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What a disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 23 / 29
Date: November 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

There are so many bugs in this game that I don't know where to begin. I meet all of the system requirements, yet I get no faces, a black map and $50 wasted! There had better be a few patches appearing shortly at Civ4 website! I hope this is a huge public relations nightmare for this company.

Absolutely the best TBS ever

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 15 / 16
Date: January 18, 2006
Author: Amazon User

People who gave the game a low review are not voting on the merits of the game's design, but rather on the shoddy QA that got rushed before final production. It is true that premature optimization is the root of all evil, but no optimization at all is Evil Incarnate. I admit that this game can be slow on even decent hardware. I'm running a 2 GHz Athlon, 1.5 GB RAM, and a 128 MB GeForce 5, and I keep anti-aliasing turned off and a few other graphical goodies to keep the game speed tolerable. And yes, the game does have bugs that cause it to crash rather ungracefully. That being said, here is my best advice for this game:

Step 1: BUY THE GAME. The worst QA issues (except possibly things like getting the wrong disk) have been fixed. What is left justifies every dollar you spend.

Step 2: GET THE PATCH. The official 1.52 patch is the version that should have been released as 1.0. It wasn't; Firaxis made a mistake; boo-hoo. Quit your whining, get the patch, shut up, and play.

Step 3: CASH OUT YOUR STOCK OPTIONS. Odds are, you will lose your job, your family, and everything dear to you for the next several weeks. Better get your finances tidied up so your electricity doesn't get shut off right before you are about to launch for Alpha Centauri.

Now, let's talk about the game. If you want the details, read any one of the other fine reviews here or elsewhere. The best sites are probably Apolyton and CivFanatics. If you are a connoiseur of Civ, and want to know why I declare Civ IV "Absolutely the best TBS ever", then read on.

1. No more time sinks. Yes, there are still things to micro-manage. If you are masochistic, you can create time sinks for yourself out of various game elements. But none of them are *compulsory*, like in past Civs. The game just flows much more smoothly. It's a true pleasure to play. Whereas Civ 1 was like driving a go-kart, Civ 2 was like driving a dune buggy, Civ 3 was like driving a military-grade Hummer, Civ 4 is like driving a Lexus.

2. The game actually looks nice. The interface is natural, intuitive, and gives you a tremendous amount of information. Of course, there's hotkeys for all the useful commands (and unfortunately, some commands are *only* available through hotkey). The 3D aspect of the world seemed gratuitous to me at first. Then I zoomed from the max, where you can see only a few tiles and full unit/tile detail, all the way out to the globe view, where the map is wrapped around a sphere, and the cities are annotated tags on the globe, and I just sat and stared for a minute. Watching that 3D globe spin with your entire Civ world on it is breathtaking the first time you see it. Somehow, it puts the entire planet in the right perspective. Unit animations bring not only units, but also the map alive. Tile improvements indicate usage through animation, and even unimproved tiles show a little hut on squares that are being worked. Attention to detail is leagues better than prior versions.

3. Combat is now as interesting as economy. Combat evolved very slowly in the Civ series. While the life-or-death battles of Civ 1 led way to more interesting combat systems, the current system is best described as "continuous". Instead of having 1-5 hit points, units now have 100 HP (though that number is represented as a percentage of their Strength factor). Why does that make combat interesting? Simply put, it gives more possible outcomes for each battle, and thus a larger combination of tactical and strategic decisions. It's possible for that archer to dent a tank without destroying it...unless the tank is actually so damaged that an archer could conceivably ambush it somehow. By doing something as simple as making the HP a quasi-continuous variable, Firaxis has opened up the combat system to a whole new level.

But that's not all. Experience also makes battle more tactical. Before, you would just build up your Stack-o-Doom and always pick the freshest units to fight. Now, you focus on units that are near promotions, and sometimes you might be willing to fight a more even battle either to get that promotion, or to get more experience points. The number of interesting decisions to make during combat has multiplied exponentially. Also, the promotion system allows for customization of each unit and each encounter. You can tune units for besieging cities, attacking unit stacks, defending, moving quickly, or even healing. The combinatorial nature of the promotion system allows you to build a highly intricate military with structure even within a single unit type. For instance, I can get three free promotions with my current civics. So when I build a tank, I can make it a pure City Raider, which leads to +75% attack vs. city (which gives me a devastating 28+21+2.8=52 strength vs. riflemen@14), a pure defender with Drill III, which gives 2-5 First Strikes (an attack on a tank with Drill III by a stack of anything less than tanks is a suicide mission sure to end in tears), a pure stack raider, with Barrage III (+100% collateral damage)...very nasty against stacks of units in the field, or an "artillery tank", with perhaps City Raider II + Barrage (big bonus vs. cities with collateral damage on each attack...after a few tank strikes, the rest of the units in the city are so softened up you can pretty much roll over 'em). So you can build a diverse army out of nothing but tanks, or artillery, or any number of different unit types.

