The original
Superpower was called
Global Power for its UK release, if that makes any difference to you. The sequel was a great idea, but missed out a lot in the execution. The scope was huge, and it's still the only geopolitical simulation I know of where you can choose to play any country on Earth (or at least any country that existed at the time) - I seem to recall even Vatican City State was playable.
Without wanting to go into a full-scale review, SP2 basically lets you tweak economic, political and military settings for your chosen country to achieve either one of the set pre-defined goals or one of your own devising. Whenever I played, it was usually a case of just switching off the time limit and seeing how rich and powerful I could make my country. Which usually wasn't very.
There's quite some detail: you can adjust taxes for industries of various kinds; personal income tax; sales taxes, etc. You can legalise or criminalise certain types of industry (say, drugs production), and decide whether they're private- or state-controlled. You can set certain major policies for your country, such as free speech or freedom of demonstration, and decide whether languages or religions become official, allowed or banned in your state; although with languages and religions you'll always be limited to the ones your country starts with - you can't create new ones; you can't remove existing ones. You can also decide what sort of government you're going to have - so you can live out your Emperor Palpatine dreams, but without all the plotting and maneouvring for position. You just need to click 'Dictatorship'.
And this leads me onto one of the problems of this game: the general lack of obvious consequences. If you tweak the money figures in great detail, and are very patient, you can affect your country's yearly Gross National Product. A little. And the game does keep track of your popularity rating and various stats related to it. But you could effectively take an ingrained democracy like Britain or the USA (and let's take it as read for the sake of this thread that that's what they are), switch it to an absolute monarchy (as opposed to our existing ceremonial monarchy), and your people will grumble a bit before letting you get on with it. Not terribly realistic. It's very difficult to make the game actually DO anything. For most of it, you're basically just chasing gauges as your popularity creeps up (which it always seems to do unless you do something extreme).
One of the extreme things you can do is declare war. Unlike Polak above, I could actually live with the conventional military system in SP2 - it's far more versatile than Global Power's equivalent, which was very basic - but I'd agree it's certainly nothing to write home about. SP2 isn't actually turn-based - the whole thing runs continuously, but you can pause time on the overall global display or on the battle screen if you want to give orders. But that said, don't expect anything visually impressive from the battles: all you'll get is simple icons moving slowly around on a very basic top-down map of the combat area. You can say that it probably looks like a military data display would look - and if that doesn't spoil your immersion then great. But if you need to see the smoke and the missiles and the explosions of combat, you won't be happy.
Then, of course, there's the nuclear option. If your country's kitted out with strategic nuclear weapons (and if it isn't you can research them at a huge cost in time and money) you can go into Strategic Mode and plan ballistic missile attacks on your opponents. You can use fixed ICBM emplacements or a submarine fleet which you'll already have positioned in the normal map. The map will display a range circle for the selected delivery system, you just target with a click, press 'Launch', and watch the fireworks. The missiles arc over to the target, there's a satisfying boom, and then everyone in the world declares war on you. Military units will flood in from all directions, and sometimes (strangely, only sometimes) other nuclear-armed parties will launch on you. You can then spend a few minutes getting beaten senseless, before using the ceasefire option available for each opposing nation to simply 'switch off' the war. Which is odd. The fact is that while nuclear attacks are a great way to make everyone hate you and get you attacked, they don't actually do much. Cities and military bases you hit carry on as normal, and if countries' populations are reduced by such attacks then it doesn't really show.
Even those like me who (perhaps perversely) liked to play Shadow President to see how friendly we could get everyone to be won't have much to do here. The diplomatic options are interesting - you can create treaties and invite countries to sign up to them - but they don't seem to make much of an impact. Countries will always like you more as time goes on (assuming you're not at war with them) - but the level creeps up painfully slowly. There's certainly no "dispatch diplomatic envoy" option that will show relations jump up as there was in Shadow President.
And that basically sums the game up for me: there's lots to do, but none of it really
does anything. It was a brave attempt to get a global-level simulation that's fun to play, but the novelty tends to wear off once you realise you're basically trying to steer a luxury ocean liner with the rudder off a training dinghy. Nothing you do will make that much difference, and there isn't really anything to aim for.
PS - Also, the game uses a protection system called StarForce, and while the debate rages on about whether it should be classed as malware, or whether it actually harms your computer, I can tell you that having typed a code in wrong on trying to install SP2 last, the system now won't let me reinstall it (it's not great, but it's the only game of its kind and scope I know, so I do still play from time to time). I'm still working on that. And yes, I DO have an original copy.
Oh. It did turn into a full-scale review, didn't it? Sorry.