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New Heights for my Favorite Series

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 11
Date: April 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

First off, it amazes me how people will buy a new game and try and install it in a horribly out of date computer, then give it one star because they can't be bothered to do a reasonable upgrade. The minimum specs for this game were cutting edge... nearly TWO YEARS ago. Get a new computer, get an upgrade, or go find a copy of Civ II Test of Time and knock yourself out.

That said, this game is a brilliant new edition of the classic world-building sim. With every version, Sid's team has found a way to bring greater complexity and humanity to the interface, yet improve the annoying aspects of game play.

Probably the single most impressive and fun aspect of the new game is the new religion emphasis. Students of history understand the enormous impact religion and religious conflict has had on the development of civilization. This game does a great job of adding that dynamic.

The other very neat thing, to me, is the new government/civic structure that allows you to customize your government "style" for lack of a better word, and bring more flexibility and realism to that process too.

Overall, an excellent update and well worth the money.

Holiday Disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 22 / 35
Date: December 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Unless you want to disappoint someone, DO NOT PURCHASE THIS GAME AS A 2005 HOLIDAY GIFT. While the game tantalizes you with the amazing graphics and gameplay -

IT SIMPLY DOES NOT WORK.

Two different PCs. On one PC the game runs unbearably slow - taking 45-60 minutes to process a turn. On the other PC, the game crashes frequently. And good luck trying to reach someone at tech support. A search of online gaming forums show that I'm not alone.

This game was rushed to reach store shelves by the holidays. I believe that they will fix these gameplay bugs eventually. But as of this writing, you would be making a TERRIBLE MISTAKE to buy this game.

Never Even Got to Play it

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 18 / 27
Date: November 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I am a Sid Meier geek. I love Civ and all previous versions of it. I also play Pirates. I was so excited, as were previous reviewers, when I received this game, I ripped it open in anticipation. It installed fine, no glitches there. but I was never able to play it. I own a nice computer that exceeded the system requirements. I called "technical support", what a joke that was. After being disconnected 4 times, I finally got a human who told me to try a fix that had nothing to do with my problem. After 5 hours of applying that fix, the game still would not work. I am returning my copy and it breaks my heart.

Excellent Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 16 / 23
Date: November 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I too have been playing the Civ series for a while and while waiting for my copy to arrive from Amazon was dismayed to see the number of problems associated with the game. Once I recieved the game it installed fine, but upon loading the game it says my machine doesn't meet minimum specs, which I didn't understand (read: Athlon 64 1.8GHZ, 1GB DDR, 128MB video card, Windows XP home-4 weeks old, home built). Now I'm almost positive it's my monitor giving me that error (only supports up to 1024x768, but I've read that some of the graphics in Civ IV require 1024x1024). Once I manually selected higher graphics in the game itself, I didn't get the error anymore. Gameplay bogs down occasionally, and the wonder movies have the typical sound problems, but I absolutely love the game and think everyone will once the bugs are fixed.

CIV IV Disapointing

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 16 / 23
Date: November 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Big fan of CIV games up through CIV III. This version focused on animation and a introduced a clutsier interface. Game action slowed down, complexity up, and its harder to tell what my empire is doing.

I finally just stopped playing it, the fun just isn't there anymore. A strategic game does not need fancier 3-D animation.

Great game, can't believe it runs on my machine!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 17
Date: November 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Gameplay:
Combat is much more complex in Civ4 than in any previous version of Civ, and if you don't stop to let the game explain it to you, you'll get very frustrated. Here's what to do: hover your pointer over units or their flag, and you'll get a detailed description of the unit's power. When a unit is glowing blue, it has earned a promotion, and how you (and the AI) handle those promotions makes this so complex. Instead of a built-in attack/defense power, you must choose whether each unit specializes in offense or defense, and even how (city defense or woodland defense, for instance).
When you are in a war, attack by clicking and HOLDING the left button over the enemy. You'll see a very detailed list of both sides' promotions, totalling up to the combat odds. It's impossible for some old-tech units to defeat some new-tech units, but just as in real life (think American or Turkish revolutions), an elite squad can defeat better-equipped but poorly trained enemies.
But like many Civ veterans, I prefer building to warmaking. The help boxes for the cities are a little buggy, but otherwise the city interface is very nice. It gives lots of recommendations, which really helped me through my first game, but once you get the hang of it there's actually a much wider range of building options. I'm still getting the hang of city specialists. To me, they seem like micromanagement, which is a shame since the best part of Civ4 is getting rid of the silly micromanagement (like having to adjust the economics sliders every few turns) that was pretty much the only flaw with Civ3. Oh yeah, and the new national borders work!

The Technical Stuff:
I don't know what these complainers are talking about. I have a 3-year-old laptop, and once I set the graphics quality to "low", this game runs beautifully. The movies are all chopppy, but on my machine, even the rotating logo on my web browser is choppy. ;)
I had tons of problems at first with the installation, until I realized that it was my computer's fault (I cracked the reader on my CD drive), not the game's. I suspect that a lot of these complaints are really from people whose systems are dying on them.
As for the complaint about the "black terrain", the terrain is SUPPOSED to be black at the beginning of the game. It only lights up when you have units or cities near it. Most exploration games are like that.

