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Ray's review

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 0
Date: April 29, 2008
Author: Amazon User

After the most recent upgrade the game play, after the 'Noble' level is exciting. The difficulty is that there are so many features that are not explained so you have to play many games to understand them all and use them effectively. Many of the frustrations of the earlier versions have been removed, like it taking forever to change regimes, keeping the government in anarchy for many moves.

MY GRANDSON LOVES IT! IT MUST BE GREAT!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 24
Date: November 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I can't conceive of a game selling 16 million copies. I wish my book, THE TOONIES INVADE SILICON VALLEY, would do that good, and am assured it will when the "right" people read it. It has great description of my unusual characters and plot, so it would make a great animated, graphic movie. (If you don't believe me, then read my reviews.)

Actually, this game is way too complicated for me, but my grandson has it up and running and we can hardly get him away from it long enough to eat. From reading some of the other reviews, I suppose he's lucky not to have had any crashes and things like that. So he must be doing something right! He loves it, and that's good enough for me.

That's why I recommend it highly!

Good game - with some conditions

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 7
Date: January 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Why can't these games be debugged before shipment? After the latest patch, the game performance and stability is much improved. But the first impressions remain.
As another reviewer said, this game also stresses your hardware. If you don't have good equipment, go for something else.
Beyond that, its definitely a positive refinement on the genre of turn based strategy. Oh, and it works OK over a network; unlike many predecessors.

The Missing Wonders

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 6
Date: February 05, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is for Sid Meier. Though I am highly addicted to the game, I think it needs a LOT of improvement! This comment is just about the wonders. I think there could be a lot of new wonders, which include the Arecibo, VLA, Louvre, Royal Botanical Gardens, Fort Sumter, Pyramid of Kukulkan(replacing Chichen Itza), Pyramid of the Sun, Libery Bell, Keck Telescopes, Mount Palomar Telescope, Very Large Telescope, NASA, Human Genome Project, Pantheon, Temple of Artemis, Statue of Zeus, National Geographic, Acropolis(replacing the Parthenon), and T-Rex Statue.

By far the best CIV game since CIV2!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 4
Date: January 15, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I'd like to say that the improvement on the graphics in this game are amazing! I have been playing the series since the very beginning and this is the best one yet. Although there was significant improvement on graphics from CIV2 to CIV3, the gameplay was just not quite the same. But CIV4 reverts back to most of the enjoyable aspects of the original. Good riddance to super-units, and hello to a whole new brilliant idea to make the game more complex (religeon). CAUTION: THIS GAME IS HIGHLY ADDICTIVE!

Jameson Luke Thottam review of Civilization IV

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 56
Date: October 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Jameson Luke Thottam review of Civilization IV

