f13.net

Obviously I don't need to say much about this game. I won't be able to really get into it until next Sunday because I'll be covering the 3 conferences this week for f13 with Shockeye and one other dude you haven't seen much/any of - so uhm, have fun. I expect it to be a tasty revival of the strategy genre (something AOEIII didn't exactly do).

EB hasn't shipped my copy yet, despite charging my card last Thursday.  The order doesn't even say 'processing' and remains stubbornly at 'open'.  I'm considering calling and getting pissy at them.

Of COURSE my PC had to die 2 days before Civ is released. Motherfucker. I had forgotten about it until I read this. AAAAARRRRGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Do people still play Civilization?

No, but I will tomorrow.

What is this "Civilization" you speak of?

So, was anyone in the beta test for this?  If so, spill the goods!  I'll be running out to buy this game over lunch, but won't be able to play it much until next week :/ (in-laws are in town during the week, then heading to AC for the weekend).

Some previews I saw linked from Apolyton:

http://www.kalikokottage.com/civ3/sullla/civ4_walk_1.html

http://civfanatics.com/civ4/preview/filling_the_gap.php

The religion aspect sounds interesting, but possibly cheesable.  The new settler costs look like early expansion will be a lot harder.  I haven't been this excited about a game in a long time.

This one change will make the game far easier for me. I'm what the old Civs used to refer to as a "perfectionist" - I try to maximize the development of each city, to the detriment of the sheer number of cities I own. That's why I lose so frequently, even on lower difficulties - I don't like to play the "pave the world" game, and the AI in Civ3 does as a matter of course.

EDIT: Did you notice the new race-specific units are all ground units this time? I only noticed when I thought it odd that the English got Redcoats rather than the sail Ships of the Line that dominated the world for two centuries. I'd be curious to know what the balance rationale was.

I read the IGN fellation of Civ IV, and that was enough to get me all fired up. I don't think I will be getting much sleep in the weeks ahead.

Would one of you early adopters set an alarm clock, and tell us if it is any good, before your life gets sucked up into the Civ Abyss?

I'll try and post something tonight after work. I'm a pretty casual Civ player. I'm in my cubicle right now seriously twitching to get home and play.

I am itching to play this, too, although it will be tomorrow night since Tuesday night is D&D night.  I've been reading reviews instead of preparing to DM (bad self, bad).

I remember doing this with Civ III, too, and then not liking it.  Fortunately, the two things I didn't like most about Civ III have been the subject of much change.  Those two things would be national borders actually meaning something significant militarily, and penalty for focusing on big cities, as mentioned by Stormwaltz.

You have the option to close borders with any other nation, without declaring war on them.  This prevents trade routes from being created between your cities and their cities, but it prevents any of their units from entering your territory (unless war is declared).  So, if you are peacefully co-existing with a neighbor whom you wish to prevent sending settlers across your territory into an area you've reserved for future expansion, you have to ways to do that without creating a high upkeep mass of units to physically wall your part of the continent off.

Infinite City Sprawl is no longer a valid tactic for several reasons.  I don't have a firm grasp on two of the reasons (something to do with a different way of producing settlers that doesn't lower your population and the need for bigger cities earlier to produce Great People who are, apparently, great), but the real killer reason is that you pay an upkeep on each of your cities that is determined by the total number of cities your control.

Oh, and games are supposed to be faster -- more automation and less cities to manager, or somat.

:mob:

Is this just shipping today, or is it actually available at retail? I may have to take a long lunch today...

Same here, except im going to try and grab it on my way home from work.

ARRGGHHHH.
In Austin, it apparently won't be available today. I spoke with EB Games and Fry's so far, and each one is citing a manufacturer shipping delay.

It's not fair! Don't these people realize that I'm twitching!

Same here in San Antonio.

Mine still hasn't shipped from EB games.  I are angry! Grr! Rawr!  :hulk_rock:  It's the same delay, of course, but I'm anxious.

Called my local DC-area EB and they said it won't be in until tomorrow as well.  I thought it was supposed to ship yesterday and be on sale today?  I am deeply upset, and very deeply ashamed.

It's OK. El Gallo, we've all been there.

Hello. My name is Evangolis, and I'm a gamer.

Dropped by my local EB (SoCal); they said it was supposed to arrive today but UPS hadn't delivered it yet "but it might still come before 4 PM".

I'm planning on phoning in after 4, just in case.

I can see the redcoats being a "race" specific unit in Civ.  Except for possibly the Prussians the Brits had the premier infantry in the world, using essentially the same equipment and tactics for two centuries.  The only real impetus for change in the British army was the Boer war when a bunch of hillbilly Dutch farmers dug in and sniped the hell out of them for a good while.  It's also probably why the Brits managed to hold their own at the beginning of WWI so well; they'd already learned the value of entrenchment the hard way.

Of course, yeah, the ship of the line is a more "characteristic" unit than the redcoat.

Maybe it is because in some games (depending on the maps and starting locations) naval combat plays little to no serious role in the game while land units are very important in every game.

I'm still in denial. I am calling all over town. I'm sure denial will give way to anger, and then, hopefully, acceptance.

I bought Winter Assault to take my mind off of it (even if for one day!).

See, now you're thinking like a European videogamer. Trust me, acceptance never comes.

What did we do to be treated like dirty Eurogamers, Sid?  I'm a by gawd american, and I demand my games on the promised day!

The reverse works the same way, though.

Try finding an english copy of the Gothic II expansion in America (two years old now). Or Silent Storm Gold (which should actually hit the US next month...a year late). Fucking Jowood.

My copy is at the post office awaiting delivery... Come now mail, come! *fidgets*

I had my preorder sent to the store, about a half hour away.

Productivity nationwide takes a dip as people start sweating and shaking. The only comment our reporters could get was "Where's my Civ?!?"

Still no dice in Austin. This is rough.

Just picked up my copy.

Have it in my dirty little hands.  There was a guy in front of me picking it up and telling the clerk about how the game has been with him all his life, I wanted to hug him.  I got the last non-reserve copy they had.  It is going to kill me sitting on this.  I don't think my work PC can handle it, but you never know...

Open it up and study the manual carefully. Inhale deeply to smell the box. Caress the cds. That should get you there.

Did anyone get the special edition?

I didn't realize that was what the guy handed to me at first...Pretty nice though.

I did, but I don't have it yet.  It's killing me. It went from Louisville to Cincinnati instead of Florence.. so that's an extra day. Yarg.  I don't get it until tomorrow.  So I shall kill things to make me feel better.

And then I saw this! (http://www.ebgames.com/ebx/product/259830.asp) and this! (http://www.aspyr.com/games.php/pc/goth2gold/) For $20, it's some great rpg action. And for $20 more, some squad-level TBS? Oh hell yeah! (http://www.ebgames.com/ebx/product/259832.asp)

Better late than never, I guess. Turning out to be a better year than I had expected, even if two of the games I'll buy are a bit long in the tooth...

I'm just trying to not think about Civ until I get home and check my answering machine...I also (should) have the pre-order edition. Going to try in-store pickup this time, given my bad experiences with preordering via EB by mail in the past (see Merusk's post).

Well I tried that send it to the store thing once.  I was working full-time then, so I'd get home and the wife would go to work about 5-10 mins after I got home.  Dragging 2 young kids to the mall so Dad can pick-up his game isn't fun, so I started doing the send to the house thing.  I did it this time not knowing the office was going to be closed-down about 2 days after I ordered it, giving me copioius amounts of time before 4:30 to head to the mall and pick it up.   :-(

So far, I like it. I haven't done anything except move some Settlers and Warriors around a bit, but it's Civ....Just a little shinier (Looks a lot like Pirates. Which is to say, good enough...But it won't stress your system).

