Dear Sid

[ThERat]

still waiting for the game to arrive in S'pores shores, it has been delayed to 7th (at least what they claim today, tomorrow is a different story).

Meanwhile I have downloaded 2 demos (AoE3 + CoD 2) and will have a look at them. I know now why there is No demo for Civ4. With a demo, many people would have realised that this is a lemon and not blindly bought the game. Smart decision, take 2. Well done!!!

 

[BlackTerrain]

know i now why there never was any demo and why they decided to release the game 10 days early in germany, in time with the us-version - would they have released the game at the usual date (4th) i would have never bought it

wow, thats really mean

 

[Neomega]

Sorry to rain on your parade of self-righteousness. But thanks for playing.

Sorry your cracked version didn't work. Gues you just aren't 1337 enough.

 

[fallofman]

I have an Alienware Area 51-m 766/whatever laptop with a pent. 4 3.0ghz processor, 512mb of ram and a 128 Nvida FX go5700 video card. I have the most recent drivers that Alienware has put out for the card. Nvida doesn't put out graphic drivers for the go cards so that's the only place I know to get drivers. I checked out my stuff on that srtest.com or whatever and I exceeded the recommend stuff. The sound in the opening video skips and the game is extremely laggy gameplay wise and when the leader box pops up it gets really laggy and the leader moves chopphy. The whole gameplay is choppy, I can't say about a wonder, I haven't played long enough. I think the max turns I have taken is about maybe 10 at tops before I can't take the insane choppy game play. It sucks. I love civ and the game looks great as long as I don't touch anything, but when I do it's like mud man. I have no clue what to do. My dxdiag.txt is posted in one of the stickyed pages called Grapics/sound errors---post your dxdiag.txt, i think. It's on page 3 i believe. I just want to play. I don't care who's fault it is, I've got all the requried stuff then some. I just want to play .

 

[opticaljim]

Glad to hear it's finally working for you, jim. Though I trust you're still upset with Sid.

Yes, I'm still upset. I've tried to explain as best I can why but here is another perspective.

This game has both "minimum" and "recomended" requirements.

To me, "minimum" requirements meant the least amount of hardware and software support that still allows you to play the game as it was meant to be played.

To me, "recomended" requirements meant that you could upgrade the experience, i. e. color enhancement, unit movement, game speed, etc, with more upgraded hardware and software.

At least on my machine (and judging from the posts almost everyone else's machine) this game simply cannot be played with the minimum requirements. Why even bother having them?

The recomended requirements should have been listed as the only requirements because it turns out they really are requirements. And this doesn't even adress the fact that there are those who can't play the game with the recomended requirments because, apparently, the game is finicky when it comes to certain types of graphic cards.

Firaxis knew about this and released it anyway. A friend of mine told me they postphoned Halo 2 for over a year because they had some bugs.

Anyway, I can play the game now. Incidentally, becasue I upgraded the graphics card and installed extra RAM my Civ III is running like a Bat out of you-know-where. I mean, I can generate a edited game with the maximum size map and all 31 civs and there is hardly any pause between turns at all even during the very late stages of the game. I guess that's the silver lining. That, and I learned how to install my own graphics cards.

 

[Hyaena]

Cheshire cat and black map, here... and none of the fixes have been effective. My desktop PC is old, and my two laptops both have the Extreme Graphics crud. One of the laptops is brand freakin' new, too.

So. I figure that by the time I finish building the PC I'm working on, they may have a playable version of Civ IV out. I just find it upsetting that they cut so many people and systems out of play of this game.

 

[blue3c]

Hey jim,
thanks for putting up the best post I have read here yet. Sorry you got ripped at best buy with the card. Glad you got something in exchange. If you think about it, you got ripped twice, once with the game and once with the card. Man what a day, I can only imagine.
I took my game back and I wasn't the only one there at the time. Gotta post this quick. I am sure to be banned for an earlier post. Just thought I would thank you for your post. I would save your self further trouble and take that garbage (civ iv) back to best buy. I am sure you are not the only one in your area also.
good luck and goodbye.

 

[crazypooljunkie]

I know its been said before but I personally think this is more a publisher issue than developer issue. Many of the problems I have seen can be directly traced back to the publisher. Especially the CD labeling, french tech tree, and things like that.

However, the Black Terrain problems, leaderhead problems, memory leaks, and lagginess is something that should have been taken care in development. Which leads to one of two results. Either the development team decided not to do thourough enough testing and were given enough time or they were not given the time (the more likely case, seeing as I'm not sure the release date was ever pushed back, in fact it was pushed forward). The pushing forward of the release date really does lead me to believe that Take 2 is the one with the issue. As a dev would never willingly push a date up, in fact most devs don't even want to give a date for anything, but due to the nature of the beast its a must.

Now, it took me about 5 hours to get Civ to (sort of) work on my comp, but at the same time its below the min specs so I didn't actually expect it to.

It is well within peoples rights to complain though. It is encouraging to me that there are actually some Firaxians on the boards and I'm hoping that a patch will make the game even more playable on my computer even though I'm below the min specs. I've yet to play a game that hasn't had a patch as long as the company was still in existence. So, I have little to no doubt that there will be a patch. Though there may not be a patch for a long while, maybe so long as till after the actual release date, because I'm sure the devs don't want to release a patch and then have even more backlash when it doesn't fix at least a majority of the problems.

My advice: Try to have a bit of patience, remember this is a game not a vaccine. While waiting for the patch play Civ 3 or keep trying Civ 4, thats what I would do. Good luck.

 

[markh]

still waiting for the game to arrive in S'pores shores, it has been delayed to 7th (at least what they claim today, tomorrow is a different story).

Meanwhile I have downloaded 2 demos (AoE3 + CoD 2) and will have a look at them. I know now why there is No demo for Civ4. With a demo, many people would have realised that this is a lemon and not blindly bought the game. Smart decision, take 2. Well done!!!

I even think you will wait much longer as they have that many problems. They will know why they do not give you an exact date. I should have been cautious that we in Germany got it a week earlier than expected. In my opinion they definitely knew that it has problems and now they might postpone the release in other regions. Europe is a considerable market for computer games meanwhile and I think they feared that we would have got notice that the US version does not work well and would have cancelled the orders. They just wanted to get the game to the stupid customers to collect their money.

I could fix my graphics issues for the time being. Although did not have the time to test bigger maps than standard, yet. BUT still my game crashes to desktop from time to time. Yesterday I could play for about two hours without a crash, the day before yesterday it crashed two times within two hours. I can reload the autosave and it works fine, but it is annoying.

Over at Apolyton someone claimed that he called the official tech support and they said they are working on a patch, but of course they did not give any date.

For myself I can say I should have trusted my feeling not to buy it immediately after release. Nevertheless it is a shame for the developers and the publisher. I am EXTREMELY .