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So far I've won one game on Medium with a high score victory, and lost a second game on Hard to my ally's high score victory (I came in 2nd place). Grifman was annoyed that I didn't mention any good things in my last post so I'll start out with the positive aspects. 
GOOD THINGS
Graphics
Yes, they *are* gorgeous. You don't get the realistic scale and all the animation details of Age of Kings but otherwise it's pretty close. Easily the best-looking turn-based game ever.
Stability
To my utter amazement, the game only crashed once in 20 hours or so (on my Windows 2000 system). For a computer game these days (and by Activision of all companies) that's actually pretty good. I easily recovered from that one crash using the autosave function, which is now so fast as to be unnoticeable.
AI Diplomacy
Sure, cutting some of the many options wouldn't have been a loss, and immediate feedback is usually poor (just "yes" or "no", basically). But the AI is remarkably sane and reliable in its negotiations, and even makes reasonable proposals at times. None of the lunatic peace/war/peace/war switching as in other games. Sympathy and trust are tracked separately, where the first reflects their basic attitude as well as the amount of your bribery, and the second quite accurately reflects the human player's action (breaking treaties makes even sympathetic nations wary of you).
Combat System
The first posts about "phalanx vs battleship" issues seem to have been based on a misunderstanding of the bombardment function (which is awkwardly implemented; artillery/bomber units by default try a close assault rather than shelling/bombing a target!) Stacks are now not only a convenience but a necessity: you must use combined arms to stand a chance at conquering a city. There are artillery & ranged units, flanking units (cavalry to tanks), and line units, all working as expected. Advance of military technology seems well-paced -- *not* realistic (that would be inappropriate for such a game) but just significant enough so that you *want* to upgrade your units but don't immediately *have* to, or be annihilated. CtP's trademark "special" units (lawyers etc.) are now properly delegated to a supporting role and no longer dominate the game -- they confer an advantage on those who use them but you can get by without ever building them, or even building special defenses against them.
Cities & Empires
Cities now harvest on an ever-wider tile radius as their population grows, and empires have a visible border as in SMAC. You can demand withdrawal of trespassers, and you can't build outside of your own national borders. Tile improvements use the same "public works" system as in CtP1 but harvesting is completely automated, too, which nicely streamlines the entire terrain management. You can still manually assign specialists if you need a boost in a certain production area. Trade is likewise managed from a central screen -- instead of manually sending caravans you just build them, then select from the available trade routes on this screen. On the whole I rather like this system, it keeps the decision-making of Civ1/2/SMAC while cutting out the tedious parts.
MIDDLING THINGS
Sound & Music
I've grown used to the nondescript background music, and the sound effects are quite good. Nothing groundbreaking here. Then again, this isn't exactly what we play strategy games for...
Manual
Includes a tech tree poster and a helpful hotkey list. Rather comprehensive but skimpy on details, and the print is *way* too small (probably to keep the manual below 100 pages... grrr). It's also too wordy and not properly layed out for a reference manual. I prefer using the online "Great Library" rather than the manual.
Tech Tree
The "wonders" of the original Civ were selected for a reason: they were the most widely known and admired manifestation of human productivity. CtP2's replacements still don't quite cut it, unfortunately. Still the extreme silliness of CtP1's overly futuristic tech tree has been cut back, and for the most part I find myself researching interesting things and building plausible units. Some reviewers claimed that they were frequently presented with only one choice; this barely ever happened to me, though I have to add that I didn't pursue an optimized research strategy yet.
Interface
The programmers seem unfamiliar with a device called "keyboard" (maybe they are programming with touch pads?). Too many simple actions require mouse clicks, e.g. closing a message window. The map doesn't properly auto-center on the active unit, menu buttons mysteriously stay depressed after they have been released, there can be extreme delays before an input is recognized. On the upside, you can right-click anywhere to get a context menu that usually contains just the action(s) you wanted; there are convenient, comprehensive control screens for everything and anything; a searchable Great Library gives descriptions of most game concepts; the overview map is great if you're running on a hi-res screen; and despite the programmers' apparent dislike of keyboards, they did manage to put in some useful hotkeys. Once the interface is fixed it will be great!
BAD THINGS
Bugs, Bugs, Bugs
There are some graphics glitches, the interface glitches mentioned above, and worst of all, some important numbers seem to be reported incorrectly late in the game. The empire screen should report total input & output of food, production & gold but this only seems to work early in the game. Later, improvements or actions that should cause significant changes in these figures don't seem to have any effect -- but they still affect the actual gameplay as they should, so I guess the problem is only with this report. Also, the research window show grossly incorrect research times late in the game; and I'm not talking about the Anarchy period where all such reports are way off. Maybe I'm actually reading some of these figures incorrectly but they sure seem fishy to me.