Sid is still behind this one, and it shows. How could any of you possibly be worried about a little "streamlining"? If he had been somehow removed from the project, then perhaps "streamlining" would have taken on a completely different meaning. But that isn't the case. It's just a lot cleaner and simpler to carry tasks out than before. That's all (from what I've seen at least).

Man, that would have been my game of the century if they hadn't put giant fucking robots in the end of it.  Makes me sad just thinking about it.  But yah, before you get to the albatross crashing into the mecha, gaming gold. 

Because imo Brian Reynolds (Colonization, Civ2, SMAC) was the man, not Sid ;) And I pretend BR didn't turn into a whore and make RTS instead of TBS.

RASIX WITH THE SPOILERS BLAH

It's not much of a spoiler.  What I've said won't ruin the game for you, the giant fucking robots will.  The game is fantastic.  It's fantastic until they introduce a completely unneccessary and fun killing element.  I blame anime for sticking giant fucking robots where there doesn't need to be giant fucking robots. 

Plus, you can know what's coming just looking at your character sheets or probably even the manual.  Still, 20 bucks is a steal, well worth it.

Dude, Civ IV is to Civ I what the new Pirates! is to the old one. That's the best way to describe it, I guess. If you don't like Civilization I or II, then you probably won't like this game. It's really not much different, gameplay-wise or in theme.

Stray, that didn't make much sense in reply to me, heh. I was just saying there is ample room to worry about Sid if you fell on the Brian side of the equation. I think Civ 2 was the strongest civ, without BR they made CivIII, which was just ok (still great compared to other games in general, but just ok compared to other Sid/Brian games). I thought Pirates was very cool but way too shallow...thus my concerns (along with the many, many dev comments about streamlining gameplay...plus the comments about RTS interface, etc). I'm just concerned is all, I'll probably like the game anyway, since I still play CivIII alot.

Ras - no problem, just busting balls. I'll pretend giant robots are cool or something. Really, though? Giant robots....in WW2? That's just dumb. Bah.

The reply was just meant to say


It's Civilization.


What more do you want?

Well, I should be joining the proud ranks of Civ IV players soon. Just found out that my HDD died (with more than $500 worth of unrecoverable iTunes on it- FUCK). I think it is still warrantied, so at least I can get a new shittily made drive to replace it.

It's just sad honestly. One of the most heart-breaking and unfortunate design decisions I think I've ever come across. The spiritual successor to Jagged Alliance 2 didn't need a dash of Voltron.

I'm curious to see if Civ 4 will run on my laptop.  I meet the min requirements but I'm not 100% positive on the hardware transform/lighting on the vid card. 

It's painful not having a desktop pc sometimes.

Hey, try to find a copy of the Gothic II expansion in the big fucking part of Europe that doesn't speak or read german fluently... Yepp FUCK YOU ATARI.

In other news, Civ 4 isn't out here until 4/11. This is the kind of shit that makes me pre-order stuff from Canada ( free shipping for the win ) and pirate it at release day until the mail gets here.

I seem to have gotten the EB preorder edition which is the special edition. Nicer box, Soundtrack CD and a spiral bound manual seem like the highpoints for that edition.

The games plays at 1900x1200 and looks great. Time to start thinking about playing games on a high-def TV. It seems more and more games are supporting 1900x1200.

So....Has the Civ addiction kicked in yet?  :-D

Some of you haven't posted, so I would assume so.

[edit] Btw, which Nationality are you guys playing as in your first campaign? Mongolian here.

[edit] Damn, this game puts a smile on my face. Good ole fashioned Civ fun.  :-)

Argh I'm jealous---won't be able to even think about playing a game like Civ (and the week+ vacation it will take to play it right/i] for another 5 weeks :(

Haha.  Play it right indeed.

I'm actually afraid of opening the box.  Seriously, it's sitting right there..calling to me..

Well, games go buy a little quicker than they have in the past. It's still Civ, but you won't need to devote days to it or anything like that.

Well, I was up until 3am, that's a good sign. And it does have the Civ feel. And there are some nice improvements, no doubt.

There, I said the nice stuff. And luckily I left my list at home, so I'll just go from memory.

My tech tree poster is in French.

The installation cds (ever hear of DVD? Please to not release games on cds, dammit) were mislabelled. Install disc was actually the installer, but the second disc, labelled Play, was not. The install disc was.

No 1280x720 support. This one really chafes, since 1280x768 cuts off the bottom of the screen, and they moved UI elements up against the borders of the screen (boo), so in the closest res to my tv (and indeed, all widescreen resolutions that work on my monitor), I can't select the second row of icons along the bottom. So I'm playing in stretched 1024x768, just like I did with CivIII. Fuck you, Firaxis.

The camera. What the fuck? Zoom distance and angle being tied together BAD, I had bad flashbacks of Freedom Force. At useful zoom levels, you have maybe a dozen tiles total on the screen, it's very annoying imo.

I was going to list the way it displays multiple units, I didn't like that...but it's a toggle, so I got it back to the old way. I don't know why the sense of scale in this game bothers me more than any other game in the series.

The tutorial was buggy. Sid tells you to order your worker to build a quarry...but I can't. I have to deselect the worker and reselect him, then I can issue the quarry command. This happened several times. I also saw several typos in "Sid's Tips".

The tutorial crashed on my first playthrough, making a wonderful impression after all the above. The game was still active, playing sound and animating, but no mouse-overs and I couldn't interact with anything.

I was kinda pissed about the tutorial crash, because I didn't want to sit through another hour of "move your warrior here!" just to see the changes to the game I hadn't gotten to before it crashed. So I started a normal game, on Terra (because it said it was HUGE) and selected Huge size. Played through for a while, and in my long standing tradition, I retired from my first game before going to bed. When I saw the extent of the hugest map option I could create...well, that's not my definition of huge.

Was this thing shoved out the door or something? I expected that streamlining bullshit, but the low level of QA was surprising.

And...a FRENCH TECH TREE. Thanks, Firaxis. Enjoy your money hats, bitches. I take back my request to remake Colonization. Don't fuck up my good memories. Same for SMAC. One comment from the head dev in the manual mentions people were frightened by the complexity of SMAC's unit creation. WTF? Just shut up. Stop shitting on intelligent gamers.

I cast thee out!

I have only been able to play for a couple hours, and I am having a great time.

The graphics are greatly improved over CivIII. The terrain is pretty richly detailed. There are little animations everywhere that reall make the world feel more alive. For example, units moving through forest send little birds flying up out of the trees. There's also contextual sound. When moving into jungle squares, subtle jungle background sound effects kick in. The little touches are very nice.

The interface is much better this time around, as many have said. It makes the workings of game algorithims more accessible to more casual players.

Diplomacy already seems much richer and meaningful. The NPC rulers kept asking me to diss rulers that I had trade agreements with. In the early part of my last game, one ruler came around asking me to declare war on another civ.

The early part of the games moves slower for me while the later turns seem a little bit faster. Settlers are harder to come by, so early expansion feels slower.

So far so good, but I need to devote a lot more time to playing.

Only problem I've run into so far is when a "Wonder" video comes on, the sound gets all choppy.

About an hour past a reasonable bedtime last night, I'd hit 1400 AD.  Played a peaceful nation (as Napoleon, ironically) almost the whole night.  Did a poor job of early city placement which left me a bit crunched for territory space, but was able to get Stone and build a bunch of wonders.  The great people rock, and I managed to get three Great Engineers who each let me complete a wonder in one turn; cultural powerhouse, baby!  Just before I forced myself to go to bed, my allies to the east, the Americans, decided it was time to off the Romans so tonight will let me know if my superior culture and technology can make up for middling production, in a war.  Should be a fairly safe test environment, though, since the Americans are between me and the Romans :P

Hey I was up til 3am too!

Fuck.

Anyways, if you got a french poster go here - http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/techtree_support.htm

Thanks for the link.