I normally am not a game player, but If there's one thing you absolutely need to play this game, it's patience. I have been playing Civilization IV for a longer time than I can recall (gift from a colleague), and I still have yet to discover and understand everything about the game. Levels of Difficulaty: Jameson Thottam What's great about it, however, is that the designers of the game were aware of this and provide for multiple levels of difficulty. I have yet to be able to handle level five, and if you can easily win on level four, then I am amazed. The fact that the game is always entirely different every time you play it keeps it from getting dull as you learn, the key is to just not get frustrated during the first few games, because you won't stand a chance even on level one. Even though this review is barely scratching the surface, I'll try to cover some of the most prominent features of this game. WAR: Jameson THottam Let's be honest, this is probably the reason why you're going to buy the game. If you've ever enjoyed playing Risk or Axis & Allies (the board game), you're going to love battle in Civilization IV. As with Risk, there is a fair amount of luck involved in combat in this game, particularly at the higher levels of difficulty. But the strategy that goes into waging a successful war far surpasses any other strategy game I've played, including Risk. There are an extensive amount of military units you can create over the course of the game, depending on how scientifically advanced you are. In the very beginning, you can build a simple Warrior unit, who's weak as can be, but over the course of the game, you will ultimately be building tanks, submarines, fighter planes, and even nuclear missles. A great feature about Civilization 3 over the prior two versions is that every nationality (you can choose whether to be American, German, Chinese, etc.) gets its own unique military unit. So if you want to play with a Samurai for instance, you'll have to select the Japanese (and just wait until you figure out how good the Persian Immortals are for early military conquest). But this is far more than a military strategy game, and the best thing about it is you don't have to play it that way. CULTURE: Jameson Thottam Easily the biggest improvement over the prior Civilization titles is culture. This took the most getting used to for me, and it will for you too if you played a lot of Civ 2, but once you know how to take advantage of culture, it becomes one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game. As with real nations, your towns form boundary lines around them, and as you expand your culture points in each town, the boundary around it expands. Put two towns near each other, and their culture combines to make an extra large boundary line, and you can see how you can ultimately own 1/4 of the world if you play correctly. The best part about culture is that it provides an alternate way to take over other nations' cities without military conquest, as if your culture is so vastly superior to another civilization's town, then the citizens of that town will literally convert to your glorious nation. To do culture right, you have to develop your towns, and there's a bit of the simulation genre like Sim City to this. The most culture points come from gaining World Wonders, which also serve other usually valuable functions (for instance, The Great Library is not only very valuable culturally, but also gives you every scientific advance that at least two other nations already possess, which is great if you ignore scientific research like me). The problem with World Wonders is that each one can only be built by one nation, so it's a race to the finish on these. This can be one of the most frustrating aspects of the game unfortunately, because you will often be literally one to two turns away from building a World Wonder before someone beats you to the punch, and then you've wasted many turns on something that you can't build and have no substitute. Other ways to gain culture include building temples (which also prevent your citizens from getting uphappy and preventing you from building anything else during rioting) or libraries (which increase your scientific research), among many others. And then of course it doesn't hurt to make your towns as big as possible... TOWN DEVELOPMENT: Jameson Thottam In addition to building structures in your town as I already discussed, you'll have to develop your towns' numerical values for several reasons in addition to culture. For one thing, a town that has a 15 numerical rating will stand up better to military attacks than one that has a 5 value. The numerical value represents the population of your town, and this is where the game can get a bit confusing and complex. Increasing the population of your town quickly requires you to take advantage of the nearby terrain, which is sometimes an impossibility. While you can always build roads around your towns for quick transport of military units and extra production in the town, you can also irrigate certain land to produce more food, which also increases your population more quickly (in fact, if you don't ensure enough food, your population can shrink). The best terrain is that which provides extra bonuses for food or products like ivory or incense, which also make your citizens more happy (and you'll find that their happiness goes a long way to developing your cities). SCIENCE: Jameson Thottam This used to be a favorite feature for me in Civ 2, but in this game, it's outweighed by many other aspects. That's not to say that it's not of the utmost importance, and it's very easy to have tons of military and cities, but get easily crushed in a war because you didn't take the time to develop better military units through science. You'll also miss out on all the valuable World Wonders and be left in the dust on the types of buildings you can create in your cities if you don't focus on science. As with most things in the game, focusing on science requires a trade-off for something else, in this case, money. Ah yes, I didn't mention that earlier, but you'll need money to run your cities (structures like temples and libraries cost money of course), and you have to find just the right balance between scientific research, money, and luxuries for your citizens to keep them happy. This is one of the most difficult aspects of the game, and chances are you're not going to be able to find a balance that does everything you want it to. Fortunately, they put a scientific advance tree in the game for those who are confused about what to research first. Discovering certain scientific advances will open the possibility of learning other advances. For instance, learning Writing will make learning Literature available, and believe me, you want that early so you can build The Great Library, you're going to need it past difficulty level two. GETTING OTHER NATIONS TO LIKE YOU: Jameson Luke Thottam You wouldn't think that this mattered, would you? But you'd be wrong, you want to stay on the good side of other nations as much as possible in Civ 3 (especially if they've got a much bigger military than you, and you're never safe in this game, even from a nation that for the moment loves you). One reason it's so important is that one way to win the game (and there are many ways) is to be voted head of the UN by other nations, although I have thus far found it impossible to win this way, and it's best to try to win the game some other way more quickly. How else can you win the game? You could of course kill everyone else, the most fun way. Or you could do it peacefully through culture or even travelling into space first if you're scientifically advanced. As such, the game rewards different styles of gameplay, and you don't have to play it militaristic or scientific. Summary: Jameson Thottam However, like I said, this is all just scratching the surface of the detailed gameplay. If the gameplay isn't enough for you, and you need flashy graphics, look elsewhere. It's not that the graphics are unimpressive (although I will say that the repetitive music leaves something to be desired), but they're just average. All in all, this is a game for strategy lovers, and there is much to love about it. If this review has bored you to tears, you're not going to enjoy this game, but I hope you enjoyed reading. The Game is Afoot Jameson Luke Thottam

A bum rap - Hard to improve perfection.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 14
Date: November 15, 2005
Author: Amazon User

As one of the many people in this world who nearly became a hermit because of this series (from I to IV), here is what I can say about Civ 4.

The overall gameplay, which is what Civ is all about, has improved, and that was tough since Civ has been nearly perfect since Civ I. The AI is better, and the worker automation makes more sense. The landscape is better organized.

Granted I play this on a newer 64-bit system with rediculous specs, the speed issues people keep complaining about just don't occur for me. There is also an adjustment on the custom game screen for adjusting the game speed. You can also turn off all sorts of animations and such to speed up the game if your system is anemic.

For Sid Meyer, thanks for keeping the series alive and for the improvements over Civ III, now go back and prepare the patch that fixes the graphic abnormalities (the wonders videos, etc).

Overall, well worth the money, if for no other reason than to keep Sid Meyer interested in making more Civ for us to burn our entire lives glued to.

Great Look to a Tried and True Model

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 7
Date: December 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I had to buy a new video card to play this (or old, depending on how you look at it), and was impressed - they really added a makeover to the series. All the fanfare was well deserved, this game doesn't disappoint. I believe I'm coming out of the stupor that is MoO3, and will return to this franchise shortly.

I don't really have anything to add, except that I've heard that Masters of Magic 2 might come out -- for anyone that's played MoM, can you imagine Tranquility over your capital, Armageddon, or any of those global spells, on a Civ-4 type world? That would look awesome...I hope a developer reads this. :)

Two Disk 1's???

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 27
Date: January 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Purchased the game for xmas -- opened it up to find two copies of disk 1, no copies of disk 2. Analyzed them both and they are the same disk! 2kGames is of little help, their support doesn't account for this -- amidst several problems with installation -- and their 800 number is inoperable.

Awesome game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 11
Date: November 12, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Excellent game! Very nice addition to the Civilization line. Very enjoyable tutorial lead by a semi-animated Sid Meier. Installed and plays without a hiccup for me, and my machine is a few years old.

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