eddie_verdde
Warlord
First, Id like to say that Ive spent the last 2 days deciding whether I should write this post or not. On one hand I knew that expressing my feelings about this game would be like throwing peas at an elephant, I mean, why would the Civilization Franchise, or the CivFanatics community care about the opinion of a single player? On the other hand, I desperately needed to share everything that was stuck in my throat and I couldnt do it with my girlfriend, with granny or with my cat. So, I finally decided to write the post.
Let it be clear that, by writing this post I dont intend to influence the design or the characteristics of further Civ games, scenarios or add-ons. I gave up doing that after my first posts in the Civ4 suggestions forum, back in 2004, because I eventually became aware of the uselessness of most wishlists, what should be in Civ4 polls, etc.
Furthermore, Id like to say that what Im about to write is my personal opinion. I know that theres no such thing as the perfect game. I know that its impossible to please everyone. I know that Civilization will never be the game Id like it to be. There will always be something that I or someone else wont like that much. I could live with that. What frustrates me most is when I see the traditional conception of a game falling apart due to marketing pressure. Some of the following opinions Im about to state are subjective and merely express a particular point of view; therefore I dont expect that more than a minority of you will agree with me. Other opinions, however, will have the support of a significant part of the community and still others Im sure everyone will agree with.
Having said that Ill say what I think about a variety of issues, focusing on Interface, new concepts, game performance and audio/graphics.
New Concepts 1: Religion
Finally!! Why did the franchise waited 4 games to include the concept of religion? Religion had been claimed for many people for too many years. Its my favourite new concept of Civ4 because it brings more depth to the game. Now we have another issue to worry about, an additional strategy that we need to define and we have an additional reason to make alliances and to declare war on our opponents. The missionaries are a very good idea, although their task could be a little more difficult to avoid unbalances during the game.
New Concepts 2: Civics
Excellent! Brought more flexibility to the game in terms of possible strategies because there are dozens of possible combinations in order to manage the empire. In addition, we dont have to face all those endless periods of Anarchy anymore in which we could only move units, end turn and wait until the revolution was over. Much more realistic than the government concept of previous civs.
New Concepts: Internal Trade/Health
This was indeed a very good idea. The health of your citizens will depend on the variety of food available, access to fresh water and presence of jungles. This is especially important if your starting location is near the jungle. In Civ3, a city that was built near jungles or flood plains would have a hard time in developing because of the systematic strikes of disease. However, I dont like the idea that a whole civilization can benefit from a single tile containing cattle or sheep. Theres an important concept missing here which is: amount. The same applies to strategic resources such as iron, copper and oil. It doesnt make sense to me that a single tile containing a resource should be enough to sustain the whole empire.
Interface/Graphics/Game performance
Very disappointing. The way they chose to present the map, units, cities and landscape looks like a mess to me. The units are literally giants, blocking the view of the landscape and of the cities. It would be a lesser problem if each unit was composed of only one figure, but I guess that wouldnt appease all those RTS fans they are aiming to this time, who love to see dozens of figures clubbing at each other. Besides, the cursor is also too big and clumsy (why not use a simple arrow?), and doesnt help at all when you need to select something with precision. So, if you want to see whats going on on a tile you have to be constantly zooming in and out and this turns out to be very unattractive due to the irregular movement of the camera (for instance: when you zoom in, theres a quick close up initially, followed by a slow breaking in the end, instead of an uniform movement). And there are also the CTRL+Left/Right Arrow and the SHIFT+Left/Right Arrow options which I find completely useless unless you are to enjoy the beauty of seeing a mountain from different perspectives personally I could live without the 3D were playing CIV, not Rome Total War: you need a global perspective of the world you live in more than a local perspective of a single tile from different views. Whats crucial in Civ is the information you can obtain from the map, not the stunning, delightful, coloured environment that you can twist and zoom.
Back to the clumsiness of the main screen, I also dislike the display of information on top of the cities. Why is it necessary an orange bar/blue bar to show the progress of growing/building if you can see the number of turns it takes to complete growth/building? Its redundant to say the least. Such information shouldnt be displayed in the map, but only inside the city screen. Again, this only brings more confusion to the map, because, in addition to the variety of colours that units, terrain types, cultural borders and buildings show, you still have to deal with two enormous blue and orange rectangles and this becomes worse when you zoom out, where the only thing you can see in the map are blue and orange rectangles on top of each others. In a nutshell, the map is saturated with colours, figures, nausea-causing movements and unnecessary information. And if the map is saturated, your eyes will also become saturated, along with your brain.
