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Good Game - give it time

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 11
Date: November 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Hello,
I purchased a pre-order game but, I didn't get it until the following week due to communication issues with Amazon.com. The first day I played it, 2 hours into the game it started to give graphical issues. I tried for about an hour and couldn't get it to work. For some reason, that only occurred on the first day. Ever since then, it has been running correctly. Of course, I turned off my Norton Internet Security and my screen saver. My specs are : Athlon 2800+, 1 GB RAM, ATI 9800 Pro. I run everything at the high end. The game is not the issue. It is the peoples PC's that they are running them on.
As far as the game goes, I wasn't as drawn into it at first as much as I was with Civ III. I think that is because of the change that I have to get use to switching from one game to the other. Civ III is fantastic. I seem to be enjoying Civ IV more and more each day too. The game itself is much more complex then Civ III. The graphics of course are much better and the combat is more realistic. I hear about 'how can an archer unit take out a rifleman' as another combat flaw/bug. I guess they never heard of General Custer and the battle at Little Bighorn. I am still trying to learn all there is about everything that you can build and do. Understanding how to build cities , use the tech tree, worker actions, what buildings and wonders benefit your Civ, which military units are best to use where, which religion, and much more... takes time. A lot of people don't give it any time. They seem to make quick assessments on the game without giving it a chance. My biggest issue that I have with the game is the number of icons. It is much easier to scroll through a list of names then to memorize each individual icon. One other thing, you really can't compare it to all of the other Civs, since it is built completely from the ground up.

I'm disappointed

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 17 / 63
Date: October 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Civilization III is my favorite game of all time. So I admit I had high expectations for this game. I'm sorry to say I was rather disappointed. The graphics are good, but what I liked most about Civ III as compared to other similar games in the genre such as Age of Empires was the arial kingdom management and the fast pace. Compared to Civ III, the game seems much slower and heavier. It's harder to micromanage and control from the overall big picture. It also drags on my computer, which is fast and high on memory.

Worst Civ Ever

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 28
Date: November 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I'll say it right now - Civ 4 is BOOORRRRRRING!!!!

While the game appears to run smoother on my comptuer than on those of others in this forum, I have to say that even when teh game is up and running it is boring. The AIs take forever to complete their turn. So basically game play is 10% actual play and 90% sitting around and getting bored. Bring a good book!

Then there are the many bugs. I say Civ runs smooter on my computer than others with the -er being the operative. It still crashes often when the Wonders movie plays. Also, it takes forever to load - if it loads at all. It also takes forever to close.

The game clearly was not adequately Beta-tested. Its pretty bad that Firaxis is basically asking people to pay $50 for the right to Beta-test it. Don't be another sucker! If Firaxis were smart, they'd issue a money back offer beacuse of all the bugs. Otherwise, I do not expect them to survive this bomb.

Can't build Wonders with Nvdia FX 5700 128MB card

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: November 14, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Game would be awesome if I could do everything but whenever a wonder is completed it freezes up. I just played entire game with no wonders and when I won and a victory video was supposed to come on, the whole thing shut down. Pretty disappointing from technical perspective but rest of game is a blast as to be expected.

The best Civ game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 35 / 173
Date: October 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is the best Civilization game. It has a very good multiplayer component, as it was designed from the start as a multiplayer game.
It is much tougher this time to expand your civilization. It's the best civ game I've ever played. I would recommend it to anyone.

Lies and more Lies

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 11 / 39
Date: February 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Before I purchased this installment of Civilization, I looked at the requirements. The box says minimum of 256MB. WRONG!!! The readme that is tucked away wants a minimum of 512MB. NICE!! Don't believe that 512MB will get you anywhere but problems. Turn off the fly-ins and Wonder movies and it runs ok at the initial stages of the game. However, I have run into so many problems in the end game stages, that I'm on here writing a review!!!

