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DO NOT buy this game until technical problems resolved!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 17
Date: December 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

We just got Civ 4 for Christmas and have been doing nothing but troubleshooting for 2 days. After searching the web and the user site http://www.civfanatics.com it appears that this game has a lot of video problems that need to be resolved. A lot of people are having problems. We love Civ and hopefully they can get this problem fixed.

Do not buy until you can confirm that the developer has fixed these problems.

Wait for a few patches...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 19
Date: November 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I picked up Civ IV the day it hit the shelves. Needless to say, I was extremely disappointed when I installed it and found I couldn't run it. The game is slow, the graphics are choppy and full of glitches, and the in-game cutscenes for the wonders cause frequent crashes. I shouldn't have any problems running this program; my system specs more than exceed the recommended system specs. Just another example of a game that was rushed into production without proper testing under real-world circumstances. What makes this game so frustratingly disappointing is the reputation Firaxis has built with its past games. Give this game a pass until Firaxis releases a patch or two.

Not Done Yet...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 19
Date: November 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is the biggest disappointment I've had with a computer game that I can ever remember. If you're reading this, you've probably been looking forward to Civ IV also. Well, the publisher obviously rushed it out the door before it was done.

The biggest issue is that it's slow even on a nearly new top of the spec machine. And turning down the graphics details, etc., doesn't do all that much to help. The graphics aren't that great anyway, everything is a little fuzzy even on the highest setting.

Then there are a lot of minor, but very annoying, things that didn't get done. Throughout the manual it says to "roll over" things to get help. But most of the help system apparently wasn't completed, because there's no rollover help.

It says to press Escape to get out of screens. But it doesn't work on several of them, you have to find the exit button and press it. And the exit button is in a different place on every screen - no consistency at all.

And then there's the web site - I went to try to see if there was any help or patches, but it won't let you in if you don't have Flash. Some of us don't want or can't use Flash - if you don't provide us an alternative, then you're shutting out a lot of people.

I'd suggest skipping this game until either the price drops twenty bucks or they get some major patches out the door (and let you into their web site to get them).

Glam not Game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 19
Date: January 31, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The Civilization series is like the Star Trek movies. Every other one is worth buying - apparently in this case, only the odd numbered sequels. This version adds lots of pretty colors and some interesting additions, but is virtually unplayable.

The game is slow and crashes frequently. Going to their website to find out what's up, the fixes are absurd. Such as opening your computer case and moving your video card away from your sound card. Or uninstalling your video drivers and installing older versions.

Game players that like this sort of game don't necessarily care if the colors are pretty, or the water is flowing or if Leonard Nemoy is doing the voice over. We want a good, playable game.

After much tweaking and trying different things to get the game to work, I have uninstalled it and gone back to Civ III (the best of the series so far). I would recommend NOT buying this version . It isn't worth the aggravation

Lags and Freezes

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: December 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

While Civ has always been the most favorite series of mine, this sequel is by far the worst. What good is gorgeous visuals when the game frequently freezes up? When it doesn't freeze up, it will take a good 15 minutes to calculate the computer player's turns before letting you have your round. Or, it will lag up so bad due to memory leak so that you literally have one frame every 5 seconds while you scroll. All this is running on a system way above the recommended specs; having 2 GBs of RAM doesn't help either.

A fair verdict would be, buy if you are only gonna play online vs other people. Otherwise, the AI will lag you to death by the latter half of the game when the world is populated and explored.

System used: Pentium IV 3.0 GHZ, 128MB GeForce 4, 2GB RAM, 200GB Seagate with 40GB free space.

The Patches are Vital

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: January 07, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Civilization is a great series of strategy games, and Civilization IV doesn't disappoint in that area. Players who are experienced with previous games in the series will probably find that the general play style feels very similar to those games.

Casual gamers will be happy to hear that this similarity applies to their experience with Civilization as well. If you just want a few hours of doing something *just* difficult enough to keep your mind busy, but not have to expend a lot of mental energy, you'll do just fine with Civilization IV. While many games stick to easy, medium, and difficult modes (with some throwing in "god" modes), this one throws in a long list of difficulty levels that will allow you to fine tune the experience to be exactly right for you both in your first game, and as you naturally improve over time. It also retains the ability to select which paths to victory will be treated as valid (I don't know about anybody else, but for some reason I've always just found the space race victory to be obnoxious, so I keep it turned off).

