Now here is what a scenario will do:

While you can argue about the last point being my personal problem, one cannot deny that most scenarios are too narrow in their scope and do not fully exploit the capabilities of CIV II. They transform CIV II into just another war game and probably not even a very good one, because the combat system is too simple. Maybe that is also my problem, that I am not a militarist. I have practiced the warmonger approach successfully several times, but at the bottom of my heart I am a perfectionist, who likes to explore, trade and research and who hates the logistics effort of a large military campaign. I played on bloodlust only once and it was my most boring game.

To keep the game interesting for me, I now try to set up a special challenge for me in every new game. In my last game for example I tried to win the Space Race while building not more than ten cities. It was a very interesting game, where I was trying NOT to become "Supreme" and also extremely fast: I finished in less than ten hours (and won by the way). There are various challenges to play with and many have been discussed in the Apolyton forums, like winning without ever going to war or winning without building a single city improvement.

What I would like to see are scenarios which start in 4000 BC, but still create a special situation to deal with. Maybe the scenario is set up in a world with very limited resources everybody has to fight for (e.g. a Waterworld) or the human player starts with a distinct disadvantage compared to the AI players. There are many ways to set up an interesting game and I am herewith announcing "Sven's Non-Scenario Scenario Contest". Please send your entries to ms@kayser-threde.de (no FW files please).
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Sven Müncheberg is our main Civ2 Database Helper.

The opinions expressed on this page do not necessarily reflect those of Apolyton CS or GameStats. They are just the personal opinions of the writer.