Civilization: Call to Power

« This game tries to use the Civilization's formula but mostly fails despite its many novel features. There are more units than in the Civ 2 game, and the game includes a "future" era, with space units. The system of improving tiles (terraforming) is done without settlers or workers/formers but instead you just purchase tile improvements using empire-wide "public works" resource. Despite a host of interesting features, the game breaks in 2 things: combat and special units. You can build armies of up to 9 units, and during fights the units are arranged in rows. The melee ones are placed in the first row, and all the ranged ones in the rows behind. The whole battle goes automatically. This system makes ranged units like archers vastly superior to melee ones. Also, when you discover cannons, an army of 9 veteran cannons defeats just about anything in the game, even the end-game robots and battleships. There are many special units, like slaver and cyber-terrorist which are invisible to any units except other special units. It's thus hard to detect them, and they can do vast damage (like, destroy all buildings in a city), which makes the game tedious in later epochs. »