AI Attitude
The AI seems generally competent at building its empire (though I can't say how much of this is cheating?), fighting other players, and conducting negotiations. However, even the "aggressive imperialistic" leaders in CtP2 seem to be devout pacifists -- it was nearly impossible to get them to attack me! They fought among themselves just fine, they also guarded their cities properly, but they wouldn't ever send an attack stack against me. Obviously this makes for a fairly dull game and for an easy high-score victory, if you just focus on expansion and research and avoid all combat. The changes suggested on the Apolyton site to give the AI more thinking time didn't have any effect; I suspect the problem is not with competence but with attitude.
In the genre classics, the AI would usually have a paranoid hatred for the human players, whereas CtP2's AI players are reasonable fellows (see AI Diplomacy above). It's funny because a non-psychotic AI is what we strategy gamers always wanted, and now we see it isn't really all that great... the AI is too predictable and reasonable, in a way it's *too intelligent* now! Maybe there's some undocumented switch to give it a negative attitude adjustment against human players?
CONCLUSION
This is what Call to Power should have been, rather than the unfinished mess that it was. Too many flaws for a classic but a good game still, and could be great if it's properly patched. The only real and potentially game-killing problem is the peacenik AI -- I'll keep upping the difficulty level and see if it makes a difference.
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First things first:
I have a Cyrix 300 (225mhz) with 64mb of ram and a Voodoo 3 2000. One of the major complaints after the original CTP release was how slow it ran even on extremely powerfull machines, well with CTP 2 there is no such problem. Even on my weak Cyrix computer the time between turns is short, the unit movement smooth and the sound is clear and unchoppy. This is also on a decent resolution of 1280 X 1024.
Now the review:
OK, now I absolutely hated CTP. I bought it and within days had sold it again on EBay for something like twenty-five dollars. And one of the reasons I hated it so much was because of its sloppy, hard to decipher interface. This has been 100% remedied in CTP 2. The interface is clean cut, everything is easy to find and I had no trouble figuring out what button went with what option, etc.
As far as diplomacy and warfare improvements go, I don't see much. Part of the fun of Civ 2 was getting that attitude from the AI when in negotiations with them. In Civ 2 you really wanted to beat down the Mongols after a sneak attack or something. In CTP 2 you don't get the feeling that your opponent is a living breathing enemy (not that you should but it should seem like something more than just programmed responses).Warfare is the same as CTP, the stacked unit method and such, but the "Army Manager" and "Unit Manager" make keeping track of specific armies far easier than in CTP. I never played CTP in very great detail but the government systems in CTP 2 are excellent and a side by side comparison to each other at the "Empire Manager" really makes it easy to decide which one you want to run your empire. The wonder cut scenes are interesting and the music decent but they don't compare to! Civ 2.
...
The AI is from what I can see at least a small amount improved. I played my first game at Beginner level in order to get the feel of the game, and I still found myself having mild trouble capturing some English and American cities, but after a few hours it was obvious that I was by far the most powerful civ in the game. But from what I can tell, the harder difficulty levels should prove to be near impossible.
From this point, I didn't see much that showed a great improvement over CTP and I was disappointed. However, when I played later and later into the game, I started getting into it, my empire started to take shape and I actually started to have fun again. There was that "just one more turn" feeling again, but I wouldn't say it was a strong as Civ 2's. I found myself actually wanting to build up massive armies and take out the next English city rather then just quitting and putting CTP 2 back on the shelf for years to come. I cannot put my finger on it but CTP 2 has something that CTP did not that actually makes you want to play the game, and take it from me, I have been playing Civ 2 since 96 and have purchased ever single addon. This is a good game, its no Civ 3, but its still a lot of fun, and I would recommend it to any die hard Civer. However, try to get it at a lower price, like on EBay ! or something, cus its a tad expensive for something that still uses 65-70% of the original game art and programming.
Rating for a new comer to Genre:
Graphics: 9
Gameplay: 8
Interface: 9
Multiplayer: 7
Sound: 8
Overall: 8.9
Rating for a player of CTP 1 (Improvements Over CTP):
Graphics: 8
Gameplay: 9
Interface: 10!
Multiplayer: 5
Sound: 7
Overall: 8January 18, 2011, 18:50 -
OK here you can find my thoughts during my first CTP2 game. I have a celeron 400 with 192 RAM and Voodoo 3000 16 RAM. I bought 128 RAM during the game so I compared 64 to 192 RAM: 64: Load= 32 sec next turn= 25 sec at turn 407 (year 1732) 192: Load= 25 sec next turn= 22 sec ... The huge difference was after playing for 5 hours continuously. With 64 RAM loading a game took about 2 min and next turn 1 min15 sec, whereas after I upgraded there was no difference at all no matter how long I played. The game didn't crash at all although I didn't try any scenario or the cheat options.
