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Great Game... but SOME issues

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: December 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First, This is a terrific game if you like the Civilization series. Its probably the best. Now, I must admit that Fraxis hasn't worked out all the bugs yet...so buying this is a risk for the short term. It could run great, as some people have experienced, or it could crash about every 20 moves or so...as other seem to have experienced. They have put out a patch that seemed to help things a lot, but its still not perfect either. I imagen that given a little time they will eventualy get this one running really well. SO, even with some of the tech. issues, i'm telling you, if you like the Civilizations your going to want to get this one, its good. Save every few moves and have a little patience when things go crazy. If your a fan of the series it will be worth it.

Civilization is the only game I play.

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

Let me start off by saying I have never been a hardcore gamer. I am 30 years old and have grown up with video games. I have owned an atari 2600, tandy 1000, nintendo, sega genesis, playstation, xbox and a modern PC. I have played many of the best games from each of these systems. I was first introduced to the Civilization series years ago when reading a magazine that rated the original Civ I & II the best video game ever. I bought Civ II for the playstation because I didn't have PC at the time and became hooked. Civ III was better and Civ IV is the best yet. Many games have better graphics & more action. However in terms of gameplay, replay, strategy & how many different ways to play the game, Civization is hands down the best game.

Let me warn those who only enjoy fast-paced, button mashing action games, Civization is not for you. Civization IV games start out even slower than the previous versions. But for those who have ever enjoyed turn-based games, this one is the King. I would also say that the learning curve for this game is fairly steep. But once you get the basics down on the tutorial and easier levels, there is a wealth of strategy and information on the net. Civ Fantics and Apolyton.net have the best forums for any game I have ever seen.

For those who have enojoyed previous verstion of Civ:
I saw one reviewer say that he loved Civ III and hated Civ IV. I have to completely and totally disagree with this person. For starters the interface has been completely overhauled, making unit & city information available without having to go to a sub-menu. The unit promotion system is great. You'll think twice about sending a City Raider III Swordsmen into a field battle while he is wounded and his odds aren't great. Civilization IV also provides the odds of your unit winning the battle. So if the odds are 11.1 to 10.6 in your favor you may want to bombard with your catapults or canons a bit more before you attack that city. There are also generally less troops you have to deal with in Civ IV compared to previous versions. Even if you are playing on a huge map on Epic setting you won't see your neighbor bring more than 8-12 tanks at you at one time. In Civ III it wasn't uncommon for me to have 50 or more units to control in the modern age.

Basically this game has an addiction factor of 100. With so many different options and scenarios it never gets old. I played Civ III from the day it came out until Civ IV was released. And I will probably do the same for Civ IV. I believe even people who don't play video games at all would become facsinated with Civilization. Who wouldn't want the power to lead your people and country to greatness. Whether you're a warmonger, diplomat, city-builder or a combination of all; Civilization takes your imagination to threshold.

Civilization IV

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: May 13, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is my first time playing the Civilization series, and I was blown away with the depth of gameplay. So much to do, so much to say.... To see what exactly is in this game, look at the other reviews. I pulled an all-nighter playing this game, until my mom caught me, but that is a different story. However, I have to say that the loading times were ridiculous. 30 minutes just to load? Crazy! After the initial loading time, the gameplay was smooth. Second of all, the sound kept on freezing, going on a loop, or just stoping, which annoyed me so much I turned it off. Finally, it took a long time to understand exactly how to play because it was so different from the other games I played (Roller Coaster tycoon I,II,&III, Simcity, the Sims, Rise of Nations, Empire Earth, Command and Conquer, etc.) The prodution format was leaving me confused, and the manual is hundreds of pages long. Otherwise, a deep and amazing game.

Lots of new stuff, but i found it simpler and less fun than Civ 3

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: January 21, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Graphics are much improved over Civ 3, as well as more technologies, but its so much easier than civ 3. Like in 3 you couldnt build an icbm without uranium, but in this one you can...that, and the fact that it will crash randomly makes it inferior to civ 3, but still a great game.

Everything as expected, and a bit more

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 24, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I hadn't played Civilization since it was on 3 1/2 inch floppies. It was good then... but it's great now!

Everything was there as I remembered it- but the obvious evloution of the game was outstanding. the graphics were excellent, from eye in the sky to practically first person view point - it was a seamless transition.

It was easy to (re)learn, and many an hour since then has been spent playing. My son and I have played both over each other's shoulder, and using hte "multi-player" option.

I heartly recommend this to everyone.

