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Bug-o-rama

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 44 / 68
Date: November 14, 2005
Author: Amazon User

"Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up"
--Shakespeare Richard III, Act 1, Scene 1

The Decline and Fall of Civilization IV

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 46 / 52
Date: November 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Do not believe the glowing praise of corporate shills - the marketing of this game is based on deception.

First, scroll up and look at the two pictures next to the game description; see that detailed little city? In actuality, when you play the game, this city will be smaller than a postage stamp on your screen. Wonders and buildings will appear on the map? Sure they will, but they will be a quarter the size of your units, and so small as to lose all character. That is what has progressively happened to this series: it has lost its flavor and become more bland and less grand. Maybe the genre is just tired, but more likely those who made this game have just run out of fresh ideas and are busy trying to address the micromanagement issues that have always been a problem with turned-based games. Here is a secret blockheads: people will gladly micromanage a game if the payoff is good.

But that is not what we have here. There is simply no payoff for sitting through a game of Civilization IV. So where has the payoff gone?

Wonders are still there, but they have become practically useless. Instead of a couple dozen world-changing wonders that really make a difference to you civilization (think free granary in all cities, double production/research where built), we now have six dozen wonders that give benefits like +2 to great person build rate, +1 health in city built provided availability of clams. Gone are the animations where we see a little story about the importance of the wonder couched in its historical context, now we have animations that show the wonder being constructed like a claymation tinker toy set. Get a clue: we don't build wonders for architectural aesthetics, but for the benefits they provide!

In a normal game, you simply will not be attacked by other computer players. This is fine because should you dare stop building your National Monument to Aardvarks (+10% city defense vs. burrowing mammals) and actually build military units, the computer players will surge ahead of you in all other fields and still have time to raise a massive army. The military promotions that you are promised are useless as well because you will watch your well-trained iron age legionaries that took 200 in-game years to construct be wiped out by marauding cougars.

A functioning religions system is overdue, but is so poorly implemented and has such a tacked on feel that it will basically be ignored once the religions have been discovered and your culture has a least one of its own founding. In order not to offend anyone's religious beliefs, no religion offers benefits over any other, so the only real effect of religion is that it makes people with the same religion friendlier diplomatically. Since those with close borders will often share the same faith, they won't attack each other, which leads back to the whole issue of no wars. Another hint to the designers: you didn't have to use actual world religions, you could have said: animistic, polytheistic, monotheistic, reformed, fundamentalist, meditative, and so on, then given benefits and detriments to those broad qualities of religions without offending anyone. It would also avoid the awkwardness of Saladin appearing with a Muslim crescent on his head while demanding I convert to his state religion, Buddhism.

Like most games that try to solve the micromanagement dilemma, the answer for Civilization IV is more automation. Take a lesson from the disaster called Master of Orion 3: when you make the player ancillary to the decision making process in order to facilitate your poor game design, you have failed and must start over. People don't want to play on autopilot, they are willing to manage even the most complex tasks if the reward they get gives them a feeling of satisfaction.

A note to those who already bought this product: If you are having trouble with this game, just let the computer choose what you build, what you research, where you place cities, and what improvements are built around your city; you really are not necessary anymore, you already wasted your 50$, that's all that was required of you.

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.

Check Your Hardware.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 27 / 67
Date: October 27, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Don't be fooled. Civilization used to be a great, low-needs game that could run on every system.

Bugs are galore, landscapes and leaders won't render, and wonder movies will crash the game.

Make sure you have a souped-up desktop and CHECK THE RECOMMENDED REQUIREMENTS. Horrible job educating people about this.

Other than that, the gameplay is immersive, soundtrack is sweet, and love the new features. If only the developers and distributors were a little more conscientious in educating the consumer about the system requirements...

Unplayable due to bugs

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 28 / 45
Date: October 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I have two very different PC setups, one a commercial build (Gateway) and the other a more high-end custom-built gaming/video rendering PC. I can't run the game at all on the high-end machine, and it crashes constantly on the other.

I was very excited when the package arrived yesterday, but it's already shelved until the first patch. It had better be big...

Edit: After tinkering heavily with my video and caching settings, I've been able to play several rounds between crashes. The graphics are an improvement over Civ3, and I'm rebooting the system and firing it up again after a crash (that old *one more turn* syndrome is creeping back). The variety of units, resources, and buildings adds a lot to the familiarities of the game from previous Civ games. I'm hoping I'll soon be able to run the game without crashes, because what I have been able to see when it runs looks great.

One odd problem I'm having is that I'm sometimes having to click my start icon three or four times before it actually begins to run. I've never encountered that before.

I'm upgrading my rating, but still not as high as it would be if the game ran without errors.

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.