...January 18, 2011, 18:29 -
As we did with Civ2:MGE and CTP1, we are happy to present you with a preview of the latest civilization game, Call to Power II. Beyond that, we present you with reviews from actual players of the game, as well as links to the entry of CTP2 in the Apolyton Links&Products Directory(where more player reviews can be found) and to the previews and reviews of CTP2 in various gaming sites.
Three Years Review
After three year of Call to Power 2, Locutus reviews what was happening in the last three years about mod making and the source code release. Read.
Player Reviews
Christoph Nahr's Review
Originally posted on the comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic newsgroup. Quote: " Too many flaws for a classic but a good game still, and could be great if it's properly patched." Read.
Tilemacho's Review
Review after the first game. "Once again I felt that "one more turn feeling" which to say the trough had missed since Civ2!" Read.
JDI_Falcon's Review
Quote: "I cannot put my finger on it but CTP 2 has something that CTP did not that actually makes you want to play the game" Read.
DarthVeda's Review
CTP1 Hater turns into a CTP2 Lover. "I don't doubt that I may very well finally put my copy of Civ2 to rest" Read.
Apolyton Preview, Part 2: CTP2 Previewed, The Real Thing
Coming very soon, no release date though...
Or won't ever. 
Apolyton Preview, Part 1: Daily Impressions
Day One
Mark's first day with ctp2: Installation, System Requirements, Difficulty Levels, Screen Resolutions, Moving Units, Right-click Menus, Great Library, Diplomacy Impressions, Great Autosave, 32 Civs, No Crash. Read.
Day Two
Second day for Mark: Explanations, Replies, No Crash, No Crash, No Crash, Manual in electronic format, Army Management, Units stats, Music, Radar Map buttons, Append to Multiple Build Queues, Retreat Button, Comparing Governments, Not yet 32 civs. Read.
Day Three
Explanations, Replies, Yes 32 Civs, New Way For Resource Gathering, AIPopCheat, Too Many Screens, Borders and Trespassing, 1280x1024 With "Clear" Map, ICS still there or not, CTRL+S CTRL+L Read.
Day Four
Text files, Trade Routes, Commerce Tile Improvements, Scientific Victory, Screens and LDL Files, Alexander's Way To Victory Read.
Day Five
Map/Scenario Editing, Why He Hates You, Mayors Do Tiles, Control Panel Totally Gone, Threats Work, Advices In Unit Manager, Flanking Units Read.
Day Six
The Impossible Medium Game, Reply to Ralf, Reply to Slingshot Read.
Day Seven
Editor Documentation, Editor Experiences, Map Sizes/World Map, Diplomacy: The Friendly Side, Diplomacy: The Ugly Side, Diplomacy: Treaties Read.
...January 18, 2011, 17:25 -
Saving a map
Saving a scenario. CTP2 takes care of all needed directories and files under the /scenarios folder
Loading my just-made scenario!
The Score formulaAfter Day 6, the final Day 7...
...
Editor Documentation
There is currently no readme for the map/editor. It seems that there wont be anything "in the box" as well. Activision is working on it though:
Dave White wrote on a mail replying to me about it
We're working on some extensive documentation for SLIC, the scenario editor and the save game files. Once they're all done we'll make them available on-line.January 17, 2011, 18:11 -
My diplomatic efforts finally show results
Science related screens
Select, cut and....
Paste!Two days since Day 5, so Day 6, posted on Day 7. Real life came knocking my door....
...
Just a small comment on deity and two lengthy replies to posts with lots of questions
The Impossible Medium Game I've put aside my first game(although i want to end it to see well, how it ends ) and started a new one on impossible(deity) level so far I've survived... That's what I was saying. The deity game turned out to be a prince(medium) one. Somehow I put the wrong setting... And I was wondering why I do so well
Anyway, on my second game on medium, the game seemed much easier. BUT the next game which was a really deity one, sees impossible after the first turns. More "research" is needed....January 17, 2011, 17:42 -
A battle with more modern units(from one side at least)
Battle view when you attack from the sea. What is missing? My ship...
Now I have some excuse for war....
Threats work some other times...
The Unit Manager screen also provides advice on where you need more units. On the bottom left my favorite choice for the radar map: no geographical or other info and just the borders
Bye bye GermansDay 5. Spent most of my time playing instead of keeping notes
... like yesterday.
Map/Scenario Editing
Ralf asked about creating maps and scenarios. I've tried the editor a bit today. Cut/copy/paste works nicely. The major difference is that maps and scenarios are distinct. Maps are saved in and loaded from another folder. Also, when you save a scenario, you also set the scenario folder and the scenario name. All the appropriate files are created under /scenarios(where the official scenarios are as well). This means that the scenario you just saved is ready to be tested right away(in ctp1 you had to find the file, create the folders and the text files, move the file, etc etc)January 17, 2011, 17:07