"Conquer or Be Conquered"

I don't know how many games I've played where the goal is to save the planet or the universe. In Civilization II you're just fighting for survival. Being one of the most played strategy games ever and widely considered one of the best games of all time, this turn-based wonder will keep you drawn in and wanting to play for years to come.

You begin with a unit called a settler in 4000 B.C. Your goal with this unit is to find a suitable place to build your first city and get your civilization under way. Since its 4000 B.C. you start with virtually no knowledge of any kind of technologies. Your scientists are constantly working to correct this by researching and discovering different advancements such as the alphabet, mathematics, and map making.

While discovering advancements is one of the most important aspects in pushing your civilization forward, it is not the only one. There could be anywhere from three to seven other civilizations out there doing exactly what you're doing: expanding. This could cause some problems.

Just as in the real world, the bigger your nation is the more resources it has, the more money it can make, the more military units it can support, and the more science it can research. Other rulers know this which is why everyone is a threat at all times. For instance, lets say you're exploring a new world you just discovered and and wandering past a civilization with no harmful thought in your body. All civilizations and leaders think differently and they might ask you to leave. If you do not leave then you are almost certainly entering a war.

The problems with wars is they put the advancement of your civilization on halt. You're spending money to buy troops and ships or you're trying to pay other civilizations to help you defeat your "evil" enemy. The thing you have to remember in this game is every other civilization can do exactly what you do. If you double cross a country, then your reputation will spread and other countries are likely to do that to you since you can't be trusted. The tricky part is when you see a fellow friendly civilization moving all their military pieces into position to strike and you can't do anything about it until they attack you.

If you start getting too big or discovering advancements much faster than the other civilizations are, they will notice and not like it. Lets say you have discovered Metallurgy and can now build cannons. Other civilizations are still defending their cities with phalanx or pikemen (since their expecting to be attacked by calvary or crusaders) and you will crush their poor 3rd-world cities into the ground. When this happens every nation in the world will start making pacts to contain your civilizations aggression. This basically means if you go to war with one nation, you are at war with the entire world.

You may choose to do this since killing everyone in the world that's different from you is one of the two ways to win the game. This is very hard to do, however, unless you have the power to create nuclear warheads. With nukes you can blow up a city and take it over in no time. Doing this however will cause mass pollution around the city, make every nation furious with you (because they don't have nukes), and if used enough will cause global warming to take effect and flood huge masses of land. There is much that may go wrong with this strategy so another more peaceful way to win is to be the first to reach Alpha Centauri, the second closest solar system to Earth.

This is done by heavy duty research to learn discoveries to build a spaceship and making sure you built it well enough to actually reach your destination. It must be safe, but fast enough to beat all the other spaceships to the new system.

There is so much more to this game than I couldn't even come close to covering in this short review. This is by far the most in depth and most difficult game I've ever played. It is too much fun, which explains why after twelve years I still play it all the time. If told that I am only allowed to play one video game for the rest of my life, this would easily be my choice.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 02/04/08

Game Release: Civilization II (US, 02/29/96)