Should I purchase Beyond the Sword or Civ V (Vanilla)?

[FriendlyFire]

I dont see a friend request ?
Iam lvl 12 and location set to Sydney Australia and you can see me in the CFC group.

 

[civvver]

Here you go, entire civ franchise on sale on steam. Civ5 is 7.49 or 16.49 for the entire thing, both xpacs and dlc. Civ4 is 7.49 for all xpacs and colonization. Civ3 complete is 1.49.

http://store.steampowered.com/sale/civilizationfranchise

 

[GoodGame]

Hmmmm..... it's basically demo both Civ4 vanilla and Civ5 vanilla.

Civ4 BTS is really great for what it is (a massive rule expansion on Civ4), but has some computational limitations;
Civ5 runs better on a modern OS, if you went beyond MS XP (which you should, it is not supported). Civ5 with all expansions is basically Civ4 BTS retooled to be like Civ5 vanilla.

But if you never went beyond Civ4 vanilla, then you honestly might not like expansions for either Civ4 or Civ5. In other words, just demo Civ5 vanilla and compare to Civ4 vanilla.

I've played them all, and liked them all. Civ5 with expansions is classy but different than Civ4 BTS.

 

[Quintillus]

Civ4 BTS is really great for what it is (a massive rule expansion on Civ4), but has some computational limitations;
Civ5 runs better on a modern OS, if you went beyond MS XP (which you should, it is not supported). Civ5 with all expansions is basically Civ4 BTS retooled to be like Civ5 vanilla.

Civ5 does support Windows XP, including all of the Civ5 expansions (whether Beyond Earth will is unknown). Every time I've played it has been on Windows XP, and performance-wise Civ5 did fine (although I never stressed it with gigantic maps like I have with Civ3 and Civ4, as I never got that into Civ5). It may indeed run better, at least graphically, on Vista+ with DX10 and multiple thread dispatch, but it runs fairly well on XP as well.