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.

Civ 4 - A Complete Disappointment

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 24 / 37
Date: November 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is one absolute, unmitigated catastrophe. It's a total mess and a waste of $50. Don't believe the other reviews--they're probably written by the developers. I have been a huge Civ fan since 1992, and trust me, if you're a true blue Civ fan--or even if you're not--this game will disappoint you. Why? Where do I begin...

First, the game was, without a doubt, not ready for publication. It's completely riddled with bugs, typos, missing graphics, and broken help file links. Let's put it this way--the game comes with two CDs, and they're mislabeled! One says "Install" the other says "Play" but they're reversed! The play CD is the install CD and vice versa. Don't believe it? Firaxis has admitted it. So right when you take the game out of the box things start off bad.

Then there's the issue of getting the game to play. Probably half the people who've purchased it can't get it to play. Civ forums have literally thousands of posts from people looking for help. Firaxis support is nonexistant. They've stopped answering the phones and answering email. I have three top-of-the-line computers, and the game will play on only one of them.

Then, if you get the game to play, you'll wish you hadn't. First, the game makers tried to wow their audience with a "rich, interactive" 3D world that ranks right up there with, oh, Warcraft 3. The graphics demand a high-end video card but are completely ho-hum. What's worse is the graphics make the game play "floaty". Remember how Pac Man in the Atari version of Pac Man kind of floated through the maze? That's what this game reminds me of. You don't have precise control of the game camera. Move your mouse slightly to the left, and the game starts to scroll to the left...slightly to the right, to the right. If you scroll your mouse up to click on the menus, the camera scrolls way to the top of the map all of a sudden so your looking on the polar cap!

What's more, if you've gotten your fill of Civ 3, this game will not do anything to renew the franchise for you. Same game. Same gameplay--except slower and harder to control. They threw in a couple new civs, a couple new techs, a couple new ways to govern, and that's it. Basically a mod to Civ 3 with crappy supposed-to-be-state-of-the-art-but-not graphics.

Oh did I mention the animals? You know in Warcraft 3 or Age of Empires how you have wandering animals? Now you have them in Civ. They serve absolutely no purpose but to kill your scouts that you've set the auto-explore. And of course, the scouts who are auto-exploring do nothing to avoid them. They just walk up on them and get killed. Hurray! Now I have to build another scout and waste another 8 turns! What a great way to speed up the game!

The interface is junk, too. Gone are the cool, clear, bright dialog boxes with your friendly advisors popping up to tell you you've discovered a new tech or that your treasury is running low. Now the game throws up a dark dialog box that covers up almost the entire screen with the name of the tech you discovered at the top, the stuff that tech opens up to you at bottom, and a bunch of wasted space in between. Oh! And Leonard Nimoy reads some totally irrelevant quote from the Bible or the Illiad that's somehow related to the tech you've discovered. DUMB!

Oh, and then they have these superfluous cut scenes of wonders getting built. You build a wonder, and the game interrupts the action to try to show you a cheesy little movie of the pyramids being built. Uh, hello? Cut scenes make sense in a game with a story, but not a turn based game!

Beyond the bugs, hangups, crashes, pointlessly bloated graphics, frustrating interface, broken links in the Civilopedia, opponent leaders who are nothing more than eyes and teeth (yes, you read that right--the leaders don't have faces on many systems--just eyes and teeth), mislabeled CDs, absent tech support, and slow, floaty gameplay, what you're left with isn't even a fun game. It's a bore. It's totally slow. In Civ3 I often deliberately turned off animations to get on with the action and strategy. In Civ4, the whole thing hinges on the stupid animations, and as a result, the game just drags.

In short, this game has a completely amateurish, unfinished feel to it. It's worthless. Nothing redeeming about it except, maybe, the manual. On a scale from 1 to 10, I'd give this game a 0. Don't buy it--trust me.

Yet another hardware victim

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 23 / 44
Date: November 04, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I wish I'd known BEFORE I bought this game that it wouldn't work with any Intel graphics cards. If you have an Intel 82852/82855 GM/GME graphics controller, you get the infamous floating eyeballs and black, unplayable map. Simply flushing $50 down the toilet is quicker and involves a lot less fruitless clicking and tweaking.

I've been playing Civ avidly since the first version, had been looking forward to a new Civ for months, and I'm very frustrated. Why on earth set the hardware requirements so high? I've never played any of the Civ series for graphics or sound; it was always the gameplay that kept me playing over and over. So now I can't enjoy that gameplay because of all the whiz-bang graphics nonsense that I don't care much about anyway.

I guess I'll break out Colonization yet again and enjoy its chunky pixels and delightful gameplay. Maybe the authors of this lemon should do the same.

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.

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