Nevertheless, I guess most of us will eventually be able to deal with this. What I find unbearable is the amount of time that takes to perform one-click tasks such as increasing the technology rate or moving a unit to another tile. For instance, one might think that increasing the technology rate from 70% to 80% would be a quick action. Well, its not. First, you have to position very carefully your fat, clumsy scroll on top of the research button. After you click, it will take almost one second for the percentage to increase. When moving units is the same thing: you enter the number pad and only after one second the unit will move. The same when youre selecting the tiles to be worked in the city screen and NO, its not a hardware problem Im running the game on a Pentium IV with 1G of RAM and a graphic card of 256M. Pretty annoying for those who hate micromanagement and want to perform these tasks very rapidly. Wonderful for those who love the 3D graphics as they will have plenty of time to enjoy the beautiful landscapes, while the unit decides to move or while the research button changes. Such actions should occur instantaneously in a normal game. Regarding the performance of the game theres another thing that bothers me: every time I enter the windows button I go the windows mode, but when I come back the game crashes. And whats with the game resolution? When I enhance the resolution to 1440x900 (which my computer supports) the game exits without further warning.
Back to the graphics, I must say that I find the graphics of Civ3 much better in some ways. Although the landscapes are more beautiful and detailed than in Civ3, the maps somehow look a little blocky resembling the graphics of Civ1 and Civ2, not only because of the excess of 90º angles (in coastal squares especially) but also because of the distribution of vegetation, hills, etc INSIDE each square. In other words, in Civ3 you would look at the map and you would hardly recognize its division into squares, while in Civ4 you can perfectly identify the squares especially along the coast. So, I guess this was a step back.
Another thing that disappointed me is the music. So far, the only tunes that Ive heard are the same of Civilization3. And in the early stages of the game, the only tune youll hear is the one from Civilization1 but you need to be in the maximum zoom to hear it. What about the units? Yes, they do speak their mother language. I actually enjoyed hearing my roman archers speaking Latin that is, until I expanded and having to spend most of the time in a medium zoom. Then I realised that I can only hear the units talk in a big zoom. In a medium-small zoom, all I hear are whispers which makes perfect sense after all, if the units are down there and we are watching them from the sky how could one expect to hear them? I recognize however that theyve done a nice job with the environment sounds (birds, wind, waves, etc) they create a very nice atmosphere for the game.
Finally, many efforts were put into giving the new players an intuitive interface with lots of hints, information and help pop-ups but they failed in providing an easy access to the information depicted in Civilopedia. For instance, in Civ3 there were a lot more links to Civilopedia entries: you could go very quickly from a unit to a technology and from there to a building, with a single click, while in Civ4 not all of the information is easily accessible, you have to open the civilopedia and search for yourself.
Wild animals
This issue has been debated for too long in other topics, so I wont spend much time with this. One of the self-proclaimed aims of Civ4 was the reduction of micromanagement in some ways this mission was accomplished but than the inclusion of wild animals in the game is not very coherent with this intention of reducing micromanagement. I mean, I, the leader of a civilization, with lots of cities to manage, lots of armies to command and thousands of subjects, dont have to worry about cleaning pollution and micromanage each tile of each city but I must be worried about a bunch of wolves or tigers because they threat the integrity of my armies and citizens (????) why on earth would a group of panthers be a major threat to an entire ARMY? Most of the animals depicted in the game dont attack in groups in the first place!! And even if they did, how could they be a menace to an army or a group of settlers? Armies and settlers have weapons, fire and they travel in big groups (remember that a city of size one has 1000 people) at least the designers were sensible enough to prevent wild animals from entering the borders.