4. Geography is key. The introduction of strategic resources in Civ 3 really brought home the point of why nations often go to war in the first place. While it is often possible to trade for what you want, it is often not possible to make everyone happy, because someone doesn't like one of your trading partners and wants you to stop. When that happens, and the belligerent happens to have a monopoly on a key resource you want, you don't have much choice than to live without or take it by force. By making city health an explicit gameplay aspect, and tying it to food resources, even something as seemingly trivial as good pastureland or arable farmland seems like a target worthy of military conquest. Civ 2 allowed you to make the world look homogeneous, which was nice for growth, but not very realistic. Civ 3 limited the terraforming abilities, but still left geography a bit lacking. The large number of tile improvements not only makes the game much more interesting from a geographical point of view, it also opens up economic and political aspects of the game. There are much greater customization possibilities without turning everything into super-irrigated plains. You can turn grassland into production-worthy tiles with the addition of a workshop. You can get a whopping 7 resource units from a hill with the addition of a windmill. You can tune the balance from commerce to food to production, not by chaning the Earth, but by changing how you use it. That is both more realistic, and more fun. I admit that it would still be nice to use desert squares, or at least make them remotely useful. But there must be pain somewhere, and there's a reason you don't see a metropolis in the middle of the Sahara (or don't you...isn't it called "Las Vegas"?).

5. Better balance in the gameplay. This is the last point I'll address. While some players complain that Wonders have been nerfed, this really leads to more intelligent games. A military player that builds Da Vinci's workshop could easily get thousands of gold worth of free upgrades, which is unreasonable given the amount of production required to build the wonder. Wonders do indeed have more subtle effects. But this is to make the game more realistic, and also more fun. Missing out on a key wonder could cripple an otherwise good game in earlier versions. Strategies that depended on getting certain wonders sacrificed much of the other aspects of gameplay to get those wonders. Now you have to play the entire game to do well. Sure, there are strategies for playing a narrow-minded cultural victory game, but the overall balance still requires you to manage your entire empire in a more even-handed way. Ignoring any aspect too much will cost you in the long run. By toning down the wonders, there is less chaos when a player gains a huge strategic advantage. The advantage is still there, but it is in closer proportion to the effort expended.

Overall, the game is brilliantly designed. It's not perfect, and it's by far not the last Civ that will ever be made. But it is head and shoulders and torso and hips above the rest, due to the high-quality improvements in almost every area of the game. One of the main reasons Civ IV is such a great game is because it was partly designed by the players...the people who know Civ inside and out and know its flaws and strengths perhaps better than even some of the game designers. I'm sure it took plenty of humility for Firaxis to accept help from the gaming community, but it was the smartest move they ever made. By listening to the players, they produced not just a good game, but an outstanding one...one that I am sure will "stand the test of time."

LM

Hold Out with Civ3 Complete Instead

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 36 / 55
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.

I waited HOW long for this?!?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 23 / 30
Date: December 02, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I read the plans, listened to the hype, read the reviews, viewed the screenshots, etc. for at least a year leading up to the release date. I preordered more than a month before release. Then I got to wait almost three weeks until I received it thanks to Amazon's shipping queue.

I'm one of the lucky ones. The game installed and ran out of the box. Slower than molasses in January once you get 1/2-2/3 through the game, but it ran.

Then came the patch. While I could run the game without the patch, the patch also addresses some gameplay bugs which I did want to fix. Couldn't update through the game interface because of my firewall. D/Led patch from [...] but it wouldn't install. The attempt wiped out the .exe file and I spent about five hours trying to uninstall and reinstall the game. Then had to D/L patch again and muck around with settings to get it to install. Do not waste your time trying to contact 2K Games for help. Sid is out on a game-promotion tour and Firaxis and 2K are so busy making sure all the official game review sites are giving Civ IV a top rating that they don't seem to be taking calls and emails only received a canned response.

Result? Still some serious gameplay issues/bugs. While saved games load much faster now, the game still has serious memory leaks and lags out badly as bafore. Now the game crashes on occasion even though it didn't before the patch. And all this for a game that is nowhere near as fun as Civ III Conquests running the Rise and Rule mod!

Religion is a joke. While it seems counterintuitive, the way it plays out is the more religions you have, the better off you are. The early game is a little more than a race to found the most religions.

It takes forever to build anything in the early game yet research seems to clip right along. 3-D graphics add nothing positive to gameplay. In fact the "camera" pans and zooms in an often pointless manner. If they had stuck with the old-style graphics, I would wager few people would have system problems with the game. It might also be the cause of the memory leak issue.

The manual is huge but basically worthless. Critical information (such as how to upgrade obsolete units) is not included. There are, of course, the standard proofreading problems in both the written manual and the Civilopedia.

