A quick and dirty review based on recent play of the playstation version and decades old memories of pc, to highlight what this game does well and poorly compared to other Civ games.
Pro
Overall excellent 4X gameplay with good balance and progression. Building stuff, expanding, and improving the land is fun.
Military units significantly cheaper than buildings. Makes buildings a significant strategic choice.
Good building balance. Production cost and gold maintenance vs very specific benefits, some of which are not always useful.
Wonders and their videos. Very powerful strategic effects like buildings that often lead to interesting decisions, like whether to invest in a wonder or let an easy to conquer enemy build it.
The live action advisors, even though their advice is not that useful.
Military units cost shields for support while workers cost food. I prefer this over gold cost in the later games because of the trade off between having a large military vs pumping new units quickly or building other things. It puts a hard cap on military size based on the land rather than the more abstract gold, and synergizes very well with the governments. Also, workers are a significant investment in population and food.
Workers can join cities to add population or delete size 1 cities. Resettlement is a good tool to have in the box.
Good terraforming options without having too much choice, especially converting tiles to better type.
Roads and rail give yield bonus but not for every tile. Roads benefit flat land, rail benefits mines and forests.
Good government choices that are balanced with powerful effects. Maybe zero corruption should not be on democracy and give it something else to compensate since I think that should be unique to communism.
Barbarians can be persistent nuisance for entire game, improving their units with tech and coming out of unsettled areas and water.
Pollution and global warming effects punish late industry and nukes while giving more for workers to do.
Cool espionage missions like poison water, plant nuke, and sabotage unit hp.
Bombers, fighters and helicopters all have different mechanics. Bombers spend a turn in the air after attacking which allows a chance to shoot them down even if the time scale is silly. More interesting is how fighters behave, being able to attack for every move and having more moves than bombers but crashing if they don't land in a city, base or carrier. Alpha centauri sadly lost this fighter mechanic and later games essentially made air units immobile with very long ranged attacks. I do like the latter system but it prevents the kamikaze you can do in Civ 2.
Unit design. I generally like the design and balance of the units, despite the problems with the combat system. How even obsolete units can still be effective and how you are not just upgrading everything to the best.
Space victory is cool.
Con
Automation for workers and cities. There was no option for this at all in ps while I believe it was possible but garbage in pc. You really should be able to directly assign what improvements to build on every tile in one go then have automated workers build them over time. Cities should at least have a standard build queue. Automation should be customizable enough to never do stupid stuff.
Cities not automatically correcting civil disorder or food shortage. Really the entire concept of making citizens entertainers is dumb and tedious. Civ 4 unhappy citizens refusing to work has the same net effect without requiring player intervention.
Only 7 players max.
Nations linked to colors so the possible combinations are limited. Though I think there was an option to unlink in PC version.
Unit movement. Extremely tedious on console requiring separate button presses to rotate direction while PC had a key for every direction, mouse waypoints, and stack move. Console auto go to requires selecting from a list of cities while PC could click anywhere. I don't remember how good the PC pathing was but on console it often ignored railroads and even land access, sending units into rough terrain or infinite loops. Made even more tedious with....
All units on tiles destroyed if defender loses, except in cities and forts. Prevents doom stacking but is much too harsh. It forces spreading out but allows doom stacking to defend cities. Better than civ 5 hard 1 unit per tile. Should be a happy medium of X units max per tile, including cities, with some units able to damage multiple units in a stack.
Large numbers of units tedious to control and figure out how many are available. I would want icons on the main screen showing every unit type I have that could move, their numbers and hp, so I could tell at a glance if I should press the offensive or spend this turn resting. And move all of certain types of units before others.
Information not clearly shown on UI. Things like city production and turns until complete or growth on main screen, number for city population in city screen (no the number of heads and abstract population is not good enough), and what technology does in the tech research popup. You can't change what tech is being researched if you just pick whatever to go into the pedia to check, though PC version might be different.
Caravan and freight trade route system is unbelievably tedious and can be abused. Internal food trade routes is good but contributing to wonders is OP despite being somewhat realistic. In fact disbanding units for production should not be a thing. I would limit to only 1 such unit allowed to exist or be building at a time, allow both food and production internal trade routes instead of wonder contribution, and make commodity trading for lump gold independent of specific cities (to function like weaker civ 4 great merchant), and no science boost.
