Is CIV 4 the bigegst piece of crap to hit the shelves this year?

Reading all these problems, it sounds like half the community can't even play the damn thing. I have the DVD version and I have the DVD drive and guess what, you put the disk in and it just skips round and round with not a hint of showing the install page. And it would seem the problems don't stop there once you actually get it to work. I can't remember ever having this much trouble with a game. I'm really disappointed cos I wanted to play it so much. You should not have to move heaven and earth to play a game - period.

I agree completely. The number of people having serious technical issues with this game is simply staggering, and the punks at firaxis have barely uttered a peep. Thank you for selling an utterly unfinished product.

game works perfect for me, never crashes all night long
buy yourself a decent PC and dont be a fool buying ATI GFX

obviously if it works for you and you bothered to post you have issues.

i have been in the civ world since day one and one thing that civ never tried to do was be graphics first, gameplay/strategy next.

that trend ends with CIV 4.

forget if your pc is the latest because in the wargaming tradition you should never need the latest.

i still play Alien Crossfire, and it has just enough graphics boosts to make it the single best game ever created for computer imho.

CIV 4 tries to be its competition -- Age of Empires etc. That means simple button screens, and a general dumb downing for the real time kids.

Well too bad, this reminds me of the Activision rip off version.

I dont care that the game fries some graphics here and there and leaves a lot of users behind -- rule #1 is never buy any new games until the first patch. People are reformatting HDDs and spending hours and hours chasing a beta game way too focused on graphics and sound.

Wait, do nothing... still play CIV 3 or for me, Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire.

Then with the first patch start really thinking of doing upgrades and or serious patching solutions. Until then, your time for the working stiffs out there can be better spent...

As for the Ocsos of the world, enjoy being the putz you are... why don't you go to a Katina relief forum and post "why y'all living so close to the ocean?" type posts... can't believe dupas like you bother posting like that. Good one Johnny Obvious.

humbly,

munky

Battle for Middle-Earth.

osco said:

game works perfect for me, never crashes all night long
buy yourself a decent PC and dont be a fool buying ATI GFX

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Way to ignite the flame boi fire. Its not Nvidia's fault, its not ATI's fault. It is poor programming and paper pushers that published a half assed game. Lets be serious about this - producing a non-competent item for retail only rolls in the software industry, and only there. We never see cars only coming in with 3 wheels and then getting "upgraded to a fourth wheel after you own it for a few weeks". Or a house with "partially installed roofing" and you recieve the rest of it once the rainy season is over... you get the idea.

Nvidia and ATI both produce competent card's; for the mainstream user it is really a choice of name and nothing eles. Benchmark after benchmark prove that for ever ATI "X" card there is an NVIDIA "X" card; and vice versa.

Although you can argue that ATI let down the hardcore enthusiast community a bit back with its slow release of crossfire and X1800 series cards, most people don't fit this profile, and for a game such as Civ4, you really don't need dual 7800GTX 512mb on a A8N32 board.

PS: FYI Im on a 7800GT and game doesn't work for me, my bro is on an x800 and game doesnt work for him; my laptops on a 6600 and it doesn't work there either.

Black and white 2

Let's be fair the game is awesome if it works. It's just that they didn't test properly. Deadlines? Financial decision? It was pushed out the door for some reason. One thing is for sure, Firaxis's great reputation is taking a serious knock. 2k Games's reputation was already in the crapper though so it's not a huge surprise.

you think thats bad ? Civ FRIED my harddrive. Totaly anihilating ALL my files.

Thanks Fireaxis. I realy apreciate spending 70 bucks on your game, and then another 250 to fix the damage you did to my laptop.

Bra-freaking-vo

The game is awsome. dont be fooled by the amount of people here with problems, because people with problems tend to post more then people without. I would say only a small percentage of people are having problems, and of that percentage, a large portion fixed it by updating their own drivers, getting omega drivers, or installing the ATI fix.

While I do blame firaxis for some of the glitches, they made it well known you would need T&L capabilities (a huge reason for people not being able to play) to play.

Jason The King said:

The game is awsome. dont be fooled by the amount of people here with problems, because people with problems tend to post more then people without.

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This is complete crap. All the responses like "it works for me" and above are meaningless. What has meaning is I tried two laotops and both had problems. So it's 100% for me.

While I do blame firaxis for some of the glitches, they made it well known you would need T&L capabilities (a huge reason for people not being able to play) to play.

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Stop blaming hardware, please. There is no evidence that most of the problems are due to T&L. Many people (me included) do have T&L yet they still have problems.

What the bloody hell is up with the influx of new posters suddenly whining about the game. It still needs to be patched up a bit and it'll work. I understand the laptop crowd and I sympathize with them as it sucks to not be able to play on a laptop. My winbox is one of only two machines in my house that isn't a laptop (the others are Macs, and one of them is a powerful desktop, but they cant play cIV as it is, so I wont complain there).

If your PC needs upgrading, upgrade it. It might not be hardware. It could be a bug. Lord knows I have one with the movie bug that keeps crashing my computer. But it's not total drek because of this. Drek is drek, and this isn't it. Lets just wait a bit before we grab our torches and pitchforks.

