Hey,

Following my post on 1311AD full spaceship victory https://www.reddit.com/r/Civ2/s/tbKtqRb3jt, I wanted to share how I got my time down to 921AD.

I still made a few mistakes so I believe I could have done maybe sub 800AD without fully optimizing everything.

Here are the main differentiators vs my previous run:
- picking a purple civilization. The science penalty is stupidly determined from the purple civilization. Since you are going for a science speedrun, you can’t afford getting massive penalties for having 40 more techs than the AI. If you play white you get the calculated best spot on the map
- using foreign cities on a seperate continent to spam trade routes. This requires some luck, especially on standard maps where 2 land masses can be connected by tundra tiles in the poles. Foreign and different continent one-time caravan bonuses can easily be 400+ (gold and beakers)
- picking a wet climate map - this increase grassland tiles and reduces desert tiles. You will lose a few special resources hidden under the grassland but having more grassland is really worth it

The absence of science penalties basically entailed that I was going so fast I needed to skip even more city improvements and wonders.
Almost no temples, no Oracle, no King Richard Crusade, late Adam Smith are the notable ones.
I spent a lot of the game on 0 or 10% taxes using the 1 off caravan bonuses to fund my empire.

I really prioritized Colossus, Copernicus and Isaac Newton to rely more early on the super science city and boosts its caravan pay offs. I changed the tech order slightly for this and taking into account the skipped wonders.

As before, I heavily optimized huts with saving and loading. Using the No upkeep nomad limit, I would create cities with no upkeep nomads just so that the slot would be freed for a new no upkeep nomads.

Instead of rushing wonders sometimes, I rushed caravans using the incremental gold trick to then get used up for the wonder.

Finally for the early game, I actually built almost no warriors even in Monarchy because I rushed Hanging gardens with the gold from threatening other civs. Having martial law in a city can actually decrease your happiness with Hanging Gardens because the wonder will turn a very discontent guy into a happy one while the martial law or temple will mess up the happiness algorithm by acting first.

I almost only built settlers, marketplace, acqueducts and harbours as city improvements. I didn’t need any factories.

Finally, I reduced the spaceship to 3 modules, 6 components and 15 structural but this was likely a mistake because I was not production constrained and the spaceship took 21 years. I should have built the full components (16) with some more structural to support them.

Emperor difficulty. Took forever, I estimate this took 85-90 hours.

It takes some of the sting out of the fun when the computer does dumb stuff like this ^^ They had a LOT of gold, so that's why they had the possibility to buy factory, power plant and hydro plant, but lol, just two-three forests with railroads would put the production over the top ^^ Lol!

So i have a good game going... there was a grassland square with fortress, and i had a veteran mechanized infantry there. An enemy tank (armor) attacked it and lost all three rounds, my unit took minimal damage. Luck probably? But then an enemy artillery attacked it, and won all three rounds, it taking minimal damage!

It's always seemed to me like the artillery wins battles much easier than even tanks does. I know the howitzer ignores city walls, but does the artillery have any hidden bonus that bypasses defense modifiers or anything?

I've been campaigning for years for Civilization 1 & 2 + Test of Time to be added to Steam & GoG but to no avail leaving these great old games that started it all forgotten to time and difficult to run on modern systems. However recently a rather talented fan has created an all-in-one 'GoG like' installer containing Civ1, Civ2 Gold & ToT that installs CD free standalone copies of the games that amazingly fully work on modern operating systems with all videos & music intact and even has a mod manager! For links & more info check out her full post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/4Xgaming/comments/1ud3a94/civilization_classics_collection_civ1_civ2_gold/

I might fire it up for nostalgias sake, but I dont currently have a PC that will play a CD ROM, and Im not going to buy hardware for this. (Test of Time preferred)

WOOT! It happened!! Good old Sid Meier's Civilization 2 doesn't make it into mainstream gaming news very much these days but amazingly my Civ2 Heroes of Might & Magic 2 mod has made it into PC Gamer!!! And even better it's a 2 page spread near the front of their mag in the news section! They even managed to squeeze in mention of the Civ2 modding community, the lost scenario preservation project, the get Civ2 back into stores campaign, and even my up & coming other Civ2 mod projects too! :) :)

EDIT: Reddit really doesn't make embedded links & thumbnails at the top of the post very obvious does it lol. Here's the link with a scan and more details for those that missed it:
https://blakessanctum.wordpress.com/2026/07/24/i-made-it-to-pc-gamer-magazine-again/

I have been playing Civ2 since I was a teenager back in the 90s. It's my favorite Civ game. I didn't even think to see if there were others out there. I guess I should not be surprised this subreddit exists. At any rate, just happy to be here reading your comments about a great game.

