Gamespot's new preview!!!!

Monkey · October 27, 2000, 02:39

HEY!!! Check it out guys!!! I'm heading there right now to read it!!!
http://www.zdnet.com/gamespot/storie...645671,00.html

October 27, 2000, 04:18

Thanks for the link, Monkey. It's very informative!

edit: Wow! quite anumber of screenshots that I haven't seen before.

[This message has been edited by phoenixcager (edited October 27, 2000).]

MidKnight Lament · October 27, 2000, 04:43

Tonnes of informative stuff in here, particularly about the AI.

quote:

Long-time fans of the series will likely warm up to Call to Power II a lot more readily than they did to the original, while newcomers should easily fall under the sway of this very promising, very addictive game.

quote:

Although the beta we tested was a tad clunky when we moved from one menu screen to the next (the game seemed very far from optimized, and it was downright slow in areas), the basic layout of menus and option screens is very intuitive.

quote:

Still, the basic framework of the system is in place and the AI is anything but a pushover, even at this stage of the game's development. Simple requests that would have flown in previous Civilization and Civilization-style games meet with firm resistance in Call to Power II. Never before have we seen so many countries so reluctant to share their world maps. Not only that, but simple bribes do not have the same effect that they once had. If you want something from your neighbors, you better act in good faith and offer up something in return - or be prepared to take it by force.

quote:

The one thing that stuck with us while playing Call to Power II was that the computer was no fool, even on the easy settings. Although you can generally outresearch and outproduce AI empires on the lower difficulty levels, you will not always outprepare or outthink them. When your military clearly surpasses that of other nations, they will no longer welcome major battles against you. Instead, they will look to hit you where you are vulnerable by pirating undefended trade routes, for example, or by building up a strong navy when your strength lies mostly in your army.

Oh yeah!

quote:

During peacetime, you can count on rival nations to build up their military forces as needed to counter any moves you might make. During times of war, enemy armies are generally well organized, with long-range units such as archers and cannon effectively mixed in with frontline troops. If your military is weak, you can expect your frantic pleas for leniency to fall on deaf AI ears. If your military is strong, on the other hand, enemy units tend to beat feet as quickly as possible - even their naval units tend to decline confrontation if possible.

quote:

The style of the computer players varies widely, however, and you'll notice that not all neighbor states focus on war and the military. More than once, we found ourselves lagging well behind in the scientific race - even when we devoted the bulk of our resources toward research. Computer players in Call to Power II don't appear to spend much time building Wonders, however, which is something that Activision should probably address before the game goes gold.

quote:

Another option on the empire management menu is for worker compensation. You select a base pay rate for your people and then assign a science tax. Immediately, you can see the net profit (or loss) you will incur with each turn. The empire management screen is a powerful tool, and a welcome one in an empire-building game, but it's just one of several key elements of Call to Power II's management features.

quote:

But you can also set each city on autopilot, thereby allowing a computer mayor to dictate the day-to-day affairs of each burg, all according to a particular specialty that you select (for example, production, happiness, and offense). These mayors were none too bright in the beta version, often choosing to build the most bizarre items.......We hope this aspect will smooth out a bit before the game is released.

quote:

Overall, Call to Power II looks like a tremendous step forward for the franchise. The game still has some rough spots: the previously mentioned glitches, a tendency to crash and spout bizarre error messages, and a game-halting issue whereby Wonders of the World windows refuse to go away (thereby blocking the bulk of the screen). Still, the game is in fine shape for a beta, and it seems to have the goods to take this series to the next level.

------------------
- MKL
"And of course Henry The Horse dances the waltz!"
Shameless Plug: http://www.poetic-license.org

Monkey · October 27, 2000, 05:10

quote:

Although the beta we tested was a tad clunky when we moved from one menu screen to the next (the game seemed very far from optimized, and it was downright slow in areas), the basic layout of menus and option screens is very intuitive.

This is one thing that worries me. It's no use having easily accessible info when it takes a minute to switch from screen to screen.

quote:

When your military clearly surpasses that of other nations, they will no longer welcome major battles against you. Instead, they will look to hit you where you are vulnerable by pirating undefended trade routes, for example, or by building up a strong navy when your strength lies mostly in your army.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy! I hope this is as good as it sounds.

On the screenshots I noticed a couple of interesting stuff.

1) There's the missing throw party function that I think was supposed to be in CTP but was yanked out.
http://www.zdnet.com/gamespot/filter...800-22,00.html

2) Multiple caravans are required to establish trade routes
http://www.zdnet.com/gamespot/filter...800-18,00.html

Tiberius · October 27, 2000, 08:39

quote:

Without a doubt, the biggest enhancement to be found in Call to Power II is the improved suite of diplomacy options

Now, these are wonderfull news!

quote:

...many of our demands came back to us instead of going to their intended recipients. (The Vikings are threatening us? Wait a minute, we are the Vikings!)

