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Firaxis updates a classic, for the better

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: December 02, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The new features in this game are numerous, too numerous for one review. The point is they work. The game feels silky smooth, yet is amazingly deep. The factors in the game are intuitive, but make for rather facinating gameplay. In example, dealing with an empire of the same religion as you is a lot easier than with a "heathen" one. Trade routes and missionaries spread you're religion. You can speed up its spread, but that can take more resources and time than its worth. The game is filled with dilemas. You'll always be trying to solve or plan something. However, the frustration factor is reduced from prequels. The biggest complaint is that it can be intimidating to newcomers to the series. This is improved from earlier iterations, but its still a big factor. This game is a classic, like those before it.

Best Strategy of All Time!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: January 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I have been a fan of this series for quite some time now, I started on Civ II back when I was like 7 years old, and it has only gotten better. Civ III was a really fun game, more fun than Civ II, but it really didn't add much to the gameplay. There was culture now, and of course better graphics and stuff like that, but that was about it. Then, sometime within the last year I heard that game was coming out, and when I started looking at info about it, I was really impressed. And I definitely was not disappointed when I got it for Christmas.

The game is much more streamlined now, it doesn't bog down like the previous versions when you get into modern times, and you don't have to micro-manage 50+ cities every turn. The combat system is much improved, they completely re-did it for this version. When I first read about this, I was worried that it would ruin the game, because it didn't sound like Civilization combat. Having seen it in action, however, all I can say is that it is Civiliation in all it's glory, and it's never been better. Also, resources are more evenly distributed now, so you don't lose a game because you can't get a certain resource and no one will trade it to you. Furthermore, the science is much more realistic now, as it isn't based on ages as strictly. They are still there, but now you don't need to research all the technologies from the one age to move on. If you feel like it, you can research all the way down one line of techs and not a single thing in another. Then there's the religion. It wasn't quite what I enivisioned when I heard they were adding this feature to the game, and I first I was kind of disappointed by it, but it's been growing on me, and I really like it by now. There are seven religions, and your cities that have religions get certain bonuses, and you get even more if you found the religion. Plus you can build a bunch of buildings that make your citizens really happy. Oh, and if your religion spreads to someone else's city, you can see that city, which can be very useful... And of course there are the graphics, which are as always much improved.

When I looked at this game here and saw that it only got 2.5 stars, I was shocked, especially since all the magazines and websites and whatnot have been giving it such awesome reviews. Then I saw the thing about crashes, and I thought that maybe there was some legitimacy to the lower rating, although you shouldn't discount the rest of the awesomeness of the game on account of that. If all of that was true, it would bring it down to maybe three stars at the worst. But that doesn't really matter anyway, because it isn't true. I have a 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4, 512 MB of ram, and an ATI graphics card with 64 MB of video ram, and I can run this game perfectly fine. No lag, no crashes, no nothing.

So this game is definitely 5 stars all around. I think it is probably the best strategy game I have ever played.

A Great Updated Game that has been horribly treated by reviewers

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: March 25, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This Game is one that has been abused by reviewers here. Although the requirements for the game are above normal, there is alot that is going on that is missed by many people.

When this game first came out it seemed to me that it was just another copy, but this is not that. They have looked at the complaints of many (at places like www.civfanatics.com), and through that seeen what was the "Unfun elements" of the game. Because of this many of the frustrating features of the game such as those below have been taken out.

-Corruption- Before a city because of corruption partially lost the ability to produce goods, to the point that many cities could do nothing at all. Now thought they introduced a much better way to have corrupting, making them cost you money at a global level.

-Infinite City Spraw- In previous versions of the game (Civ3 especially), the best way to make a giant empire was to put the cities extremely close together, event though they overlaped because of it. Now though cities are much more valuable, the thing that should be done is to space them apart and then specialize them for an exact task (like producing Great People, or science).

-Making each unit valuable- Before it was a much more "This unit is the one to spam, with a super stack of these you will conquer the world", and you could. Now though there are limits, there are units (such as the catapult and Cho-Ko-Nu) that cause collateral damage, which can make a once invinceable stack now very weak. They also made each unit very good at one thing, but weak to another unit, such as the vulnrability of swoardsman to axman, who are vulrable to crossbowman and other units.

-Balence of the game its self. Each of these new things brings alot to the game, but also the potential for abuse, and for the most part this has been avoided.

