CIVILIZATION:CTP PREVIEW
PART 2: PAGE 8

Another good change is that ai-controlled civs with "peaceful" or "agreeable" personalities act exactly this way. You can make alliances with them without fear that they will betray you, nor will they do so if you become too powerful. Instead, if they are weak, they will be sending you presents(their maps, gold, etc)

What's the backwards step? There is no negotiation. For example, you have crashed an enemy and he asks for peace. You reject. Does he asks for mercy giving you money and advances? No. He will be more submissive though, but it's not the same.

In CTP you know exactly when pollution will cause a major disaster. Since you wont be the only civ causing this, you'll have to find peacefull or military ways to reduce their polution...

Finally, there two changes which I'm not sure if it is for better or worse. The first is that normal peace treaties last for 10 turns. After that, it turns to a cease-fire. This is good because you can go to war more easily by waiting a couple turns and without thinking about your reputation, but the bad thing is that so can the AI, and you have to keep an eye on when the peace treaty ends. The second is that alliances can only be broken by one of the civs attacking the other, and not through diplomacy as in civ1/2. I think that others will like this and others not.

IX) TRADE

However, if CTP looses something in diplomacy, the new trade system really rocks. Trade is now based on the actual resources of the map. If a city has a tobacco resource in it's city radius and a worker of the city is working on that specific tile then it can trade tobacco with other cities of the same civilization or export it.

When you send a specific resource from various cities to one, you get a profit from the trade routes and you can sell it to other countries at a bigger price. You can set a price of a resource or you can leave it blank. Other civs will come to you with offers to some of your resources in order to concentrate more of these resources and be able to re-sell it at a bigger price.

So, in a map with lots of resources trade becomes important, and so does pirating trade routes. Trade routes are shown on the map and any military unit can pirate one destroying it and earning some money for it's civ. I can now imagine scenarios based on trade and pirating.

But I think it's time to move on to other things beyond actual features of the game.

X) MULTIPLAYER

Everyone knows that making a turn based strategy game with good multiplayer is something quite difficult. These kind of games need lots of time. To tell you the hard truth, I didn't get to play much of multiplayer CTP, but the situation is somewhat what Civ2:MGE is, in the sense that each player plays on his turn but he can also do other things like giving build orders while others play, but certainly faster due to the changes which reduce micromanagment. A good idea is that you can have one on one games, which means no waiting for the AI. Another good thing is that you can start(and end) at a specific age, saving time for playing in the Ancient age. Also, I'm sure there will be multiplayer scenarios which will allow really fast games.

PAGE 7 VII) CIV MANAGING: GOVS/GLOBAL SETINGS/HAPPINESS VIII) DIPLOMACY

PAGE 9 X) MULTIPLAYER XI) GRAPHICS/SOUND

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