Nobody else feels the huge maps aren't as huge as older civs? Or the camera/zoom/tilt levels suck?

I know my love of expansionism was going to take a hit, but if people thought the worlds were too big, they could have just played smaller maps. I'm bummed out about that part. For me, the game is all about building a HUGE empire. I like the gameplay, and I'm holding off on an opinion until I get a lot more playtime, but something tells me I won't be uninstalling CivIII when I want an EPIC game.

I am also a fan of ginormous maps. I am distressed to hear that they were left out.

The good news is I got a call from EB last night and my reserved copy is in :mrgreen: . Just waiting to hear from the PC repair shop...

omg no, I loved the hugenormous maps

Mac users will get Civ IV early next year.
http://www.insidemacgames.com/news/story.php?ID=12295


Civ3 expansions in December, then a few months later Civ IV…

Just got and installed about 2 hours ago.  Ran through the tutorial and am starting up my first game now.  Lenoard Nimoy reading the text from the original Civs as your world builds is too damn cool for words.

The only thing that would make it better is if the cheesy synthesizer theme from the original "In Search Of" was playing in the background. Either that, or a Shatner appearance  :-D

I guess I can agree about the small maps Sky, but I'm not much of an expansive player to really notice. I prefer to just make a half dozen or so wimpy, cosmopolitan, culturally rich cities, and just try to win the game that way.

Ah, shit.  I'd thought that they'd actually expanded the available map sizes, so this is a letdown.  I'm a big fan of imperial stretch.

Well, it can be fairly big. Big enough to hold all civilations/races in a match at least (maybe a couple a dozen or so).

http://www.kalikokottage.com/civ3/sullla/civ4intro.html

This guy, who worked on Civ4 says:

"And for those people who were whining about the maps being smaller in Civ4: try running a Huge Terra map. The thing is gigantic; it's significantly larger than a Civ3 Huge map. Don't think we weren't paying attention to you. "

Got it yesterday and played it until way too late in the AM, just like the old days. I :heart: the new UI, the religion system and the replacement health/happy systems for the old pollution/riot systems. The new terrain system seems cool and fun so far, although the random generator seems to love deserts far too much. I'm mixed on the camera; it's fun to be able to do a Black-&-White-style zoom-out from a single city to the orbital view, but it's not much more than eye candy in general. I like how they removed or nerfed most of the horribly game-breaking-gotta-build-it wonders, or made nerfed versions as 'national wonders'. I like the naming of the Great People; it gave me a chuckle to have Louis Daguerre and John Roebling pop up on my doorstep, ready and willing to do my nefarious bidding. I will have to find the name file and edit it with my own favorite semi-obscure Great People.

The Nimoy VOs are pretty good, but it sometiimes sounds more like a professor reading from a book than someone putting any emotion into the lines. Sid VOing the tutorial is neat for about 2 minutes, and then you realize that Sid has a terrible voice for VOs. I don't like the new wonder movies; they're pretty but, unlike the SMAC videos, they don't really have any 'heart' to them. I'd guess they don't have quotations/VOs in order  to hold localization costs down...

I haven't had any stability or performance issues. It's not the chocolate robojesus, but I'm pleased at the surface level. Whether it will hold up to scrutiny, I can't tell.

So, who's setting up our destined-to-failure Giant MotherFucking Civ 4 Battle.

Whenever it happens, I'm in (and won't quit  :wink:).

I'll be back saturday, and then gone from Tuesday til Wed night, but if there is such a thing (haven't played the game yet), I'd like in - as would one of my roommates.

I want in.

So what (if any) multiplayer features/options are there? Or are they pulling the same bullshit they did with Civ 3 and selling the MP-enabler as an "expansion"...?

That's me calling bullshit for the subtlety-challenged.

I read on Apolyton that the reason people think that huge maps are not huge enough is that unlike previous civs (where you could see the whole, blacked-out world from turn one) your visible map gradually expands as the game goes on.

The Huge Terras are definatly larger than Civ3, Sky.  I'm playing one right now and I barely have 1/4 of the globe discovered by 1315. (and oddly I was in Medieval time period by 30bc).    I'll get a tile count sometime after I get a ship that won't sink in the ocean. (another few turns).  It does FEEL smaller, though.  I blame that on the scale of the units and the graphics overall.  Soom out to the Civ1 camera view (one click before you see clouds and the info bar dissapears) and you'll see how much bigger the map is, though.  (Zoom out to globe view and you can also see how little of the whole world you actually are seeing.)


Disclaimer: The following is based on the "chieftan" setting.  My first game was on the default "noble" and I got my ass kicked before 100AD.  I figured I'd better learn the nuances before trying again.

Things I like after the first 8 hours:

* All the city features are visible on the city as they're built. Very cool seeing the Temple of Solomon, The Colossus and the Hanging Gardens as I peer at Delhi.
* OOOh, shiny.  The leaders are all great-looking and have some personality rather than just staring at you.  The overland map is great as are the unit models.
* Aquaducts stretch from the city to the closest mountain or fresh water source.
* The Religion system is very cool. (Though Possibly a little overpowered since it's new and hasn't been tweaked/ refined enough.)
* The new interface Roxorz.  Popups for exactly what each building does, on-screen score so you can keep track of who to dis and who to please as they come begging (or demanding) to you, A lot of the old things you had to go digging through other screens for happen right in the first one or two layers.
* No more rightclick to find out what each square produces or what that special is.  Mouseover and it get the info in the lower left.
* You instantly know when your city is "sick" and you need to focus on health/ sanitation.  A lovely green smog-like haze surrounds it.
* All the little terrain upgrades are kick-ass.  Windmills, Fishing Boats, Cottages/ Villages/ Hamlets, Plantations and more.  And they all have special effects so it makes for a more thought-provoking game than the old "Irrigate/ Road/ Railroad and move on" when managing your workers.
* The Music is fabulous.  I haven't popped-in the CD I got yet, but I really dig all of it. They did a fantastic job here.


Things I dislike:
* Oh dear lord, the load times.  No more "oops I fucked that up, i'll just reload the autosave real quick.."   My system's a 3-year-old p4, 2.5 ghz and it takes about 3-5 mins to load-up a savegame.
* Indians are overpowered as a race.  They start-out with Mysticism which means they can found most of the religions very quickly.  I've founded everything but Bhuddism (and I missed that only because I went for pottery.)  I know it's not just me, because the Indians in the first game I played and abandoned did the same thing.  This means I get a lot of gold as I build specials with great citizens, and really don't care if anyone else is a different religion than I am.  After all, I get the gold regardless because I founded the religion.
* Crashes.  Sometimes I'll get something kinda glitchy during a load and the game won't load and locks-up my machine.  Not sure if it's me or the game.  I've also had a few times where I tried to go into the Military Advisor and the game locked-up.  Alt-tabbing also does a number, so I've loaded up the laptop to post this.
* Build time seem slower.  Maybe it's just me and my love for wonders but though my cities are hitting 12 and 14 in size, I still have some basics like walls and Coloseums to build. This is on one of the easier setting where build-times are actualy sped-up.  Perhaps I'm just not building enough production.
* Having to re-train myself from the 'expand, expand, expand' mode and take reassess things again.  It's feeling a lot more like Civ2, though, in that I can't ignore my military like I had been in 3.  Not really a dislike as much as a, "wtf I'm a noob again," feeling.

In all it's fantastic, and really feels great. I can tell I'm going to enjoy this more than 2 or 3.

I was gauging it by how big the one continent I had explored was when compared to the full map that gets shown when you retire. I know (and like) that you can't tell during the game until the world has been circumnavigated - very cool. Maybe I'm wrong, I'll withdraw that gripe until I've fully played the huge terra map game I started.

But the camera and resolution are still stuck in my craw in a big way.

