Civilization 2 questions and version comparisons.

Back in 1996 MicroProse released the sequel to one of the best strategy games of its era, Civilization. I remember loving this game and playing it extensively back in the day. (Fundamentalism FTW.)

However, instead of going with the Civ sequels I hopped over to Alpha Centauri, and I really didn't pay much attention to the Civilization games until I got a copy of Civilization 4 Complete some years ago. I remember there being disputes over usage of the name "Civilization" around the turn of the century which led to 2 different games being made. This confused me and led me to lose interest in the series.

As a result I may have missed what may be the ultimate edition of Civilization 2 - the version called "The Test of Time". Seeing as I own the original retail version of Civilization 2 and the original retail versions of both Conflicts in Civilization and Fantastic Worlds, my questions are:

# Is Civ 2 Test of Time truly Civ 2, or a different game that was caught up in the dispute?

# If Test of Time is truly a Civ 2 game, what does it offer on top of Civ 2 and the two scenario packs?

# Is Civ 2 still comparable to Civ 4?

EDIT: Factual error corrected.

 

Nevermind, I stumbled upon the answer myself.

I found this page which details all the differences between the various Civ 2 versions.

May this mini-thread be of some use to someone in the future.

EDIT: Lulz at the bottom of that comparison chart:

 

If you wanna play Civilization 2 ToT, here's something you might like - they're making a nice new fan patch for it:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=517282

 

Sadly it doesn't have the "Has the Live action advisors" comparison too.

 

Actually it does. All versions but Test of Time have the High Council, a.k.a. Live Action Advisors.

I'm beginning to think that the Gold Multiplayer Edition is the best one.

 

I really enjoyed the fantasy campaign in Test of Time, but if you just want to play normal civ, I think vanilla Civ 2 is better.

 

You're right. I completely missed it.

Anyway thanks for sharing that comparison chart. I only learned about the existence of Test of Time a few months ago and I wanted to check it out ever since, but I didn't know what exactly was different. That chart fixed that.

 

I tried installing Civ2 on my Windows 7 64bit PC awhile back but the high council advisers never worked right. Is there a way to get it to work properly?

 

Civ II Gold has all the stuff you want out of Civ, really. Most noteworthy is that it comes packaged with a number of stupidly good scenarios that are still playable today. The music is also outstanding.

 

A fantastic thing in ToT (also for modding purposes) was the ability to have multiple maps that worked essentially like the planes in Master of Magic.
There were some excellent mods (official and otherwise) to make use of this feature that remains unparalleled in the Civ series to this day.

But yes, for playing "classic" Civ2, I guess MGE is the way to go.

As a somewhat related remark, I wish someone would make a hacked WinCiv.exe that worked on 64 Bit systems. In it's glorious simplicity, I feel Civ1 remains a wonderful "coffee break" style Civ today.

 

Civ 2 ToT at the very least is better than Civ 3. Had some fun with it.

 

Meanwhile, I'm reading that Civ 2 won't work AT ALL on my system, with the executable being a 16-bit program and all. Various compatibility modes and things will work, but by this point one has to wonder if it's worth it.

 

There's this wine source on winehq and it has a compile flag for 16-bit programs.
Not sure if enabled by default in binary form, but it's definitely in there.