The flow of the game
This is the issue that I most dislike and that frustrated me most since Civ2, and that I was hoping could be corrected. Basically, in Civ3, the game flows too rapidly, especially in ancient times, partly due to the technological race set by the AI. This could be summarised as follows: in Civ3, the priority of the AI is having access to new technologies as fast as possible. New technologies lead to new units and new buildings. What happens is that sometimes, especially in higher difficulty levels, the technological race is so intense that entire sets of units are skipped without having the opportunity to be used. In 90% of the games that I played in Civ3, I could spend the entire ancient era without needing to use swordsman or I could spend the renaissance without using musketmen. At the time I was finished upgrading all my pikemen to spearmen, there was already riflemen available. In other games, when I finally had managed to gather an adequate number of knights to attack my neighbour there was already Cavalry available. A similar situation happened with the explorer unit when the unit was finally available, there was nothing left to explore why? Because the game went too fast in the earlier stages. Last night I was playing Civ4. I chose the Epic mode and the Warlord difficulty level to prevent this from happen Right now, Ive just researched Feudalism and Im about to enter the middle ages, where new, more powerful units will be available. In the meantime, since the beginning of the game, I created 3 Praetorians (Rome unique unit) and a handful of Archers, and soon they will become obsolete and Ive never had the opportunity to use them, because there was no classical age because things have gone too fast since the founding of my capital. And Im playing on a relatively easy difficulty level I cant wait to see what will happen when I play in King Level, where the tech race is more intense and the human player is forced to keep up with the AI. Probably Ill be able to build Nukes by 1500 AD and units such as Crossbowmen, Knights and Cannons will be part of the list of the units that have never been used. Having said that, whats the point in having so many varieties of units? Its clear that the objective of the game is to reach the Modern Age as soon as possible so that one can enjoy all those cool Tanks, Helicopters and Nukes. Thats the path of the game: no Dark Ages, no turning points, no global catastrophes everything is always better than the previous turn Its a shame. If the goal of civilization is merely to reach the modern times, why not create a Sid Meiers Modern Civilization instead?
Conclusion
In conclusion, Civ4 was created with the clear purpose of attracting a new profile of players, namely RTS fans and to do that, certain things had to be changed, such as the 3D graphics and the representation of units; things that most fans of Civilization could well live without. Civ4 brought an end to the usefulness of the advisors and the interface also changed a bit and still has some flaws. The performance of the game could be better. But what frustrated me most was the pace of the game, which changed little or nothing since Civ3 and leaves no room for a plausible, challenging and flavoured experience in each of the different eras of History. Entire Eras still can be skipped without relevant events and without enjoying its environment, buildings and units. Nevertheless, Civ4 brought a set of new interesting concepts that certainly will please everyone (religion, civics) but other concepts (eg: civil wars) were once again forgotten, and probably will only be included in a new game in 3 or 4 years, when Civ4 ceases to be profitable and a new, fresh product is required.
I hope to get some feedback and Id appreciate if you refrain from using the typical clichés: if you dont like it, dont play it or if you dont like it mod it because, although that might be true, its not enough to wash the negative aspects of the game. Plus, not everything can be moded and some of us have more important things to do than spending days in front the computer modding Civ4. I like to think that, if I have some free time, I want to spend it playing, not modding.
Let it be clear that, by writing this post I dont intend to influence the design or the characteristics of further Civ games, scenarios or add-ons. I gave up doing that after my first posts in the Civ4 suggestions forum, back in 2004, because I eventually became aware of the uselessness of most wishlists, what should be in Civ4 polls, etc.
Furthermore, Id like to say that what Im about to write is my personal opinion. I know that theres no such thing as the perfect game. I know that its impossible to please everyone. I know that Civilization will never be the game Id like it to be. There will always be something that I or someone else wont like that much. I could live with that. What frustrates me most is when I see the traditional conception of a game falling apart due to marketing pressure. Some of the following opinions Im about to state are subjective and merely express a particular point of view; therefore I dont expect that more than a minority of you will agree with me. Other opinions, however, will have the support of a significant part of the community and still others Im sure everyone will agree with.
Having said that Ill say what I think about a variety of issues, focusing on Interface, new concepts, game performance and audio/graphics.
New Concepts 1: Religion
Finally!! Why did the franchise waited 4 games to include the concept of religion? Religion had been claimed for many people for too many years. Its my favourite new concept of Civ4 because it brings more depth to the game. Now we have another issue to worry about, an additional strategy that we need to define and we have an additional reason to make alliances and to declare war on our opponents. The missionaries are a very good idea, although their task could be a little more difficult to avoid unbalances during the game.
New Concepts 2: Civics
Excellent! Brought more flexibility to the game in terms of possible strategies because there are dozens of possible combinations in order to manage the empire. In addition, we dont have to face all those endless periods of Anarchy anymore in which we could only move units, end turn and wait until the revolution was over. Much more realistic than the government concept of previous civs.
New Concepts: Internal Trade/Health
This was indeed a very good idea. The health of your citizens will depend on the variety of food available, access to fresh water and presence of jungles. This is especially important if your starting location is near the jungle. In Civ3, a city that was built near jungles or flood plains would have a hard time in developing because of the systematic strikes of disease. However, I dont like the idea that a whole civilization can benefit from a single tile containing cattle or sheep. Theres an important concept missing here which is: amount. The same applies to strategic resources such as iron, copper and oil. It doesnt make sense to me that a single tile containing a resource should be enough to sustain the whole empire.
