My apologies. I shouldn't have assumed English was your first language.
Go into google earth and you can see what real terrain looks like.
Hmmm, maybe I missed something but isn't Google Earth pretty bad at showing what real terrain looks like, at least compared with observing something directly with your
own eyes?
I'm won't completely write off the look of the game. Its obviously a lot better than its predecessor, but firaxis is just never up to date with graphic technology.
A valid criticism maybe, but always do consider the relatively unique civ fanbase who love using their out of date computers. As someone said earlier, this genre is not one where people expect to need
beast computers (I think that's the correct term) to best run the game.
There's also the issue that making the game extremely graphically intensive is just wasteful.
As an example, suppose you wanted to individually render every blade of grass instead of just having a nice looking texture for a flat grass tile. Think about all the CPU (or GPU) cycles of all civ-playing computers round the world doing all their calculations on that silly grass. Think about all the energy (and hence money) it wastes. How much are those little blades of grass going to please the players of the game? I doubt many would care at all - many probably wouldn't even notice.
Lastly, who cares if the graphics are "sub-par" as you call them? I don't take a game like Monopoly and say "Eewww, the tiles are so bland and the player's pieces look dumb. Why would anyone play this?" A game like civ, thankfully, does not depend so greatly on the style of its graphics for its quality of gameplay. If I want good graphics I'll go outside of the house and look at some real trees and real grass
. (I don't mean that completely literally
). Or maybe I'd seek other forms of entertainment, Avatar comes to mind - whether you love it or hate it it's obvious a lot of work was put into its graphics. Unlike Civ, if that movie had "sub-par" graphics it would have had a much higher chance of being a flop.