It prevents people from coming in the city although it might have an excess of food. Also the overcrowding effect works nicely. Instead every turn your population increases according the excess of food in the city. You no longer have stores that get filled. Something I like very much is the way population increases. BTW here are the max tiles a city can work according to its size: Of course I don't think players will place cities very close to each other any more, both because it is very nice to see your capital reach size 58 (my largest city by the end of the game) and because you will try to max expand your borders with only 20 cities (max cities in Monarchy and other ancient Governments). In those games you should be very careful when choosing where to place you city and you should take care if you wanted it to grow (I liked that!). I can't say that I don't like the new system but I think the main reason why it is still functional is because ICS is now even worse! Remember that the first 6 workers now work on 9 tiles.! In my last turn I have a coastal city surrounded by tundra with only 1 advanced farm and size.22!!! Something like that would never have happened in CIV2 or CTP1. I'm one of those guys who really liked micromanagement.
Borders are also very good and the fact that cities grow over the environment as the population increases is fantastic. Although I don't always understand how the units are placed, usually I like it. The game lasted 7 days and I must have played more than 40 hours to finish it! In general I liked the game very much (I have played civ1, civ2.quite a lot, SMAC only the demo and CTP1.a lot PBEM) and I can definitely say this is the best title!ĭiplomacy is really good (I think there is a little problem with the AI to withdraw his units, especially naval units) and the combat system excellent. I conquered only one civ completely because I wanted to check more the diplomacy options and because the "max city" restriction was always a problem for my plans to expand. I played at medium level, 8 civs, huge map and I won the scientific victory after 703 turns (year 2103). The game didn't crash at all although I didn't try any scenario or the cheat options.
With 64 RAM loading a game took about 2 min and next turn 1 min15 sec, whereas after I upgraded there was no difference at all no matter how long I played. The huge difference was after playing for 5 hours continuously. I bought 128 RAM during the game so I compared 64 to 192 RAM:Ħ4: Load= 32 sec next turn= 25 sec at turn 407 (year 1732) I have a celeron 400 with 192 RAM and Voodoo 3000 16 RAM. OK here you can find my thoughts during my first CTP2 game.