quote:

Having burned myself with CTP I decided to wait for a moment to see how it panned out. The usual "CTPII rocks!" at the start, some nitpicking "where's xxxx?" at the start and the usual "let's wait for the patch first". Patch got released, some bugs fixed but main problem still remained: gameplay. You see folks, gameplay's one thing you can't easily fix with a patch and the truth is that CTPII doesn't have it. And what you don't have you can't fix. I experienced that for myself in CTP, everything was nicely polished and so on but it didn't have the factor that's important for all strategy games: Just one more turn. CTP didn't have it, and seeing that CTPII looks 'veeeeery similar' I didn't believe that CTPII would have 'it'.

The truth is that CTPII was just what everyone thought right from the start: a souped up data disk that should have been released as such, not as a 'sequel'. Even after they bought it, people just wanted to believe that it was better than CTP, SMAC or Civ2. There's term for this type of behaviour in pyschology: cognitive dissonance.

In short: Glad I waited and saved my money...