I was really really enjoying it up until about 1925AD, when the fucking Mongolians attacked me with horse archers and knights and wtfpwned my marines, tanks, and helicopters.

Huge Terran Map: 86 Turns to Circumnavigate and and 68 turns high with a Caravel. (3 spaces a turn) So 258 tiles wide, by 204 tiles high.   For a total of 52,632 total tiles.  That's pretty damn big, but I haven't loaded-up civs 3 yet to see how big its largest map was.

Still not big enough IMO, should be double that size atleast. Doesn't take many turns before all the land is populated with cities.

The reason that's happengin is on the "Terran" setting, there's 2 or so large landmasses.  Everyone starts on one and you have to rush to get to the other one.  So if you've got 11+ civs when you start up a game, the land will disappear very quickly.   ( I just discovered the other landmass.. and to my surprise barbarians build/ maintain cities like like good ol' Civ1. Sweet.)

You've played it? No way will it be all be populated. Just no way.

Or maybe you should define "many turns".

20 minutes of play or so with 6 players on the largest terrain with the lowest water level possible.

So can you play versus other humans easily out of the box?  If so I will consider the purchase.  I'd love to play a all human game of Civ even if it took forever and a day to finish.

And after 20 minutes, the map was filled up even in it's second stage/zoomed out state? If so, that's pretty amazing (maybe not unbelievable, but amazing). I didn't even know the map would let you see how big it is after only 20 minutes.

Yes.  Lan, Internet (via Gamespy), Direct IP, Hot Seat, or By-Mail.   Tho Multi-player Civ always dies in the first two days, so playing a small world with an advanced start makes more sense than staring from 4K B.C.

I'd prefer that we go Epic. I may quit a lot of games, but I'd stick with this at least.

Waah waah waah. The maps are too small. Isn't there a world editor also?

Wait, is that a complaint, or are you mocking the others?

Just ran a Play Now game instead of custom as warchief. They expanded way slower than on custom it seemed, dunno if it was because I played on warchief instead of noble though.

This game is awesome, do you people even like video games?  Also, is there a way to turn off wonder movies?  The Colossus one always crashes my computer.  It's pissing me off.  I need complete cultural domination to feel good about myself as a person.

Yeah it is. Best fun I've had with my PC in a long time. I've been playing every chance I can get.


I mentioned above that I'm getting choppy sound with the videos, but I did crash once on the Oracle video. Lucky that there's an autosave though -- it worked on the second try.

I've been doing the Cultural domination thing too (Rock N Roll for the win!), but I'm not having much luck with that strategy with Noble difficulty or higher.

In other news, there's nothing worse than seeing Barbarians raze one of your cities right after you just set it up.

Yeah, I'm having a BIG problem getting set-up on the second continent.  All the barbarian cities are size 5 or higher and the units all, somehow, have 2 upgrades.  Considering that I can only move 3 units at a time it's going to be damned expensive and time consuming to even attempt to take-over one of them.  Any city I build gets auto-detected and the barbarian hordes rush in with 6-10 guys and completly overrun me.  Very frustrating.

Why are you guys having such a problem with Noble difficulty?  I started with that and kicked ass.  Remember, in any war, catapults are essential in this game.  Also, if you want to kick ass culturally, pick a Philosphical ruler, they get +100% to Great People.  Then just make sure to build wonderes that increase the likelihood of getting Great People, my first game on Noble I had like +300% after awhile and I was popping out Great Artists like clockwork.  I detonated two in the same city and in the next 20 turns or so 5 enemy cities fell under my sway. 


You guys probably already knew that stuff, but I see a few mentions of problem with Noble on here.  Also, if you want a really huge map, pick pangea, with low sea level.  If you aren't satisfied with how big and long that is on Epic speed, then just play two games in a row.  That should keep you at your computer all day.

It's just that Noble requires me to be more balanced than I'm used to. Plus, my city placement hasn't exactly been optimal up to this point (I'm rethinking atm though heh).

I didn't read the manual until last night....Didn't realize how much of a difference some of these attributes can make. Too bad one can't have "Industrious/Philosophical" though --- That'd be perfect.

Anyone able to run this in windowed mode?

Got it installed, haven't gotten a chance to play though. Too enthralled with Soul Calibur 3 and RE4 for the PS2. :P

Loving the game, easily the best since Civ II.  In very sore need of a patch, though.  I've noticed the odd boot to the desktop, and even just had it give me a hard reboot.  Also noticed that if you exit the game, then relaunch it later that you enter slideshow land.  The only fix seems to be rebooting your box.  This seems to get worse when you play on a huge map towards the end and you're sending godawful amounts of units around.

I know I don't have the most current specs (1.8 Ghz, FX5200 card), but you'd think that the 2 GB of RAM would at least provide a buffer from this kind of crap.

I was thinking that because my system crashes on the Colossus wonder every time there was something wrong with the CD.  I've since seen crashes on other wonder movies and for other reasons.  My computer sucks too, but the wonder movies aren't exactly Doom III.

What's going on in good computer land?  Are you people dealing with the same shit?

The first couple of sessions I did crash a couple of times on various places, but not anything repetetive. I don't really have a physical CD while playing.

I have to say that I got bored pretty fast of this game, sadly. I can't argue that it isn't a great game though, but it's not THAT diffrent from its predecessors, which is the reason I ultimately got bored after the second day of fairly hardcore playing.

My computer isn't bad. GeForce 6600, mediocre cpu, 1.5 gb of ram. And like I said before, same video problems as you.

I had the slideshow problem BG mentioned too, but only once. I didn't see it as a bug though. I had already been playing for hours, and the area where my cities were built were surrounded by several other civilizations. Structures were everywhere.

Things were going fine until I made a new settler (which popped up the little resource icons over every visible tile) -- Then my computer got bogged down. After relaunching the game though, everything was fine.

Sairon, ya, it gets boring.

But that's not a problem. IMO you shouldn't be playing game after game after game of this.  Should be something you launch up, play through a civilization, then leave alone for a while.

Like I said on the other site, I can't get bored of games like this --- It's more about what I want to do, and less about what someone else wants me to do.

Another thing I just realized is that when I toggle the productivity indicator that pops up how productive each tile is, I only see food.  I only see food and it's always 2 food.   Just 2 little bread slices on every fucking tile.  I didn't notice before because I didn't really mess around with the toggles and was still familiarizing myself with the new features/interface. 

It's kind of lame though, and I don't understand why it would do that.  It would make deciding where to build cities so much easier.

Yea I guess you're right.

Anyway, I think this gameplay suffers a bit from the "lazy syndrome". It takes a lot of time to achive anything, and turns take longer and longer to complete. I don't have the patience for it anymore. A funy thing I did a couple of months ago was starting to play some old amiga games, and I found some of the REALLY good old gems to be extremly lacking. I played some Syndicate for example, and as you might remember quick save didn't exist back then. Redoing a whole mission because you died gets pretty damn irritating. Same goes for Lemmings, which I couldn't stand for more than 10 minutes. Back in the days I could play them for days without geting bored.

Freaky, it works just fine for me.  New and unusual bugs for the joy.

I'm getting a lot more frequent crashes as I've entered the modern age and have a lot more units and landmass to pan around.  I read the Civ Apolypton and Civ Fanatics sites and the crashes are a universal problem.  I've get "virtual Memory is Low" warnings after about 3 hours of play, which then gives the game a hard-lock forcing a reboot.  Not sure if that's a memory leak or just a symptom of how much it's keeping track of... I suspect a leak though since the reboot fixes things for another 3 hours or so.  (Barring any crashes due to other bugs...)

Resources are irritating as the new ones seem to show up everywhere but my country.  I can tell that if I weren't the superpower I'd have a hard time of things building modern units without inciting a war to take control of certain cities for their resources. Then again, it's a lot easier to stay friendly with folks and know why it's that way and in any of the previous Civs games.

