Civilization 4

[gromit]

caving in to the fucking creationist / ID movement.

Uhm... this is the same game that makes monasteries obsolete upon discovery of the scientific method. I'm sure there's some reason, from a good one like balance to a bad one like time, other than "oh, we'd better not step on any toes."

 

[HanoverF]

Its pretty damn buggy, the 'just one more turn' mentality leaves quickly when every little command takes several minutes because the game leaks memory like water through a sieve.

And at least now they are up front about the "ai" cheating like a punk at higher difficulty levels

 

[MarFish]

caving in to the fucking creationist / ID movement.

Uhm... this is the same game that makes monasteries obsolete upon discovery of the scientific method. I'm sure there's some reason, from a good one like balance to a bad one like time, other than "oh, we'd better not step on any toes."

The reason scientific method obsoletes monasteries is that monasteries served the role of science think thanks during the middle ages, which they do no longer. No religious insult here.

Darwin however...

 

[kingcomrade]

Yeah, I'm sure the "fucking creationist/ID movement" would make that distinction too, dumbass.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Civ 4 - buggy piece of shit

I went against my instincts on this one and got the special preordered version of Civilization 4. It looks alright, maps are big, and it's pretty much exactly like the previous games. Except I don't remember it crashing to desktop so god damn much. Sometimes it'll happen three turns into a game, sometimes three hours. That alone kills it for me.

The new wonder movies are nifty. Only they tend to violently skip if you look at them wrong.

Don't waste your time with the tutorial. It is so easy to break the scripted events. And even following the shit doesn't guarantee the game won't fuck up.

Computer oppononents frequently get stuck in mountains.

The interface sucks. Most of the buttons are tiny and the icons make no damn sense as to what they are or do.

No throne room/palace.

No more city view. Zooming in close is kinda crap with buildings out of scale.

There's probably more I can't remember. Compared to all the problems people are having in Civ fansite boards, I guess I'm considered one of the lucky few who can actually run it. When everything is working it's quite good. Sound is awesome. The new music is nice (Civ 3 sucked so fucking bad, if anybody remembers). I don't hate the graphics, but they aren't too good either considering how much of a resource hog this thing is. Zooming out to globe view is cool. Some of the included scenarios are awesome. Starting in the Ice Age is brilliant.


I recommend waiting several months before picking up a copy. Let a few patches iron out the numerous wrinkles the reviews conveniently ignore.

It happens randomly. There's no slowdown, I didn't click or initiate anything. Sometimes it'll happen a minute after loading (before completing a single turn) or an hour into a game. That's probably the worst of it. Sudden crashes to desktop are slightly less painful.

The deal with Civ4 is it suffers from huge memory leaks. Unless you have 2 gigs of RAM (like myself) and allocate 3 gigs to your paging file, it probably won't run at all.

There is a group of people (mostly of the blind fanboy variety) who claim to not have any problems. They're lying. There's no doubt about it. Every game released in shit conditions has idiots backing it, claiming all is well. Eventually they're drowned out by the enormity of the problem.

Absolutely it's dumbed down. But they didn't do as bad a job as I expected. Still retarded, though.

You can only get a fraction of the cities and units as seen in previous Civs. They did this not so much to simplify the game, but with so many units and animated 3d things on screen at one time with this fucked game engine it would be totally unplayable. You start feeling it when several other civilizations are revealed. My framerate stays kinda steady. I don't get why they didn't support lower resolutions than 1024x768 when the system requirements start at 256MB RAM and a Geforce 2. I can't imagine anyone with that kinda setup being able to play.

A size 3 city can crank out just about any unit in 2 turns, and a wonder in about 10. You can only get 2 wonders per city.

Somehow it takes workers longer to build a silver mine than the Great Lighthouse.

The new religion system is interesting but ultimately pointless. As far as I can tell there's no difference between them. Only if you discover one before anybody else you get a holy city, and I have no idea what that does if anything.

Cancelling and swapping around development is so disorganized I can't begin to explain what's going on. If I remember correctly you can't almost finish a wonder then convert all that work to a building or unit and finish it instantly. But sometimes it doesn't function that way.

Advisors are gone. They're replaced with several pages of stats. Think about it. If they really wanted to open up the franchise to a wider audience doesn't it make sense to have the Civ 2/3 advisors who give clear responses to what the hell is going on?

