Here is the first of a series of short diaries or articles on the incoming Civil War 2 game. The diaries will continue until the game is released, at the brisk pace of one article a day.
And without further delay, here is the first one!
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A question that often arises is 'why makes Civil War 2 when American Civil War is already a complete and fulfilling game?'.
There are several answers to this one. As most of you know by now, Ageod’s policy has been one of regularly improving their games post release with patches which are not only bug fixes, but also new features based on feedback from our vibrant community. Sometimes these feature requests are game specific and sometimes they are related to the AGE engine and benefit all games using the AGE engine. As American Civil War was released in 2007, it was becoming increasingly difficult to continue updating it without rewriting it from scratch as the engine had changed so much. This is one of the reasons we created Civil War 2, because sometimes the best thing to do is just start again, with all the knowledge and experience you gained allowing you to make a much better overall experience.
In Civil War 2, the interface has been changed extensively. We are not talking about a change in the look, which might or might not please everyone
We are talking about changes in the way you use the UI making the game much easier to pick up and play for new users and yet still with all the controls the hardcore players want. The code redesign also allows us to structure things in a way that the development team can maintain it for years to come. Let's just take one striking example: the Load Game interface in Civil War 2 is in our opinion some light years better than the previous one. It displays your game very fast, in a clear and clean way. While the UI is improved, Civil War 2 has a lot more to offer and also includes a range of new and updated features which were only possible with a complete rewrite of the game. One of the biggest additions is the regional decision model. These add a card like game mechanic that allow us to recreate lots of special case situations and events that it is very hard to model in another way. For example things such as raising partisans or sending the Confederate sub CSS Hunley to attack the US Navy. There are many others features too but we’ll cover those in more detail in a future diary.
So the bottom line is: Civil War 2 exists because it proposes a cleaner and intuitive new interface, with major additions in gameplay that we developed for the AGE engine over the years. Top that with a bigger map for some Western actions, and everybody should find something to like in Civil War 2!
