Ny main beef with Civ 1 and 2, and even SMAC, is that once you have mastered them they tend to become very predictable. So any new game of Civ 1, 2 and to a lesser degree SMAC, develop along the same predictable lines, and thus they are not very replayable for single player at least.

For this reason Master of Orion is easily my favourite 4X game, with it's semi-random tech and asymmetric races making the game unpredictable enough to be replayable even after you have won with every race on highest difficulty.

Now Call to Power II is next on my play list. Being a Civ clone/sequel I don't have very much hope for it, but according to Wikipedia

"One significant feature of Call to Power II is its support for mods. A large number of game rules are stored in text files, along with many AI scripts."

"The game's community created many mods, with the primary goals of fixing the AI and balance issues that were in the original game. Later, new game play features were incorporated through mods as well. These mods allowed the community to enjoy the game more, as they fixed at least some of the worst problems in Call to Power II."

Anyone have experience with these mods?

No, because from what I recall, I couldn't figure out how to install the mod. And considering how old the fandom is, there's a lotta dead links out there. In fact, the majority of the fandom appears to have died out a few years ago.

Thanks for the info.

I guess modded CTP2 was made redundant by newer Civ games/clones anyway.

That is not necessarily true.

If you search through the Forums try out the 'Ages of Man' Mod, it basically adds more content to each era of the game.

Personally I prefer the unique game Mechanics of CtP2 compared to Civ, despite CtP2's general jank.

I found SMAC to be EXTREMELY re-playable because of the map editor.

The editor is essential because the random map generator is very unbalanced. There are only 3 half decent AI races in that game, the rest are F-ing useless and just waiting to be taken over, so if one or 2 of the decent races get a stupid spawn location it can be quite a disappointment. You HAVE to use the editor and check, it may just need a simple island connection or you may need to move one or 2 races to one of the huge unused expanses of land that was inevitably ignored by the landing site selection.

Call to power 1 has a space dimension which is interesting, but Call to Power 2 has an undersea dimension which is probably better. I think it is the second best civ game you will ever see with SMAC still remaining my number 1.

Call to power has some interesting features, i will mention a few things i like;
1) I like the early slaver unit which you can use to capture barbarians (slaver combined with your army) and add population to your city. In a war you can capture enemy units the same way.
2) I love the army configuration system and battle screen... think of Galactic civilisations 2 and 3 combat system, but this was invented in Call to power much earlier, all be it less pretty.
3) the variety of terrain is very nice
4) Combat outcomes are pretty reliable, but that can be said for most of these games, i am just taking a jab at civ 4 with its F-ing ridiculous constantly losing valuable units with 99% odds of victory nonsense.
5) Terrain improvements are very advanced, and far superior to ANY other civ game i have seen.

The down side is that the AI is going to be weak in these very old games, that is to be expected, you have to probably nurture them a bit to get a good game out of them.

Call to Power 2 is definitely a big of a standout game in many categories from the Civ series. Alongside the features already mentioned is the pollution - if you create too many factories, you end up having tons of dead tiles around your civilization. If it gets too bad, you can even have global flooding events!

It's also the only civ-like game that I know of to have technologies all the way from the stone age to "diamond" age. In the beginning of the game, you get units like Hoplites, Archers and Samurai. At the end of the game, you end up with Fusion Tanks, underwater cities and arcologies. It's a pretty insane game and definitely a great look at what someone from the year 2000 thought the next few years would entail. To top it off, you have downright fun units - one of my favorite feelings ever is using the Eco-Terrorist unit to basically restore tiles to nature and decimate a city that way. You just don't get that same feeling in any other civ-like game.

It's sad that the game is quite buggy in its default state, but the Apolyton Edition patch definitely helps.

There are many mods as you mentioned that help add to the craziness: Modern Times, Age of Man and Cradle of Civilization come to mind.