-Many have complained about it not working well with their system, but what they don't realize is that there are easy ways to fix their problems. If you go to the My Documents/My Games/Civilization 4/ There is an Ini, which is very easy, which each changeable thing explained, that can greatly reduce the load on your system. Addtionally the lastest patch has fixed many of the problems that people have been having, and there is another that should be comming soon.

Yes it does make a large load on the system, but that's what happens when you play large games on an old system, but there are solutions to many of your problems, look at forums (like the one at civfanatics, there are many people there to help you), and updating your drivers.

No problems after about 20 hours of playing

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 10
Date: November 11, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I haven't had any problems with the stability of this game. I would think most of the problems stem from the fact that strategy games usually don't have 3D-interfaces, so people who have old hardware are caught out by it. Especially on laptops the screen resolution may be too large vs. the power of the graphics adapter. My machine is an average gamer machine these days, or even a bit old (an overclocked Athlon XP (about 3000+), Radeon 9800 Pro).

This game is addictive, and somehow feels more balanced than earlier Civs. (I believe the time I've spent with the different incarnations of Civilization is in the thousands of hours.) I haven't played on the big maps (only on small/normal), but it is reasonable to assume that the big maps demand even more from your computer. Around 20 hours isn't enough to explore all the properties of this game, but I'm quite happy with it. The game seems to proceed in a faster pace this time. Some of the most menial and repetitive tasks can now be successfully automated, the battle animations are quite nice, the tech tree is now more 'realistic', and doesn't contain techs that you absolutely have to have first, religions are nicely done, the starting points that the computer generates for you appear to be consistenly relatively good, and you can succeed with a smaller number of cities...

The game has nine difficulty levels, and I have played it on 3,4, and 5. Civ III had two difficulty levels that were quite sadistic, and I would guess there are three (?) in this game, so I guess difficulty level 6 (maybe 7) is quite playable after you get more of a handle on the game. According to the manual, on the fourth level the computer plays with the same rules as the player, and even on that level you have to play well to succeed, so the AI seems to be nicely balanced, and doesn't have to rely on 'cheating'. This time the computer doesn't seem to have uncanny knowledge of your empire before it has even explored it. The borders of your empire are now more important and realistic.

Back to stability: even though the game uses the same engine as Pirates!, I seem to have less problems with Civ 4. Pirates! crashed consistently at one point, after which I changed settings of my computer (and dropped the relatively aggressive timings of the main memory after that was suggested somewhere), which mostly fixed the stability of that game. So while you may have problems with Civ 4, I'm not at all convinced that is due to the game code, and not the million other things that might go wrong in a PC (background processes, say). Furthermore, because I live in Europe, the game comes only on a DVD, so I don't know anything about wrongly marked CD:s etc.

ps. "It takes all the fun out when you play a map for two hours and have it bomb out."
The game saves itself automatically (I believe about) every four turns, so this should not be fatal.

Also, I would suggest to all that you put the movement animations to fast.

Prepare for Seclusion!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 19
Date: October 31, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The difference between CIV3 and 4 is simply out of this world.
First, The graphics are absurdly cool. You can zoom in to look at individual tanks, or you can use your mouse scroll key to back-out. Sounds simple, but as you zoom-out you zoom away on a curve (like an airplane taking off), and as you zoom out far enough, clouds drift by, and finally you see the world as a 3-d globe that your can rotate and spin!

Second, government is a blast. Do you want to be a pacifist dictator committed to Taoism? Go for it! You can really set-up unique government this go-around. The fantastic thing is that your internal policies really will affect the way the other countries work with you (or against you), and you can see right-up front on the screen the reasons why Mao is thinking of invading you.

Third, Barbarians rock. Yeah, in the past they were good for a little gold. In CIV IV, being a barbarian is more like looking at the Goths or Huns. Sure they were barbarians (to a Roman), but left alone, they will eventually build cities, and ARMIES THAT WILL SWEEP OVER YOU! Way cool.

Fourth, the wonder movies have to be seen to be believed, and Leonard Nemoy does all of the voice overs.

Fifth, you can now choose about 50 types of planet-types, you can play multi-player easily, and you can now set game speed so that you can play a game in 2 months, or in 2 hours. Gone are the bogging-down affects of the past. Your nation may grow large, but it still MOVES along.