That's deep! Your worst enemies are ... you and yourself

[This message has been edited by Tiberius (edited October 27, 2000).]

Nikolai · October 27, 2000, 09:27

One thing; On the first picture in the article, you can see a bear standing ON the water!!

John-SJ · October 27, 2000, 10:51

Interesting preview, and sounds like a pretty interesting game.

One thing concerns me though. The preview mentions a few issues still left in their "beta" version of the game that could be serious if they are still in the final game. From my experience as a software developer I would say that the game is probably 3-6 months away from reasonable stability (unless Gamespot was using an old version or they've been sitting on this article for awhile). This may not be good if the game in fact is released next month. Is that the plan?

John-SJ

hexagonian · October 27, 2000, 21:48

Overall, sounds very promising. The statement concerning the AI is good news. (They probably picked Wes/Nordicus' brains for that info) If it approaches or surpasses MedMod in that regard, it will be a great game. And they were playing the beta, as opposed to (idle) speculation, so most of the comments were positive.

The statement about the game interface being clunky and slow, however, is a concern. I wonder what type of requirements are needed to run this game. I would guess that the folks over at Gamespot have current equipment, so a 350Mg, PII, 64 Mg RAM computer (mine) might bog down.

We may have to hope for the mandatory patch for some of the bugs mentioned though.

I am looking at it this way...

AOE was reviewed lukewarm at Gamespot. The sequel, AOK is highly praised. So there is hope that a sequel to CTP will learn from its mistakes. The standard has been set by CivII and SMAC. My hope is that the programmers at Activision had access and took advantage of the vaunted CIV3 list too.

That would be a kicker if CTP2 sends the developers of CIV3 back to the drawing board.

Sirotnikov · October 27, 2000, 21:59

I hope this will send them back to the drawingboards and then they'll make the best game of all time!

However, I am quite pleased with what I read about CTP 2 and I think I'll buy it (unlike the original CTP) because CIV III is no where to be seen.... *sigh*

Pyaray · October 27, 2000, 22:28

quote:

Originally posted by John-SJ on 10-27-2000 10:51 AM
One thing concerns me though. The preview mentions a few issues still left in their "beta" version of the game that could be serious if they are still in the final game. From my experience as a software developer I would say that the game is probably 3-6 months away from reasonable stability (unless Gamespot was using an old version or they've been sitting on this article for awhile). This may not be good if the game in fact is released next month. Is that the plan?

Just out of curiousity, what makes you say it's "3-6 months away from reasonable stability"? The Gamespot article mentioned very few bugs, and said it had some "rough spots", but that's not nearly as critical as you seem to be about it. I'm asking not out of hostility or anything like that, I'd just like to know what you're prime info points are for your assertations? I'm having difficulty seeing why you feel that way after reading the article.

Pyaray

Atahualpa · October 28, 2000, 05:58

From the Gamespot Preview:

quote:

Although the beta we tested was a tad clunky when we moved from one menu screen to the next (the game seemed very far from optimized, and it was downright slow in areas)

quote:

The diplomacy system was clearly not complete in the version of Call to Power II we tested, as many of our demands came back to us instead of going to their intended recipients. (The Vikings are threatening us? Wait a minute, we are the Vikings!)

quote:

. One possible glitch in the game thus far: Computer-controlled empires get mad when you have any unit in their territory, even diplomats

quote:

In general, rival nations will agree to remove their own troops from your land, should you request it - and have the power to back up the request. Often they will find the single neutral square in the middle of your empire, retreat to it, and fortify - which is just annoying enough to be realistic.

quote:

Computer players in Call to Power II don't appear to spend much time building Wonders, however, which is something that Activision should probably address before the game goes gold

quote:

These mayors were none too bright in the beta version, often choosing to build the most bizarre items. Building a cannon when the city focus is on happiness? Maybe the people like their shiny new cannon, but an arena or theater would be more on target. We hope this aspect will smooth out a bit before the game is released.

