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[A Black Falcon]

As for the Irrigation I think its more realistic in CIVIII ,But later on in the industrial age you can research a way to allow you to irrigate without having to do that. I guess you have been spoiled by the old way, But there is a way to compensate for that , You go next to the river or source of water and irrigate everywhere spread it around and eventually you can make a irrigating network that can connect with your cities.

Most of the time it's not so bad, but when your starting city is surrounded by mountains and there are no rivers there... well, you might as well start over...

But on that note CiVIII did improve the AI ,Thats atleast what they say they did.

It's not bad in the previous games either, I'd say.

The Monuments have movies , But I dont know if it is what you wanted?

They basically removed the video content. Civ II has animated heralds (on the diplomatic screen), a video High Council where the five people tell you what they think you should do (they're funny too... :)), and a movie whenever you successfully complete a Wonder. Civ III just has static images and text for Wonders, diplomacy, and the opinions of your councillors. It does still have an intro movie (which is neat but not as good as the Civ II one) and a win movie for the space race (which is pretty cool, just like the Civ II one was), but that's it for them...

Oh yeah, and Civ II also has more (I believe) and better music.

I agree artilery is crap in CIVIII ,But I was abled to enjoy the game without it, Though aircraft bombers were fun and effective.

Artillery was great in II... maybe too great, they thought, but I wouldn't say so. If you could attack artillery with any contemporary unit it'd probably lose... they don't defend well. :)

As for cheats , I am glad it doesnt have it otherwise Id start using it and never really master the game.

The Cheat and Editor (if you have the second expansion, Forgotten Worlds) menus were more than your average cheat stuff. First, it was a menu right there on the screen. Now, there is a cost -- use it and your score has a big red CHEATER label on it on the high score table. What is it most useful for? Not really for me but for scenario designers. It let you, right in the game, do a huge amount of map and game manipulation... creating cities and units, terrain too I think, changing alliances, etc... you can do so much with that to make scenarios. Basically, the map editor made maps and then you did the scenario design ingame with those menus. Cool.

Yeah, the added campaigns are one of the big reasons I want Conquests -- I liked some of the missing ones! However, even renaming doesn't fix one flaw: you can't change the leader's gender. In Civ II you could choose male or female (with a default name) for each civ. I guess they didn't want to bother to make a portrait for both genders for each civilization...

Campaigns. That's also missing from normal Civ III. I know basic Civ II pretty much doesn't have them either, but each of the two expansions added 10 campaigns and there were a lot of awesome ones among them... I definitely missed them from Civ III. That's the other big reason that that would be worth getting. The multiplayer? I never played Civ II Gold Multiplayer Edition (civ ii + both expansions + win95 + multiplay) online, so that doesn't matter much.