In Civilization II, an advisor is a personification of one of the departments of a civilization's government. In addition to providing statistical reports and commentary, advisors offer help and suggestions for production and research choices. A special interface, the High Council, provides advisor-specific appraisal of the general state of the civilization through full-motion videos.
Advisor list[]
The Advisors menu is accessed from the top bar on the game screen. Individual advisor windows can also be accessed directly by keyboard shortcuts:
- City Status (F1): Not a named advisor; lists the civilization's cities, including their size, surplus yield, and production progress.
- Defense Minister (F2): Lists the number of each unit type in production and on the field with its combat statistics and special abilities, if applicable. A separate page, "Casualties", lists the sum losses of all known civilizations.
- Foreign Minister (F3): Summarizes the player's relative power and reputation; lists all known foreign civilizations with their leaders' attitude toward and relation with the player civ. If an embassy is established, the civ's treasury and total units are also listed, with an option to examine further intelligence, including government, relations with other civs, personality, city list, and completed research and current goal.
- Attitude Advisor (F4): Lists each city by citizen type and happiness.
- Trade Advisor (F5): Lists each city's Gold and Science output from the current tax rate; tallies maintenance costs for improvements, and summarizes total income, expenses, Science production, and research time. A separate page, "Supply and Demand", opens a menu listing source and destination cities for different trade commodities.
- Science Advisor (F6): States the target advance under research, displays the visual progress to its completion, total turns to research, and lists all the civ's known advances, with potential options for trade highlighted in white. A separate page, "Goal", opens a menu to easily identify available research options leading to a specific advance, improvement, or unit, and a shortcut to its Civilopedia page.
- Casualty Timeline (Ctrl+D): Introduced in Multiplayer Gold Edition; lists individual unit losses by date, map coordinates including nearest city, and defeating civ. Chiefly intended to help keep track of actions in hotseat multiplayer games.
If "Instant Advice" is enabled in game options, the city production menu will feature recommendations by a "Military Advisor" and "Domestic Advisor", likely representing the Defense Minister and Trade Advisor, respectively.
High Council[]
The High Council is a special interface where the player can solicit specific advisors' feedback as full-motion videos. In addition to addressing the player, they will also respond to each other, supporting or dismissing recommendations based on their own priorities. Their costumes and personalities change with the eras, appearing as Roman senators in the Ancient Era, Renaissance Italians (French for Attitude) in the Renaissance and Industrial Eras, and contemporary Americans (Russian for Foreign) in the Modern Era.
If enabled in graphic options, popups will invite the player to consult the High Council periodically throughout the game. The Council can also be convened at any time via "Consult High Council" in the Advisors menu. It requires either the game CD to be present in the disk drive, or the video folder to be copied into the main game directory.
During anarchy, the High Council will open with all advisors briefly arguing over each other, before their screens are replaced by a red 'A'.
Cast[]
- Brad Howard: Defense Minister
- Thomas Seibert: Science Advisor
- Spencer Humm: Trade Advisor
- April Cantor: Foreign Minister
- Frank Wagner: Attitude Advisor
Modding[]
Titles for the Advisors menu are defined under @ADVISORS in Menu.txt. Advisor names in their report screens are defined on lines 336–341 in the @LABELS section of Labels.txt. Advisors are also used as the titles to various popup messages in Game.txt.
Scripting for High Council messages and video sequences are defined in three files: Council0.txt, Council1.txt, and Council2.txt. Their behavior is not documented, and third-party modding is generally limited to changing the display text.
Activating cheat mode enables the key-code Ctrl+Shift+T, opening the "Council Cheat", a developer tool for playtesting a customized High Council report. Each advisor's "rating" specifies the subject of their video segment and responses to peers' advice; valid inputs are numbers 1–7 (1–6 for Attitude), with the corresponding subject varying by advisor. Pressing "OK" prompts a choice for era variant (0: Classical, 1: Renaissance, 2: Modern). "Anarchy" ignores individual ratings, only prompting an era.
Videos[]
See also[]
- Advisor in other games
| Civilization II [edit] |
|---|
| Conflicts in Civilization • Fantastic Worlds • Test of Time† |
| Lists |
| Concepts |
| Miscellaneous |
| † Standalone remake with different graphics, units, etc. |