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Don't buy until it's patched

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 24 / 30
Date: October 31, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is barely playable in its current state. I have a nVidia FX5900, a 2.6GH P4 and 1GB RAM, which is above the suggested requirements, and the game runs extremely slowly on huge maps. I don't understand how they could list the minimum requirements for RAM as 256MB or even 512MB when I've seen the game taking over 600MB by itself. As if the slowness wasn't enough, the game occasionally crashes to the desktop, often taking down the video drivers and reverting to 640x480 and 4 bit color requiring a restart of the computer.

If at some point the game is patched to fix the above problems, it will be a very good game. I like the way unit upgrading was redone to allow the specialization of individual units. I like that borders were redone so that the AI can't enter your territory unless you allow open borders. I especially like that there are now many more paths and choices to be made regarding the tech tree, city improvements, city specialists, worker actions, and government types.

Just not as compelling as previous Civ games.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 17 / 19
Date: January 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I got this game for Christmas. It's now January 9th, and I'm shelving the game. It feels closer to Alpha Centauri than any game in the Civilization series.

The design enhancements don't seem to be a significant enough improvement to make this game better than CivIII, while most of the problems still exist or got worse.

For example, new leader units have been added to allow you to customize your Cities/Civilization more than you could in CivIII. You can assign these leaders to be super workers, or to give you a free technology. They're not necessary for winning, and their absence would not cause you to lose.

Also, military units gain custom abilities when they win enough battles. This is probably the coolest feature in the new game, but again, it doesn't have a huge impact on gameplay. I found that even though I could choose to upgrade my units a little in their ability to attack cities or give them combat bonuses on different terrain, the units themselves were not long lived enough for those bonuses to have a significant influence on overall gameplay. I'd either lose the units in battle before they got too specialized, or they'd just become obsolete. Either way, I didn't get more than a couple "promotions" before the unit was lost. Not much of a value add for me.

Also, worker units have a lot of options for what they can build on a tile. It's not just irrigation and mining anymore. This can be great if you want to sit and crunch the numbers and figure out what will optimize your city, and then change what's on the tiles as your city's needs grow. On the other hand, it's very confusing if you don't want to make a science of it because each tile can have up to five different options. And be careful, once you chop down a forest, it's lost forever. And there are some tiles that can never be improved. I never really understood why that was.

Where I think CivIV is actually a worse game than CivIII is the fact that automatic city management has become less complex, at the user's expense. I can no longer tell a city to "only build buildings and don't bug me until you're done". The city governor, can only be turned on or off, not customized. If you turn it on, it starts producing a slew of military units that I don't want and am frustrated to have to deal with.

Further, it's less obvious to me in this game what the other civilizations on the planet are up to. I found it hard to get a handle on what their level of technology was without invading them and seeing what units they were using to defend their cities. Also, I had no idea what wonders of the world they were building until I got a message box telling me that I could no longer work on the one I was building because it was built elsewhere.

Also, it became very difficult for me to see events that happens on the enemy turn, such as their attacks on my cities. They all seemed to happen at once, so that I couldn't watch the results of their sieges if they had more than one happening on a turn. It was dizzying and frustrating trying to use the first half of my turn scouring my territory to figure out what might have changed from the previous turn.

Lastly, there are significant technical defects in the game. A lot of other reviews go into great detail in this area, so I won't spend a lot of time, but there are three things that really annoyed me. One, the mouse cursor had a hard time figuring out what tile you wanted because of the 3D interface. It was a pain to sit there and wiggle the mouse around until it got it right each and every time I wanted to do something. Two, The UI was painfully slow. I wanted to queue up some buildings in my city's production queues, since I have to do that manually now, and I would click wait ten seconds for it to catch up. Then I could click the second building in the queue and wait ten seconds for it to catch up. Then I could click the third, etc etc. My computer is decent. There's no excuse for that bad performance. Third, the graphics engine would get confused and render incorrectly, which then would confuse me. For example, if a tank moves, it leaves tracks. About half the time, the tracks were drawn such that they came from a completely different tile than the tank. At first I thought it meant something was shooting at me and leaving black trails in the air, but then I figured out that it was just bad game code. Shameful and disappointing.

There are so many great game play enhancements that could have made this game so much better. For example, an explorer unit that could claim territory so that you had a little time to put down a city before someone else moved in and took it out from under you.