The awesome Civilopedia is gone, replaced with tiny bits of info that sometimes appear over highlighted terms. So disappointing.

I'm playing on "Epic", which is supposed to be a pace more like the past games. It's kinda fast. Almost as soon as I finish a unit there's something better that comes along and makes him obsolete.

It's okay, there's a patch coming out next week and probably another one coming after that.

 

[kris]

Civ IV is the best game of the series so far! Much deeper, much more strategic options than in previous games. It almost restored my faith in PC gaming. While all new RPGs try to hit new dumbing down lows the new Civ is more complex than every before. I just love the civics, religion, unit upgrades etc.

The combat is much improved but I can't find this "depth" r all those strategic options. Civics and religion have no depth. The real improvment have been in how the combat works and how the AI works, for not it can be challenging without the AI cheating a lot and going into war just being a "problem".

It's okay, there's a patch coming out next week and probably another one coming after that.

I have not encountered one single bug...

 

[Nutcracker]

For people like me who liked to play games on Huge maps in Civ III (i mean ubersized 200x200+) with a lot of civs, the game looks like a sad disappointment. Why did they need to go 3d? It just limits what people can do with the game on current machines. An upgrade of Civ III's graphics with all the new gameplay features could have delivered a great game. This newfound obsession with graphics > gameply is destroying or damaging many a franchise.

 

[LlamaGod]

There's little to no gameplay bugs, all the GODDAMN BUGS situations are just performance crap where people have something retarded and it CTDs.

My processor is way way way way below minimum requirements and I can play with game without a crash or anything.

The only thing that's effected me was the leaderheads memory leak, which will probably get fixed.

It's not a 'BUGGY PIECE OF SHIT' as it is a complex game with some performance issues and an overly whining fanbase.

also: MMRW is either just retarded/doesnt know what he's doing when it comes to his comments on things like religion and the advisors.

 

[RuySan]

the game has memory leaks indeed. I have a 3.2Ghz processor + 1Gb RAM, and the game slows down a lot in the late game. But i'm not going to say that the game is buggy because of that. A patch will solve the problem

 

[NOVD]

The combat is much improved but I can't find this "depth" r all those strategic options. Civics and religion have no depth. The real improvment have been in how the combat works and how the AI works, for not it can be challenging without the AI cheating a lot and going into war just being a "problem".

The religions are all the same, but it takes some strategy to get use religion effectively in the game. Religion affects foreign relations really heavily (which in turns affects much of the game) and it's also a big source of income. Using religion effectively requires some diplomacy and effective use of missionaries, and using religion effectively is a big help to your civ. Considering this, religion adds depth. The civics system is considerably more deep than the traditional civilization government type system.

I haven't really experienced performance issues, but, judging from polls and stuff, I'm guessing a pretty substantial number of people have difficulties with the game.

Also, don't trust people who obviously never spent much time playing the previous civilization games to compare this one to the previous ones. In addition, you can get more than two wonders in a city http://civ4info.com/Sullla/walk133.jpg , and a size 3 city won't be able to crank out any unit in two turns.

Sid Meier is a major pussy for not putting in terrorist options and advantages for different religion. The major problem witht the game, I think, is the slight pussification of civ.

 

[Shagnak]

How long untill you're meant to see bugs or performance hits?

I've only played it for about 8 hours, but going by some of the threads I've read it should have crapped out already, rather than being the rock-solid experience I've had.

 

[HanoverF]

I had to download something and run some compiler on a file before I could even get the game to start. The longer I play, the worse it runs, and it starts to chug sooner if I load a game with more cities/units in play, but its usually stable for a couple hours. I've only had two complete crap outs where I was booted to desktop. If you played 8 continuous hours I can't believe you didn't see a performance hit, for me it gets to a point where just selecting a unit (clicking on the unit, and getting the unit options) takes around 20-30 seconds.

 

[Shagnak]

I had no crashes to desktop, and the game started without any problems at all.

But you are right, my playing time was not continuous.
But I'm pretty sure I was playing for way longer than two hours in each chunk, and continuing from a save game.
If I hadn't known about the problems from certain threads, then I wouldn't have known about stability issues at all.

This was all on a friends computer (Athlon ~3000 (?), GF6600GT, unknown amount of RAM - probably heaps if there is a memory leak I didn't notice), so I have no idea what it'll run like on my computer when I get it.

