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MacSoft, $49 ($10 Rebat for CivII Owners). Requirements: PowerPC, 10MB RAM, System 7.5.3+, 2x CD, 96 MB HD. For more information, visit MacSoft at http://www.wizworks.com/macsoft/
Review by Bill Jahnel
Civilization II is one of the all-time classic games, not only in the strategy genre, but in ANY genre. Brian Reynolds took Sid Meyer’s classic designs in Civilization and made them better in every way. While Civ II is now a ripe 3 years old, it remains one of the most addicting gameplay engines ever invented.
On the PC side, the original Civilization became multiplayer with the CivNet edition. . . barely. The original connectivity issues were buggy as hell and it was never ported to the Mac side. Not until Civ II Gold was reworked into multiplayer TCP/IP connections IN Civ II Gold did the Civ line began to deliver some truly solid multiplayer gaming experiences. However, the original 1.0 release of Civ II Gold on the PC side still had numerous bugs to lift out. While the PC edition has been upgraded to a 1.1 release that fixes numerous errors, Mac gamers rightfully question whether Civ II Gold in its current 1.0 release is worth the money for the scenarios and multiplayer capacity. The quick answer is if you have never owned Civilization II, Civ II Gold is a must-buy. If you already own Civ II, the Gold edition can be had with a $10 mail-in rebate coupon; at $35, the extra scenarios and multiplayer functionality are worth it, with a caveat. Game value suffers from unexpected game behavior, occasionally wobbly code, and horrid pathfinding in a manner that makes some of the game more work than necessary.
Something Old, Something New
If you haven’t played Civilization II by now, no 5-sentence summary can capture the awesome addictiveness of that game. Basic gameplay, for those who have been dead for the last 3 years, follows your civilization in a turn-based game format as you build cities, research technologies, and ultimately try to win by conquering the world or landing a spaceship on Alpha Centauri. (Ergo Sid and Brian’s Firaxis game, Alpha Centauri, taking up where this game left off; also soon coming to the Mac.)
Besides some new Redbook audio tracks, the main single-player game of Civ II remains basically unchanged (except for notations on bugs, below.) What Civ II Gold adds to the equation is TCP/IP multiplayer gaming, The Fantastic World scenarios, the Conflicts in Civilization scenarios, and a Map Editor. The fairest way to evaluate the conversion’s value to the Mac gamer is look at each of the features in turn.
The Scenarios
Civ II Gold offers both add-on pack scenario sets that were released for Civ II. In general, I found the Fantastic Worlds expansions much more interesting that the Conflicts in Civilization scenarios, mostly because of the play style each evoked. Civ II has never been a tactical combat game, and the attempt to make specialized maps that try and force the Civ II engine to become a tactical wargame left em cold. Perhaps this bias surfaces because my style of expected play from Civilization II is a build / expand / research model rather than a tactical battlefield game, but ultimately, I found the limited technology trees in many of the scenarios less interesting than what was offered in the Fantastic Worlds scenarios.
The Fantastic Worlds games really changed play balance and held my interest, but even here, the limitations of the Civ II scenario design engine and poor scenario choices began to chafe at my sensibilities. Further, any wonders included in the game must have the same functionality of the old wonders renamed and cannot have any new displays or movies attached to them. Consider how I loved the new units in the Masters of Magic scenario, with the ideas of technology trees based on types of magic and differing units a very exciting prospect. However, the scenario is poorly programmed in terms of wonders: The Potion of Transformation (Leonardo’s Workshop in medieval disguise) would have been great IF ANY UNITS HAD BEEN DESIGNATED AS UPGRADES OF EACH OTHER. Instead, even the upgraded "settler" units from peasants to zombies were not designated as such, making this wonder essentially worthless. Yes, the new scenarios offer new units, and some can offer surprises (such as settler units with attack capabilities), but the scenarios can sometimes be problematic. They become even more tricky under multiplayer play, where some civilizations are simply inappropriate, impotent, or imbalancing to play. The scenarios are nice but not alone with the money for an upgrade.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer gaming is the whole reason for Civ II fans to get Civ II Gold. The game can usually be stable, but it has nowhere the solid connections that one can get from some real-time games such as Warcraft or Starcraft. Indeed, there are many concerns that multiplayer Civ II Gold has: Some are outright bugs, and a few are multiplayer game design decisions.
In terms of the game itself, players have a wide variety of choices in game style of play. The most exciting are the "Double Production" and "Double Movement" modes that essentially make the game a whole new strategic ball of wax. All of a sudden, cities grow dramatically early on; granaries are a little less important, forests trump mined hills, and exploration and combat are a LOT more dynamic. As one of my friends who plays Civ II Gold noted, the double options make Civ a whole new game. (He actually sets up phony multiplayer games just to play single player in double modes.) Add to that the kind of double-dealing, back stabbing, and conniving that you can only get from racing your friends to conquest and you have a whole new addictive experience to Civ II. One of the best features of multiplayer games is that you can adjust city production and fine tune your empire during another player’s turn, giving you less frustrating waiting times. One of the major inconveniences of all turn-based multiplayer games is their grinding inevitable longevity between turns. Civ II always takes a long time, and building an empire waiting for more than one other player can be a painstaking process. I personally use the in-between time to read and I’m happy as a clam.
