Civilization 2

Civilization 2 is one of those cases where the continuation turns out to be an improvement in almost all respects of the version of the already magnificent original, without any radical changes whatsoever. No wonder the modest subtitle “The ultimate version of the best-selling strategy game” flaunted on the game box, emphasizing the degree of its continuity in relation to the titled predecessor. Of course, in fact, the differences between the two games, albeit small ones, are enough - if only because a completely different team was already working on the sequel. Despite the usual appendage to the title in the form of the name of one of the most famous igrodelov in history, Sid Meier himself practically did not participate in the creation of the second “Civilization” - except for the one-day “brainstorming” preceding the beginning of works.

Fortunately, the Civilization II case turned out to be in the hands of experienced craftsmen, exactly on the eve of this case, in 1994, they released Sid Meier's Colonization: Brian Reynolds (who was the head and soul of the whole team) was responsible for the design of the continuation of the world's first epic strategy. ), Douglas Kaufman and Jeffrey Briggs (a man of many talents - starting as a composer, he also acted as a producer in this game, and later led Firaxis, which continued to produce strategies under the famous brand). At the same time, the authors widely used in their work all the ideas and suggestions that fans of the first game sent to Microprose almost with bags, of course, trying, first of all, not to spoil anything - but only to deepen, expand and refine. Thanks to this cautious approach, the novelty has retained intact almost all the advantages of Sid Meier's Civilization, including the gameplay, by significantly expanding the range of miracles, technologies and combat units available and reaching a higher level of balance between them. And besides, she found all the details and elements of historical authenticity that the co-author of the first game Bruce Shelley lamented at the time, regretting that Sid Meier himself, being faithful to his credo "no exhortation, only entertainment", did not consider necessary to equip the game with such details.

We will not repeat the well-known things about the gameplay, the details of which can be found in the description of the original game on our website, and briefly examine only those innovations that Sid Meier’s Civilization II can boast of. The most obvious improvements are in terms of graphics: instead of a simple and flat “top view”, the main window with a global map now appears in an isometric perspective. You get used to it pretty quickly, despite the fact that the textbook square cells took the form of “rhombuses” - well, the “pseudo-three-dimensional” elements of the landscape, the images of units and especially cities clearly delight the eye. The nationality of combat and not-so-few units is now determined not by the color of the background of their icon, but by the shield that even representatives of the most peaceful professions hold the settlements have changed even more - instead of plain cells with a digital indicator of the number of their inhabitants, we can admire “voluminous” icons, the style of architecture of which can be chosen when starting a new game of four options. As the population grows and the epochs change, they also change vividly - and the colors of the small icon with the numerical designation of this very population and the flag fluttering here make it easy to distinguish your metropolis from the neighbor.