The two biggest improvements that I was looking forward to being added that were are a "no city razing" option that you can turn on when you start a custom game, and no pollution on map tiles which is a part of every game. Great! Unfortunately, compared to the other detractors and lackluster improvements, it just doesn't feel like enough to keep me interested.

All in all, this game is a great disappointment for me. I've played and loved every Civ game since the original Microprose DOS Civ. I really wanted to love this one too. It took too many steps backwards and not enough forwards to satisfy me. I'm heartbroken.

Do Not Buy This Game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 21
Date: November 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I know there are other reviews that say the same thing...don't think it won't happen to you! This game has more bugs than an ant farm under a bee hive! What a shame too, great franchise, it obviously spent a lot of time on this release, but the final product is an insult to the computing public...unless you want to go out an buy a new video card to play the game...and even THEN people are having problems! Wait for the next release!

Too buggy

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 21
Date: December 14, 2005
Author: Amazon User

My laptop meets all of the minimum requirements and most of the recommended requirements, and I can't get the thing to play beyond the opening credits. My fiance can get his copy to play on his older desktop machine, but it's sluggish and choppy. I had no luck with any of Firaxis' supposed fixes, and their tech support was less than helpful. They were stumped. What kind of a game gets released that is not only unplayable on most machines, but whose tech support doesn't know how to solve any of the problems? They also wouldn't help me get a full refund for the game, so I'm stuck with Amazon's opened-software return policy (not 100% refund). Not only did I not get to play this game, but I had to pay for the privilege of finding that out.

Firaxis should have spent another year on this game, rather than trying to reap the rewards at Christmas-time for a shoddy piece of plastic, worthless except perhaps as coasters.

Oh yeah -- Firaxis' QA (was there any, at any point?) was so good at their jobs, they allowed the Play and Install discs to be mislabeled.

Firaxis, you're fired

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 21
Date: November 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I'm sorry Firaxis! You're fired!
Perhaps when customers stopped being customers and became consumers, businesses forgot their role. It is their role to bring together people and machines for the sole purpose of providing a product or service for the customers of this business. The employees of this business don't work for the stockholders, the CEO, the CFO, their supervisor or themselves. They work for you and me, the customer and we have a right to expect full service for the pay we provide to them.

Now it is obvious that a portion of the customers who purchased CIV IV are having no or little problem with the program: however, it is equally obvious that a significant portion of us are in great distress. I have a system that more that satisfies the higher end specs for the program and all of the latest drivers. It is impossible to play more that 20 moves before I encounter an unrecoverable crash. In addition, the program has affected other programs that I have had to reinstall.

In the early days of computers, when you bought a piece of software that didn't work, the software manufacture said the problem was the hardware, usually they were right. The disc drive speed had to be adjusted. Today that is not the case. The problem is seldom truly the hardware. The problem is with the company rushing a faulty program to market and with programmers pushing the envelope with their beautiful graphics for the sake of the graphics. Fact is, they are not very pretty when you can't get them to work.

More importantly, I don't work for that company; they are supposed to work for me. When I find myself having to report bugs or try fixes from some web site of "fanatics" then that company has put me to work for them. I refuse. That company owes us customers a better product. A product that is complete and ready to run on something other that a few select machines. This is, by far, the worst program I have ever purchased. It has more bugs than a rain forest and more ways to crash than a race car. If you are thinking of purchasing it, wait. Wait until Firaxis discovers that they work for you, not the other way around.

An expensive disappointment for my inner Genghis Khan

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 19 / 23
Date: May 01, 2006
Author: Amazon User

IMO it seems the problem is that Firaxis had too many artists and animators, and not enough expert game testers. After installing the 1.61 patch, I had no problems with crashing - though I had the graphics/animations set to minimum.

My specific complaints were thus:

1. Too much eye candy that I couldn't turn off - it interfered with a quick understanding of what I was looking at. Although it's great art, I don't really want complicated art when I'm playing. I want a situation display that's easily comprehensible! I really liked the 2-D display back in Civ II in this respect.

2. All the animations and detail bogged down the performance of my PC. I have a 3-year old AMD XP 2000 system (3/4 GB RAM, 64MB AGP card) which runs other strategy games just fine. This game is NOT worth plopping down the bucks for a new PC.

