User blog:Odin-gaming/Caveman 2 Cosmos Review and Installation Guide

Read the full review on Odin Gaming.

C2C introduces a lot of additional depth and complexity to Civilization IV. It goes beyond a TBS game and makes Civ a civilisation simulator, which is arguably what Sid intended when he set out on this journey with the original Civilization back in 1991.

Often when I reflect on these mods, and for the benefit of you, the reader, I open with the qualification that more depth and complexity isn’t for anyone. I stand by that, but I feel like this doesn’t quite apply with C2C. The mod is so massive that it shifts its base game’s genre significantly enough that it can no longer be compared directly alongside it.

There are features in C2C that I could quite happily ignore. In fact, one can quite easily do just that with many features given how customisable the game experience is (in game setup and the in-game BUG menu). However, there are many, many more features that I just couldn’t go without in Civ IV knowing now that they exist.

There’s enough in C2C to keep a player occupied for dozens, if not hundreds, of hours before they’ve even seen it all just once. And there are some incredibly ambitious expansion ideas on the horizon, such as the aforementioned Nomadic Start and Multi-Maps, which make it worthwhile to keep coming back and seeing what’s changed. I can’t express how excited I am to see Multi-Maps – and the possibility of expanding naturally into a space 4X game – arrive in C2C.

The years of work by its many contributors has generated a truly iconic game in Caveman 2 Cosmos. It’s not perfect – there are technical issues – and it’s not finished – some later eras have not had the same love and attention as their predecessors. But it draws you into an historical simulation – no, a bonafide anthropological study – like no other.

Installation
Civ IV was ahead of its time a bit with mod support, so installation of mods is actually pretty easy compared to its contemporaries.


 * 1) Install Civ IV and it’s expansion, up to and including Beyond the Sword with the 3.19 patch. Most digital downloads will result in you getting the most up-to-date version (search for Civ IV Complete Edition).
 * 2) Download the latest version of C2C. At the time of writing this is version 37 with a release date of 23rd December 2016.
 * 3) Unzip the downloaded file. It’s in .7z format so you’ll need to use an archiver that can work with this format, such as the open source and free 7-Zip.
 * 4) Copy the Caveman2Cosmos folder into your Beyond the Sword mod folder. If you’ve installed from Steam, this will be in something like C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Sid Meier’s Civilization IV\Beyond the Sword\Mods. If you’ve installed from a CD this will be in C:\Program Files (x86)\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier’s Civilization IV\Beyond the Sword\Mods. (I’m not 100% on these locations – you may need to hunt around for a bit, and some of the directory names might be different if using the Complete Edition. If anyone knows definitively, please let me know in the comments.)
 * 5) Run “Start C2C.bat” located in the Caveman2Cosmos mod folder to launch the modded version of the game directly. (You can alternatively launch Beyond the Sword and from the main menu, select ‘Advanced’ > ‘Load a Mod’ > ‘Caveman 2 Cosmos’.)