As to boredom: These are the games I love.  MoM, MOO, Civs.. I can't get bored of any of them and still play all of them fairly regularly when I'm just worn out of an MMO or there's nothing new I want to play.  I'm loving the Huge Epic Terran game I've got 23 hours into and still going.  The lenght of the turns can get tedious, but then anything can if you've been sitting there doing it for 5 hours straight.

Hmm Lemmings. I  need to find my diskette of that and load it up again sometime.  Sounds like a good lunchtime diversion.

Heros of Might and Magic would be the game for me, in fact I'm thinking of installing HOMM 3 ( which is my favorite togheter with HOMM 2 ) right now. Funy how it's suprisingly close to civ gameplay wise but still manages to be fun for long sessions for me.

I had been playing HoMaM3 Complete just before Civ4 came out, I love that game.

I finally got the time to spend with the game, got to maybe 1500AD on huge terra, which still seems a bit small to me. And the resolution thing is really bothering me, the widescreen forum people seem not to care since it supports 16:10, though not the quite standard res of 1280x720 (16:9).

But setting those gripes aside, it's a great improvement in a whole lotta ways. I had a great time playing through as FDR, but expansion was really limited by the amount of civs in the game. I actually restarted because there was no room to build a big civ the first several maps I tried, until I limited it to 4 or 5 civs with a Custom game. The map is too small. Well, I was going to set that gripe aside. Oh well. Kinda tough when it completely changes the way I played the game, in a bad way, especially when compared to how great the game itself plays.

And having the bottom of my screen cut off. Yeah, it's tough getting past those gripes. I want to give it a 9/10, only dinging it for a few technical and QA issues, but as it stands right now, I can't. With bigger maps and 1280x720, I give it a 9. It might happen, one hopes, given the mod-friendliness they promise.

I've taken to naming my units rpg-style. Beowulf and Conan, my axemen. Ol' Creaky the catapult. That's kinda cool, along with the upgrades. Lots of nice improvements, I'm really enjoying the game. Oh yeah - count me in the 'I don't get tired of these games' camp. Grinding mmogs, yes, but long strategy games, hell no.

Finally got my PC up and running and got Civ 4 installed. I was busy most of the weekend, so  I didn't end up playing it at all until 9 PM Sunday night. Bad idea. I got to bed around 2:30, up for work at 8. My ass is dragging!

I really like it so far. I played through the tutorial to get a feel for the new interface, but I still have lots to learn. I also re-learned the age old Civ 101 lesson- don't take your neighbor's good will without a giant grain of salt. They are all just waiting for the right time to rat-fuck you. Isabella went from Pleased to taking over one of my cities in about 4 turns. Bitch.

I am going to lose A LOT of time with this one. These are my very favorite types of games. I am staring at the strat guide on my desk here at work...I will be thumbing through that the rest of the day. I may need a 12 step program before this is through.

I have been playing a lot of this game. This being my first Civ game, I have a few gripes that I dont know if are series related or just Cvi4. I always feel like I run out of time before Im ready for the game to end. I dont understand how a lot of the stuff works. Usually I just build the recomended units (for the most part) unless I know for sure what I want to build. So far in 4 pretty long games I have not had a single civ try and attack me, and just by making a lot of settelers and doing the recomended options, I always win on points. Yeah, this is on easy level, I just wish I understood what I was actually doing a bit better. Also, by the time I have Stealth Bombers and Fighter Jets, all the other civs are just starting to get Gunpowder.

Another thing I found, is that some times my units just disapear. Gone. I dont know if there is some thing I am unaware of, or it is a bug. But some times while a unit is parked in or on a city, Ill come back to it a few turns later, and all the units on that tile are gone except for one.

I found a way to bypass the fact that the games always seem to end to soon by playing the "Ice Age" map. This starts you at 180,000bc instead of 3,000bc.

All these widescreen gripes... it's like listening to a Ferrari owner whine about bad gas mileage. Suck it up.

P.S. I  :heart: Sid Meier. Thanks buddy.

I found a way to spice the game up. I realized that I was always playing as a pacifist. I would have a small-medium size empire with almost no military.

So, my game last night I played as Japan to play a militaristic strategy. I had a great time, especially when Mao attacked me out of the blue.

I didn't have much of an army at the time, so Mao may not have realized that I had the tech saved up to build marines and bombers to go against his grenadiers and riflemen.

I dominated that game (my score was around double the next civ). Unfortunately, that rat bastage Napoleon completed the space program one turn ahead of me with 9 turns to go in the game.

Expanionist strategies don't seem to work really well in this game. The maps are possibly smaller, and it's slower to build settlers.

Played a couple games over the weekend.  They seem to have really balanced the military vs civics.  Even when I vastly out gun my opponents, bum rushing a near by enemy city seems was hardly worth it.  The city will be severely degraded and won't be productive for a dozen turns plus all the productivity I lost to attack in the first place.

Yeah dude.  You'll find when you stop playing on easy level that you will be attacked, and that you will die.  There won't be vast technological disparities either, unless it's you behind the curve.  So, there's that to look forward to.  Also, the manual is decent, and I hear the strategy guide is quite good, though I didn't buy it, because I haven't stooped that low in many moons.

My favorite thing about this game is the diplomacy.  You can actually cultivate friends, and those friends will go to bat with you.  It means something.  In a similar vein, you can't be friends with the enemies of your friends, of which religion will play a big role, so it's nigh on impossible to be friends with everyone.

Bah, my highest score was shit today.

I haven't purchased Civ 4 yet.  This thread is making money burn a hole in my pocket with pay day tomorrow.

Does anyone else turn off that damn space ship in every game?  I always play for domination or time but I hate that space ship. 

Go into the config file in the main folder of yer civ directory to turn on windowed mode.

Might solve yer problem with widescreen.

Can't get this to work..

The widescreenforum folks said there is an ini in the My Documents Civ4 folder. Going to hit that up last night but I was Mario last night.

Not gaming, but ripping out plumbing  :cry:

I cranked up the difficulty a bit to "Noble", and some bad things happened to me. In consecutive turns, barbarians conquered and razed two new cities I had just built. Pure evil.

Just bumping up the AI up 1 level from default, the AI went Linda Blair.  2 AIs decided that they where going raze me even though they basicly ruined there own empires to do so. Weak.

I started on Noble and thought it was pretty easy.  Go for an early religion and spread it to your neighbors.  If you get into a war, use cats to bombard down the city defenses, and then send them in to cause collateral damage on the unit stack inside the city.  Sign open borded agreements to spread your religion and increase your trade route income.  Try to earn enough money to keep your research at 100%.  If you do those things Noble is pretty easy.

This guy seems to know what he is talking about on the world size issue http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=f370a204d0326a76261ee93958b533d9&threadid=141673

I've finally had the chance to start playing in earnest.  I think I am in love.  I am not so hot on the new map yet, it doesn't want to pan out far enough for my taste, but I guess I will get used to it.

I heard a lot of statistical claptrap, and this is what I got from it:

Bolding mine. Per-civ land amount can suck my ass. The huge map is smaller.

And... it's not a mirror.

Yeah, it looks like this is the real info:
Civ3 Huge - 12800 total
Civ4 Huge - 10240 total
Civ4Terra - 14592 total

So, Terras can be bigger than Civ3, but in those maps you only have access to half the map until you can build ocean-going vessels, so it plays a lot different than a regular map.  Hopefully, modders will get on the ball for those of us who want to really catass!

Yeah I was playing on the level below Noble (Warlord?) last night. Things were going swimmingly- I had the highest culture rating in the game, but was kind of limited on expansion areas due to the large # of civilizations stuffed into the same area. Then the AI decided it had had enough of me, and within 5 turns, 3 of my 4 neighbors declared war on me. They took 3 of my cities without batting an eye, and I went to bed in disgust. I need some more tinkering time to get used to the tech tree and other things. I don't have a feel for a proper expansionist/cultural strategy yet, so I am getting routinely pwn3d by the AI.