3. The underlying rules make my standard strategy of an early game ruthless land grab prohibitivly expensive. Why not assign initial borders then? Racing your opponents to settling (and defending) the valuable real estate was a big part of the fun of the earlier Civ II. In this game each city becomes progressively more expensive; you can afford many cities only if most of them are well developed.

4. Technologies can't be obtained through conquering cities, a real weakness. You can't play "Genghis Khan style" because when your nation is geared towards cranking out military units and no techs come in from conquests, your hoard quickly becomes obsolete. This leads me to think the play testers did not play many full-length games: on a large or huge map, a military victory strategy must begin early in the game to have a chance of succeeding.

5. Settlers are twice as fast as the defensive units that would be used to escort them? Come on!

6. "Neutral" nations will allow third nations to attack your nation through their territory. If you don't have "open borders" with the neutral country, you may have one heck of a problem with your flanks. Gee, you'd think there'd be at least a diplomatic penalty for that kind of thing. Look at how much trouble the USA goes through in real-life to get basing/transit rights when prosecuting a war. The "Open borders" relationship is way too binary - there needs to be graded system, such as:
A. Border is closed.
B. Border open to scouting units;
C. + open to settlers, workers, and traders/trading;
D. + open to missionaries;
E. open to all units with prohibitions on attacking 3rd parties;
F. open to all units with NO prohibitions (passive ally).

7. Most civics are unable to hurry production via an infusion of cash. What's the point then of having built up a big pile of gold?

8. Seige units have no safe "stand off barrage" mode to use against a stack of enemy units. It's bad enough your seige units will probably get killed during the opponent's move phase (range of only 1 square in all cases); to almost certainly get killed while bombarding an enemy stack is double jepordy.

9. Mechanized units are only as fast as horse units?

10. Unit attack strength and defense/hit points are the same thing. Even Civ II was more realistic than that...

What I liked about this version:

1. Wonders are no longer (since Civ II) game-breaking.
2. The "Great person/leader" system.
3. Stacks are treated more realistically than Civ II, though I'd like to see some kind of combined stack attack/defense mode.
4. The workers in automatic mode are relatively smart.

If I had bought this game from a $5 bargain bin, I wouldn't have felt too bad. It was engrossing for a couple of weekends before I stalled out on its agravations. I'd give it an overall 3 stars for all the graphics wizardry, but that doesn't make it fun to play!

Hold Out with Civ3 Instead

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 24 / 32
Date: August 21, 2006
Author: Amazon User

In late 2002, I took a second job at a major electronics retailer and decided to use my employee discount on what looked like a cool game: Civilization III. That game changed my life... in the gaming sense. It was everything I ever thought a computer game should be: turn-based strategy with multiple avenues to test my ego and self-promoted genius. Above all features of Civ3, however, my most favorite was the customization of the game through the map editor and the wonderful online resources of the Civ community. (I've downloaded more Civ3 files than MP3s.) This allowed me to express my self-proclaimed genius with new rules, technologies, and units (and all the accompanying chronologies and requisites) at my discretion. Nothing could get any better, I had thought.

When Civ4 was being talked about, however, I couldn't imagine on what grounds they could improve - except perhaps making the game even more customizable and thorough. Well, you've already read about the differing features of the game: less micro-management, more diplomatic and trade features, new technology trees, enhancing popular mechanics found in previous Civ titles, and of course, going 3D with it all.

When playing Civilization IV, you sense an overwhelming POTENTIAL to be a really great game. In my mind, that potential has not been fulfilled, and I hereby advise you to purchase Civ3 Complete instead and forego Civ4 if you haven't chosen so already. If you have already purchased Civ4, let's send a message to Firaxis Games that they need to do better - let's stop purchasing Civ products until they are actually without so many bugs, that aren't rushed to be released for the holidays, and that don't insult our intelligence by requiring expensive "expansion packs" which merely add content that should already have been included in the original release.

Here is a list of comparative reasons to only own Civ3 and not Civ4 and boycott future Civ titles until something changes for the better:

1. There is no map editor in Civ4. Instead, they included a "World Builder" which is so awkward and strange. It is not like Civ3's map editor where you can set starting positions, resources, civilizations, and terrain BEFORE you play the map. The "World Builder" of Civ4 only allows you to alter scenarios from the installation or randomly generated maps. You cannot create maps from scratch - you can only change what has already been created within predefined parameters.