And by the way, my current game has 40 turns left and I'm stuck again, because now, when I end my turn, the game either crashes (BECAUSE IT RUNS OUT OF MEMORY) or after about 2 or 3 minutes of the hard drive spinning, I regain control again only to have a mystery "layer" appear and slow the game to a snail's pace. This mystery layer turns the map orange and green. I'm sure its trying to show me something "important", but I DIDN'T REQUEST THE DATA.

DO NOT BUY THIS GAME if you have less than 512MB of RAM. Even then, good luck. Civ3 was sooooooo much better.

Great Game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 13
Date: November 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Civilization was the very first game I ever bought for a computer back in 1991. I've been addicted ever since. Civ IV does not disappoint. I'm running it on my HP Pavillion zd8000 laptop. I did have to update my video driver to get it to run properly, which isn't a biggie since it's something that should be done on a regular basis anyway. It runs beautifully. I would reccomend this game to anyone who loves strategy games.

A load of fun, but...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: December 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Civilization 4 is extremely addicting, as befits the history of Sid Meier's Civilization brand. Firaxis tweaked the engine to remove boring things (pollution) and add new and interesting features like religion, simplified unit strength measurements, and so on. The music is brilliant, especially the euphoric main menu song, as well as the intriguing choices for the music from the different ages. The graphics team also deserves a round of applause for making the game visually beautiful and a joy to look at...

But the problem is that at times, your computer denies you the pleasure of being able to look at it for long. There are major memory leak issues, especially on large maps - immediate crashes to the desktop are common. I'm lucky enough to have 1 GB of RAM, a 128 MB video card, a P4 1.8 GHz processor, and everything else above and beyond Firaxis' "recommended" system configuration, let alone the "minimum." Despite this, I still have problems with consistent crashes when trading maps, zooming out to the earth view, and anything else that has a certain feeling of rendering more complexity on the screen.

I am still comfortable with giving this game a 5 star rating, though, because it is indeed a joy to play and a dramatic improvement visually and gameplay-wise over Civilization 3, which itself seemed perfect in its own right when it came out. As for the crashes, at least in my case, they are indeed annoying but not necessarily debilitating - the game autosaves rather often, every 4 turns I believe (and surprisingly quickly - it takes less than 3 seconds). Civilization 4 is an ambitious, adept and overall successful attempt at perfecting the Civilization franchise - though the development team may have overextended themselves by underestimating the computing power necessary to run their creation.

Updated Version of the Original - good but not great

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 14
Date: December 16, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I am a Civ lover, I got hooked with the original version. I loved it and played for hours, it was a breakthrough in game design in its time; just like to first person shooter games were once.

Civ 4 is a bit of a disappointment in the anima department. I did not have all the install problems that people have had. I had a small problem, it would not start but I just updates all my video drivers and a Windows Update and I was fine.

No the real disappointment is the animation. I was expected much more from it, the cities are not very interesting, I wanted to be able to zoom in on a individual building if I wanted, all you get is a generic city view.

The battles are a BIG dissapointment. I really wanted to have something like AOE with a movie like experiance. The anima for the battles is not much better then the old Civ 1.

The underpinnings of the game and the control over cities is better, the religon, civics and other stuff is improved and makes to game richer, but where is the eye candy?

Good but not great.

this sux

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 68
Date: October 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

big civ fan, but not so much with this version. i dont have any problems running the game. graphics are nice. i enjoyed the new combat animations, except for armored vehicles, which looked cartoonish. unit promotions were a nice touch. there is way too much going on to keep up with and the game does not keep you informed of whats happening very well. theres a small text box that reads off world events, that you'll ignore or miss 90% of whats happening. as one person stated, micromanaging is a pain at best. the biggest gripe is that the game has an entirley different feel from all other installments, but that stems from inovations to the game. overall a few of the new features were nice, but this game is a step down from civ3, at least for me. i forced myself to complete one game. my suggestion is buy the game and have a go at it, you might like it, but there's always ebay.

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