• Spies who are caught are hanged -- Most units just die off with a non-interesting "Ugh!".

• Subneural Ad -- It floats around the map implanting thoughts into enemy populations, lowering happiness by 5 points, and allowing you to stop production in enemy cities. This is just like other units (such as the Corporate Branch), but the Subneural Ad is not restricted by movement only over land, so it can simply float off of an ocean and start attaking your enemies.

• Settler vs. Fusion Tank -- A big old Fusion Tank (an upgrade of a normal Tank) versus a Settler with a shovel. We all know who will win, but the Settler actually tries to fight back, and you get to hear the shovel hitting metal sound ... Love that.

• Wonders:
  • Edison's Lab -- gives up to 10 free advances per age. Again, more advances means better technology. Better technology, typically, means you will win against less technical opponents. (See "Settler vs. Fusion Tank" above.)

  • National Shield -- gives a +16 defense bonus in each city. I'm a big believer in strong defense. You can't keep track of everything going on across all your borders, so prepare yourself to defend off attacks as best as you can. National Shield makes it almost impossible to capture a city. (If possible, put a Leviathan in your city -- nothing short of a Nuke can get in.)

  • GlobeSat -- removes Fog of War and reveals unexplored areas on the map (world-wide radar coverage). You can't see everything (Submarines don't show up on radar), but most everything else is visable. Turns out that one of the major bugs I complained about in CTP v1.0 was that GlobeSat didn't do anything. I'm happy to report that CTP v1.1 has fixed this really annoying problem.

• Complex game -- CTP models "real-life" in a lot of ways. I love all of the intricate details that one has to deal with to become a successful leader.

• Complex game -- all of those intricate details require management. This takes a lot of time. See below.

• Micromanagement (unit movement, controlling city food/happiness, keeping build queues busy, dealing with laborers, etc.) During one game, I had over 40 cities built. Each turn took over 30 minutes because a large proportion of cities needed attention. A complete game of CTP can take at least a week of playing.

• The manual pretty much sucks. It does have some merits (it explains how to win through Alien discovery), but for the most part it's useless. I suggest picking up the Gamespot game guide (link is available at the end). It costs $5.95 to get the PDF file, but it is free online in HTML format.

• Disk Space! The game takes around 400Mb without MPEG videos, and about 600Mb with the videos. Huge amount of space!

• Memory hog. I have 128Mb of RAM on the machine I use to run CTP. After playing for a while, my box has to start using swap space. Annoying, but not unplayable.

• After you've discovered all of the scientific advances (Diamond age), CTP still wants you to gain advances. It will therefore start making up advances to learn: "Future Flight 2", "Future Sea 7", etc. This is really annoying since they don't give you any new benefits, but still cost gold.

• Rushed printing -- The manual, box, user profile, etc. all mention Windows to some degree (either mentioning the "Windows swap file", or DLLs, etc.) Obviously Loki took a copy of the printing materials from Activision, but their proof reader might need to get glasses.

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