odalrick seriously? Thats your reasoning. "I can't understand it as well so its worse." Seriously? wow...just wow, I am almost dumbfounded by this. I'm tempted to make a personal attack on your IQ here, but I think I will just stick with being dumbfounded...
Yes, that's the short version.
What, have you never had to learn
anything? You don't think there is a difference between being handed the Encyclopedia Britannica and told to "learn math" and attending a class, having a well thought out textbook and a teacher?
Strategy games are no different, though the cycle is shorter. At the beginning of the turn you have to learn what the enemy has done, what new things you have discovered and probably whatever you've forgotten you did in the past.
Graphics that make this task easier is better than graphics that make it harder.
I seriously don't understand your complaint:
Granted, there aren't many units here, but they are mostly differentiated enough, even at this level of zoom.
The blue unit I think is a melee unit of some sort. Something is hidden under the ivory icon: Worker? Archer? I can see two workers and a chariot, though I'm not sure I'd call it clearly. At first glance I only saw the chariot.
Also, I noticed that single unit graphics is on. What; doesn't more polygons automatically mean better any more?
Sure, the resource overlay is on, but resources were never that hard to tall apart. Maybe some of the metals (gold, silver, iron, aluminium) looked similar and incense and wine always seemed to look the same to me, but that's fixed with an easy mouse-over.
Without the resource overlay I wouldn't have noticed the corn next to Thebes, and the mine covers the gold pretty well. Mouse-over would not help as there is nothing to tell that there is anything extra there. Also, mouse-over is not in any way graphics.
Perhaps hills were sometimes hard to identify, especially under a forest or a city.
And this is the best example of 3d-graphics in a strategy game there is, at least that I know of. Compared to Battle for Wesnoth it's
lousy.
Civilization IV doesn't fail, it's just not as good as it's predecessors. All Civ games have great graphics by the standards of strategy games.
Ahh, and here we have the crux of the issue, don't we?
Oh, I see. Unlike everyone else on this forum who uses completely objective definitions of "better graphics", I made the mistake of expressing my own subjective opinion.
I forgot the section of Principia Mathematica that deals exclusively with establishing metrics for computer graphics.
Why do so many people complain about the vanilla version
Can't speak for anyone else, but for me it's mostly boredom.