Interface/Graphics/Game performance
Very disappointing. The way they chose to present the map, units, cities and landscape looks like a mess to me. The units are literally giants, blocking the view of the landscape and of the cities. It would be a lesser problem if each unit was composed of only one figure, but I guess that wouldnt appease all those RTS fans they are aiming to this time, who love to see dozens of figures clubbing at each other. Besides, the cursor is also too big and clumsy (why not use a simple arrow?), and doesnt help at all when you need to select something with precision. So, if you want to see whats going on on a tile you have to be constantly zooming in and out and this turns out to be very unattractive due to the irregular movement of the camera (for instance: when you zoom in, theres a quick close up initially, followed by a slow breaking in the end, instead of an uniform movement). And there are also the CTRL+Left/Right Arrow and the SHIFT+Left/Right Arrow options which I find completely useless unless you are to enjoy the beauty of seeing a mountain from different perspectives personally I could live without the 3D were playing CIV, not Rome Total War: you need a global perspective of the world you live in more than a local perspective of a single tile from different views. Whats crucial in Civ is the information you can obtain from the map, not the stunning, delightful, coloured environment that you can twist and zoom.
Back to the clumsiness of the main screen, I also dislike the display of information on top of the cities. Why is it necessary an orange bar/blue bar to show the progress of growing/building if you can see the number of turns it takes to complete growth/building? Its redundant to say the least. Such information shouldnt be displayed in the map, but only inside the city screen. Again, this only brings more confusion to the map, because, in addition to the variety of colours that units, terrain types, cultural borders and buildings show, you still have to deal with two enormous blue and orange rectangles and this becomes worse when you zoom out, where the only thing you can see in the map are blue and orange rectangles on top of each others. In a nutshell, the map is saturated with colours, figures, nausea-causing movements and unnecessary information. And if the map is saturated, your eyes will also become saturated, along with your brain.
Nevertheless, I guess most of us will eventually be able to deal with this. What I find unbearable is the amount of time that takes to perform one-click tasks such as increasing the technology rate or moving a unit to another tile. For instance, one might think that increasing the technology rate from 70% to 80% would be a quick action. Well, its not. First, you have to position very carefully your fat, clumsy scroll on top of the research button. After you click, it will take almost one second for the percentage to increase. When moving units is the same thing: you enter the number pad and only after one second the unit will move. The same when youre selecting the tiles to be worked in the city screen and NO, its not a hardware problem Im running the game on a Pentium IV with 1G of RAM and a graphic card of 256M. Pretty annoying for those who hate micromanagement and want to perform these tasks very rapidly. Wonderful for those who love the 3D graphics as they will have plenty of time to enjoy the beautiful landscapes, while the unit decides to move or while the research button changes. Such actions should occur instantaneously in a normal game. Regarding the performance of the game theres another thing that bothers me: every time I enter the windows button I go the windows mode, but when I come back the game crashes. And whats with the game resolution? When I enhance the resolution to 1440x900 (which my computer supports) the game exits without further warning.
Back to the graphics, I must say that I find the graphics of Civ3 much better in some ways. Although the landscapes are more beautiful and detailed than in Civ3, the maps somehow look a little blocky resembling the graphics of Civ1 and Civ2, not only because of the excess of 90º angles (in coastal squares especially) but also because of the distribution of vegetation, hills, etc INSIDE each square. In other words, in Civ3 you would look at the map and you would hardly recognize its division into squares, while in Civ4 you can perfectly identify the squares especially along the coast. So, I guess this was a step back.
Another thing that disappointed me is the music. So far, the only tunes that Ive heard are the same of Civilization3. And in the early stages of the game, the only tune youll hear is the one from Civilization1 but you need to be in the maximum zoom to hear it. What about the units? Yes, they do speak their mother language. I actually enjoyed hearing my roman archers speaking Latin that is, until I expanded and having to spend most of the time in a medium zoom. Then I realised that I can only hear the units talk in a big zoom. In a medium-small zoom, all I hear are whispers which makes perfect sense after all, if the units are down there and we are watching them from the sky how could one expect to hear them? I recognize however that theyve done a nice job with the environment sounds (birds, wind, waves, etc) they create a very nice atmosphere for the game.
