Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6763 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Focus Multimedia Ltd
• Released on: 2003-09-26
• Platforms: Windows Vista, Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP

Manufacturer's Description
Where Exploration Meets World Domination!

The New World unfolds before you. Your objective is to skilfully parlay discovery into riches and amass enough power to dominate Europe's political landscape. Combining elements of resource management, economic trade, exploration, diplomatic manoeuvring and military conquest, this multi-faceted strategy game challenges you to leverage New World riches into Old World dominance. To achieve victory, you must employ a web of intricate strategies. When diplomacy is the order of the day, dispatch envoys to develop critical trade relations whilst secretly deploying spies to undermine your enemies. If diplomacy fails, build an invincible military machine with an unquenchable thirst for conquest. Skilfully manoeuvre your nation and don't forget: the object is to unite Europe under one flag.

Customer Reviews

Grrrrrreat!
Imperialism 2: Aaah. Nice.

The player plays a ruler of a colonial nation: England, France, Spain, Holland, Portugal or Sweden (don't ask). For those who have played Imperialism, you can skip the next section of this review.

The maps are generated randomly, although there is an option to play with the original Europe, and a random New World. Unfortunately, there seems to be no real-world map of the Americas to play.

The standard game map is divided into squares. Said squares are arranged like bricks in a wall, so that each square borders six others. Each square also has a type of raw material it produces. That is dependent upon terrain type (eg mountains and hills produce minerals).

Players use Civilian units to improve these squares and thus increase economic output. Engineers build roads and forts. Builders build farms and mines. Explorers will discover new lands, and Merchants will purchase land for development on foreign soil.

The military moves in the turn, and then land battles are resolved in a very nice tactical map between turns. There is an option to turn this off, but the computer is a bit thick, and humans are invariably their tactical superiors.

Diplomacy, production, transport, trade and research all have separate screen for players to fiddle around and optimise their industries, cash flow, research and so on. Diplomacy is conducted in an indirect manner, with players sending a proposal, and the news log reporting the success or otherwise of the diplomacy. There is no face-to-face diplomacy involved.

The graphics are very cute, and clear as well. My taste in music is classical Baroque, so I enjoy the in game music as well, although given the length of games, it can get a bit samey.

In all, I enjoy Imperialism 2 very much. It is a good solid strategy game, which has some interesting - and welcome -differences from Colonization (a game set in the same period). A good one to buy if you feel that you want a change from Colonization, and are looking for something with just that little bit more depth.

A classic
This game is a real gem, and is one of my all-time favourites. It is surprisingly good, given its age and relative lack of polish. The emphasis is on slow and deliberate strategy, rather than fancy graphics or crowd-pleasing action.

The game is a kind of distant cousin to the Civilization series. You send out explorers, build builders and military units, research new technologies, declare war and use diplomacy and trade to expand your empire, and so on. In many ways I think it is better than Civilization, perhaps because the economic model is so ingenious, and the gameplay often so edge-of-the-seat.

Everything has to be kept in delicate balance - your exploration and territory, your finances, your technological development, your raw materials, your workforce, the size of your military, the size of your merchant fleet. It is like trying to juggle several balls at once, and you are usually forced to neglect something. If something falls too far behind, then bottlenecks develop and your growth can suddenly grind to a halt. Neglect the military (which is all-too-easy given all the other demands on your economy), and you can quickly meet a sticky end.

You are often involved in a race against time, which keeps the game exciting and addictive. For example, you may be running deperately low on funds, and need to discover some precious resources before you go broke. Or you may be running low on food, and need to build some new farms before your population starts to starve. A particular challenge is building up your merchant fleet. You end up building ship after ship, and yet there never seem to be enough to transport all the materials you need to feed your hungry empire.

If all this sounds difficult, it is. But it is also great fun, and it is also quite easy to get the basic hang of. Although complicated, the economic system is also very logical and intuitive. It all hangs together surprisingly well.

While managing your economy is a challenge in its own right, the ultimate goal of the game is to expand territorially. This is also a slow and deliberate process, requiring careful preparation. Again, you will often find yourself in a desperate race against time, trying to grab land and develop new offensive technologies, before your enemies have time to build powerful defences. Each attack is an exciting gamble, where you pray and keep your fingers crossed that the enemy defences are as weak as you think they are. Defending is also a tense business, where you never seem to have quite enough troops to plug all the holes in your defences.

All in all, it's a highly addictive and intellectually rewarding game. If I have a criticism, it is that there are certain resources (diamonds and gems), which have an excessive amount of influence. Basically the opening phase of the game is a desperate race to find the diamonds. This is of course not at all realistic, and it is also slightly disappointing that so much should hinge on one thing.

It's a pity that there aren't more possibilities to customize and modify the game (which would have been one way to solve the "diamond-hunt" problem just mentioned). If Imperialism 2 came out today, there would no doubt be many more options to change the value and availability of resources, how much things cost to build and maintain, and so on.

What a shame that there don't seem to be any developers willing to take over the Imperialism franchise and give it a modern treatment. I think that anyone who has played this game knows just what an outstanding classic it is.

Not as good as it's predecessor
Having spent many happy hours playing imperialism, I was somewhat disappointed by this sequel. Many of the elements of the game are the same, there has been no change to the diplomacy mechanism, the production mechanism has been streamlined, the technological tree has been expanded and made more sophisticated, the new world has been added.

None of this has made the game any better. Diplomacy could have been improved by allowing peace to be made without breaking alliances, but has not been. The addition of the new world has actually made diplomacy less important than it's predecessor. Whilst it is technically possible to use diplomacy to absorb new world colonies into your empire, this takes time and in the meantime your computer opponents go on a land grab by force of arms, the only way to keep up is to do the same. This is a shame as diplomacy was a challenging and satisfying part of the original game and this element has been reduced in imperialsm 2.

The production mechanism is now balance between labour and resources. labour requires food and cloth. Previously the capacity of your factories also had to be considered and labour required more diverse resources. As a result production is simpler and quicker, but to my mind less challenging and interesting.

Technologies are now researched rather than becoming available for purchase during the course of the game. This could add to the game but is rather similar to other games in this genre and robs the title of a little bit of individuality.

Overall it is not a bad game but the original is better.