Edit:
Oh, saw this in a review
"Gamers with ATI videocards should prepare for some strange issues and occasional crashes (definitely upgrade your video drivers before playing)."

Maybe...?
(For your desktop crashes n stuff I mean, not memory leaks)

Oh, and what did you have to recompile and why?

 

[RuySan]

The combat is much improved but I can't find this "depth" r all those strategic options. Civics and religion have no depth. The real improvment have been in how the combat works and how the AI works, for not it can be challenging without the AI cheating a lot and going into war just being a "problem".

The religions are all the same, but it takes some strategy to get use religion effectively in the game. Religion affects foreign relations really heavily (which in turns affects much of the game) and it's also a big source of income. Using religion effectively requires some diplomacy and effective use of missionaries, and using religion effectively is a big help to your civ. Considering this, religion adds depth. The civics system is considerably more deep than the traditional civilization government type system.

I haven't really experienced performance issues, but, judging from polls and stuff, I'm guessing a pretty substantial number of people have difficulties with the game.

Also, don't trust people who obviously never spent much time playing the previous civilization games to compare this one to the previous ones. In addition, you can get more than two wonders in a city http://civ4info.com/Sullla/walk133.jpg , and a size 3 city won't be able to crank out any unit in two turns.

Sid Meier is a major pussy for not putting in terrorist options and advantages for different religion. The major problem witht the game, I think, is the slight pussification of civ.

Sid Meier games were always pussified. In colonization there was no slavery (????) and in this civ game, Germany has 2 leader and none of them was Hitler. I mean, i'm sure that germans wouldn't take it badly, history is history, and it can't be erased

 

[Psilon]

Less controversially, why aren't Stalin or Lenin in the Russian leader list? Catherine II somehow made it on, when she was a fairly minor player in history.

Let me guess. They took out the "Suitcase Nuke" and "Poison Water Supply" options from the earlier games. (Actually, I think Civ3 got rid of well-poisoning, but still...)

 

[RuySan]

Less controversially, why aren't Stalin or Lenin in the Russian leader list? Catherine II somehow made it on, when she was a fairly minor player in history.

Indeed. Even so, i remember Stalin being the russian leader on Civ I.
And sorry for being patriotic here, but it makes no sense that the portuguese have no place here since it was europe's biggest and one of the most powerful empires in the 15th and 16th century.

 

[Nutcracker]

Churchill should be in instead of Queen Victoria.

 

[Pegultagol]

Indeed. Even so, i remember Stalin being the russian leader on Civ I.
And sorry for being patriotic here, but it makes no sense that the portuguese have no place here since it was europe's biggest and one of the most powerful empires in the 15th and 16th century.

I agree with your assessment. Maybe in the expansion packs...

 

[Jinxed]

I love civ until I hit late industrial or modern ages. To beat the AI then, I have to forget about tech and buy a zillion units if I want to win a war.

I don't know how the AI manages to acquire tech, build and upgrade units while they are getting their asses kicked.

I also wish the AI was more agressive towards each other.

 

[NOVD]

Sid Meier games were always pussified. In colonization there was no slavery (????) and in this civ game, Germany has 2 leader and none of them was Hitler. I mean, i'm sure that germans wouldn't take it badly, history is history, and it can't be erased

Yeah, I guess that's true. I would respect the game more, though, if they gave Islam a +1 terrorism bonus. Not because I like stereotyping, but because I like ballsy moves.

But the fact that they removed Darwin's Voyage as a wonder stinks of caving in to the fucking creationist / ID movement.

In the opening, Leonard Nimoy describes Earth from its beginning to the birth of man. In it, he notes that life started by abiogenesis and evolved through natural selection. Really, I doubt the removal of Darwin's Voyage was due to pressure from the ID "movement".

 

[kingcomrade]

Catherine made it in because omg she wuz teh hot chixzor who slep wit hall teh guyzz. Read her entry in the incredibly crappy civlopedia. I remember from civ3 and alpha centauri, the civlopeda was very in-depth. This time around it sucks. The least they could do was offer some explanations for some of the game more obscure game mechanics. Instead, I learn how to do all the easy intuitive things.

I've been playing this game a bit, and I'm not sure if I like it. Maybe the game is just too slow, but there's a lot of stuff that I don't like about it. I'm also really bad at it, so this probably contribues some.