A step back for Civ, a step ahead of the rest.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 17, 2008
Author: Amazon User

My conclusion first, then details after for those with patience. Get this game, when all is said and evaluated and it is picked apart by critics it still remains to be a lot of fun. If you've never played a Civilization game before and you've got your fair share of hard core strategy love, start with Civ 3 or even Civ 2. The previous games are better but I would recommend this one to someone who has played the others and wants more, a friend with ADD, or someone who thinks a pet rock is too much work.

Here's why:
Civilization 4 is a lot prettier, its got some fancy bells and whistles, very enjoyable, but it threw away a lot of what us hardcore Civ fans came to know and love. Gone are the informative spreadsheets, gone are the advisers, gone is all the manipulatable information, replaced instead with the basic of useless info. Not that there's a lot of micromanagement to do anymore, the AI is good enough now to take care of it for you or just simply deny things that in the past made sense like moving population from city to city via settlers.

Speaking of denying, one of my favorite features, taunting the enemy by making outrageous requests is also gone, the game now assumes you wouldn't want to have that option and blocks it out in red till your enemy wants it as an option.

And although military action is now more enjoyable, they messed with the ultimate weapon, the Nuke! No longer is the day when a nuke sent everyone in the map out to get you, but also say goodbye to the raw destructive power. The nuke has been reduced to a dirty bomb, it no longer destroys roads, makes craters, levels cities or melts the ice caps into a water world of Armageddon. The worst a barrage of nukes will do is maybe poison a city with fallout and make one tile of land "globally warm".

Despite losing time fishing around the mis-decorated icons, Civilization is still a lot of fun! Great military progression, historic people, leader attributes, religion, and new government policy, and a plenty of ways to win as expected. Go play!!!

An improvement in most ways

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 04, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Civ IV is still recognizably Civilization, but with enough tweaks to make it fun and plenty of new stuff to master during repeated play.

The game has movies about each wonder that play when you finish it. It animates battle scenes with great detail and sound effects. It has great music - Gregorian chants, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikowsky and even modern opera to match the era.

The internal math has been updated. Food, production, and culture still work more or less as they did in Civilization III - land gets farmed or mined, its food or industrial production goes up accordingly, and when it accumulates enough culture points, it expands. But there are new ways to tweak them. There are lots of new resources, seem to be more on the map, and you don't seem to stress out as much over getting them.

And there are some whole new dimensions.

Instead of offensive and defensive numbers, military units have a single power number. They get different bonuses against different opponents - archers get an edge, say, against mounted units - creating the offensive or defensive edges Civ III featured. You can see odds calculated before you opt to fight, and see every unit in a city before attacking it. You avoid unfavorable battles. The ones you pick, go faster.

Also, there are a slew of promotions you give units as they become eligible, customizing them with different strengths. A swordsman can get a bonus against archers, handy particularly if you know he's about to face one. Or a bonus good for attacking across rivers. Or one good for faster recovery.

The infamous "spearman effect" has been quelled. A primitive unit with the right promotions can still be effective defending a city against a stronger, more modern foe but when the odds get beyond a certain point, they collapse to 100 percent. So your tank won't get destroyed by a spearman who's having a lucky day.

The game introduces collateral damage to discourage stacking units into numerically unbeatable armies. If you shell or bomb a stack of units, you can damage the whole stack. On offense, you can bomb a city to weaken its overall defenses, but you can also bomb the defenders themselves, with one bomb damaging them all, making conquest immeasurably easier.

Religion is a major element. If you discover a religion, you work to spread it. Other rulers are friendlier if of the same religion, more hostile if from a different one. You can convert to curry favor. Religion helps keep your people happy, as it did in Civ III, but it also allows you to spy on foreign cities where you've sent a missionary. (The "Jesuit effect.")

Every time you build a synagogue, a cantor chants something in Hebrew. (And every time you finish a new technology, Leonard Nimoy recites some pithy saying about it. Gunpowder: "You can get more with a kind word and a gun, than you can with just a kind word." - Al Capone.

Health and sickness have been quantified and elaborated. The numbers tell you when you need to build Aqueduct, Grocer or Hospital, and how much you need to solve your problem.

Diplomacy has been updated. A running list of praises and gripes from rivals, whose attitudes you could only infer in Civ III, let you know who's a strong ally or enemy, who's on the fence, and why, which helps you figure out what to do about it.

The rulers have more personality. It's priceless when Julius Caeser or Queen Victoria, annoyed because you've refused trades or alliances, says, "I studied on killin' you."

Trade has been altered, in my opinion, for the worse. Resources can only be traded for other resources, or gold per turn, which other rulers never seem to have much of, meaning even a resource-rich empire must return to the market repeatedly to sell Silk for 2 Gold, then Corn for 1 Gold, then Wine for 3 Gold, etc. Or you trade Silk straight up for Corn, which the game thinks is an even trade. This is an improvement? It's a lot less like real history, when Silk or Spices were precious and rare, as they were in Civ III.

