Civilization falls into a category of turn-based strategy games affectionately referred to as "4X" by their fans. The abbreviation stands for "eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate", and that's at heart of what Civilization is about. You explore the area you start in, expand with new settlements, exploit the natural resources around you for materials and income, and exterminate your opponents-not necessarily by force, though. CTP2 offers multiple victory scenarios, ranging from completing a massive scientific and production undertaking to forging a peace with every nation in the world. Of course, you can also exert your dominion worldwide and exterminate all cultures other than your own, as well. CTP2 lets you win the game how you want to.

CTP2 changes the Civ/Civ2 paradigm in a number of ways. The first, and most apparent, is the addition of public works. You can allocate a certain amount of your production to a public works fund with which you can buy roads, farms, trading posts, and mines, and place them on the map. This removes the need for settler micromanagement like in Civ2, where late in the game you could easily find yourself manually moving thirty settlers in an attempt to make a newly claimed continent suitable for colonization. This system (also in Civ:CTP, CTP2's predecessor), is definitely a great feature and really makes upgrading infrastructure and settling new land far easier. As a side benefit, the expensive settler units are only needed to produce new cities, which makes building and growing cities far simpler. Another major change to the domestic system in the Call to Power series is that you no longer assign workers to individual squares outside the city, instead, the city has a sphere of influence that increases with city size and the materials are harvested from the sphere. The more people you have in the city, the more materials. You can use slider bars to quickly prioritize between farming, production, science, and the like. While this works when dealing with a specific city, I do wish that there were an empire-wide setting. Often times during a game I had to reallocate scientists to my 25-city empire, and it was a pain having to iterate through each city to perform the change.

One of the more delightful features of the CTP series has been its extensibility, and CTP2 seems to have plenty of features in that regard. The game ships with a campaign and rules editor, along with three very different and interesting playable scenarios. There is a very active community for the original CTP, and their efforts after the products' release went a long way into making the game better by adding more refined rules and different ways to play the game. If the scenarios that shipped with the game are any indication, then the community will also have a wonderful time altering and modifying CTP2.

The military aspect of the Civilization series has also been improved in CTP2. One of the biggest improvements is the Army Manager, which allows you to group units together so that you can move and fight with up to 12 all at once. The game leverages this grouping by creating different unit types (flanking, artillery, and regulars) that perform better when combined than they do alone. This is a vast improvement over the original's scheme, and helps to really bring combat to the Civilization series in a palatable form (Civ and Civ2 were so bad that I regularly one the game by diplomatic means-war took too long and took way too much effort). Also including in CTP2 is bombardment, which allows certain units a free shot during their turn. Bombardment's main purpose is to soften up a city for invasion, and it is a realistically effective tool to that end. There are all sorts of polishes like that on CTP2's military management scheme that make it easy to use and, most importantly, allow the game to keep endgame complexity down, which is one of the things that has always plagued the series.

While the new features added to the series in CTP were vast, there were problems as well. The first version of the CTP series released last year had some horrible interface problems, and CTP2 hasn't fixed them all. It's pretty easy once you've played the game for about 10 hours to understand how to navigate to the screen you need, but there's still a great of mouseclicking to be done, which is only compounded my the number of tasks that must be done over each city (e.g. building a recently-discovered city improvement in every city). Also, there are far too few ways manage your empire at a high-level. The AI city mayors do a terrible job of proper city management, and units can require plenty of babysitting as well, especially when they aren't in armies. There is also no way to easily upgrade obsolescent units in the game, which makes migrating units very difficult and tedious (once again, the classic city-by-city iteration is necessary). Separately these issues aren't that much of a problem, but when you get to the endgame and realize that each turn is taking almost 10 minutes, it starts to dawn on you that the sum of the problems are greater than their individual parts.

One of the most-vaunted features in CTP2 is the new diplomacy system. While it is very slick, it is also very insignificant to the game as a whole. While there are a variety of ways to make an offer to exchange maps or technology, there really isn't much impetus to do so. Part of making diplomacy in a game essential is to make a compelling backdrop for dialogue: demands, wars, natural disasters, and feuding are the foundations for diplomacy, and what little foundation CTP2 provides for it is sterile and uninteresting. I never once felt like I was dealing with a people in need, or with people who hated my nation and its accomplishments. I felt like I was negotiating with computers who make their decisions based on formulae and variables, and that's not an appealing adversary.

CTP2 won't wow you with it's graphics or sound, but they do very well what they are supposed to-facilitate the gameplay. Tiles are easy to see and clear, national borders (ala SMAC) are clearly marked, and units are easy to spot and determine national origin. The best part about the graphics is the amount of options you can turn on and off to suit your style of play the best. I feel that this is far more important in a strategy game than coming up with super-pretty tiles or nice unit explosions, and I applaud Activision's commitment to the hardcore strategy gamer for putting an emphasis on usability over sheer appearance. The music is decent, but mostly forgettable, as it didn't take long for Enya and Dido to hijack the other CD player in my machine and provide my own tunes for the game.

I realize I have been pretty hard on CTP2. It is worth noting that I think CTP2 is a far better game pound for pound that any other Civilization game made. But for a gaming paradigm that has been around for almost ten years, there's no reason for the genre to still be stumbling over the same problems over and over, and that's exactly what's happening here. I think if anything it's clear that it's the core framework of Civ that needs work, as I feel that CTP2 has done Civ as well as anything can without making such dramatic changes to the gameplay that it would be difficult to classify it as a "Civilization" game at all.