“It established that Civ was the type of game that could support sequels. By the time Reynolds left the company, it had sold 2.5 million. In the end, word of mouth saved it.” The publisher estimated poor sales. “When they took over, they didn’t have confidence in the game, so they did very little marketing for it. “I put a good amount of time into multiplayer logic for Civilisation II, but by 1995, there was no way we were going to get it in.” After the acquisition, things seemed to get worse. This wasn’t helped by the fact that multiplayer wasn’t on the cards for the sequel. It was more invested in the multiplayer remake of the first game. There’d always been issues with the business side of MicroProse not understanding Civilization II. In 1993, MicroProse was sold to Spectrum Holobyte. I’d already coded the idea of hit points, getting ready for what I thought was coming, and Sid was like, ‘Yeah, my prototype isn’t as fun as that,’ so I carried on.” “There was talk of Sid working on that side of the game, but it didn’t happen. Master of Magic was a source of inspiration, but he still didn’t find the combat to be much fun. “It was a long journey, making it more tactical,” Reynolds recollects. “It actually quadrupled the amount of code we had to write.” These changes to diplomacy also served as the beginning of the national border system that would see use in future Civs, as well as Alpha Centauri, which Reynolds also designed. “We did a lot of work on diplomatic AI in Civilization II,” Reynolds stresses.

So there was the aforementioned alliance system, while peace treaties would force the other civilisation to remove its units from your areas. The original Civilization made it so that there was more than one way to win the game, but with Civ II, Reynolds wanted to double down on peaceful solutions. It was probably the first triple-A game that could run on the operating system, and we really leaned into it.” This allowed Reynolds to play around with different screens, making the UI modular, taking advantage of the OS’s strengths. “We were perfectly placed with the launch of Windows 95 to be successful. They just thought it was Civ, but for Windows.” That didn’t mean the fact that it was being designed to run on Windows 95 wasn’t important.

“It all started to feel really fresh, but for reasons you couldn’t always put your finger on. After Civ II, Reynolds went on to design Alpha Centauri, as well as Rise of Nations.

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