There are changes that have an impact on gameplay, naturally. The addition of religion is one of the bigger ones. In some ways you can largely ignore it, if you prefer (at least at the lower difficulty levels, naturally as you move up the ladder you have to start taking every possible advantage). One of the big places where it affects your play in a way that you can't ignore is that other nations will adjust their opinion of you based on whether you share their state religion (in the case that you have one, in the later eras of the game "free religion" becomes an available civic setting and selecting that eliminates state religion).

The biggest change to the game in general is in the visuals. The user interface is much more visually appealing than prior games in the series. The main game screen works very well, though I sometimes find the interface to manipulate cities in detail somewhat awkward. Fortunately, unless you're playing on the higher levels where you'd have more need to micromanage, you don't have to enter the city screens very often.

What you absolutely must do when you play this game, above all, is install the patches. The early releases appeared to have memory leaks (that means the game needs more and more RAM the longer you leave it running, because it isn't properly keeping track of what it's using). In bad cases, I would find that after a couple of hours the game would become progressively less responsive. The most obvious sign that this effect was happening was actually watching the water move up and down along the shores. After a while, instead of a smooth up and down motion it would start jumping from place to place. Installing the patches to update to the latest version fixed that, which was a big help because without them I found the need for periodic restarts to be extremely annoying.

One small complaint about the way patches are handled: to install the patches from inside the game you have to go through the advanced menu from the main screen. Patches to a game, repairing bugs and fixing performance issues, can be so vital to having fun. Since "advanced" is usually a tag put on features that no one should touch unless they know EXACTLY what they're doing, because they could otherwise cause problems, it just doesn't seem like an appropriate place to put a function that ALL players (even the ones who aren't very confident with computers!) will be needing to use.

Game Doesn't Install, Buyer Beware!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 25
Date: April 26, 2006
Author: Amazon User

There is a well known problem with this game not installing properly. The second disk may require replacement. If you contact Take 2, they will insist that you send the disk to them and pay them $7.50 to fix their manufacturing defect.

I strongly recommend you avoid this product at all costs. Having played Civ, Civ 2 and Civ III, I was very hopeful about Civ IV. The failure of the distributor to address the technical problems however is extremely serious. After numerous emails and follow ups, they refuse to correct the issue. Everyone can screw up, and everyone deserves a chance to make things right. That they continue to blame the customer for poor product quality assurance is an outrage however.

Wish I could play this game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 20 / 29
Date: December 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

BEFORE YOU BUY THIS GAME download the free demo version and make sure it works on your computer. I have 3 PCs, each with a different video card (9800Pro, I855GM, 9600xt) and it has severe problems on all three. The support forums have messages from tons of users with problems, but very little feedback from the developer or publisher and NO fixes released at the time I'm writing this.

Test the demo first. You'll save yourself fustration and the hastle of returning the game.

Sad disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 12 / 14
Date: December 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

What could be a fun game is so riddled with fatal bugs that I've deleted it after one day.

The "solution" provided by 2K is to run a naked system; no firewall, no anti-spyware, no anti-virus, nothing. Come on people this is almost 2006, no one runs, or should run, a system without protection. I wonder what would happen if I actually wanted to go MP?

The graphics are the best yet in the series, the interface is better but not great. But this is a complex game.

I had installed the 1.09 patch so these comments are valid for the current version.

Too bad I can't get my money back.

Don't Buy It

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 30 / 52
Date: October 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've now installed this game on 3 PCs. On 2 of them the terrain is black and the game is unplayable. On the best PC, the game is viewable but still unplayable. Civ4 is an unspeakable desecration to a great line of games.

Some specifics: The map is just plain ugly and eye-straining. The screen floats and jumps around like playing a shooter game. You have to constantly look all over the screen to find pieces of related information. The right-click options (formerly a Civ game strength) are turned off by default and even when you re-enable them, they still aren't very useful.

All the effort at trying to 'see' what's going on produces a gaming experience that is mentally exhausting and devoid of strategic thinking. Don't buy this game. They'll probably come up with some graphic patches for some of the hardware, but don't buy the game then either because it just isn't any fun.

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