Now here comes something that makes me jump (of happiness):

quote:

The one thing that stuck with us while playing Call to Power II was that the computer was no fool, even on the easy settings. Although you can generally outresearch and outproduce AI empires on the lower difficulty levels, you will not always outprepare or outthink them. When your military clearly surpasses that of other nations, they will no longer welcome major battles against you. Instead, they will look to hit you where you are vulnerable by pirating undefended trade routes, for example, or by building up a strong navy when your strength lies mostly in your army.
During peacetime, you can count on rival nations to build up their military forces as needed to counter any moves you might make. During times of war, enemy armies are generally well organized, with long-range units such as archers and cannon effectively mixed in with frontline troops. If your military is weak, you can expect your frantic pleas for leniency to fall on deaf AI ears. If your military is strong, on the other hand, enemy units tend to beat feet as quickly as possible - even their naval units tend to decline confrontation if possible.

The whole thing makes me a bit worried! The game sounds very very very promising. But the time to finish the game is just one more month!
Great however that the AI will be challenging! Thats really good news! Make it difficult! Make it real hard to win on Deity!

ATa

Atahualpa · October 28, 2000, 13:28

quote:

(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.)

The Stress Test couldnt simulate the amount of users that hit the realms when the game shipped.
Single Player had little to no flaws in D2 by the time the game shipped.

ata

Pyaray · October 28, 2000, 19:00

Let me try and address some of the concerns then.

quote:

Although the beta we tested was a tad clunky when we moved from one menu screen to the next (the game seemed very far from optimized, and it was downright slow in areas)

The game has been optimized. It certainly doesn't have the response of a first person shooter, but the game is fairly responsive.

quote:

The diplomacy system was clearly not complete in the version of Call to Power II we tested, as many of our demands came back to us instead of going to their intended recipients. (The Vikings are threatening us? Wait a minute, we are the Vikings!)

This is quite obviously a simple bug. It is resolved. Although I have to say, I thought it was pretty funny the first time I declared war on myself.

quote:

One possible glitch in the game thus far: Computer-controlled empires get mad when you have any unit in their territory, even diplomats

Well they should get mad when you have non-diplomatic units in their territory. They don't get mad about diplomats anymore though. Nor about units they can't see.

quote:

In general, rival nations will agree to remove their own troops from your land, should you request it - and have the power to back up the request. Often they will find the single neutral square in the middle of your empire, retreat to it, and fortify - which is just annoying enough to be realistic.

This doesn't sound like a bug to me. They withdraw when you request, but they only withdraw as far as they "have" to.

quote:

Computer players in Call to Power II don't appear to spend much time building Wonders, however, which is something that Activision should probably address before the game goes gold

This is fixed. They just didn't quite have their priorities straight. Building Wonders is a balance issue, and the game has been being balanced. It would be a far worse thing if they had built wonders instead of defenses.

quote:

These mayors were none too bright in the beta version, often choosing to build the most bizarre items. Building a cannon when the city focus is on happiness? Maybe the people like their shiny new cannon, but an arena or theater would be more on target. We hope this aspect will smooth out a bit before the game is released.

I can't say for certain, but this may not have been a bug at all. If the mayor is set to make happiness, and the people are unhappy becuase there are no military units to defend them, then building a military unit is the fastest way to happiness. Without context, I can't say that this is right or wrong.

I assure you all, we are very close. There are no major issues left as far as I know. Obviously there could be issues I'm unaware of, but the game is coming along very nicely. This team is very dedicated to delivering a quality product. I don't know what else I can say to try and address your concerns. If you have any other specific concerns, I would be happy to try and address them for you.

Pyaray
[Ooh, looky, I have the Acitivion tag now!

]
[This message has been edited by Pyaray (edited October 28, 2000).]

October 28, 2000, 19:17

quote:

Originally posted by Pyaray on 10-28-2000 07:00 PM
[Ooh, looky, I have the Acitivion tag now!

]

and you're in the news now....

Monkey · October 28, 2000, 20:58

quote:

The game has been optimized. It certainly doesn't have the response of a first person shooter, but the game is fairly responsive.

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!!

quote:

In general, rival nations will agree to remove their own troops from your land, should you request it - and have the power to back up the request. Often they will find the single neutral square in the middle of your empire, retreat to it, and fortify - which is just annoying enough to be realistic.

I didn't think that was a bug too. It's more like "annoying human brat mode" to me. Nice touch

quote:

If you have any other specific concerns, I would be happy to try and address them for you.

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.

Pyaray · October 28, 2000, 21:45

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 · October 28, 2000, 22:14

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 · October 28, 2000, 22:47

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 · October 28, 2000, 23:52

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 · October 29, 2000, 00:12

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 · October 29, 2000, 00:21

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 · October 29, 2000, 01:26

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 · October 29, 2000, 12:54

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 · October 29, 2000, 14:52

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 · October 30, 2000, 01:11

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 · October 30, 2000, 20:12

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 · October 31, 2000, 02:04

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 · November 19, 2000, 19:30

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!