Recently came across a few different PC builds for a few MicroProse titles: Risk II, Diplomacy, and Iron Blitz. The Risk II build is probably the most interesting of the bunch. It's the Milestone 10 build from March of 1999, a full year before the final game shipped. As such, the build is in a very early state. The only playable mode is the hotseat-style of gameplay, and things like AI are completely unimplemented at this phase. The graphics and animation are also primitive compared to the final build. In addition, the disc comes with a "Design Doc" which is more like a collection of production notes for the build, listing the status of various features and ranking the priority of tasks, etc. Really interesting stuff if you're a sucker for learning about the development process of titles like this. It's also interesting to note that the title of the game at his point was "Risk II: Forty Years of War". The final game was simply named "Risk II". The Diplomacy build is near-final and is dated just 17 days earlier than the final build. Even still, there are a few differences. I didn't play this one in depth, but when comparing the amount of data on the disc against the final disc, you can see that there's a few less kilobytes of data in a number of files, and about 30 megabytes or so of information missing from the sprite data file. In addition, the non-final build contains bug reports in its Readme.txt file. The final disc is labeled "Iron Blitz Gold" which leads me to believe this was used as the master copy of Iron Blitz. Sadly, the disc is unreadable on any drive I put it in, so I can't confirm anything here. Anyway, kind of interesting stuff from a company that has a long, long history.
