|
CIVILIZATION:CTP PREVIEW
Finally, a nice change in conventional combat is the ability of submarines and bombers to carry nukes. The advanced
form of the submarine, the stealth sub can carry four nukes!
Beyond the conventional units there are the unconventional ones. It turns out that you might never need to use them
or you might base whole strategies on them. What is interesting about them is that you can't base your whole game
on one or two of these units. For example, the slaver lasts until the building of the emancipation wonder or the
discovery of some modern age advance, clerics and televangelists can be built only under the theocracy government,
and you can't have such a government if you have to many cities, etc.
Other than that, you can do all sorts of things with unconventional units without causing war: convert cities to
your religion and sell indulgences(clerics), temporarily stop the production of a city(lawyer), receive half the
production of a city(corporate branch), infect a city with a virus which can also spread to other cities(infector),
assassinate someone important(ecoterrorist), and lots of other stuff like that. If you think all these units seem
too powerful, the "makewight" is that all actions cost money and almost all have 50-75% chance of success.
In general, I find the unconventional units to give the player the chance to create new attack strategies and find
out defence mechanisms for AI unconventional attacks. I don't remember ever saying "God, this is ridiculous",
but then again, my objections to them were never many.
Closing the reference to combat, a change and a new idea. The change is that you can't bribe units or cities anymore.
You can incite a revolt in a city using the spy, but if successful it will create it's own civilization, it wont
join yours. The new idea is that some of the units can be built only under a specific government. For example the
fascist, a strong and cheap military unit, can only be build under, surprise surprise, Fascism. The interesting is
that if you change your government, these units will be automatically disbanded. Nice idea don't you think?
VII) CIV MANAGING: GOVS/GLOBAL SETINGS/HAPPINESS
There are some nice ideas in governments too. CTP has a total of 11 governments. Beyond the advantages or disadvantages
each government has in production, gold and science, a new factor is empire size limit. Each government has a specific
limit in how many cities you can have. Over that limit, you will start to have serious unhappiness problems. This
means that you will have to be careful on how much you expand(either by building cities or conquering them) if you
haven't discovered a more advanced type of government. So, for small empires you have Tyranny(replaces Despotism as
the government you start with) and Monarchy. For medium sized empires the options are Theocracy, Communism,
Republic, Democracy and Fascism. Finally, for large empires you get to choose between Corporate Republic, Ecotopia,
Virtual Democracy and Technocracy.
Apolyton Civilization Site Copyright © Daniel Quick All trademarks and trade names are the properties of their respective owners.
|