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Relax Or DIE posted:Yeah, I played a lot of Civ: ToT as a kid. If I recall, you had 3 different scenarios that used the 'stacked' maps: Default Civ 2 with an Alpha Centauri map in case you want to end the game by grinding through an alien civ, a sci fi one that covered 3 planets and orbital platforms around the starting planet, and a fantasy one with land, ocean, sky, and underworld. I think only the fantasy one really worked, as the different civs would start in different areas and determined your access to units that could move between the different maps. The Alpha Centauri mode was just a slog tacked onto the end of the normal game, and the Sci-fi one was neat but snowballed even worse than normal Civ because whoever got to the 'upper' maps first and claimed territory had a huge advantage. I never really played the sci-fi mode, so I can't say what the specific problems were with it, but I did play the extended and fantasy modes a lot. The extended mode, as you say, was just a bit tacked on to the end of the game where you'd also have to conquer Alpha Centauri. I feel like they really missed an opportunity there by only having one alien civ, because it might actually have been more interesting to have essentially two games going on at one time that join up near the end, but what they actually did was put one civilisation on a map by themself, so that player gets a huge advantage. It can actually be kind of fun to play as the aliens and conquer the Earth, but it's not the game you'd expect to be playing based on the concept. The fantasy mode is absolutely awful though. You had four world maps: surface; underground; underwater; sky. The first problem is that they didn't match up at all. You'd only be able to go from the surface to the underwater map at the shore, but there was no guarantee that the underwater map would have traversable terrain at the right location for that to work. Going from the underwater to the surface was even worse as you could only travel from an underwater mountain to a coastal tile. The underground made more sense, because you can obviously have underground lakes and there is land underneath the ocean, but it would have been a lot cooler if the maps matched. The sky obviously didn't need to match, but they made the weird decision to keep the "ocean" concept, so you could only travel to the sky map if you were directly underneath a cloud or you were controlling a unit that was able to cross oceans. You mentioned that the different civs started in different locations, and that was a cool concept, but it also made some much, much more powerful than others. The Humans, for example, as basically stuck on the ground. They have very few units that can travel to other maps and those they have are not very good. The Butoes (bird-people) start in the sky and can also easily get to the surface but are almost completely locked out of the underground and underwater maps. This means that they can basically colonise the entire sky map unopposed but never conquer anyone who lives below the surface. The Stygians (undead) quite early on get a unit that treats all terrain as roads and can travel to other maps from any location (as long as the tile they're trying to travel to is traversable and unoccupied) and is also good in combat. So on one end of the scale you've got the humans, who are basically hosed from the start, and on the other end you've got the Stygians who are just going to win. There's also a built-in fantasy scenario where, instead of the normal victory conditions, you have to prevent an ancient evil from awakening to destroy the world. It has a human-designed map and different goals for the civilisations so it actually works a little bit better, but not a lot, because it still has the massive issue of different civs not really being able to interact with each other properly.
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Oct 1, 2018 05:11
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 16:12 |
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