Manual rehoming. As much as I like production support, having to physically move units to cities to assign support is extremely tedious. It should instead draw from an empire wide pool with a setting in each city to pick what % of production there can be taken by support.
Combat always all or nothing with 1 unit always being destroyed. No ranged bombard, withdrawal, or way to inflict damage without losing a unit, other than missiles and spy sabotage. Combat heavily favors defenders, at least until howitzers. I dislike the save scum promoting % based combat of the entire series. It should instead be like chess where the outcome of any specific combat with that set of parameters is fixed across all instances. For example, a full hp alpine troop attacking a full hp tank in open terrain should always reduce both to 50% hp. The complexity would come from many units attacking and defending with different hp levels over multiple turns.
No way to reduce city defense other than killing population or destroying walls with spies. Attacking well defended cities requires absurd numbers or tech advantage. Should be over time defense reduction from siege units and zone of control like prevention of citizens working tiles to really starve the defenders.
Difficult to destroy cities. Combat in cities reduces population by 1 and a city is only destroyed if captured at size 1. Being able to raze a large city instantly with only 1 military unit is unreasonable. I would allow 1 population or 1 building to be destroyed per full movement military unit, so a tank can't attack and then raze. The city would only be destroyed once all population, buildings and wonders were destroyed, and doing this would potentially damage the unit and spawn insurgents. Possibly even making the city revolt back to its faction while killing your units, ruining reputation, and causing unrest back home. Genocide should be possible but challenging and with consequences.
Diplomats and spies OP with bribe and tech steal. Similar with tech steal on city conquest. Would make more sense to only give research towards a tech if the city is big enough and/or contains a unit or building unlocked by that tech. How could you steal tank tech from a tiny frontier town that has never built or even seen a tank? Bribing is an important mechanic and benefit of democracy, but still too easy to pull off and not every unit in a city should defect.
Air units somewhat OP with this combat system and lack of AA ground units.
Fighters only intercept their own tile and are way too weak on defense, often losing to bombers. They really need x2 defense vs air and interception out to a certain range.
Air units can't pillage.
Air units lack long distance mobility compared to airlifting and infinite railroad. Infinite rail movement is OP and air units should airlift. Air units only airlifting between airports makes sense. Also there should not be a limit of 1 unit airlifted per airport. Maybe not infinite but more than 1.
Zone of control. I do like the idea of a front line instead of a doom stack but completely preventing unit movement even by non combat units in your own territory is ridiculous. Instead it should lower movement to 1 and only be done by ground combat units while not at peace and only in enemy or neutral territory. Otherwise units from different factions should freely move through and exist on the same tile. Note that my X units per tile limit should not prevent other units from passing through even if they only have 1 move.
Non combat units can do surprisingly well when defending. They should have 0 defense and be completely unable to defend, even warrior vs engineer. Maybe even being captureable.
Having to track down every city to win conquest.
Fog of war not visually represented and sight range around territory should increase with tech. I would give modern ships and cities enough sight range to simulate sending recon aircraft in each direction. Who wants to do tedious manual ocean recon?
Using enemy road and rail is OP.
No visual representation of borders.
AI not great. While they can tech and build well they do not do war or diplomacy competently. I dislike how they build forts everywhere, which helps my army more than anything.
Long AI turns late game. All civ games have this issue and there really should be no need because the AI should go at light speed.
Some of the wonders are dubious why they should exist as wonders, or why they should give the effect they do. Pyramids give free granaries? Build the crusades without ever going to war? SETI? Things related to great feats by specific people? Many of the wonders are better implemented in later games by great people, or pillaging or being the 1st to actually map around the globe. To me wonders should only be great works of construction and engineering since they cost production to make, while other things that count as wonders here should be done through units or abstract science or culture or population. Like the cure for cancer should be a random event triggered by a research lab. No telling when it could happen or where. I also dislike how many go obsolete.
I don't knock civ 2 for not having features found in later games but a lot around combat, unit and wonder design could have been significantly expanded.
Civ 2 was astounding at the time but quickly overshadowed by Alpha Centauri and Civs 3 and 4. There were good reasons why I never went back to it once those newer games were out. Thus I can't quite rate it a masterpiece, especially when compared to other franchises.
8.2/10
