A few questions about civ 4

[bootrick]

Hi all I was an avid player of civ 3 but Have opted out of laying civ 4 until now due to the fact that civ 3 took so much of my free time. I just downloaded the civ 4 demo and I love it but have a few questions.

1. the demo said it had compatibilty issues with windows vista is there a patch I can download for this it played ok but was a bit glitchy.

2.does anyone know when they will release a compleate pack with both expansions and the main game here in the us, I know they have it in the uk. I would hate to buy gold and then have to buy the bts expansion latter only to find I could have waited a month and saved a ton of money.

3.is there online with this civ and how does it work?

4. should I get gold? or just get civ 4 is warlords expansion realy worth it? and is bts worth it?

[kazapp]

Gold-related answers:

I can't imagine the Gold edition not being on its way to all markets. Patience...

But if you can't wait for Gold, or you somehow can get Civ + BtS for the same cost, you could safely go for the BtS option. You'll get everything in Gold except the Warlords scenarios (and possibly any extras in Gold I don't know about).

As I said, the only thing from Warlords you don't get with BtS is the scenarios, but that's no big loss, unless you're a Civ completist. All the important stuff (like trebuchets, Great Generals and lots of other tweaks) is incorporated into BtS.

As for BtS, its a mixed bag. Most new stuff are very good (like Colonies, Random Events, better AI, and new leaders like William of Orange just to take four examples) but the end score cannot be five stars because of one big miss and a few small ones.

All these misses can be summarized in one word: "micromanagement". In their enthusiasm, the Civ BtS developers apparently forgot to prune down any new ideas to not increase micromanagement.

Perhaps the experienced leads wasn't on this project, but the overall impression is that enthusiasm overtook prudency and playtesting.

The big miss is the expanded Espionage system. Or rather, not the system in itself (it has loads of potential) but how Spy units are spammed all across the globe. As a minimum, you must sacrifice 10% of your sliders just on counterespionage and post one Spy in each of your cities. Sigh.

If you like espionage, it's fine I guess, but the developers clearly left the rest of us, who just wants to play Civ, in the cold. Put simply, BtS assumes you want to play with the new spies, and doesn't correctly handle strategies that involve pre-BtS levels of involvement/micromanagement concerning spies. There's not even a switch to turn off the new system, which more or less forces you to spend time with it. This increases total play time, makes the game more complex and is as said a big increase in micromanagement. Someone at Firaxis should really have reined in the spylover dev team...

Minor misses (poison water supply, apostolic palace cheese, etc etc) are much more easily forgiven, especially with the help of people like Solver and Bruic.

[bootrick]

I whent ahead and took the plunge I got the gold addition which should keep me bussy. I will dive into it tonight.

[bootrick]

I just played for three hours strait(I never do that with a game) and I have to say this game rocks, I am definatley going to get my moneys worth out of this game.

[bootrick]

One thing I noticed about this game vs civ three is the fact that this game seems to move along more quickly I have not finnished my game yet but in three hours I was able to whipe out a big civ next to me and almost make it to moderan age. BTW what does it take to get a cultural victory in this game it says three citys must get legendary status what does that mean?

[Walliard]

Legendary status is 50,000 Culture.