CIVILIZATION:CTP PREVIEW
PART 2: PAGE 10

XII) AI/DIFFICULTY

But that's all nonsense in front of the real questions: how smart and how difficult is the AI, and how fun is the game anyway?

The save/load window can also show the powergraph, the map and the civs of the game

The result of the ozone layer destruction

For start, the AI can now have several personalities: Slaver, Religious, Militant, Aggressive, Peaceful and Agreeable. The improvement is that each personality now uses actually different strategies and act as they should. As said before, a peaceful civ with which you have a peace treaty is very unlikely to attack you. You must really make him angry. Or a Religious AI will get Theocracy as fast as possible and start sending you clerics.

As for smartness, it seems smarter. Or at least, less stupid. A weak civ wont attack you for no reason. Or the AI wont brake a treaty unless it has some good chance of getting something quickly. Other "smart" actions of the AI is that if possible he builds his cities on hills to get the extra defence advantage, or that he finds your trade routes and pirates them(and then he demands that you stop pirating his :))

As for difficulty, it appears to be more difficult. I'm a civ2 deity player, winning most of the time, and I had to start from Chieftain. This was because civ2's strategies must be re-worked or totally changed to fit in CTP. I'm now finishing a Prince game and it turned out to be an easy win. The higher levels are certainly more challenging. Even if this is not enough for you, difficulty levels can be tweaked. But this is something for the next paragraph.

XIII) SCENARIO/MAP CREATION/CUSTOMISATION

So, what's into for the civ creator? Well, for one the map and scenario editors are not ready yet, and will not be in the final thing. The map editor at least is very close though, both will be available as free downloadable patches. Activision has spoken about a scripting language for scenarios but it remains to be seen along with the scenario editor. Also, Activision plans to have a section on the official C:CTP site for map and scenario editing.

Other than that, there is a lot of stuff in text and common graphic format(tga). Starting from the number of simultaneous civs in a game(up to 32!!), to the names and the cities of the civilizations, to the colours that are used by each civ, to how many turns the ages last, to units and advances, even some of the AI behaviour can be tweaked from a text file.

PAGE 9 X) MULTIPLAYER XI) GRAPHICS/SOUND

PAGE 11 XIII) SCENARIO/MAP CREATION/CUSTOMISATION XIV) CONCLUSION/VS SMAC?

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