2. Who needs 3D graphics for a turn-based strategy game? Civ4 is not fully 3D; it merely allows a tilting view from ground level to overhead. That can be cool, but consider the offset: it is unnecessary for this genre, it diverts computer resources from other cool and more thorough features, and it makes the game extremely difficult to modify. For Civ3, there are well over 1,000 things you can either download or make yourself and put right into the game. You don't have to know XTML or Python programming languages as you would in Civ4. Civ4 requires advanced education (like a graphics design or computer science degree) to simply alter things like governments, units, buildings, and game rules. Waiting for others to design them (like the amateur online community or the professional expansion packs) isn't so fun anymore.

3. Expanding content for more money? This was a problem with Civ3, as well - its first expansion pack was a total waste of money because everything was later put on the second expansion pack. People bought the first expansion pack because they loved Civ3 so much and didn't know it was a waste. (Many video game makers are taking advantage of gamers in this way, not just the Civilization makers.) My point here is to fight back. We already know what they are going to pull: Civ4 has an expansion pack out there titled Warlords. It basically includes elements intentionally left out so as to somehow formulate a "new" product. In the base version of Civ4, you have the Great People: artists, scientists, merchants, and prophets. Hmmm... now we get the warlords, eh? Oh, and a few other civilizations and buildings left out from before. Nice try... Boycott this type of marketing out of sheer principle. Play Civ3 Complete until Civ5 comes out if you have to. Maybe Civ will be less of a cheap shot then.

4. The last reason why you should be content with Civilization III and completely forget that Civilization IV was ever made is the most simple. Purchasing Civ3 Complete right now (1) will cost you less than half of Civ4; (2) is fully expanded while Civ4 is still looking to make more money off of us; and (3) Civ3 has the very same level of addictive game play as any other Civilization title. If you have already dropped the cash for Civ4, simply do not support Civ4 any longer. In fact, uninstall it and put it in your drawer as a sad chapter of shameless marketing. Yes, Civ4 is fun, but it is does not live up to its potential in most ways. Playing Civ3 will take up your time quite nicely until they release a REAL title that doesn't take advantage of us so blatantly.

To conclude, my overall point to stick with Civ3 and forego Civ4 is this: without an easy, efficient, and overwhelmingly powerful customizing interface (like an awesome map editor that allows FULL customization), we are simply asking for "re-tread" products. The fact that Firaxis did not include a kick-butt map editor proves in my mind that they expect us to wait for their "expansions" to come out and spend at least $150 each before they move onto Civ5. Hold out with Civ3 Complete and wait until Civ4 goes away.

A Platinum-Plated Turd

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 42 / 68
Date: May 23, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I'll be completely honest. I have lost sleep to this game. I've played with that "just one more turn..." gleam in my eyes until suddenly it's 4 AM and the sun is rising. However, this was only for the first few days, and right now, I feel like dusting off my old copy of Civ II and giving someone a Babylonian Beatdown. Civ4 is not a bad game per se; however, it is not a great game either, and mostly just serves to remind me of what a freaking awesome game Civ2 was.

If you've played the previous Civ games, or Alpha Centauri, the first thing that you'll notice about this one is how much the core elements have stayed the same. The map is still divided into square tiles. You still use settlers to build cities and then put the little people-heads to work on the 20 squares around the city in order to produce varying amounts of food, industry, and money depending on the terrain being worked. Population still increases according to how quickly you can stockpile food, and there's still no distinction between mining capacity and manufacturing capacity. Combat still involves only one attacking unit and one defending unit at a time. In other words, it's still immediately recognizable as being made in the mold of Civ. However, it was not designed by Sid Meier, who created the original, nor was it designed by Brian Reynolds, who made Civ2 and Alpha Centauri. The lead designer of Civ4 was Soren Johnson. Remember that for later.

The most immediately noticeable difference is the perspective. The pseudo-three-dimensional isometric perspective of Civ2 and Civ3 has been replaced with a true and fully 3D graphics engine. This has allowed the maps to be done as true square grids like in Civ1, as opposed to the ugly jagged-edged diamond grids with skrewy coordinate systems in Civ2/3. The mouse wheel adjusts both zoom and perspective; the view becomes more top-down as you zoom out, and more first-person-ish as you zoom in. It's quite lovely, and the ONE area in which Civ4 has managed to improve upon its predecessors.

