it though:

Dave White wrote on a mail replying to me about it
We're working on some extensive documentation for SLIC, the scenario editor and the save game files. Once they're all done we'll make them available on-line.

Two days since Day 5, so Day 6, posted on Day 7. Real life came knocking my door....
Just a small comment on deity and two lengthy replies to posts with lots of questions

The Impossible Medium Game
I've put aside my first game(although i want to end it to see well, how it ends ) and started a new one on impossible(deity) level so far I've survived...

That's what I was saying. The deity game turned out to be a prince(medium) one. Somehow I put the wrong setting... And I was wondering why I do so well
Anyway, on my second game on medium, the game seemed much easier. BUT the next game which was a really deity one, sees impossible after the first turns. More "research" is needed....

Day 5. Spent most of my time playing instead of keeping notes like yesterday.

Map/Scenario Editing
Ralf asked about creating maps and scenarios. I've tried the editor a bit today. Cut/copy/paste works nicely. The major difference is that maps and scenarios are distinct. Maps are saved in and loaded from another folder. Also, when you save a scenario, you also set the scenario folder and the scenario name. All the appropriate files are created under /scenarios(where the official scenarios are as well). This means that the scenario you just saved is ready to be tested right away(in ctp1 you had to find the file, create the folders and the text files, move the file, etc etc)

Ralf asks "The .txt tweak-files is much more userfriendly and powerfull then CTP/Civ-2/SMAC, they say. Is that true? In what ways?"
Well, my involvement in the modification of ctp1, was not exactly big. I mainly organized and added the pieces of the apolyton pack, so I didnt get into more imprortant stuff like unit attributes, slic, aip files, etc. Therefore I cant say much about it. Still, here is an interesting example of the personalities.txt which replaces the .fli files.