I don't understand the relationship between the various improvements. Really, I have trouble deciding whether to put farms or a cottage or what on the various squares. Heavy food squares I usually farm, just to make them that much better. Usually I farm as many squares as possible, except hills which I mine, but the computer always wants to put cottages. I don't get why, I'd like some tips here.

Choosing a leader is also a problem. Are there any leaders with worthwhile traits? It seems that aggressive is the only one that makes a difference at all. Once again, in the civlopedia, there's no explanation of the various other effects of these traits. Also, the "preferred civic" that some leaders have. I can't find in the civlopedia what that does, either.

The combat is okay, but I really hate the 1-stat system. It just makes it hard to attack cities. Can anything beat archers entrenched in a city? The only way I've been able to do it is suicide 5-6 squads of swordsmen/axmen into the city. I tried cavalry archers, but if I build them the comp just makes spearmen, and you can't choose which unit to engage.
The units don't seem to make sense at all. What's the difference between an axman and a swordsman, for instance? It isn't much as far as I can tell, but for some reason you can build both.

Also, does anyone else's cities get the sick icon, and keep the sick icon for the entire game? There's pratically nothing that nets you health points besides late in the game, and even then you have factories and whatnot that just make more pollution.

 

[Higher Game]

Civ 4 is terrible. Alpha Centauri will never be topped.

 

[Jinxed]

I don't understand the relationship between the various improvements. Really, I have trouble deciding whether to put farms or a cottage or what on the various squares. Heavy food squares I usually farm, just to make them that much better. Usually I farm as many squares as possible, except hills which I mine, but the computer always wants to put cottages. I don't get why, I'd like some tips here.

You'll mostly want cottages that turn into villages and towns. Unless you want the city to grow a lot of population instead of money. Towns generate less food but more work and money.

Choosing a leader is also a problem. Are there any leaders with worthwhile traits? It seems that aggressive is the only one that makes a difference at all. Once again, in the civlopedia, there's no explanation of the various other effects of these traits. Also, the "preferred civic" that some leaders have. I can't find in the civlopedia what that does, either.

It's all explained in the Civ pedia. I like creative because it means the culture borders of my town will expand without any extra buildings and philosophical because of the +100% bonus to great person. I think the most uless trait is religious.

The combat is okay, but I really hate the 1-stat system. It just makes it hard to attack cities. Can anything beat archers entrenched in a city? The only way I've been able to do it is suicide 5-6 squads of swordsmen/axmen into the city. I tried cavalry archers, but if I build them the comp just makes spearmen, and you can't choose which unit to engage.
The units don't seem to make sense at all. What's the difference between an axman and a swordsman, for instance? It isn't much as far as I can tell, but for some reason you can build both.

Every unit has different benefits. Swordsmen get +10% to city attack. It's all written down in the pedia. Look through it.

Also, does anyone else's cities get the sick icon, and keep the sick icon for the entire game? There's pratically nothing that nets you health points besides late in the game, and even then you have factories and whatnot that just make more pollution.

No, different resources give you health, aquaducts, some wonders and being expansive as leader trait.

 

[HanoverF]

The ai loves cottages for some unknown reason, they add gold (more as they grow) and later in the game (or with a civic?) provide production. There is a point where farms can only be built on fresh water, so depending on the terrain you might only be allowed to make cottages.

If you hover over the trait, a box pops up telling you what it does. I think preferred civic only applies to what the AI will use.

Swordsmen require Iron, Axemen require copper OR iron. Swordsmen have 6str (6.6 str when attacking cities), axemen have 5str (7.5str when attacking melee units).

Floodplains and Jungles are unhealty, Forests are healthy, most food type rescources provide health with the right improvment built on it

 

[kingcomrade]

I know the swordsmen have a +10% to attack cities. Archers get much better, insane bonuses to defending cities. There doesn't seem to be an archery counter unit. There isn't even a cavalry unit besides cavalry archer (early on), which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Right now, I like Industrious (+50% build wonders), and financial (extra gold), and Cultured, or whatever it is, (expansive borders). I mix and match them, usually.

I know aqueducts provide health. I think because I build so much food, my population expands far too quickly. So maybe cottages are worthwhile. Usually I leave grassland forests because of the 2 hammers, which are useful.

Also, does the computer cheat? It always seems to have a ton of military units, but also keeps pace with me on city improvements and wonders and such.

Also, I wanted to ask. City specialists. When is it appropriate to use these?