The second immediately noticeable difference is the terrain. Hills, forests, and jungles are not distinct terrain types anymore, but rather, attributes that terrain can have, just like Xenofungus and "rockiness" from Alpha Centauri. Rivers, which were a distinct terrain type in Civ1 but a terrain attribute in Civ2 and Alpha Centauri, now run between tiles as they did in Civ3. The game also divides water tiles into shallow ("coast") and deep ("ocean") categories, another trait borrowed from Alpha Centauri. Nothing bad, but nothing new, either.

The third immediately noticeable difference is the combat stats of units. They no longer have distinct offense and defense values, just a single combat value. In all previous Civ games, if a strongly attack-oriented unit like a catapult attacked another catapult in flat open terrain, the attacking unit was almost guaranteed to win. Similarly, if a strongly defensive unit like a Phalanx attacked another Phalanx, the defender had the distinct advantage. In Civ 4, this aspect of combat is completely gone. Catapults are just as good at holding hills as they are at knocking down city walls. Ummmmm... yeah, right. Unfortunately, that's only the beginning of the dozens of lapses in logic that Civ4 demonstrates. I've also been unable to figure out what the hell kind of combat system it's using, but however it works, it allows archers to regularly beat WWII-era Infantry. Even Civ2 was better than that. But I'll hold the complaints for the second half of the review.

One of Civ4's best attributes is its emphasis on special resources. In Civ1/2, special resources did nothing more than boost the food, production, and trade output of any given terrain square. Civ3 changed that by making them required to build certain units; for example, you couldn't build gunpowder-based units unless you had access to the Saltpeter resource. Civ4 adopts the same idea. This makes wars MUCH more interesting and realistic - you need access to horses in order to build mounted units, Copper or Iron in order to build most melee weapons, Uranium to build nukes, and so on. Many resources also require specialized improvements, like offshore oil rigs. Very, very cool, though again, sadly, nothing new.

The removal of pollution, drone riots, and fixed population caps is a welcome change. These are now handled by new, less annoying functions. Corruption, Waste, and individual building maintenance costs are also gone, with building maintenance now directly determined by a city's distance from your palace. Naturaly, this means that many buildings have had their functions altered; Courthouses cut building maintenance costs in half, while Aqueducts add 2 to a city's healthiness. Actually, just about every building has been changed in some way. For example, Coal Plants, instead of increasing your production directly, now provide an entity called "power", which increases the effectiveness of your Factories. Woo! Realism!

The addition of culture and religion is... interesting. Unfortunately, it has very little real effect on the game, except that it boosts the combat effectiveness of the troops defending your cities. Yes, that's right... you can make your city walls stronger by writing books and singing songs. Sure. That makes sense. Oh, and because Firaxis was so obsessed with being politically correct, all religions are functionally identical. Because, you know, a society of Buddhists and a society of Muslims are equally likely to go to war. Ummm... woo, realism? Commence the complaining.

The tech tree has been completely redrawn. You no longer start the game with Irrigation, Mining, and Roads; instead, you must research Agriculture, Mining, and The Wheel, respectively. This is another thing that annoys me. Why can't roads be built until The Wheel is discovered? In the real world, roads existed long before wheels did! And honestly, how much "scientific research" is involved in discovering that you can scoop dirt out of the ground? You also have to research "hunting", despite the fact that dinosaurs had that "technology" hundreds of millions of years ago... and humans had in tens of thousands of years ago, if not hundreds of thousands, well before the game's 4000 BC starting date. Hunting is also a prerequsite for animal husbandry, meaning that you have to learn how to kill animals in order to befriend them. Yeah, you try to figure out the logic behind that one. But the madness doesn't end there. Paper, which the Egyptians and Chinese had somewhere around 3000 BC, is a good halfway up the tech tree. Polytheism is a prerequisite for Literature, as if a person's religious beliefs have the slightest relevance to their ability to write books. Polytheism is also STILL a prerequisite for Monotheism (in violation of Occam's Razor), but this blooper was in all of the previous Civ games, so I'll let it slide. Actually, tech trees have been so generally nonsensical in all of the previous games, so I think I'll let this whole category slide. Instead, I'll complain about the specific things that each technology allows. The "Machine Gun" unit requires Railroad. What the hell do machine guns and railroads have to do with each other? The Galleon and Frigate require Astronomy, as if boat design has ever been improved by looking at the sky. The "Mount Rushmore" Wonder, a symbol of American freedom and democracy, requires the discovery of FASCISM - what was Soren Johnson smoking when he came up with THAT one? The "Hereditary Rule" civic option must be researched - seriously, how much "scientific research" does it take to come up with the idea of "the kid gets the throne when I die"? Or how about the Free Speech and Free Religion civic options? Those are in the upper half of the tech tree, despite the fact that in reality, both speech and religion STARTED OUT free until someone came up with the ideas of censorship and state religion. Soren Johnson needs to be smacked upside the head with a two-by-four. Hard. And repeatedly.