SaaM

Stuck_as_a_Mac said:

What the bloody hell is up with the influx of new posters suddenly whining about the game.

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To put it simply, a game is not good if it does not work. No amount of saying "it'll be good when they fix it" changes the fact that the game is not good for players right now. To put it simply, I am a computer programmer. If my team released a piece of software which did not work for a large portion of our users, we would probably be fired. I admit that this isn't as easy for a programming team releasing software for retail purchase to do that, but it doesn't change the fact that there are problems which make the game temporarily worthless for many people.

This is also not a hardware issue. I have two computers, both of which easily meet the recommended specs. It works fine on the one with worse hardware, but it crashes on the one with better hardware. I even tried replacing my GeForce video card with a new Radeon (which wasn't exactly cheap), and the problem persists. I also put in the art unpack fix, updated my video card drivers, tried third party drivers, updated my motherboard drivers, updated my bios drivers, underclocked my video card, overclocked my video card, messed around with the config file, cleared my cache, replaced my DirectX dlls with the dlls from my other computer, attempted playing with either one of my RAM chips removed, ran defrag and scandisk, and played around with various other video card settings.

Now these things take time to do. It is frustrating to first pay fifty dollars for a game which you cannot play because it does not work, but it is even more frustrating to put a lot of time into fixing the problem only to see it continue to fail each time. And frustrated people are going to complain.

So hopefully that answers your question.

Stuck_as_a_Mac said:

What the bloody hell is up with the influx of new posters suddenly whining about the game. It still needs to be patched up a bit and it'll work. I understand the laptop crowd and I sympathize with them as it sucks to not be able to play on a laptop. My winbox is one of only two machines in my house that isn't a laptop (the others are Macs, and one of them is a powerful desktop, but they cant play cIV as it is, so I wont complain there).

If your PC needs upgrading, upgrade it. It might not be hardware. It could be a bug. Lord knows I have one with the movie bug that keeps crashing my computer. But it's not total drek because of this. Drek is drek, and this isn't it. Lets just wait a bit before we grab our torches and pitchforks.

SaaM

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The influx of new posters are here because the game is broken and they are looking for a solution. Don't try and sugarcoat it.

Amen

Does any one know what card i needi have a NVIDIA Geforce 4 MX graphics card What do i need?????????????
Thanks

Anyone who isnt having issues, has no right talking about how "big of a problem" it is. How would you know? Your on the other side of the river. Anyone who even utters the words "not" "alot" and "problems" in the same post about this game im assuming is blind as a bat, or just entered the forums today and hasnt seen the flood of issues that have been bombed into this forum.

Yes, i agree, this is seriously the worse release yet. Yes maybe it is a good game once it works, but ummm...thats the problem. Just on the premise of how sloppy of a release this game was. I mean they couldnt even label the Cds right, they shipped with french tech trees, and the game is broken pure and simple. Without doubt the sloppiest release this yr. Theres games out there that suck, but at lest they WORK.

Heck lets say 2 out of 3 people get it to work ok. That means 3 out of 10 have an issue. That means 30% of the people cant play the game. HECK lets say only 1 out of 4 people have an issue. Just cause alot of people can play it, doesnt mean its ok if a quarter of the people cant. Bottom line is, there way too many people with issues, and the issues are so broad. Black maps, Invisible Leaders, Slow Performance, ect..

The one brother who said it has to do with below standard PC, is the perfect example of a guy who just strolls into this place and thinks hes got it figured out in 5 minutes. You might want to see how far of a leap it is before you jump next time buddy. Theres people playing the game with 1.5ghz, MX440s, and sometimes just under a gig of ram without issues. While other people are getting bogged down with bugs with 9800s & 6800s, 3.0ghz pro, and 2 gigs of ram.

I cant even believe that they dare take this weekend off, with the game in this state. I wipe my *** with Civ4 Firaxis, and its the best use for the damn game ive found yet.

Somebody with no problems does not post in forum. He/she plays Civ 4.

So here we have a hole bunch of people with problems. But as we all know, 90% of computer problems a located between the display device and the chair. If everyone would have...

- newest, clean installed drivers esp. for graphics
- maybe newest firmware for their crappy optical drive (may Pioneer DVD dated back to stone age does the job, btw)
- less piracy-supporting software installed

...we should see far far less problems.

Plus: other games newly released suffer the same problems, mostly due to the copy protection. (ever heard of Starforce?)

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The only real problems are the fps and slow scrolling/interface. It's not figured out yet wether it's the computer or the game itself...some report to have no performance issues on their calculators and some believe to see stuttering on their multi-million-dollar-machines...

Game works great for me. Not one single bug.

Multiplay is a constant crash-fest.


Sucks.

archer75 said:

Game works great for me. Not one single bug.

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I absolutely love these posts...

Obviously the hundreds of other people reading this forum are having those exact same results. Consider yourself lucky the peice of crap runs on your machine, the rest of us just spent 50 dollars on a pair of coasters.