Summary:
All in all, I am having a heck of a time. There's very little taken away from Civ3 that I miss, and very little added in that I dislike. This game deserves all of the awards that it's winning.

Best Civ yet, but you better have an updated system

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 17
Date: December 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

In almost every aspect, this game is the best Civ yet, and better. The Special Edition has a few bonuses, such as the soundtrack CD (and there are a couple nice songs on there), the tech tree poster and so forth.

The minimum system requirements posted for the game, however, are very misleading. My system met or surpassed the min reqs since I had a 2.6Ghz P4 with 512MB RAM and a 64MB Nvidia MX440. Even after upgrading all my drivers, the game could barely run and crashed constantly. Graphics were a snail pace.

I immediately bought another 1GB RAM (for a total of 1.5GB) and a 256MB Nvidia FX5500. Now the game is running smoothly even at the best graphic settings.

So if you want to play this game, you better have an updated system, or plan on spending a couple hundred dollars upgrading your system. Personally, I was OK with spending the money since I needed to upgrade my system anyway.

Great Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 13 / 17
Date: December 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First of all, I didn't have any technical problems with the game. I've heard that some people have and that is unfortunate. I am running Win XP professional, patched all the way. On the hardware side I have Pentium 4 2.6ghz, 1gig RAM and ATI Radeon 9800.
On the game side I was pleasantly surprised.

First, I am finishing games much faster than I did in Civ 3. My first game was on a Standard size world, Noble level and normal game length. It took me about 6hrs of game time to end the game with Space Victory. I was an American competing furiously with (ironically) the Russians to see who would complete the spaceship first.

Second, it is very nice that you can advance in the tech tree without researching some technologies. It allows for specializations and abandoning dead end branches, or just trading for a particular branch later on.
The units are now very interesting since I can customize each unit with promotions, so I can have a few bowmen specialized to defend cities, and a few specialized to defend hills.
Another new addition is religion. So far, religion seems to be beneficial to the player, with only a few bad side effects. Depending on your religious civic you the religion helps from adding extra XP to your newly built units, through speeding up the build times in the cities with state religion, to just plain adding happiness in every city with state religion. You can also spy in enemy cities that have same religion as you if you're the founder of that religion.

There are a few annoying things, but none of them are so annoying that I would drop the score. First is worker automation. You can automate the workers to do a few different tasks, such as trade network building (side note: rivers serve as trade routes!) and road building. However, the city improvement is still very annoying. I guess that the optimal improvement is the village improvement since that is almost all that the workers will build. They do not build any farms or mines unless they are to be placed on a natural resource (wheat or iron or such).
Second problem is probably due to my machine being a little sluggish. When I play on a huge world it takes a bit to load (understandably) and sometimes the game just seems to slow down a bit, with a bit of jerkiness every now and then.

All in all it's a fun game and there are so many things about it that I can't mention them all.

If you have an older computer, you have no chance

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 25 / 43
Date: November 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've played and loved all 3 of previous Civ games, but I definitely no gamer because I don't have time. I saw this new release and quickly snapped it up, but when I tried to run it on my laptop (which is a Dell Inspiron only a bit older than 1 year old) I discovered all the terrain was black. I soon found out online that supposedly my video card was outdated and that I would have to buy a new card if I wanted to run the game. Since I'm a student, I simply can't afford $100 after I already dropped $50 for the game.

It makes me angry that the designers made the game with so many bells and whistles so average gamers like myself couldn't even play it on their normal laptops. The beauty of the Civ series was its design and strategy, not its graphics. But apparently in today's x-box world, a simple strategy game won't do. So if you have a normal computer that isn't brand new, beware. Don't waste your 50 dollars.

HUGE Ripoff!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 27 / 48
Date: November 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I am blown away by the number of positive reviews I've been seeing about this game. I am starting to wonder if we're all talking about the same product.

I can't say I actually know anything about how the game plays because I have never been able to get the program to load on my computer. I have a brand new AMD 64 processor and a Radeon 9600 256 mb video card. (Note to the previous reviewer who actually got the game to work with older ATI drivers; that sure didn't work for me.) After spending about 10 hours over two evenings installing, uninstalling, reinstalling drivers, patches, DirectX 9.0c about ten times, loading every update available for XP, and the game itself, and following every instruction from 2K to the letter, I've given up.

This game simply does not work.

I'm pretty much at the point that I don't care if Fraxis comes out with a patch to fix the problems or not. It's clear to me someone got greedy and rushed this product out about four months too early to take advantage of Christmas shoppers. My advise would be to wait awhile before you buy this title to see if the bugs get fixed or not.

Civ IV is on my list all right; my RETURN list.

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