I loved Civ 2. If it was fixed to work on Vista/Win7 and was released on Steam, I'd clock up hundreds of hours on that.
And Civ 2 was only easy on the lower difficulty levels. Once you got to Prince or higher, the AI started getting mean...
But my main like of Civ 2 was there was no "pretty" to distract you from the game. Civ 4 is great, but I get bored with the 3D "fluff".
well I can't say I've experimented every situation out there for sure, however once I took in a supposed impossible savegame that a friend couldn't complete, he did let the computers outgrow himself in the highest difficulty, no space left to colonize, the AIs had too much late game units to be defeated
yet I succeeded where he failed... spies... :mrgreen:
And in any case, a computer that gets too much advantages to keep up with a player ain't really a challenge just a cheater :p
If anyone played Empire Earth 1 with "good" skills, you'll see what I mean :
-play bad => AI is scaled bad, doesn't cheat a lot yet still cheats for basic ressources since he doesn't know how to handle them correctly..
-play good=> AI becomes incredibly hard, near impossible to fully beat cheating like mad, reconstructing bases faster than you destroy them, forcing you to occupy with your forces every percent of the map to utterly eliminate them...
@Tanuki
it's supposed to be kind of a game ender I guess, however should you not like it, you can always mod it out or increase its cost or whatever cross your mind, that's the power of Civ 4 ...