Gamespot's new preview!!!!

[Pyaray]

quote: Originally posted by Monkey on 10-28-2000 08:58 PM How does it compare to say....hmmmm... CTP1? I know that during the later stages of the game in CTP1 accessing the city menu would be downright slow. Plus the autosave option wasn't really an option since it took approximately 2 seconds to save after each turn an if you add that in to the time it takes for AIs to make a move in the late stages the whole game turned really really clunky. Now that space layer is gone, will CTP2 run as fast as say....mmm.... civ2? If you can get close to that then I'm definitely buying it!!

That's really hard to judge, and it's sort of an unfair comparison. Civ2 didn't have nearly as many graphics as Call To Power 2. And graphics takes horsepower. Turns can take a long time if the enemy has a lot of units to move. I don't think I can give you any more of a satisfactory answer than that. I will say in my experience I haven't noticed autosave taking a significant amount of time, but I have never honestly clocked it or anything. Another thing I will say is that things are cached, the first time you access any screen it takes longer than all subsequent calls to it. So the first time pulling up the city menu in a save I have from 2500ad (only relevent to point out that I have a lot of things in the city) took a few seconds, but the next time I pulled it up it was about a second.

quote: Originally posted by Monkey on 10-28-2000 08:58 PM Will Activision be putting out new graphics packs afor CTP2 after release ala the Sims or SimCity3000? From what I have seen of the screenshots, a medieval castle style is still lacking in the ancient age and I think there have been many people requesting new city styles.

I haven't been here at Activision long enough to be sure of how they do it, but my experience from other companies is that add on packs are almost always decided upon based on public response of the release. So I don't think anyone can answer that question right now. If this game sells 50 gazillion units, I'm sure an add-on pack will follow. If it sells 4 units, and 3 of them were wholesale, well... Personally, I'm hoping on 50 gazillion, but I don't get to make that decision, only the fans can make that one.

Pyaray

[hexagonian]

Pyaray,

Any news on the basic system requirements for CTP2? Are they much more than CTP1?

I gotta say that I am impressed with what I have seen so far...and the response to the bug issues is very good to hear. The mayors are nice, but a regular player ususally would prefer to make his own decisions, so that is not a big deal to me.

As for the construction of a military unit as opposed to a city happiness improvement, certain governments allow military units to boost happiness, so production of a military unit will serve a dual purpose.

The screen shots were excellent. Filters for the radar map. Very cool!

[Pyaray]

quote: Originally posted by hexagonian on 10-28-2000 10:14 PM Any news on the basic system requirements for CTP2? Are they much more than CTP1?

I'm afraid I don't have your answer. I wasn't the one doing the optimizations, and my systems aren't min spec. So I haven't really paid too much attention to the requirements. I think they are very close, if not the same, as the min spec for CTP1, but I'm afraid I can not really say for certain. The only thing I can really say for sure is that I'm running the game on a 400, and it runs just great.

Pyaray

[WesW]

Note: This is a copy of a post I made a couple of months ago, that was never addressed. I think it would be a relief to all of us to hear the answers to the items in this list.

"There are several bugs still alive in CtP1, and I would like for us to list all of them that we can think of, and hopefully have them addressed by the Actigrammers.

1)The "water bug". This is the one which renders aircraft defenseless when attacked over water.

2)The AIs will run their aircraft out of fuel, causing them to crash. Apparently, they do not understand the concept of fuel.

3)Conquest distress heal rate. It is set at .2, which I assume means 20% per turn, or perhaps .2 points per turn. Anyway, it actually decreases at 33% per turn, plus it takes 33% off the top when you initially conquer a city (the counter is initially set at 1 instead of 0, or something).

4)At home radius. This line in the govern.txt apparently does not work at all. Any and every unit outside a city is counted towards war discontent, regardless of what the 'at home radius' is set to.

5)Pollution disappearance. Under the initial settings, when you discovered Gaia Theory, all your civ's pollution disappeared. I found that this was because the total of pollution-reducing advances was 3 for the non-future ones, while the total of pollution-increasers was 2.5. When I set the reduction value of Gaia Theory to .5, thus balancing out the scales, the bug was solved. I also deleted the reduction effect from all future advances, which would have caused the bug to appear again.

6)Stonehenge notification. The game does not notify you when someone starts construction of the first Wonder listed in the wonder text. Some of us, it may have been Paul, found that you could place a "dummy" wonder in the top spot, and move the first wonder, Stonehenge, to the bottom of the file, and this would solve that problem. I had to leave the dummy in the gl's wonder section, though, and instruct players to ignore it.

7)Gaia controller. There is a bug in the 'reduce worldwide pollution' flag, which meant that building the wonder eliminated all pollution, both that already in the atmosphere and that currntly being produced by cities. It eliminated pollution completely no matter what value the flag was set to.

Finally, I have two questions regarding the AI's choice of wonders:

1)Galileo's Telescope, which is in the sequel, increases the output of scientists by 200%. Does the AI recognize what this means, and increase their number of scientists when it gets this wonder?

2)The Eden Project. This wonder destroyed the 3 biggest polluting cities in the world. It was out-commented in the ctp1 AI build lists, so apparently the programmers could not figure out how to get the AIs to use it properly. Have they solved this?

