Hello, I have been a long-term civ III player and have recently purchased civ IV and found it to be a terrible game in comparison. Not only that but it runs very slow on my machine. What about CIV IV makes you prefer it over III? Also what innovations do you feel it has made over Civ3
Too many to mention them all, actually. I liked Civ3 (and found it an improvement over Civ2), but Civ4 is the pinnacle of the series in my opinion. Usually, when I buy a new game of a series I like, it makes me want to go back to the previous game for a while ... usually there are always some things that I miss in the new game. However, Civ4 made me never want to go back to CIv3 - and I reall, really liked Civ3!
Here are some of the things that make me prefer Civ4:
- No corruption, no more tons of totally useless cities that you only keep to occupy the respective space on the map
- Much improved maintenance system, paying maintenance for cities instead of buildings now makes it viable to actually develop all cities, even if they are far away from your palace.
- Religion added, an interesting new game feature offering many new possibilities (although the implementation of many of those is left to the modders due to Firaxis being very careful and politically correct with religion as a game concept)
- much improved AI that does not magically know where your weakest defended city is, or where resources will appear thousands of years later
- Better implementation of artillery - still not perfect (suiciding artillery against well-defended cities seems not very realistic), but gameplay-wise much better than the overpowered artillery of Civ3 Conquests
- Unit promotions and many special abilities for units, which allow for interesting counters and counter-counters, much more complex, tactical and challenging than the simple "offense/defense" system of previous Civs
- all in all, more focus on viable builder strategies, including possibilities to actually win a game with a rather small empire (specialist economies etc.), less focus on war and conquest as in Civ3
That said, there are also things that I didn't find that great in Civ4. Fortunately for me, those were things I regarded as unimportant (3d graphics, choppy movie replay), or that could be fixed by mods and patches (game speed was too fast before marathon was introduced, maps were too much concerned with "fair" positioning, salpeter was taken out, etc.)
Unfortunately, Civ4 *is* a much worse resource hog than it could be. Don't expect to be able to play huge maps unless you're well above the recommended specs.
Also, no doubt there are people around that do not like the changes introduced in Civ4. The aspects above are my personal feelings about the game, I don't regard them as the one and only truth.
If you tell us what especially you found terrible, we may be able to help you adapt (or find out whether Civ4 really isn't the game for you)