Is it just me, or do you end up meeting the rest of the leaders MUCH, MUCH earlier than in previous versions? I have a nearly full diplomatic area by the time I can even build boats. In older versions it seems like I would meet 3 or 4 of them, but not discover the rest until I had a monster navy.

It just seemed like the AIs were just attacking me to grief me, not doing whats in their best interest.

I wish you could ask others to close their borders, it'd really slowed the assault if my enemies couldn't walk through the friendly nations to get to me.

I have been experimenting with bribing others with tech to get them to declare war on my attackers(thus closing borders), but it seems risky.

Is culture take overs of others civs cities a viable strategy? or is it a nice perk the every once in a while a small city will join you?

I've seen it happen once; I was expanding over onto a second island which happened to be the home continent of another civ. Since I was placing cities to strategically capture resources, I ended up with two clusters of colonies, which the AI decided to slap a city between. Turns out the two cities he decided to place between were in ideal growth/production sites, so they rapidly rose in culture while the AI's city got smushed between the encroaching borders. The city seemed to flip only after about 75% of the land immediately surrounding it fell to my side.

I imagine it would be possible if you strategically encircled another civ (or portions thereof) in your cities and blasted out culture and Great Artists, but squeezing your borders together also drops diplomatic relations into the toilet, so you might just get a war out of it instead.

Indeed, in the above example, the civ that lost the city declared war only a few turns later.

Fortunately, my words are backed by nuclear weapons.  :-D

It seems Civ 4 collector's edition is only $37 at Fry's. Must resist.

I paid $71 for the preorder special edition and the strat guide, so that ain't a bad price. Make sure and take pictures of the kids before you start playing so you can remember what they look like.

I need to remember what happened when Alpha Centauri came out and all thoughts of buying this should go out the window. Should.

It's getting silly. I love the game but it's crashing every-other turn now.  I'm having to save every turn and reboot if I crash, so the time to play is achieving levels even MMOG catassing hasn't seen from me. (At least I can walk away for a few mins and not worry about anything happening, though.)

Culture war is greatly reduced compared to Civ3.  I wouldn't try to take-over cities, and just enjoy when it happens.   Even when it does happen, that city's borders are going to be tiny until you start pumping culture out of it.  A city looks like it can flip as soon as the population hits about 51% of your race, but all the ones I've recieved have been at about 70% before they revolted. (Nice thing, though, was that the garrison units auto-upgraded to my best.)

You Can NOT ignore your military in this game.  I traditionaly just dumped 1-2 defenders in a city to prevent an easy takeover and counted on high production/ rails to save me if things took a bad turn.  I'd see building military units as a waste of precious time/ shields that could be going towards a city improvement.  That doesn't work so well in Civs 4 unless you are so far ahead of everyone technologicaly that you could steamroll them anyway.

 Big tips I've discovered, you NEED a combined arms force, not just one or two of the 'best' units, because of the way combat and unit structure has changed.  Also, you can NOT just send a settler out and then produce a defender.  They need to go with their defense garrison when they settle.  This used to just be a good idea, but in Civ4 it seems to have become a requirement if you don't want your city crushed by barbarians or opportunistic civs.

Also it seems like the AI will NEVER trade you oil.  I offered almost everything I had and my closest ally refused.  War or a new city looks to be the only option if you're screwed out of getting any oil on your land.

I think this is spot on. I have been using the traditional approach and getting my ass handed to me. Time to crank up the war machine.

I think militarism is also encouraged by the fixes to the revolt system. I remember in Civ3 that creating military units and waging war would create a bunch of annoying revolts. The new system lets you wage war without all the annoying diversions.

Also, I'm coming to realize that playing harder difficulty is actually more fun. It forces more strategic thinking with less laziness. It's one thing to produce settlers and expand. It's another thing to have to worry about securing the colonies against barbarian attack!

I was wrong its not the Ice Age map, its one of the senarios, called like 30,000bc, or some thing like that.

Marines are awesome.  Even moreso when you start having them gun-down defending riflemen.. Won't give ME oil, eh? Say hello to Mr. Browning...

I love this game the more I play it. All they need is a patch to add a nice polish to the rough edges, it'll be nearly perfect.

Still need the noah-ceedee version though.  I haven't had any luck using Alcohol 120.  I *really* hate to use physical disks.

Yes on the military buildup. I had the default two defenders mentioned earlier, but also a very large standing army. The whole army was razing leftover Chinese towns on my western borders, and the sneaky Japanese on the eastern borders seemed to have noticed that they could take a few cities before my army could run back to help. Totally caught me by surprise, since we'd been pretty good trade partners until then. The AI has also sent suicide units to pillage connections to my strategic resources like Iron. I like that craftiness.

I've been building up a varied force too... but it almost seems useless. The manual says that when you attack, the game will pick whichever unit has the best odds at defeating you to defend with. So when attacking cities, why not just load up all axemen/macemen with +City Attack bonuses, and about 5 catapults to ruin their defense bonus? You're gonna go up against their best odds anyways... might as well favor the dudes specialized for city attacks. I'll have to play with this more in later games. I do notice that it helps a lot when picking off invaders in your territory. A stack of archers/spearmen... send some units that have bonuses against them to keep them off your land.

As to culture flipping... I've had three cities flip over to me in this, my first game. All of them were at least halfway filled with my territory when it happened. I've used a new town shoved really close to an enemy border as a culture bomb pretty well. Send two Great Artists over to bump up the culture instantly, and you have a pretty fat buffer into their territory. Can even take over some of their nice, pre-infrastructured tiles. :)

Can't wait to move up one level and try Noble.

Noble seems noticably harder in that barbarians are much worse. Expansion is very tricky because they'll come out of Barbarianville and raze your outlying towns within a few turns.

One weak point in my game is definitely oceanic expansion. I really hate naval units. Any tips for how to expand across oceans?

Catapults and all artillary pieces have a big weakness, mounted units have a base +50% vs them.  If the city has one or two horse archers they'll do some major damage to your army unless you've got a good defender with them.   It doesn't have to be a balanced mixed-force, just don't always produce reams of the 'most powerful' unit.

I'm going to call a plumber to fix the pipes and break up with my girlfriend. I've had about 5 hours total with Civ4, most of that last sunday after football. Fuck.

why not just have your girlfriend fix the pipes? 2 for 1 ftw

Because then his pipes will never be clean again.

There's a crude joke buried in there...

This lawn supervisor was out on a sprinkler maintenance job, and he started working on a Finley sprinkler head with a Langstrom 7-inch Gangley wrench.

His apprentice leaned over and said, "You can't work on a Finley sprinkler head with a Langstrom 7-inch wrench." Well, this infuriated the supervisor, so he went and got volume 14 of the Kinsley manual, and reads:

"The Langstrom 7-inch wrench can be used with the Finley sprocket."

Just then the little apprentice leaned over and says, "It says SPROCKET, not SOCKET."

Can diplomats armed with gold turn an entire civilization in this game?  That was always my favorite tactic for subduing those damn Iroquois in North America in Civ2.

I really wish I could start playing this damn game but it runs godawful on my computer. With everything on low it still runs like piss. My computer may be a few years old but I still play most games fine, I can't figure it out.

So umm...ETA on a multiplayer match and whatnot?

And can we agree beforehand that Indians are the new Akuma?

(http://www.anikionline.com/2003/ae2003/akuma.jpg)

Overpowered, I say!

I run it fine... sometimes. Sometimes when something happends at a city it run's like piss, then it zips to another city and everything runs fine. Something is strange in the world of Civ... sometimes.

think a 6600GT and 1gig ram should do ok.