Finally, many efforts were put into giving the new players an intuitive interface with lots of hints, information and help pop-ups but they failed in providing an easy access to the information depicted in Civilopedia. For instance, in Civ3 there were a lot more links to Civilopedia entries: you could go very quickly from a unit to a technology and from there to a building, with a single click, while in Civ4 not all of the information is easily accessible, you have to open the civilopedia and search for yourself.
Wild animals
This issue has been debated for too long in other topics, so I wont spend much time with this. One of the self-proclaimed aims of Civ4 was the reduction of micromanagement in some ways this mission was accomplished but than the inclusion of wild animals in the game is not very coherent with this intention of reducing micromanagement. I mean, I, the leader of a civilization, with lots of cities to manage, lots of armies to command and thousands of subjects, dont have to worry about cleaning pollution and micromanage each tile of each city but I must be worried about a bunch of wolves or tigers because they threat the integrity of my armies and citizens (????) why on earth would a group of panthers be a major threat to an entire ARMY? Most of the animals depicted in the game dont attack in groups in the first place!! And even if they did, how could they be a menace to an army or a group of settlers? Armies and settlers have weapons, fire and they travel in big groups (remember that a city of size one has 1000 people) at least the designers were sensible enough to prevent wild animals from entering the borders.
The flow of the game
This is the issue that I most dislike and that frustrated me most since Civ2, and that I was hoping could be corrected. Basically, in Civ3, the game flows too rapidly, especially in ancient times, partly due to the technological race set by the AI. This could be summarised as follows: in Civ3, the priority of the AI is having access to new technologies as fast as possible. New technologies lead to new units and new buildings. What happens is that sometimes, especially in higher difficulty levels, the technological race is so intense that entire sets of units are skipped without having the opportunity to be used. In 90% of the games that I played in Civ3, I could spend the entire ancient era without needing to use swordsman or I could spend the renaissance without using musketmen. At the time I was finished upgrading all my pikemen to spearmen, there was already riflemen available. In other games, when I finally had managed to gather an adequate number of knights to attack my neighbour there was already Cavalry available. A similar situation happened with the explorer unit when the unit was finally available, there was nothing left to explore why? Because the game went too fast in the earlier stages. Last night I was playing Civ4. I chose the Epic mode and the Warlord difficulty level to prevent this from happen Right now, Ive just researched Feudalism and Im about to enter the middle ages, where new, more powerful units will be available. In the meantime, since the beginning of the game, I created 3 Praetorians (Rome unique unit) and a handful of Archers, and soon they will become obsolete and Ive never had the opportunity to use them, because there was no classical age because things have gone too fast since the founding of my capital. And Im playing on a relatively easy difficulty level I cant wait to see what will happen when I play in King Level, where the tech race is more intense and the human player is forced to keep up with the AI. Probably Ill be able to build Nukes by 1500 AD and units such as Crossbowmen, Knights and Cannons will be part of the list of the units that have never been used. Having said that, whats the point in having so many varieties of units? Its clear that the objective of the game is to reach the Modern Age as soon as possible so that one can enjoy all those cool Tanks, Helicopters and Nukes. Thats the path of the game: no Dark Ages, no turning points, no global catastrophes everything is always better than the previous turn Its a shame. If the goal of civilization is merely to reach the modern times, why not create a Sid Meiers Modern Civilization instead?
Conclusion
In conclusion, Civ4 was created with the clear purpose of attracting a new profile of players, namely RTS fans and to do that, certain things had to be changed, such as the 3D graphics and the representation of units; things that most fans of Civilization could well live without. Civ4 brought an end to the usefulness of the advisors and the interface also changed a bit and still has some flaws. The performance of the game could be better. But what frustrated me most was the pace of the game, which changed little or nothing since Civ3 and leaves no room for a plausible, challenging and flavoured experience in each of the different eras of History. Entire Eras still can be skipped without relevant events and without enjoying its environment, buildings and units. Nevertheless, Civ4 brought a set of new interesting concepts that certainly will please everyone (religion, civics) but other concepts (eg: civil wars) were once again forgotten, and probably will only be included in a new game in 3 or 4 years, when Civ4 ceases to be profitable and a new, fresh product is required.
I hope to get some feedback and Id appreciate if you refrain from using the typical clichés: if you dont like it, dont play it or if you dont like it mod it because, although that might be true, its not enough to wash the negative aspects of the game. Plus, not everything can be moded and some of us have more important things to do than spending days in front the computer modding Civ4. I like to think that, if I have some free time, I want to spend it playing, not modding.
Those wolves taught me how to send a warrior along with a settler though.
