CIVILIZATION:CTP PREVIEW
PART 2: PAGE 4

You might notice that I haven't mentioned any keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts helped a lot in civ2, giving the player the chance to avoid searching in menus. They still exist in CTP, and they can even be changed from the options menu, but I've found myself using only "n" for next turn. I'm doing everything else with the mouse.

In general, the interface has lots of other small changes which speed up the game and reduce micromanagment. There are things that could be improved, and I'll discuss both of these issues on the next section.

V) MICROMANAGMENT, LAND IMPROVEMENT

City and Unit screens. Especially the city screen is a very helpfull tool

The Science screen. You wont use it a lot, but it's good for seeing which advances other civs don't have(and what you can get from them)

Three were the things that caused micromanagment in civ2: the first was that you could only give one build order in a city. This is solved as you can create build queues, from the city tab or the city screen. Furthermore, from the city screen you can also save and load queues. Also, one can assign single build orders or queues to multiple cities from the city screen(which by the way allows for different sorting of the cities according to name, size, gold output, etc). Something missing is the ability to insert orders in the middle of a queue, everything is put at the end. Not very important, but it might be irritating when you try to create a big queue. I would also like to be able to give "max orders" to multiple cities, like to tell all of my cities to maximize production or gold output.

The second was giving move orders to units as the "go to" algorithm didn't work well. In CTP, you can still use the arrows to move a unit, but I found myself using the mouse to do it. You have two choices: the first(and default) is first left click to select a unit, second left click to define where you want it to go. Before the second click a line appears showing you the path and the number of turns it is required to get there. The second choice is left click to select, right click to define destination. Generally, this works quite well, but I'm missing a "go to city X" command or the ability to set waypoints.

The third cause of micromanagment was the use of settlers to improve the land. This has totally changed. You set a portion of the production to go into what is called "Public Works". When you have enough PW credits you can place a tile improvement(road, farm, mine, etc) on a tile. This system is certainly an improvement over civ2, especially in the latter part of the game. I don't know if there could be a way to have an automated procedure though, as it would be nice to just forget about it.

Speaking of tile improvements, there are changes on that too. There are now three levels of farms, roads(roads, railroads and maglevs), mines and sea improvements(like fisheries). As you make scientific advances you will be able to place more advanced tile improvements. Important changes from civ2 are that even with maglevs you don't have zero movement cost, and that you can place mines on grassland and plains, combining them with farms on the same tile(of course you wont get the same production you would get from a mountain). Beyond these, there are tile improvements for undersea and space orbit cities. And of course, you can have undersea tunnels.

PAGE 3 IV) FIRST CHANGES YOU NOTICE FROM CIV1/2, INTERFACE

PAGE 5 V) MICROMANAGMENT, LAND IMPROVEMENT VI) COMBAT(CONVETIONAL/UNCONVETIONAL)

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