While I thought it was far too easy to achieve a cultural victory in Civ III, it is darn-near impossible in Civ IV. I have yet to get ONE city up to "Legendary" let alone the three required. Requiring three cities for a cultural victory also means you cannot have a cultural victory if you play One City Challenge. Conquest can also be a challenge since many of the AI civs refuse to fight. Domination is hurt because rapid early expansion is curtailed by the length of time it takes to build anything in the early game and the fact that even on a huge map there are *always* AI civs starting within a couple city-radii of my starting point.

There are faint glimmers of hope in this game. Polluted tiles from population/buildings have been eliminated. Creating a "civics mix" is a nice touch although religion needs to be tweaked (see above). If Firaxis/2K spend another year or so 1) listening to and communicating with customers 2) cleaning up the code and 3) balancing some of the gameplay issues, they could have a good game. Until then, caveat emptor.

The most poorly programmed game I have ever played

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 24 / 32
Date: November 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I am a computer programmer, and this game makes me sick. I have never seen such a piece of trash thrown into a box and sold to people. I think the game itself is pretty interesting, but what does it matter since I can't play a game all the way through? Once I get to the 1800s or so, the game crashes every 2 or 3 turns. Firaxis and 2k Games (the companies responsible for this piece of garbage) should be ashamed of themselves. I want my $50 back until you finish beta testing!

Not Done Yet...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 21 / 27
Date: November 06, 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).

Wait until the patch!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 19 / 24
Date: November 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I had this game running perfectly for two weeks and got a lot of enjoyment out of it. But then, stupid me, I had to go and download the latest ATI drivers and update my Radeon 9600. Now the game crashes.

Only after the fact did I find out that tons of other people are having problems with the new drivers.

I've rolled back, cleaned, and re-installed older drivers all to no avail thus far. Worst part is, I can't remember the previous driver version I had when the game was working properly.

Darn you Civ Makers!!! These bugs are ridiculous!!!

A Step Backwards

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 24 / 34
Date: November 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First off, if this were a "normal" game, I'd probably give it three stars. But this is supposed to be the successor to the Civilization games, with the original Civ 1 being one of the best computer games that has existed. Because of it's aspirations, and because it fails to meet them so badly, it's getting one star.

There are a lot of good ideas in the game, but ultimately they're compromised by the poor implementation of everything else. And every bit of game play is plagued by extremely bad performance, even on a fairly high end machine that runs every other game around with no problems at all.

For an example of the performance, start up a new custom game. It sits and spins for about a minute, then it says it's done. But then it sits for at least three or four minutes on that screen without moving. Finally it displays a prompt asking to play, and you click on that and then you wait another minute or two.

Likewise, loading a game takes forever and ever and ever...

I also have a big gripe about barbarians. If you don't turn them completely off, they are persistent and annoying even on the easier levels. That might be OK, but your units no longer level up for defeating barbarians beyond a couple of levels, so you don't even get rewarded for fighting them off continually.

There's also supposed to [roll over] help on all the screens, but it's missing on the configuration screens. And they're not explained at all in the manual, it just says to [roll over] them to see what they do. So you have to experiment and hope that you can figure them out. There are also a couple of adviser screens with the same problem - icons across the top with no explanation and no [roll over] help.

I went to their web site to see if they had a forum or other help explaining all these things, or maybe a patch. But you can't access the web site without Flash in your browser. I'm on a satellite hookup with limited download capacity per day, so I have to leave Flash off to keep from going over my capacity. So I can't access the web site at all - most companies provide another way to get to their content, not everyone has or wants Flash.

To summarize, I'm very disappointed and I'm very annoyed. It seems like the publisher rushed this out for Christmas without really testing or balancing things, and without finishing a lot of things either. It doesn't stand up to the its predecessors, and I'm surprised Sid Meier would let them put his name on it.

Did they actually test this ?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 17 / 21
Date: November 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I am an avid fan of the Civ series and it is with great anticipation that I have been waiting for the latest Civ 4. What a disappointment! I had a bad feeling when the audio in the pretty intro kept cutting out, but then I started playing and the whole thing took a turn for the worse: as soon as I complete a wonder, the game crashes, even though I am running with the recommended configuration. So this prompts me to ask: did they thoroughly test this game before rushing it to the store shelves ? I am glad for those lucky enough to have it running fine on their machines, and I wish them a lot of good times with the game, but is there a refund program for the good folks that were duped ?

Technical Problems 'render' game unplayable

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 26 / 39
Date: November 18, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I loved Civ I, II, and III. I have a loaded Dell XPS which is less than 1 year old, and I can not get this game to run. The error I get is as follows: Failed to Initialize renderer - check directX version and graphics setting.

The online help is pathetic. I finally went to a private Civilization web site and found many other people were having the same problem. 2k games has somehow released a game which does not work with Raedon (and other) graphic cards. Specifically, I have a RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition.

Do not buy this game if you have a Raedon video card.

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