First off, great game, I have had this whole week off between the holidays and have been playing Civilization IV a lot. I've been a long-time fan of the Civilization games, the Alpha Centauri games and the Call to Power games. I'd have to say that Call to Power 2 up until this game, had been my favorite. I'm sure there will be an expansion to this game in the future and I'd thought I'd make some suggestions.
A quick note: The latest patch went a long way to solve some problems I had with this game, as I thought the game progressed too quickly before. The new Marathon setting makes the game more "epic".
Suggestions to improve the game:
The largest maps aren't big enough. I'm sure these limitations were put in place because the dev team saw the performance implications and thought it would garner too many complaints. We should have two more map sizes: Enormous and Gargantuan. Better yet, just add a "custom size" that will allow players to play any custom size map they want. Then have a pop-up box come up that says, "Custom games may have performance problems on older machines, hell if you are crazy enough it might even have performance problems on future machines. Are you sure you want to continue with these setttings Yes/No". Please put this in an expansion.
Even "Marathon" isn't long enough. Add Eon and Eternity settings (alright, I just had to come up with names for them, but you get the idea)
No custom leaders built into the game. What if I wanted the Americans with Philosophy and Creativity? It should be an option. You choose the portrait from existing in-game portraits, you select your empire name (or choose your own), select your color and your attributes. Your attribute selections could limit your starting technologies, either fixed, choose between two per attribute or completely random. As far as special units: It could be randomly selected, based on the portrait, the empire or even no special unit.
Have National Wonders versions of each of the World Wonders. A world wonder shouldn't automatically convert into cash if someone else builds it. It could continue to be built, however, it becomes a national wonder version of the same building with reduced bonuses. If the player chooses, convert to cash.
There is no mouse sensitivity function within the game. This is a problem when running at really high resolutions. I tried running the game at my monitor native resolution of 1920x1200 and the mouse movement rate was atrocious. I could have adjusted windows movement rate, but I like my desktop setting when I am on my desktop, I just hated it when I was running the game.
Scalable text is another issue at extremely high resolutions. I have a large monitor and at high resolutions the text size was too small.
The pop-up-screen for the religion specific "Wonder" building (e.g. "The Kashi Vishwanath") do not show the benefits of the building like the wonder buildings pop-up does.
Bugs: (Should I post these in the bugs-forum?)
The mouse-scroll-wheel doesn't work on the foreign advisor pages.
The edges of the map don't match up correctly. When bombarding a city that is at one end of the map from a catapult at the other end of the map (they are adjacent in "the world" because the map wraps at the edges, but at the extreme ends of the game map.) the catapult rocks go in the opposite direction of the city across the screen.
When moving, the unit does not always follow the path laid out on screen by the dotted movement line.
A quick note: The latest patch went a long way to solve some problems I had with this game, as I thought the game progressed too quickly before. The new Marathon setting makes the game more "epic".
Suggestions to improve the game:
The largest maps aren't big enough. I'm sure these limitations were put in place because the dev team saw the performance implications and thought it would garner too many complaints. We should have two more map sizes: Enormous and Gargantuan. Better yet, just add a "custom size" that will allow players to play any custom size map they want. Then have a pop-up box come up that says, "Custom games may have performance problems on older machines, hell if you are crazy enough it might even have performance problems on future machines. Are you sure you want to continue with these setttings Yes/No". Please put this in an expansion.
Even "Marathon" isn't long enough. Add Eon and Eternity settings (alright, I just had to come up with names for them, but you get the idea)
No custom leaders built into the game. What if I wanted the Americans with Philosophy and Creativity? It should be an option. You choose the portrait from existing in-game portraits, you select your empire name (or choose your own), select your color and your attributes. Your attribute selections could limit your starting technologies, either fixed, choose between two per attribute or completely random. As far as special units: It could be randomly selected, based on the portrait, the empire or even no special unit.
Have National Wonders versions of each of the World Wonders. A world wonder shouldn't automatically convert into cash if someone else builds it. It could continue to be built, however, it becomes a national wonder version of the same building with reduced bonuses. If the player chooses, convert to cash.
There is no mouse sensitivity function within the game. This is a problem when running at really high resolutions. I tried running the game at my monitor native resolution of 1920x1200 and the mouse movement rate was atrocious. I could have adjusted windows movement rate, but I like my desktop setting when I am on my desktop, I just hated it when I was running the game.
Scalable text is another issue at extremely high resolutions. I have a large monitor and at high resolutions the text size was too small.
The pop-up-screen for the religion specific "Wonder" building (e.g. "The Kashi Vishwanath") do not show the benefits of the building like the wonder buildings pop-up does.
Bugs: (Should I post these in the bugs-forum?)
The mouse-scroll-wheel doesn't work on the foreign advisor pages.
The edges of the map don't match up correctly. When bombarding a city that is at one end of the map from a catapult at the other end of the map (they are adjacent in "the world" because the map wraps at the edges, but at the extreme ends of the game map.) the catapult rocks go in the opposite direction of the city across the screen.
When moving, the unit does not always follow the path laid out on screen by the dotted movement line.