Other changes include that diplomacy-affecting wonders have no effect on human players; the Great Wall is porous and the United Nations impotent in causing peace offers against human players, and the Eiffel Tower only charms computer Ai viewers. In fact, the game’s standard enforcement mechanisms to penalize characters that break strategic alliances by forcing them to remove hostile troops have been removed.
However, some game design decisions make interacting with other civilizations a little more annoying than they have to be. Chat modes bring up a modal dialog box that obscures your screen. Chatting can be a real nuisance when it is your turn and would have better been served by an interface more a la Warcraft or Heroes of Might and Magic II, where the message window is either yet another open window or overlays messages briefly onscreen. Either choice simply scrolls along and does not interfere with your ability to make movements in the game the way the Civ II chat function does.
Weird things can also happen in trying to set up trades. While the trade menu is pretty extensive, there is no way to offer mix and match offers (like I’ll give you 50 gold and a phalanx unit for your tech advance). You can work around this by trusting the other player to trade you one and then just to give you the second one in a second "give" diplomacy action, but can you always trust your friends to follow through? Also, when making offers to trade tech advances you have to scroll through a list of ALL tech advances, whether the opposing player might have them or not to trade. While understandable that the game designers did not want you to get sudden knowledge of what technologies your opponents had without an embassy there, once an embassy is established an abbreviated list would have been appreciated. You also can’t call up your science advisor’s report when wanting to trade technologies without exiting the deal screen and having to go back and reinitiate the diplomatic process, making dealing making a sometimes tedious process.
One of my biggest disappointments comes from the scenarios. The scenarios offer a lot of new and exciting units in games and different themes. However, because of the limitations of the scenario editor (from which they were made), you cannot set up a "normal" game playing with a scenarios set of units; instead, you MUST use the premade map for each scenario, strongly limiting their replayability value.
Bugdom
These game design choice problems are pale concerns versus some of the pernicious bugs in multiplayer games. The game does a great job of saving a game position when you tell it to and reinitiates the game with you being able to jump back in where you left off from the save. However, there are times where you get dropped from a connection that the game is incapable of properly polling you to see if you are still there, effectively freezing the game in a waiting for player mode without the other player knowing if you still exist or not. This can be an EXTREMELY frustrating experience for both players in and out of the game.
Other problems include a modal dialog box of doom that occurs on rare occasions. This dialog box draws itself without any button to exit from or way to escape from the game without force quitting. This only seems to happen when you have been given a foreign country’s caravan or freight unit in a diplomatic trade and then attempt to use that unit in trade with another country. However, it makes trading caravan units effectively impossible until the update comes out.
More immediately apparent is the extremely perversely bad pathfinding exhibited in Civ II Gold. Somehow the pathfinding seems to have gotten WORSE than the original Civ II, lending credence to the idea that your units can’t find their backsides with both hands and a compass. While the 1.1 version of Civ II Gold for the Mac should patch out most of these problems, we continue to hear that the patch is going to be out "any day now" but it remains elusive. And as long as it remains elusive, 1.1 and 1.0 versions of Civ II are incompatible, making it less likely for you to be able to drum up multiplayer games with your PC friends.
Civ II Pyrite or AU together now?
Ultimately, you need to make a purchase decision on Civ II Gold. Do it. Multiplayer games are strong and the map editor gives a lot of options for extended gameplay. While it has tremendously limited options in terms of the Wonders and it is extremely disappointing new units and hierarchies must be played on the scenario maps only, you can mess with the order and dependencies of the tech tree, rename things, and use new art for units in ways that offer new challenges. The Fantastic World scenarios can be a hoot and in some cases cause outright laughter in their odd conceptions. And unlike the forthcoming Age of Empires and other Mac ported titles that use Microsoft’s unsupported on the Mac DirectPlay networking protocol, you can actually duke it out with PC and Mac players (at least those with the same version numbers.) You have every right after purchase, however, to get after MacSoft to finish the patch to bring the game up to parity with the Windows side of the world. Mac users (and reviewers) should not have to wait months to get a patch already coded for the Windows side that eliminates known bugs in a translated title.
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Pros
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Cons
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This is Civ II with multiplayer, baby!
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Unit pathfinding is as smart as a bird repeatedly divebombing a plate glass window
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Fantastic Worlds scenarios offer interesting new challenges
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Contact with other players in Chat obscures gameplay; diplomatic trades of technology unnecessarily tedious
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Double Movement and Double Production settings make Civ II an incredible new challenge and speed up play
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Known bugs that cause crashes or hangs that could be eliminated with a Mac version of the 1.1 patch which continues to be delayed
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Map Editor relatively robust, extending gameplay
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New Units from Scenarios can ONLY be played on custom scenario maps and not used as replacement pieces in randomly-generated map standard play
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TCP/IP networking avoids the "Mac has no DirectPlay so you can only play with other Mac Users" trap
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