10/25/05 - Civilization IV (PC)

[Merusk]

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.

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...

[tazelbain]

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.

[Pococurante]

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

[Jobu]

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.

[Toast]

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?

[Merusk]

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.

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.

[Sky]

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.

[Swede]

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

[Merusk]

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

Because then his pipes will never be clean again.

[Pococurante]

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."

[Triforcer]

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.

[MuffinMan]

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.

[stray]

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

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



Overpowered, I say!

[Eldron]

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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 

[stray]

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

[NiX]

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.

[Rodent]

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

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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.

[Sky]

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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.

[Sky]

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. 

[Bunk]

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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.

[Trippy]

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.

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

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

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.

[El Gallo]

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               

[Merusk]

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.

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.

[Yegolev]

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

[WayAbvPar]

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.

[Sky]

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.

[Pococurante]

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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.

[Sky]

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

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

[Stephen Zepp]

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.

[Yoru]

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?

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.

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.

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.