[Title]: Rewriting History (Activision again tries to out Civilization Civilization with Call to Power 2)
[By]: Tom Chick
'PREFACE'
"In the beginning, Sid said, "Let there be Civilization" And there was, and it was good. Then Civilization begat Civilization II, which was also good. After a due time had passed, Civilization II begat CivNet, Test of Time, and Call to Power, and lo, they were...well...adequate, at best. Despite its
shortcomings, Civilization: Call to Power easily became last year's best-selling turn-based strategy game.
Activision is quick to point out that the game beat all its competition by selling just under 300,000 copies (it squeaked past Firaxis "Alpha Centauri
by 12,000 copies). This nay be more a testament to name recognition and Activision's marketing prowess than any true excellence on the part of the original game, bit it's a great reason to develop a sequel.
CALL TO DIPLOMACY
Also, consider it an opportunity to benefit from some 20/20 hindsight. Among Call to Power's problems were superficial diplomacy, unbalanced gameplay mechanics and an awkward interface. Each of these elements is being heavily reworked for the sequel. The changes to diplomacy are the most striking, not only because they're so different from the underdeveloped system in Call to Power, but also because they offer an unprecedented amount of interaction with other player. Senior producer Parker Davis calls their model for diplomacy a "discourse paradigm," which is just a way of saying there's a lot of back and forth.
This is a virtual diplomat's dream-when you receive a message, you can modify the terms of an offer and send it back as a counteroffer. You can also select a tone to give your to give your message a bit of color or some extra weigh. The messages are built with a step-by-step wizard that lets you make detailed compound demands and offers. You can make specific threats to
attack certain cities. You can threaten to amass troops on another nation's borders. You can demand regular tributes on money. You can ask for cutbacks
in piracy or legal actions by marauding lawyers. You can exchange maps or call for nuclear, biological, or conventional arms reductions.
"Alpha Centauri brought diplomacy to a new level," admits Davis, "and we want to take that even further... I don't think that's ever been done, where you have these back and forth negotiations or the breadth of options that we have."
CALL TO SLAVERY AND STUFF
Call to Power's unconventional warfare was one of its strongest points, but it was also its undoing. As you uncovered new technologies on the tech tree, you learned alternatives to direct combat: slavery, religious conversion, legal action, corporate branches and sub-neural advertising. These were insidious ways to bring another player's empire down, and they were hard to combat if you were behind on the tech tree. This meant you had to hit a few particular technologies to defend yourself, and it robbed Call to Power of a lot of choice and strategy.
In Call to Power 2, the basics of unconventional warfare are the same, but Davis hopes to fix the balance by altering the stealth aspects. This will
make it easier to track down unconventional units and kill them, although this is considered an act of war. You can also send diplomatic messages to the offending player insisting that he stop. Ideally, you'll want to build the same kind of unit to counter the other player without necessarily escalating the situation, but if this isn't an option, you won't be
completely vulnerable.
Another problem with the original title's balance was the way combat was implemented. The first game shipped with some very strange unit data the made it easy for the infamous "phalanx sinks a battleship" results to occur. Enterprising players were able to restore a little sense into the game by tweaking some of the values in the unit data files, But Davis says the team is aware of the problem and plans to avoid it in Call to Power 2. Also, combat will be more flexible by allowing the attacker the option to retreat if he doesn't like the way a battle is going.
CALL TO A BETTER INTERFACE
Finally, the new interface will be drastically different. Although Call to Power 2 includes a wide range of elements and factors to control on any given
turn, the detail seems easier to manage this time around. Screens are crosslinked nine ways to Sunday, with multiple ways to reach any given piece of information quickly. Advisor screens show all the stats you need to act on their advice, as well as connections to related screens. For instance, the trade advisor offers recommendations for trade routes with a list to manage your existing routes and set up new ones. A government screen lets you compare the exact effects of changing to a new form of government before you make the switch.
On the city management screen, you no longer place workers around a city on the resource squares. Instead, a city has an area of influence that is
automatically harvested. As a city grows until it eventually reaches four squares in ever direction.
"What you end up having is a patchwork of cities with different sizes and shapes of influence," Davis says. "It starts to look a real collection of different cities and villages and municipalities
that grow organically much the way real cities do, but they're confined by one another."
You can tweak a city's production by assigning specialists: farmers, entertainers, laborers, merchants, and scientists. Mayors can be
given a general priority and then assigned to develop individual cities so they'll build units and structures as if the AI were playing them.
CALL TO ORDER OF BATTLE
The interface for managing units is also a new. Up to twelve units can be organized into an army, which you then control as a single unit. These armies can even be named to make them easier to keep track of. When a unit is given a destination that takes more than on turn to reach, it will of course, automatically follow its route from turn to turn; but the twist in
Call to Power 2 is that units with stored movement orders won't moved until the end of your turn. This means you can react to events that happen during
your turn by changing movement orders.
There are also some intriguing minor additions, like Feats of Wonder. If you accomplish a Feat-such as being the first to circumnavigate the globe,
discovering the highest peak, or founding a new world-your civilization will get a temporary bonus. The concept of political borders, which worked beautifully in Alpha Centauri, is now being introduced in Call to Power 2.
Of course, there will also be a few new units (like an urban planner who settles new cities with basic impovements already built) and some new terrain
improvements (such as mall outlets and drelling rigs). The outer space region has been discarded in favor of a greater emphasis on underwater areas. You can also expect a less catastrophic model for pollution, streamlined trade, self-contained scenarios, and more turns before a full game ends. In
short, the mandate seems to be bigger, better, faster, more.
Among the other changes in Call to Power 2 is a shorter title. The original game was Civilization: Call to Power. When asked what happened to the original name, Davis thinks for a moment, almost as if he was wondering where he left it.
"Uhh, the Civilization license was not available to us. That's probably as much as I can say about that," he replies.
Activision licensed the Civilization tredemark from Avalon Hill, who had created a board game with the name long before Sid Meier started tapping out the code for his masterpiece. But when Avalon Hill was acquired by MicroPorse, who published Sid Meier's Civilization, lawsuits followed.
Davis is too tactful to explain that they gave up the license in a legal settlement with MicroProse before the first game was even released. Activision was allowed to use the magic word in the first Call to Power title, but after that, exclusive rights to "Civilization" reverted to MicroPorse. Hence the plain vanilla Call to Power 2.
But if all goes well, there'll be no doubt in players' mind that this is a Civilization game.
[Bottom of page right]
The goods
Genre: Turn-based Strategy
Publisher: Activision
Release date: Christmas 2000
Top right of page. Three screenshots. A large picture of a trireme receiving orders. A small picture of the stealth fighter and bomber. And
last a small picture of a solder (pikeman) patrolling Indonesia.
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