uat2d
ಠ_ಠ
I think the "break the game" things are not that frequent. And I think civ is a better game when you add the **** happens factor. Just my opinion of course.
Over the course of this discussion I think I now appreciate the other side of this argument a bit more due to the insightful responses from others.
That crap happens factor already happens enough even without events, and it's only acceptable when it can be at least prevented, attenuated or affects everyone equally. I spawned with Shaka, Monty and Toku on my continent and Gandhi, Lincoln and Mansa Musa are on the other one, crap happens, but whatever, this should be interesting! You managed to survive and are unify your continent and are now alone against all three of them on the other side of the ocean, and have 20 turns to raze Timbuktu or you'll lose by Space Race, and 3 turns before he reaches Alpha Centauri, just when your immense navy and army are ready to burn the whole place to the ground, LOL, Bermuda Triangle, say goodbye to a +50 unit stack and your game, crap happens and whoever designed and decided it was a good idea to implement this feature should say that when they were about to be lynched for such horrendous idea.
Imagine if they added an event like "Comet sighted and the peasants are worried - reduced income and some other annoyances" that hurt everyone equally - that would be acceptable because basically you wouldn't be the only one who got screwed over. That would be acceptable and would add another layer of depth to the game, even though it would basically just be there annoying everyone if it fired. Now consider that instead of this, the comet thingie only affected one Civ or that if it was always firing and it got to the point were the game was unplayable - that would be just awful, indeed something that would be best if it wasn't there at all.
The thing with Civ4 events is that they're like this, 90% of the time they can't be predicted, avoided or immersing and act as just annoyances - sure, it's only the 9000th time a careless smoker burned down a theater, give us some more gold so we can rebuild it again and continue to enforce even stricter safety measures, this isn't what I call good gameplay but whatever, and the other 10% just act as you win or lose events that can't as well be planned for, and this is just ridiculous, never should it happen in a strategy game.
"A game that still doesn't work". Say that to my awesome Europe scenario games and tens of hours spent playing and enjoying it. I'd love to see a poll destoying your flawed idea that Civ4 is unfinished and broke, yes because the flawed thing here is not really the game, as i stated before, perfection is perfection, human is human, you'll never get anything perfect about videogames, pros and cons are everywhere, what changes valor of videogames is the ratio about pros/cons.
The thing about Civ4 is that it can be modded and patched to keep pretty much every nuisance away and the modding community right here has made a great job in improving it tremendously, because if you simply take the vanilla game and all the patches, there are still broken features, bad gameplay elements and decisions and overall annoyances that should either be fully reworked or removed, and the game is now out for how long, 3 years since BtS, 7 since Civ4? It obviously will never be fixed now but the truth is that even today there are people out there for example asking on how to disable Global Environment, a feature that they probably came up while on hard drugs or with a schedule that only gave them 10 seconds to think about it before implanting it. Don't tell me this isn't finished and in perfect working condition.