Civilization had been successful and it had never, even initially, been a technological marvel. The feeling was that we could do a significantly better job with presentation. We also had gotten so much play out of Civ. People had come up with new ideas. We had come up with ideas. So between better graphics and adding some of these gameplay things that people had come up with and we had come up with, there was really a need for a new game.

I think that the look of Civ II was certainly an improvement. My skin is thick, and people can tell me, "Sid, Civilization looks like an EGA game" and I accepted that criticism. But we tackled that with Civ II. A lot of the new gameplay things polished and built on some of the ideas that we didn't have a chance to follow through on in Civ. I think the diplomacy system in the original Civ was a little weak and the economic system - caravans and things - was cool, but I know that we added those towards the end. We didn't totally exhaust what we could've done with them. Those systems were flushed out a little bit. Most of the games I've done have been somewhat new stuff, so what you're getting is some new ideas, but not all of them are totally polished or finished. Civ II was a chance to go back to Civ and polish and finish up some things.