I would be happy to try some multiplayer, but I will utterly pwned. I might as welll start as the Aztecs or Incans to confront my underdog status head on. Unfortunately, everyone will be playing version of the Spanish  :lol:

I've got a soft spot for zee Germans myself. Russians are cool too.

I just have to say that GameSpy is the buggiest piece of shit match making service. Everytime my buddy and I played on it he'd get kicked every 20 minutes on the dot or both of us would lock up bad enough that I'd have to reset my entire system. Not nice. Direct IP is a lot better.

Bismarck and Panzer for ze win! I tend to invest heavily in research and expansion with an army no larger then needed for my defence, then when the UN comes into effect I blitz the shit out of my neighbors to increase my number of votes in the UN. Ah, ze German diplomatic victory. Makes me giggle every time.

Damn shame Firaxis left out us poor ol Norse again, I want Karl XII to win the space race damnit!

Edit: And patches, soon damnit.

I got pwned by the AI AGAIN this weekend. I am just not grokking how to do this I guess. I spend all my time worrying about my neighbors, and then I am suddenly attacked by some motherfucker from half a continent away. And will my nice neighbors ever stop allowing their troops to wander through their territories on the way to fuck me in the ass? Of course not! This is on the semi-retard level too- I can only imagine how much fun it is on the higher difficulty settings.

I am dreaming of the day I get nukes before everyone else. The world will be a smoking crater of ruin.

I actually had a bit of time (6 hours /played it said) to work through a nice archipelago map as the Greeks. I went for Galleons to get a jump on expansionism, then played nice tradesman with my fellow civs until I get nukes...I control 3/4 of the world's uranium, bwahaha (and guess who eats the first nukes...).

I bypassed on island close to mine, figuring I could backfill it, and half the world has a city on it. Fuckers, all their cities are doing crappy, but I had to build in the crappy corners, so even though mine are better cities, it's sloooow going for the culture takeover.

I like the global circumnavigation bonus. I just wish the damn game ran in widescreen resolutions with vertical lines less than 768 :( Sorry to harp on that, but it's almost a deal-breaker, I have to guess where the replies are in diplomacy and where the buttons are on the bottom of the screen, it really fucking sucks donkey balls.

Yeah, I think I will try an archipelago map. I have been doing the big land masses (Terra and Lakes), so a naval-centric game might be fun. At least I will be better able to defend my borders. That seriously fucking pisses me off- a non-hostile nation can allow troops through their territory to attack me with no retribution (save declaring war on them too) to be had. The instant troops attack from their lands they should have to declare war themselves.

Not that I am bitter. Fucking Catherine the Great and Isabella. Every game I have played it is the damned women who betray me. Weaker sex my ass.

Defensive pacts ftw?

I've got a nice passive aggressive thing going with Hatsheput, she and I are leading the culture battle, with dropping little colonies on everyone's continent...I've almost got a few of her cities and she'll lose some nice resources, but she's still Pleasant. We'll see how Pleasant she is The Morning After ;)

Probably won't get to finish that game until next sunday, though.  :cry:

Hmm, well I played for about an hour last night. Was really pretty until the graphics screwed up. I'm just moving my scout along when suddenly all of the terrain graphics for mountains became garbled. Figured, no biggie, I'll just save and reload. Oops, the graphic glitch has also garbled all of the fonts in the menus. Too bad I haven't used the save menu yet, so I have no fucking idea which line of squiggles means save. Grrr.

Oh, and it also locked up completely on me once becuase I dared to try turning on the grid.

Still, looks like a great game if I can past these issues.

My specs before anyone asks: P4 3.2, 1 GB ram, GForce 6600 GT, Win XP.

How updated are your drivers?


I played for a couple hours last night on an archipelago map. I got a nice big island to start with, along with some less advanced and passive neighbors. Found another decent sized island and plopped down an extra 3 cities, and then took a barbarian city that was already there. Things are progressing nicely- I am tooling around in destroyers while my rivals are just getting their galleons out. Unfortunately I am gonna run out of time for anything but a time victory, although I might be able to squeeze out a space race.

Alt-Tab back to the desktop and then switch back to the game. That fixes the graphical glitches for me on my system.

Try Alt-Tabbing here as well but that doesn't always work for me. I can usually fix it by using Remote Desktop from another machine but that requires you to have two machines.

Just FYI, apparantly with ATI drivers they say you should downgrade them to stop the crashes.  I don't crash very often, so I haven't bothered.  There's a thread somewhere on CivFanatics (I think) about that.  I know nothing about invidia.

Anyway, this game is nearly perfect.  I am regularly getting pushed to the limit on Prince.  It will be a long time before Deity.  I can't remember a Civ game ever kicking my ass like this since the original.  They really have gone to the next level.

/sigh Sid  :heart:  :heart:  :heart:  :heart:  :heart:  :heart:  :heart:  :heart:

I swapped-out my old 4200 GeForce last week because WoW was just plain shitting itself on my ATI card since the last patch.  I was having a number of graphics problems with Civ4 as well.  Since the swap they've all cleared-up and all I get are long pauses if I try to click to a area on the world map, and the 'norma' long pauses as it thinks in late-game epic worlds.   I haven't had a crash or system freeze since I did it, though.

So yeah, go nVidia with your 'optimize for us' deals. Damnit.

Five pages... Civ4 is the bee's balls, then?

If you liked any of the previous versions, or are a turn-based strategy fan, then yes.

It's a great game, if tough for me to play currently. I have a queue opened with 2k support. I expect absolutely no help from them, though.

I have to guess where the last few diplomatic conversational replies are, since they don't show up on my screen, and forget any buttons near the bottom, too, or half the minimap. I know I'm the only one here with this gripe, but not supporting any resolutions under 768 vertical is really pissing in my soup.

Still having fun with it.  Amazed though that late in the game it can bring my rig down to a crawl - not shocked since my rig mainly is tricked for graphics performance (SLI).  But I think their code is still non-optimal or it might be a side-effect of developing over a common abstraction layer to support both Wintel and OSX.

That's it - the worst criticism I can come up with.

Yeah, the end game can really get slow. Part of it is what I believe is a memory leak, but after saving and restarting my machine things are a bit slower than I would like.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Without the resolution problems, I love it.

I've been playing it a bit, and quite honestly am extremely dissapointed with the "streamlined interface".

WTF--I have no way of seeing what wonders I've built except for manually scrolling through each city?

WTF--The city info screen won't let me zoom to one of the cities? I have to exit out, and then go manually search for it?

WTF--combat odds are nuts. Simply nuts. Well, that's always been a problem with Civ games in general, but I've watched (saved/reloaded) > 2.0 odds lose 5 times in a row. I can see I guess that they didn't factor in "special powers" like first strike, but still.

WTF--WHY can't I have control over which unit in a stack attacks first? I hate having a stack of 10 units, then having to individually select each one in the order I want them to attack.

Sorry, but I just don't see any streamlining in the UI, and in some cases it's worse than it was in the past.

Umm, I know that sounds resentful, but the game in and of itself is addicting, but it's like MMOG-style addiction: I hate it, but play anyway. I don't -enjoy- playing, but I do, so they at least got the addictive part right.

Top right hand corner menus -> Info Screen -> Top 5 Cities/Wonders.

Gives you a list of all wonders in the game. Still pretty suboptimal, but it's there.


First Strike is nuts. Cities that have units specced out with lots of First Strike (although it costs a lot of promotions to get it solid) are pretty invincible against most comparable units. The bulk of my assault forces tend to spec into First Strike, with some medics as well; attrition is lower with those units - in fact, if the enemy doesn't have a big bonus or some first strikes, I can often get away unscathed, allowing me to completely roll over large swathes of terrain.

First Striking-specced Gunships with a double jet bombing cost me a stack of 5 Modern Armor.. that was a harsh lesson to learn. "Send the armor out with a mech inf."

