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Elliott Chin of GameSpot recently published a preview of Call to Power, including an exclusive interview with Cecilia Barajas, CTP's Director. Here are some excerpts on the latest new information on the game.
The following excerpts are attributed to Elliot Chin and GameSpot, unless otherwise noted.
- Combat
- Diplomacy
- Interface Changes
- Managing Workers
- New Endgame Info
- Public Works and Improvements
- Trade
- Unconventional Units
- Wonders
Details
Combat
Military "States"
Combat has also been expanded with the inclusion of different military states. When you are "at war," units operate at their maximum hit points but require more production maintenance. When your units are standing down, they are weaker but cost less to maintain. However, it takes several turns to get them to "at war" status. There is a state in between these two that you can enter if you suspect conflict will erupt soon. It's called "on alert," and although it requires a slightly higher maintenance cost than "stand down" status, it allows you to move into "at war" status much faster than if you were at "stand down" status. These new states of military readiness allow you to launch surprise attacks and really catch enemies off balance.
Battle View
The battle view is great in that you can watch your forces at work and, perhaps even more importantly, learn what makes certain units stronger and weaker. active defense," where your unit (like a Mobile Sam) will defend an intrusion into its territory even if it's not your turn.
Diplomacy
Diplomacy hasn't really changed, although there are now more options when dealing with rulers, such as swapping cities, units, and technologies or telling rival rulers to stop polluting the environment.
Interface Changes
Game setup is the same as in Civilization II: You pick world size and type, choose your civilization, decide a few world settings, and then jump into a game.
Using the Interface
Most of the game's important information is contained in the status window at the bottom of the screen. These keep you on the main map without pulling you away to different screens. Now, you can just double-click on the city from the main map and get a close-up of the city and the surrounding tiles. From here you can adjust which citizens work where and still be able to view the rest of the world.
- To build, you simply click on the production tab at the bottom screen window and set a build order or a queue.
- There is a new button at the side of the screen that lets you jump to your units so you don't have to scroll around the map looking for them.
- Settlers now have a grid around them that shows the city radius should you choose to settle, making it easy to place new cities.
- When certain events occur, like a building being finished or a technology finally researched, icons will appear at the right of the screen to alert you.
The Go To Command
You can use the mouse to click anywhere you want to go. A marker shows how many turns it will take for the unit to arrive at that location. A line also appears between the unit and the destination. A green line means the unit can move there with no problem. A red line indicates that the unit can't move through those tiles. The "go to" [however], is only available in the areas you've already explored.
Managing Workers
You must set your civilization's work hours, wages, and rations. These are adjusted with slide bars. Each form of government has an ideal setting for these three factors, which influence your production, gold, and food, respectively.
Long hours, low wages, and low rations will make your empire more efficient but will make your citizens damn unhappy. Conversely, short hours, high wages, and lots of food will make your citizens happy but also lazy. Balancing these three resources will determine just how successful your empire can be.
With the advent of wages, you no longer have to set taxes. Instead, the gold you get from the tiles around your city go straight to your chests. Then, you set wages to determine how much of that gold goes to your citizens. [You will also be] setting aside a percentage of your wealth for scientific discovery.
New Endgame Information
New Technologies
There are many new technologies that can be researched between 2000-3000 AD that offer a variety of benefits. For instance, you can build advanced assembly bays (a public work that boosts production) with the asteroid mining tech, get space bombers with the discovery of the zero-g industry, and build sea colonies with the sea colony discovery. There are nearly two dozen new advances that are futuristic discoveries with all sorts of benefits.
Cecilia on the Pace:
Cecilia Barajas: The end is also fun because it gets really fast. As the player enters the last stage of the game, the race is on for victory (and the AI is tough). Rather than slowing down the pace of the game, we amp it up. The race for space becomes particularly brutal, because the first players to enter space gain a military advantage akin to the earlier discovery of gunpowder.
Space
Space is fast and deadly because of the nature of the military units and their incredibly high movement points. These units can move across wide areas in one turn. Moreover, units like the space bomber can actually bombard unsuspecting land units below.
Peaceful Victory Condition
Worm Hole Probe and to discover sentient alien life - the scientific victory condition of the game. The new peaceful win condition is to create first contact - you send a probe through a wormhole and bring back the plans to create alien DNA. Once you replicate those plans, you've won.
Public Works and City Improvements
The settler [in CTP ]...just builds cities, and tile improvements, now called public works, are built automatically.
You can set aside a percentage of your production to public works. After a given amount of time, the computer will tell you when public works have been completed.
Public Works are not a per city resource. Instead, the percentage you earmark for public works is a global setting. A counter on the main interface tells you how many public works you have left to place anywhere in your empire.
Trade
Trade has been altered to require less micromanagement. Instead of building a caravan unit and sending to another city, you now build a caravan "building." The caravan icon stays in your city and signifies one trade route, which you can set to any domestic city or a contacted rival's city. From that point on, trade continues automatically. For each caravan icon you build, you can support another trade route.
Trading also makes use of the special tile icons spread throughout the map. In Call to Power, you can control a monopoly of these tile resources and get even more money from trade. However, beware of pirates who might raid your trade routes, which are blue lines connecting the two trade cities. Any enemy ruler can turn his military unit into a pirate and simply click on your trade route to steal money.
Unconventional Units
We learned some more about the unconventional (nonmilitary) units:
Abolitionist
Any city with slaves has a hands-and-chains icon above it. You can't hide the fact that you are using slaves. Using an abolitionist, you can move to a slave city and then have the abolitionist incite a riot. She can also free one slave and convert it into a free citizen at your closest city.
Cleric
The cleric can also "sell indulgences," which raises the happiness of your cities, or "soothsay," which raises the unhappiness of enemy cities.
Lawyers
Lawyers can sue an enemy unit (destroying it), and it can see hidden televangelists and corporate branches.
Wonders
There are no longer the Pyramids, Great Wall, or Hanging Gardens. Even the Great Library is gone. But, in their places are over 30 new Wonders.
Stonehenge (boosts food production), the Forbidden City (makes you immune to the machinations of diplomats), the Sphinx (gives you military readiness bonuses), the East India Company (boosts trade revenues), Emancipation (ends slavery throughout the world), the Internet (speeds up research), and the Gaia Controller (reduces worldwide pollution).