Unit obsolescence/upgrade paths are even worse. In previous Civ games, as in reality, medieval weaponry became obsolete with the discovery of gunpowder and the creation of muskets. In Civ4, gunpowder does not make any units obsolete. Not a single bloody one. NOTHING upgrades to a Musketeer - NOT EVEN ARCHERS!!! WHAT THE HELL?!?!? Instead, musketeers/musketmen are basically medieval units, and all Pikemen, Macemen, Longbows, Crossbows, et cetera are made obsolete by Rifling and upgrade directly to Riflemen, as do the musket infantry. This is, for lack of a better word, completely f***ing retarded. Also in previous Civ games, as in reality, wooden warships became obsolete when Ironclads were developed. In Civ4, nothing upgrades to an Ironclad, nor is made obsolete by its existence; instead, both Ironclads and wooden ships are replaced directly by Destroyers. Oh, and there are no Cruisers in Civ4. You get Destroyers, Battleships, Submarines, and Carriers, but no Cruisers. Soren Johnson has clearly not played "Battleship" in a VERY long time. Oh, but there's more... in previous Civ games, as in reality, Tanks were the modern replacement for Cavalry. In Civ4, Cavalry upgrades to... helicopters? What the hell!

Some of the more "fun" specialty units are nonexistent. Paratrooper fans will be disappointed because the Paradrop function has been removed. The "Alpine" ability is gone, too. Diplomacy and espionage units are gone; the Spy is still around, but has been reduced to a modernized Explorer. Those crazy little Fanatic guys are gone, along will their railroad-pillaging counterparts, the Partisans. Marines are still around, but this doesn't mean much because now ALL ground combat units can attack directly from transport ships. Cruise Missiles are gone, and nukes have been heavily watered down. Caravans and Freight units are gone - no more stockpiling for instant Wonders. Oh, speaking of which, Wonders no longer come in increments of seven. Another brilliant move by Soren Johnson.

Of the 18 playable civilizations that come with the game, not one is Mesopotamian. There are no Sumerians, Babylonians, or Assyrians, despite the fact that one of the Wonders is the HANGING GARDENS OF FREAKING BABYLON!!! I'm hoping that this is fixed in the expansion pack...

Unfortunately, it's these little things that ruin the game for me. Colosseums are bugged and produce three times as much happiness per culture as they're supposed to, making them obscenely overpowered. AI empires never declare war on each other. Dozens, if not hundreds, of these little things. Gameplay is smoother and more manageable than before, but when my intelligence is so frequently assaulted by such horribly sloppy game design, I begin to wonder just where that old Civ2 disc is hiding.

But hey, maybe they'll finally get it right with the fifth one.

Absolute, unplayable crap.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 21 / 27
Date: November 07, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Why, in this wireless/broadband-enabled age, would ANY game developer effectively cut 90% of all laptops out of the market? That's what Firaxis has done. I have the floating eyeballs and the black terrain and the rest of the same problems so many others are having... on three different machines, one of which is two months old.

I am yet another person that is going to stick with Civ III and never buy another Firaxis product.

Trying to make lemonade!!!!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 41 / 67
Date: October 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

My experience with this game has been absolutely horrible. I have an ATI Graphics card and Sound Blaster Audigy two very common components. Put simply the game won't start and it locks up. Support for this game is non-existent and when you call the help number you actually wait ten minutes on the phone before an automated message says that all the reps are busy please call back in 24 hours, "24 HOURS!!!", then hangs up. If you are lucky enough to get through they will tell you whatever they can just to get you off the phone. Whatever you do if your are gullible enough to buy this game and have to call support, do not let them say they will send you an email. DONT HANG UP THE PHONE!!. DON'T BUY THIS GAME UNLESS YOU ARE A GLUTTON FOR PUNISHMENT or are looking for lemons!

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