One Tribe to Rule Them All

Recently I revisited an old classic: Civilization 2! Yep, I played this a lot back in the day and I managed to get it working for my present-day PC! Okay, so I can’t spare the money for Civ 4 (the best in the series as is my understanding) but I’m content to blow dust off a classic and fire it up again (for now).

I played the Civ games a lot during my high school years: The first game was great and a lot of fun. And then came Civ 2 – and at the time it was recognized as something of a revelation. It had all the trappings of Civ but it was in isometric 3d! It expanded the game features dramatically! It even incorporated FMV and photo-realistic images! (or whatever you call it) Indeed, Civ 2 was highly regarded and suddenly became the game that everyone owned, everyone played and everyone loved. I didn’t bother with the Civ series afterward Civ 2 because a) I didn’t like Test of Time and b) as far as I was concerned, improving Civ 1 was a tall order but improving Civ 2 was looking more or less impossible (of course I could be wrong…).

Anywho I managed to get Civ 2 working through finding a fan-made patch. And it’s great to play Civ 2 again – after all, I’ve sunk several hours into this game already which should provide a testament to it’s addictive nature (World of Warcraft can go sit in the corner). Yet the patch has a drawback – it inspires the AI to be more hostile to me the human player. This does create problems that are funny when one thinks about it: The opposing civilizations break peace treaties and declare war at a drop of a hat and then afterwards they treat me like it was all my fault. And my Freight don’t have an easy time as they have to evade the enemy forces and any successful trade route established is usually an excuse for the opposition to declare war. And why is it that I get a reputation whilst the opposition doesn’t? Why are they allowed to get away with being aggressors when I can’t?

And now that I think of it, I wonder if this problem is resolved in the more recent Civ games – Do the other Civ games, Civ 3-5, have reputations akin to the player? Can anyone confirm this? If so, I think I may scrape the cash together for one of the more recent Civ games…