[John-SJ]

Pyaray,

Reading the preview, I saw a couple of things that seemed like simple rough spots and a couple that seemed more like areas of incompleteness.

It's been my experience that for a very large, complex software project that first finishing incomplete features and then integrating them into the rest of the project always takes longer than one would think. What seems like 2-4 weeks worth of work can easily take longer, even 2-3 times longer.

Then, there is the question of QA. I'm sure Activision is doing QA already but once these last features are also included in the build much of the QA already complete will be invalidated and will have to be redone. Add another 1-3 months.

The sad fact is that most games are released with woefully inadequate QA. Those that are adequately QA'ed tend to be very late hitting the marketplace. Look at Blizzard games, they're always late but they are GREAT games! (until you get to Diablo 2, this game had good QA but still had SEVERE multi-player problems for a couple of months after release.)

Using Blizzard as an example one could conclude that 6+ months is a minimum for testing and bug fixes. Blizzard tries to do that before a game is released but most other companies will do that testing/fixing after release and use the game playing public as a free QA department. Some companies never fix all of the serious bugs in a game. Take Firaxis, I have a wheel mouse, and if I don't remember to unload the Windows mouse driver before running the game it will consistently crash when I try to move needle jets.

Sorry about the long winded response to such a simple question.

John-SJ

[Pyaray]

I don't have the answer to your questions, but I'll see if I can figure them out in the next few days. A little busy with other things at the moment to go and test all of these.

Pyaray

[XMon]

Will CTP1 sprites work in CTP2?

Will different land types have different movement restrictions other than land vs mountain? In other words, now you can make a unit move through; space, air, deep ocean, shallow ocean, land, mountain. Will land types be separated so that a unit can travel in desert and plains and grasslands but not mountain, swamp or jungle?

For Pyaray or anyone else...have Activision ever made available the non-compiled graphics for current official sprites? Like all the individual .tga files for a unit's sprite so that you can alter them.

[Atahualpa]

Pyaray: Thanks for your clarification! I really appreciated that!

As for reaction times. I have a P200 and CtP1 wasnt all that funny to play on it. Especially in the later game you could forget it. Large maps were also impossible to play.
Now I already own an Athlon 800 and there CtP1 runs fine. Even with 32 Civs on the largest map!

But really, CtP1 on a P200 wasnt that great after all. Anyway it would be a good minimum for CtP2 I think.

ATa

[hexagonian]

I have a PII350 without any problem running CTP1. It seems to me that the minimum requirements for CTP1 were P166. I remember that there were a lot of complaints from people who had systems in that range having performance problems with CTP1 too.

When there were statements from the Gamespot reviewer that there were performance issues, that was a reminder to me of those past problems. I expected the requirements for CTP2 to be more than in CTP1 - the question is how much?

As much as I am looking forward to CTP2, I am not about to go out and buy a new computer to play it.

[John-SJ]

Pyaray,

Thanks for your response. It sounds as if you might have quite a game on it's way. If it's as impressive as the preview seems to indicate it could be, I will definitely be a customer. But at the same time, I will adopt a wait and see attitude. I have been burnt too many times by gmaes that "seem" to be good.

John-SJ

[Pyaray]

I don't have all of the answers yet (not actually sure I'll have time to get them all either), but I'll answer what I can for now.

quote: Originally posted by WesW on 10-28-2000 11:52 PM 1)The "water bug". This is the one which renders aircraft defenseless when attacked over water.

I had never heard of this bug before this. I just tested it, and it seems to work fine, so I assume it's fixed.

quote: 2)The AIs will run their aircraft out of fuel, causing them to crash. Apparently, they do not understand the concept of fuel.

This was fixed.

quote: 5)Pollution disappearance. Under the initial settings, when you discovered Gaia Theory, ...

This works differently now, so this is no longer an issue.

quote: 7)Gaia controller. There is a bug in the 'reduce worldwide pollution' flag,

As I said above, this works differently now, so this is not an issue. And to head off the question, I don't feel qualified to explain it properly, so rather than give you wrong information, I'm not going to explain it.

That's about all I can answer at the moment. If I come across more answers I'll post them, but right now I don't have the time to go off and research these questions. I apologize for that. But you shall have all the answers in your hands soon enough.

Pyaray

[Monkey]

quote: I haven't been here at Activision long enough to be sure of how they do it, but my experience from other companies is that add on packs are almost always decided upon based on public response of the release. So I don't think anyone can answer that question right now. If this game sells 50 gazillion units, I'm sure an add-on pack will follow. If it sells 4 units, and 3 of them were wholesale, well... Personally, I'm hoping on 50 gazillion, but I don't get to make that decision, only the fans can make that one.

Ummm... I was wondering if we would get FREE downloads like the sims did from the very start. If Activision did that then maybe the game WOULD sell 50 gazillion units.

[John-SJ]

Hi,

I'm here to admit that I was wrong. Wrong about my estimation of game completeness, wrong about my estimate of time to a stable game.

After reading Pyaray's reassurance I managed to get caught up in the "pre-release hype" and bought CtP2 last Friday, and I am GLAD I did!

After 2 days of play I find that CtP2 is one of the best games I've played and seems a lot more stable than many games I've seen right out of the box.

I commend Activision on a job well done!