So, yah, conquest victories need to happen before Armor comes into play or else it's just fucking expensive.

My biggest gripe is that you can't sell shit off in the cities.  I had built a nuke plant because I didn't have hydro plants yet. NBD, I figured, they never REALLY go thermal.  HAHAHA.. .WRONG!   Had to reload a 1945 save because Thermopalye became a crater in 1948, taking it from a 16 city to a 9.  Ow.   When I reloaded I decided to sell-off the nuke plant, but nooooo... can't do that.  Crap.

I hate how Civ4 handles modern warfare. Regardless of what happens EVERYONE gets pillaged back to stone age. There are also way too many units and AI loves sending them on suicide pillage raids that works better than capturing cities. Nukes also not that powerful - one game I dropped 5 ICBMs each on every single city of my enemy and not only nuclear winter did not started but cities and most military units stood unaffected. About only useful thing ICBMS do is pillage surrounding area.... To me it feels like entire game revolves around pillaging.

Open borders are annoying - it is very basic agreement that will result in your borders attacked from all directions from nutral territories unles you live on an island. You have to garrison large number of troops abroad just to have any chance of stopping pillaging.

Another problem - if you happen to not have uranium, oil or aluminum you are fucked. AI will not give it to you or will charge you outrageous price, like 30% of your total nations income per turn.

Still haven't heard from tech support about my resolution problems. I contacted them 11/8 and got a form "We're too busy to reply to you, thanks for the money" reply. :cry:

So... anyone found any good mods?  :-D

I've been looking around for a mod that lets you select the color of your civ. No luck yet.  Just one of those little things that bugs me. 

I think people are still digesting the new systems. The only mods I've heard of are one that allows you to demolish city improvements, and new map graphics (http://www.civfanatics.net/~bluemarble/content/index.php) using NASA satellite imagery.

Here's (http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=171) a direct link to the CivFanatacs Mod Forums.   There's a very interesting-looking "Realistic Religions" mod that's in there.  Here's a quote just to show what they've done (other than renaming "Missionaries" to something more appropriate for each religion.)

Very cool.

Indeed, though it reminds me why I hate to play Earth maps in Civ - Earth continents are just too small.  Britain barely supports a moderate sized city and like the graphic showed Florida can barely hold a fort.

Seems that A patch is out. (http://www.2kgames.com/index.php?p=support_patches)


I won't get a chance to patch & play today though.  Someone who does (or has) let us know how it works out.

Here's something strange that I found out...

If you like this game, then you probably have had that intro song stuck in your head a few times right?

It's in Swahili, here are the lyrics:

Baba yetu yetu, uliye
Mbinguni yetu yetu, amina!
Baba yetu yetu, uliye
Jina lako litukuzwe.

Utupe leo chakula chetu
Tunachohitaji utusamehe
Makosa yetu, hey!
Kama nasi tunavyowasamehe
Waliotukosea usitutie
Katika majaribu, lakini
Utuokoe, na yule, milelea milele!

Ufalme wako ufike utakalo
Lifanyike duniani kama mbinguni. (Amina)

Utupe leo chakula chetu
Tunachohitaji utusamehe
Makosa yetu, hey!
Kama nasi tunavyowasamehe
Waliotukosea usitutie
Katika majaribu, lakini
Utuokoe, na yule, simama mwehu

Baba yetu yetu uliye
Jina lako litukuzwe.


English translation:


Our Father, who art
in Heaven. Amen!
Our Father,
Hallowed be thy name.

Give us this day our daily bread,
Forgive us of
our trespasses
As we forgive others
Who tresspass against us
Lead us not into temptation, but
deiver us from Evil, and you are forever and ever!

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
On Earth as it is in Heaven. (Amen)

Give us this day our daily bread,
Forgive us of
our trespasses
As we forgive others
Who tresspass against us
Lead us not into temptation, but
deiver us from Evil, and you wake the dead

Our Father, who art
Hallowed be thy name.


Umm...That's the Lord's Prayer. I just find it strange that Sid would use something so specifically "Christian" in a mass market product. Does this irritate anyone (I'm just asking)?

I doubt the motivation behind Civ is "Christian"...It's more of an anthropological thing, what with the Taoist, Buddhist, and various politcal/philosophical passages as well. It's just strange that Sid has no qualms about opening up the game with that instead of something more neutral (all the while having Nimoy read from book of Genesis heh).

Hi, this is Civilization. You're playing God.

If anything the game is sacrilege. Don't read into it too much, your brain might go POIT.

I just edited while you posted. Check my post out again.

I'm not reading too much into it myself. I just wonder if it offends anyone. Some people get pissed at this stuff. God game or not.

The Lord's Prayer is Jewish as well as Christian, is it not?

Either way it's in Swahili, so the vast majority of folks neither know or care. If anything, people are more likely to be offended by calling the Chistian and Islamic structures Temples(Jewish) rather than Mosques and Churches. 

Well, if we're splitting hairs, yeah, the Lord's Prayer is "Jewish". It's just not "Rabbinically" Jewish.

In other words, it was a prayer first said by Yeshua of Natzeret, a peasant in first century Palestine, who was Jewish. He's also known as Jesus of Nazareth, so it actually makes it Christian. If one were to take the Toledot Yeshu into account though, it would mean that he was decidely not Jewish.

Short answer: It's Christian

Spock is a Jew though, so it's all good.

Anywho....I was naive for not realizing where this conversation would go. I was just curious about what people think when they see veiled religious references in popular art and products. Some people get pissed, some don't I guess. And it probably wasn't appropriate to ask anyways.

It's a good song though.

If I'm remembering the audio CD that came with the special edition right (don't have it in front of me right now), the song was composed by Jeff Briggs, so Sid might not've been involved in the idea to use the prayer. And you've got to admit it's pretty catchy without being overtly religious (unless you speak Swahili or go look up a translation), which probably led to it being used as the main title theme.

I am usually the first one to blast anyone for overtly religious content, but this doesn't bother me. The song is pretty cool, and the Lord's Prayer is very well known- I think it is kind of cool that they 'snuck' it in. There is also a game- related tangent- any culture can research, found, or convert to any religion, so I see this as kind of a nod to that.

As for the patch- I am looking forward to seeing the changes- I have been looking for a reason to fire up another game. I wonder if the memory leak is covered under " Global performance enhancements"?

Well, after the patch, and playing at medium graphics with everything turned off in the background - game still likes to grind to a halt at random on me. That, and the occasional Magical Rainbow World graphic glitch.

Its a damn great game when I can play it.

I wonder what ini options. Specifically, the ability to specify a vertical resolution under 768 would be nice, so I can use the UI along the bottom. I'd like to play the game properly some day. Still haven't heard from Firaxis, and you've seen my thread about Take-Two (Tokes?).

Blah.

I found a post on Apolyton that outlined some ini changes that enabled me to actually play a game without CTD or any hangups. 

I will try to find the post and/or the changes that I made to the ini to make it run.

I was directed to a post here (http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=146309) about a possible mem leak fix. I will have to check it out this week.

I just installed that mem fix.  The difference is astounding, and I didn't even turn-down any of my settings like its author initially recommended.  The only thing is you can't run X-fire with the current version of his patch. (Something he says he's working on fixing.)

Firaxis poll for future Civs and Civ IV additions. (http://firaxis.com/community/polls.cfm)

Cool- thanks for the link. My rule change suggestion was to impose some sort of diplomatic penalty for allowing a civ to attack another civ by traveling through your civ's territory. Global leaders should take note of this tacit alliance and react accordingly.

Anyone want to guess what my suggestion was? Winner gets an iPod*!


*Don't be stupid, stupid.

I would rather win a wide screen tv so I could play with widescreen support  :evil:

Add Elron as the leader of the Elven nation, with a special archer unit that can surf on shields?