You have to trade techs for flat sums or other techs, not for gold per turn. Other rulers won't haggle much, which is no fun. In Civ III, I liked counteroffering 15 times until I'd shaped absolutely the best deal possible, or trading a resource for a tech with some gold and gold per turn thrown in on either side. I liked being able to sell techs repeatedly for hefty golds per turn and have them keep me rich for the next 20 turns. All that's gone. Feh. Also, there are options involving conversion or adoption of another country's civic values, but they're usually grayed out, and the game doesn't let you offer to convert in exchange for something. It should.

The graphics are fabulous. You can zoom in and see every building in your city, or zoom out to a globe view, handy when viewing a whole continent, estimating sea distances or scanning the entire world's resources.

There's a lot of automation. The game can suggest where to send workers or build cities - the latter usually near water - speeding up a lot of busy work. The new system for right and left-clicking units to move them, goes a lot faster.

Many minor flaws have been ironed out. You needn't colonize bits of land to keep opponents out, because the game won't let new cities form within two squares of another. Cities expand faster so more of those land slivers end up safely inside your borders anyway. Not only does corruption, now called "maintenance costs", discourage huge empires, but it also punishes fast growth, even early in the game. Besides farms and mines and a variety of mills, workers can build outlying cottages growing, with time, into money-generating villages and towns putting the city into the black. But before their surrounding settlements grow, new cities drag down your economy, so you don't want too many new cities all at once. At war, you can plunder those towns and villages for gold, which makes plundering a lot more lucrative, and gives your cavalry something to do while you're slowly moving footsoldiers and catapults into place.

Civ IV moves a lot faster. You can turn off some animation, once you've seen it all - seeing the Taj Mahal get built a dozen times was enough - to make it go faster still. I could spend 50 or 100 hours playing Civ III games if they had large maps and big wars. 12 to 24 hours is more typical for Civ IV. The game is also sped up by this: the characteristics of every unit, technology, resource, improvement or what have you is right there when you click on something. You don't have to remember that Optics lets you build Caravel, or that Caravel requires Optics; it says so right there in both places. You don't have to get out the instruction book or go to Civilopedia very often.

The down side is that a Civ III game became part of your life, a given map part of your mental geography that you'd pondered over every city. When a game was over, I was sorry to say goodbye. I still remember Civ III games I played two years ago. Civ IV games aren't as involving. Players don't really get into the city screen and get their hands dirty, and so may not really learn the game's guts.

But because each game is shorter, you feel freer to take chances and make mistakes. You have less vested in each game. I'd play safe in Civ III, not wanting to blow three weeks of work with a dicey attack or strategic error. A couple of days ago, by comparison, I had to decide between the UN victory in Civ IV and the space race, and opted for the latter. No matter: today I did the UN victory in the next game and learned how it worked. Finishing two games in three days never would have happened in Civ III.

Civ IV: Nothing is more addictive!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: April 13, 2008
Author: Amazon User

Civilization IV:
A game of excelent graphics, and realistic scenery shows how magnificent this game actually is. I believe several hours could be spent on it, so overdoing game-time in CivIV is the greatest concern. This game is truly an amazing, and addictive computer game.

All the Problems Are Fixed

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: August 04, 2008
Author: Amazon User

I was shocked to see how low this game was rated. After reading the reviews, I found that the early version of this game had a bunch of problems.

Rest assured, they are now fixed. Plus you can go online and install recent updates to get the most up-to-date version.

This game is a lot of fun and highly addicting. I've always avoided turn-based strategy games in the past so this is my first time playing a game like this and I absolutely love it. Don't be frightened off by the low reviews. It's all good now.

simple problems simply didn't get fixed

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 2 / 6
Date: December 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First of all, all of those who have played Rome Total war (and the Barbarian Invasion expansion) should know that our dear mr sid myers should have been aware that the universe was still evolving, and that combat systems that tire you out is sure no highway to fun. Why do you have to manually click the "fortify" botton every time you create an archer unit? If you create an archer unit in every city for 8 turns and you have 5 cities, that makes for 40 annoying clicks, why can't they make the statis of fortification a defaut state?

Also, the move or "go-to" command in this game is also insanely annoying, you simply cannot issue an order to all your troops, you have to do that one unit at a time, and it would eventualy tire your brains out if it doesn't wear out the computer first.

So aside from being quite graphically stunning, I still think this is not a very good game, from the stand point of a gamer who likes good games, such as Rome Total War. You rock, Rome, and I'm Maximus Decimus Meridius.

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