Civ2

[Buster's Uncle]

I've only got the original - but I love it.

[Mart]

...

Mart, you need to dig up the woman advisor - I always fancied her...  Disregard - I found her, now.

She sounds with Russian accent?

[Buster's Uncle]

Yes, in the modern era, IIRC, not earlier.

I like Russian/Slavic/eastern European accents - they hit the ear real nice, and I regret having all these friends who no doubt have them, but I don't get to hear.  Not what I was talking about, but there it is.

[Mart]

Yes, in the modern era, IIRC, not earlier.

So it is likely, like she has parents from that region, and could hear speak that accent at home, while being raised from a child in native English speaking place.

[Mart]

! No longer available

[Elok]

I remember Civ2.  What I liked best about it was its extreme mod-friendliness; while a lot was hard-coded, it was easy to understand its system, and the meh graphics meant you could make decent-looking units, terrain, etc. without using a complicated program.  Want a different-looking soldier for a Civ2 scenario?  Take an existing picture, spend five minutes in Paint tweaking it to fit your needs.  Same thing in Civ4 requires extensive work to handle 3D animation.  It's a shame few computers can play it anymore, and I think the modding community has more or less dissipated; Catfish's War of the Rings was the pinnacle and swan song of Civ2 mods.

[Valka]

I wish I'd known about this thread sooner - Civ II: Test of Time is my favorite Civ game. Mind you, I loved the videos of the Civ II council. I never heard some of those before.

The video of the Civ II Extended game had me yelling back at the screen, because that is definitely NOT the strategy I use!

Honestly, who puts off writing and trade? That's the key to getting as much tech as fast as possible, and bribing useful units. And not bothering to explore to the south? No Map Making? Even a lowly trireme is good enough to help you figure out the limits of the continent you're on.

I wonder what kind of strategy the person in the video had with the Lalande and Fantasy games...

[Unorthodox]

can't watch that video, but sounds like you would be shocked by some of my strategies.

Writing can often wait till after I bonk some heads, heck, with any luck one of the enemy researched it for me, and I'm often happy to explore with a large army stack later. 

[Valka]

I save the violence for when I need it. Diplomats are absolutely critical units to have in the Test of Time games, particularly in the Lalande scenario. You can't engage in back-and-forth diplomacy with the aliens until you get a particular tech in the late-middle/early-late stage of the game, and that doesn't happen until you've got other particular techs, have made it to at least the moon, Naumachia (the Lalande and Midgaard scenarios have 4 map levels and Naumachia is the 3rd level).

The aliens still have to be alive to get this ability as well; they're notoriously prone to killing each other off and they're incredibly stupid about researching their own tech. They try to fight the Nona aliens with a Bombus (essentially a giant bee) and that's absolutely inadequate. So I spend part of the game protecting the aliens until I can get the tech I need, as they're the only ones who can research it.

And are they grateful? Not for a moment. So it's keep them alive to get the tech, at some point give them Ley lines (Railroad) so they'll build tracks between their cities and make it easier to eventually conquer them, bribe useful alien units, steal their tech as fast as they can research it (and curse them when they're too slow; lots of times I give them tech right and left so they can research what I need).

In the meantime, research, build, and hoard the powerful flying units necessary to kill the Nona aliens; those are the units you need the heaviest stuff for.

[Unorthodox]

Oh, never played test of time, only vanilla.  I always need violence, though, and tech routes are usually the shortest route to violence.  Every now and then I can go totally builderrific though.  You know, "every once in a while declare peace, it confuses the hell out of your enemies"