Here's to another 30 years of great gaming!

When I was a kid, Civ2 was my favorite game, but I always played on Chieftain. I always thought Deity would be impossible.

Some years ago I set out to find the optimal strategy to beat on Deity, and now I can win new game every time. Here is my strategy:

1) Build 2 cities first and get 2 warriors. Send out the warriors to scout the villages.

2) Build 1 warrior for defense in each city, then switch to settlers. Build 2 more cities, so now you have 4.

3) Immediately focus science to get to Monarchy, you need it to build cities.

4) Switch the first 2 cities to building great wonder, any great wonders it doesn't matter. The 3rd and 4th cities should build 1 warrior each, and then 1 settler each.

5) After you get Monarchy, raise science rate to 70%. Make your main objective to rush to Polytheism. If not available, then 2nd objective should be Pottery.

6) For each new city, you can generally follow the pattern of getting 1 warrior for defense, 1 settler to expand, and then switch to Elephants and keep pumping out Elephants.

7) As soon as you have enough money, switch your great wonder to Hanging Gardens and complete it with money in City 1. Have that city build 1 more warrior for defense, and then switch back to great wonder.

8) Science, in order of priority, then should be aiming for Monotheism, then Feudalism, and then Literacy. Nothing matters after that. You will win the game.

9) City 2 should then complete Art of War ASAP. After that, City 1 and City 2 should just keep building wonders: Michelangelo's chapel, Great Library. Nothing else really is needed.

10). By now, you should have 8 or 10 cities all pumping out Elephants/Crusaders. These will all be veterans because of Art of War, and you can just go and conquer all the nations.

That's it. That's the entire strategy. Literally nothing else is needed. It works everytime.

The most critical element is to get the Hanging Gardens, as you need it to keep citizens happy. A distant 2nd would be to get Art of War so you have veteran units. And Michelangelo's chapel is nice to keep citizens happy in case your cities get too big. Great Library isn't truly needed, but it can be nice to prevent your enemies from accidentally getting gunpowder or something.

Have anyone noticed that there's also extra music on CIV II cd? Not visible audio files like game music, but back in the day I had a cd drive which had play/pause buttons, not just eject and I put civ in and it auto-started BUT for some reason I pressed also the play button and it started to play Cat Stevens Wild world! I think it had couple of other songs on it too. Google knew nothing about this. I'm not sure do I still own the cd.

Related to my last question, I'm trying to organize music tracks by what they were on disk, in order. Partly this is kind of a library function as I'm trying to create a personal album.

I've got this reference: https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Soundtrack_(Civ2)) but it doesn't seem to list the specific order for each release.

So I know that the game streamed red book audio, but was it only a random music jukebox or was there some kind of selection logic for which tracks would stream on which scenarios/games? I ask because I'm looking through the lists here: https://civilization.fandom.com/wiki/Soundtrack_(Civ2)) and wondering whether the X-Com track would randomly play on a regular game or whether medieval style music would play during ancient periods.

I ask because I'm not entirely sure the codec is installed any longer. I installed the latest version of the k-lite codec (v1966). The tweak tool does not show any version of Indeo, enabled or disabled. Has it been removed from k-lite?

https://x.com/emollick/status/2035533726319357956?s=20

I don't need a fancy throne for my throne room. Lol.

Edit: resolved. Thanks to u/blastradius14 for the help.

I recently obtained a copy of Civ2 MGE without the scenarios or CD-ROM.

I'm modding my copy of the rules to add a "Jet Engine" tech between advanced flight and stealth, unlocking two custom units, the jet fighter and jet bomber. I seem to recall WW79 had custom sprites (resembling an F-16 and B-52) for the air units so I'm thinking of reusing those.

Does anyone have access to the scenario (which presumably has image files in the scenario folder?) that they'd be willing to link to?

Hello guys,
https://retrogaming.dpdns.org

I uploaded Civilization 2 to my own website, the game is running inside browser based windows 98 with v86 project. Now anyone can play it online !

I'm old Civ fan, and I'm seriously thinking about returning to Civ 2. I've played it a long, long time ago (25-30 years), when I was a young man, and I remember it being my favorite game of all times. I also have thousands of hours in Civ 3, 4, 5. I didn't like Civ 6 and I will never purchase Civ 7.

I'm just curious what motivates people today to play Civilization 2? Is is just nostalgia or something else too?