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Long-time Barbarian Laurence Scotford gets civilised enough to conquer Sid Meier's latest masterpiece.

Empire building in Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon proved surprisingly addictive. Laying down tracks between American or British cities and then setting up your own timetables was like having a huge, unlimited train set on your Amiga, and you didn't have to suffer the embarrassment of queuing up behind six years olds at your local Hornby stockist. With Civilization, Meier has applied the same principles on an even bigger scale - conquering the entire world!

The objective, put simply, is to lead your ever growing tribe of people from the dawn of man, through the ages, to become the most advanced civilization on the planet. This vast scheme is played out on a world size map which, populated with tiles representing everything from armies to cities, essentially resembles the sort of thing you might find in any bog-standard war o strategy game. But hold on there, before you yawn and slink off to read the next review, let me reassure you that Civilization, far from being the dry and boring pursuit of train spotting nerds, is actually one of the most absorbing and entertaining games to come the way of the Amiga in a long while.

Underneath the slightly tacky graphics, the ugly typeface and the strident soundtrack there's a first class game struggling to be noticed. If you've played Railroad Tycoon, you'll know exactly what I mean: so-so audio-visuals, but you'll quite happily play it to three o'clock in the morning three nights running.

So how does Civilization work? It's normally a question best left to philosophers, economists, social scientists and their ilk, but in this case it can be summed up quite easily. You begin with one measly flea-ridden rag-bag of a tribe, and your initial task is to found a capital city. Having done that you can use the resources in and around your new home to create a range of useful things, be they soldiers for defence or invasion, settlers and traders to expand and improve your empire, shipping and other transport, or important constructions like temples and universities.

One of the most appealing and the most daunting aspects of the game is that, no matter how many extra units you create during the course of play, you have control over every single one of them, all the time! You can guide your budding empire in exactly the direction you like, a either a peace-loving trading people or a horde of warmongering barbarians. Neither option guarantees success, and whatever you decide, the competition is always tough.

Let's make no bones about it, Civilization is a brilliant game. It's got all the appeal that Railroad Tycoon had, but even more depth and variety. This is not the sort of game that you'll play once and then feed to the dog.

For one thing, unless you go drastically wrong, each game takes a good ten to twenty hours to complete, and there's plenty of scope for customising worlds or playing at an increased difficulty level or with greater competition from other Empires.

In other words, and this is typical of Sid Meler's stuff, you're investing in a game that's going to provide months, if not years, of entertainment rather then days or weeks. I guarantee that the game is compulsive enough to keep you burning the midnight oil for at least a couple of nights the first time you play it.

Before I get too eulogistic I ought to point out that the game is by no means faultless. Disk swapping has been kept to a minimum but it is still frequent enough to become annoying. The problem is compounded by lengthy disk accessing between some screens, which is frustrating when all that is loading is a non-essential animated sequence.

The graphics are good in some places, but pretty humdrum in general, the game's font s the ugliest you've ever seen and the soundtrack is not the most inspiring in the world. Given that the actual gameplay is so good, these faults can't really be elevated above the level of minor quibbles and are all easily forgiven.

If you're turned off by anything more intellectual than Shadow Of The Beast then I suppose you can't be blamed for leaving Civilization alone. If not, then do yourself a favour and give it some serious consideration.