Civilization II
Sid Meier's Civilization II is a turn-based strategy video game in the Civilization series, developed and published by MicroProse. It was released in 1996 for PCs, and later ported to the PlayStation by Activision.
For the EP by Kero Kero Bonito, see Civilisation II.Civilization II
Jason S. Coleman
Chris Taormino
Michael O. Haire
Players build a civilization from a primitive tribe, competing with rival computer- or human (in some editions)-controlled civilizations. They manage cities and units in a quest to assure their civilization's dominance—either by conquering all other civilizations or by manufacturing advanced space technology.
Civilization II was a commercial hit, with sales of around three million units by 2001, and has won numerous awards and placements on "best games of all time" lists. It was followed by Civilization III.
Development[edit]
Civilization II was designed by Brian Reynolds, Douglas Caspian-Kaufman and Jeff Briggs.[7] Following the success of Civilization, the ongoing development of a sequel was kept secret for years. The game was publicly announced when the team was in the final stage of tweaking and balancing.[6] The game's working title was Civilization 2000.[8] Asked about Sid Meier's involvement in the project, Reynolds replied, "We sat down and brainstormed about it and hashed out ideas, that's about it."[9] Emulating the recently released Doom, Reynolds implemented support for modding despite Meier's fear that customers would blame the company for poor-quality mods.[10]
Meier commented, "Civilization greatly favored the military approach to achieving victory. We've now adjusted the balance to make trade and diplomacy a more integral part of the game".[6]
On the PC Civilization II was developed for Windows 3.1 and later using the WinG API. The later released Civilization II: Multiplayer Gold Edition required Windows 95, and no longer ran on Windows 3.1.
Release[edit]
Re-release[edit]
The game was re-released on December 9, 1998[11] as Civilization II: Multiplayer Gold Edition, which bundled the two prior expansion packs and added options for multi-player games, among other tweaks with the disadvantage that it required Windows 95 and later, while the original Civilization 2 version worked in Windows 3.1. The Multiplayer Gold Edition was included in the Civilization Chronicles box set released in 2006.
Expansion sets[edit]
There were two expansion packs that slowly added more features to the game. The first, Conflicts in Civilization, included 20 new scenarios: 12 created by the makers of the game,[12] and eight "Best of the Net" by fans. It also added an enhanced macro language for scenario scripting with advanced programming features such as variable typing and network features, which was considered widely unnecessary. Due to a programming bug, the Encarta-style Civilopedia was disabled from the game.
The second expansion was Civ II: Fantastic Worlds.[a] It also added new scenarios that had many unique settings such as one scenario dealing with colonization of Mars, and one scenario called Midgard that had Elven, Goblin, Merman, and other civilizations from fantasy. There are also some scenarios based on other MicroProse games such as X-COM, Master of Orion and Master of Magic "Jr." scenarios. Fantastic Worlds also contains a new scenario editor that allowed users to edit the statistics and icons used for units, city improvements, terrain, and technologies, as well as creating event triggers and other enhancements to the game.
Remake[edit]
The remake Civilization II: Test of Time was released in 1999, following Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. Test of Time has a new palette and user interface, and new features such as animated units, a playable Alpha Centauri to settle and new campaign modes.
Reception[edit]
Sales[edit]
Civilization II placed second on PC Data's monthly computer game sales chart for April 1996.[13] The game secured position 3 for the next four months,[14][15] before dropping to No. 5 in September.[16] It exited PC Data's top 10 in December, after remaining there for an additional two months.[17][18][19] In the United States, Civilization II was the third-best-selling computer game of the first six months of 1996,[20] and the fifth-highest seller of the year as a whole.[21] Worldwide, its sales surpassed 400,000 copies by August, reached 500,000 in September and topped 600,000 by November.[22][23][24] In the United States alone, it sold 482,522 units and earned $21.1 million by the end of 1996.[25]
By mid-January 1997, global sales of Civilization II had surpassed 720,000 copies.[26] It finished 20th on PC Data's monthly chart for March,[27] and was the United States' 17th-highest-selling computer game of the year's first half.[28] The game had topped its predecessor's 850,000 sales that August,[29] and continued to sell "over 20,000 units a month" by November, according to Microprose.[30] Civilization II reached 1.2 million units sold by April 1998; Terry Coleman of Computer Gaming World wrote that sales were "still going strong" at that time.[31] In the United Kingdom alone, the game sold 160,000 units by 1999.[32] It also received a "Gold" award from the Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland (VUD) in August 1998,[33] for sales of at least 100,000 units across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.[34] Civilization II Gold alone sold 171,495 copies in the United States by September 2000, according to PC Data.[35]
In August 2001, Jeff Briggs of Firaxis estimated that Civilization II had sold "about 3 million" copies.[36] Meier said that he was "wrong on all counts" about opposing mod support; "The strength of the modding community is, instead, the very reason the series survived".[10]
Legacy[edit]
Several other games have been heavily inspired by Civilization II. In 2006, an N-Gage version of Civilization was released, based on Civilization II and its successor III.[77] The open-source game Freeciv has a "ruleset" that is virtually identical to II's mechanics.
In 2011, researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the University College London published the results of a machine learning system playing Civilization II, in its Freeciv implementation, which used the text from its official game manual to guide its strategy.[78][79] The linguistically informed player outperformed its language-unaware counterpart, winning over 78% of games when playing against the built-in AI, a 27% absolute improvement.[80] The same group also showed that their "non-linear Monte-Carlo search wins 80% of games against the handcrafted, built-in AI".[81]
In June 2012, the Reddit user "Lycerius" posted details of his decade-long Civilization II game,[82] since dubbed "The Eternal War". The viral story spread to many blogs and news sites. The game closely mimicked social conditions in the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, with three superpowers engaged in perpetual multiple-front total warfare.[83][84]