The very first strategy game that I bought for my PC was Civ 2. I had played it at a relative's house last summer while looking for a job. I had time to kill and a house to myself, and spent many lazy summer mornings learning to play this classic. After I bought my own computer I just had to own this title.

At first, Civ 2 seems like one of the best, if not the best, strategy games ever made. In case you haven't heard about it, I will give a brief overview.

You begin with one settler, and he can create a new city wherever you feel like plunking him down. Depending on where he settles, you may have a wide variety of natural resources. Build near a river or the coast, get good commerce. Build in the mountains, have plenty of manufacturing "shields". From here you can spend your tax money and production in many ways. Spend them on technology upgrades (you basically begin in the stone age, so we are talking about everythg from the wheel to space flight), food production for population growth, buildings, or on military units or more settlers. One of the most exciting parts of the game is the ability to build one of the "wonders of the world". Depending on what the current technology level is at, you can be the first to build the pyramids, explode a nuclear bomb, or discover the cure for cancer. Only one nation gets to build any given "wonder", so it is often a race of both resources and technology to build the better ones. Each wonder gives either the city it was built in or your whole nation a specific ability. For example, developing the S.E.T.I. program (search for extra terrestrial intelligence) acts to boost your whole nation's science rate.

Depending on what government you have (these are developed as technology upgrades as well), there are various limitations on what units you can build or how many resource points you can pour into any one field. There are also advantages and disadvantages for any given government type. For example, Democracies have a problem getting their people to back wars, but they have incredible rates of growth and economies.

Well, there is the overview. In conclusion Civ 2 is a grand strategy game of epic proportions, right? Wrong. Civ 2 has some weak points that seriously detract from its gameplay. Most of these points stem from the massive micro-management that occurs late in the game. All units, unless they are fortifying a position, need to be told individually what to do. You cannot group large numbers of units and tell them to finish a collective task, like sacking a city. You cannot ignore a few units in one turn to allow others to catch up. You must, individually, tell each and every unit what to do. No big deal when dealing in armies of 5 or even 10 men. Get up to 30 or more, however, and a simple movement can take 10 minutes.

A second shortcoming, in terms of micro-management, is in the use of settlers for developing cities' lands. Settlers can build irrigation, mines, or roads. This is necessary to increase the mobility of units throug your lands, as well as getting more efficient farming out of your lands. Once again, this is simple to do with five or six cities, but when you get up to 30 cities it gets very tedious. For this reason, Microprose included an "automate settler" option to let the settlers figure this out on their own. This sounds great, right up until you are far into your game and notice that a few of your settlers have just been moving back and forth for the last 5 turns. In other words, the automated settlers are extremely inefficient.

My final gripe with the game is that combat with some government types is nearly impossible. In a democracy, for every military unit outside of a city square one civilian is made unhappy. Make too many people unhappy and the city in question basically goes on strike. Make too many cities unhappy as a whole and watch the government collapse. I have had situations where my city was under siege, unable to feed itself, and I could not beat the invaders off because my government would collapse if my military went out to meet the enemy.

Real conclusion- Civ 2 is a wonderful game if you limit the game to a small map or if you don't mind micromanaging. Otherwise, be prepared to get bored even as the war for the world breaks loose.