Look, the things I think are great may not float your boat, but this is a WORLD they've built here, and I guarantee you will find stuff you will love about this new game. It is absolutely bitchin. I've only played 2 times so far (once as Saladin, spreading Hinduism and Judiasm to the world!), but over the whole weekend of play, not five minutes went by without a wow or a call to my buddies. I am SO thankful that I did not let myself bring the game to work today. I could not have withstood the temptation.

Troy

Sweet but wee bit slow

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: January 08, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing Civ since the early 90's and have loved every version, including this one. The conceptual enhancements are nice, battle is more interesting and complex with the troop experience enhancements. The game does start to slow and bog down when your Civ becomes more advanced (around 20+ cities) but it hasn't gotten too bad yet. Overall, I would give it a thumbs up. An overall improvment over Civ III and still the best strategy game around.

great game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: February 01, 2006
Author: Amazon User

this game may not seam very great because of the turn based system but it is very fun and very addictive. the first week alone i played it for close to 28 hours. one bad thing about it though is that it takes a long time to play a full game so make sure you have plenty of time for multiplayer before starting. there is the hot join feture that lets you pick up a multiplayer game where someone else left off though. overall though i think the game is great and much better than civ 3.

A little slow but a lot of game.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: February 02, 2006
Author: Amazon User

After blogging a bit about purchasing a system that could play this game I finally had my shot over the last week or two and here are my impressions:

Graphics. The general illustrations are not bad but not earthshattering. The background animation is pretty nice. I keep noticing new things every game I play.

Game system changes: The addition of Religion add a real interesting aspect to the game, the ability to see why people like or hate you is good too but Religions are to my mind the backbone of the game. It adds a realistic aspect to the game and is handled with respect. I must admit I get goosebumps when Leonard Nimoy reads "I am the Lord your God...."

The new civic system is pretty nice too. You get a lot of options, I also like the idea of leaders trying to CONVERT you to their system or their religions, it adds a lot to the game.

The new units work very well and force you to go in many different directions along with the promotion system. There are almost TOO many choices. The ability to speed up the game really helps if you are not somebody with unlimited time.

The only big change I would make would be to allow a random selection of the starting world. I don't see why that wasn't included. I expect in the expansion when we see additional civs that would be there.

System issues: Remember this game needs a TON of oomph. If you have an old system stick with CIV III which is an awesome game on its own (as is CIV II). High memory and strong graphic cards are a requirement not an option.

Still it is worth your money if your system can handle it.

Civ Jest gets better and better

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: February 02, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I have been playing Civilization since I owned my first Mac in college. I have loved every single version even more than the last.
This new Civ4 ROCKS!!!
It has improved everything I didn't like about the last version in ways I didn't think possible.
It developed the interactions between Nations in the most amazing ways. From trading resources to Religious differences to outright declaration of WAR!!!
I did play this Game first on my older Pentium 3 computer and while it played, it was very slow. However, I soon bought a new computer anyway and now the game flies.
Thank you Sid Meier!!!

Significant gameplay differences from Civ3

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: February 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I am a long-time Civ fan, having played the first game back in 1990 to the wee hours of the morning (RIP MicroProse). This game doesn't seem to be as difficult to play as Civ3, which was impossible on anything but the first two difficulty settings. Here, they have done a much better job with the difficulty playing against computer-run civs. I can't comment on all the apparent crashes and bugs because the game ran fine on both of my computers without a hitch. I did install the first patch right after installing (as a matter of habit) so maybe that made a difference. I ran into a recent problem with the 1.52 patch that prevents the game from recognizing the CD. I can insert the CD and it will fire up, but then I get a popup message saying I have to insert the CD-ROM. Some stupid annoying copy protection crap, and it's faulty. So I grabbed the no-cd crack from gamecopyworld.com and that solved the problem. This game is a lot of fun and I'll be playing it for the next couple years. However, it's not as much fun as Civ3. I can't quite explain why, it just isn't as addictive. One improvement I like is that it's now entirely possible to wage all out war without a single battle lasting 1000 relative years. In the real world, many wars waged across the globe in a span of 20-30 years (namely, the rise of the Roman Empire), so why a single battle among a few cities would last centuries is just plain bad design, and that has always been my biggest gripe with the Civ series. But in Civ 4, that seems to be less of a problem.

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