So, what do we find "bad" about Civ4?

[Kinseek]

Having played it for some hours now; I`ve got some things I find lackluster about it (but it seems quite fun overall).

Bugs: There seems to be pretty much here. Rather then list every one, I`ll concede it has some issues.

The civiliopedia: Incredibly poorly made. Civ3 did it almost perfectly, but here it is a mess, with few "encyclopedia" entries, and overall confusing. A major setback.

The science-advisor: I don`t know if it`s just me,, but I find this one utterly confusing at times too. Sometimes I`m trying to research techs that for some reason doesn`t seem to list the pre-requisite (that is it doesn`t have those arrow nor a red text saying the other tech is required), but it simply demands I research this tech thats far off and well, it didn`t make sense.

The constricted and convulated city build interface. Civ3 had it pretty nice, a long fast list with unit names and cost and attack ratings and you name it. Here you get a bunch of pictures in a row where you have to mouse-over each one in order to make sense of it. Further on you have to scroll through a very little window to see it all (a poor design which is seen many places in civ4).

Religion: I don`t know why, but it just didn`t seem all that important. I guess I was expecting it to be a major thing where you constantly have to check where the other missionaries are in the world and what religions are trying to catch onto your civilization, but it just doesn`t seem important, at all.

Mouse-over in general: I recon its a bug, but its one that annoyed me immensly. Basically almost all the buttons are prone to sort of disappear. What I mean is that instead of showing a mouse-over pop-up of a button, it too often shows me the bottom layer, which means the terrain. So I have to constantly move the mouse to try and find the "sweet-spot" where I actually get the relevant mouse-over pop-up. Combined with the constricting interface its a nightmare.

Anyone else found something you define as bad features?

 

[general_kill]

i agree with the civilopedia and your mouse-over complaint, but the religion once seemed fine and the science problem is also fine with me.

 

[Kinseek]

I guess my main problem with religion is that I was sort of expecting religious wars, not wars based on other civs liking me a tad less for being a wrong kind of believer. That is a sort of struggle over which religion gets control over which cities and so on. As far as I can see whenever some foreign religion spreads to my cities I`m all "whop-de-doo, who cares".

 

[Mujadaddy]

Civilopedia has always been of only cursory interest.

The one "bug" I have is that it's juuuuust a little counter-intuitive on how to initiate diplomacy; ie, there's no "Contact" button, just the leader pic.

 

[JP Marat]

Over 11 years I've played CIVs 1, 2, 3 and even both CTPs and I think my total time looking at the Civilopedia couldn't have amounted to an aggregate total of ten minutes. And only then to figure out what raw material I needed to build some unit or other.

 

[Rellin]

No large X in upper right to leave city screen. Mouse-over issues. Love it all in all and it will be patched a ton either way I am sure.

 

[ThERat]

Over 11 years I've played CIVs 1, 2, 3 and even both CTPs and I think my total time looking at the Civilopedia couldn't have amounted to an aggregate total of ten minutes.

that's odd, I have been using it esecially in C3C. Infos about shield costs for wonders, UU's, Civilization attributes etc. I simply can't remember all that by heart and whenever I played SG, I relied a lot on the pedia, a mighty tool.
I haven't played Civ4 yet, but if the pedia isn't that good, that's pretty sad

 

[Ravinhood]

The whole damn game design is bad to me, most boring CIV I've ever played and I have them all even CIV-NET. I'd like to do more than press the end turn button.

 

[Nicole]

I'm not real keen on the pictograph icons for city improvements. They all look very similar, and since they are so small it's hard to tell which is which. On the other end of the spectrum, there's a little tiny scroll bar since you can only see two lines at a time, or else those little tiny buttons, so despite being small you can't see all of it.

Screen real estate IS at a premium; I understand the trade-off, I just personally don't like the choices made. I'd rather have small, hard to read text than small, hard to read icons. It's my only real beef with the interface so far.

An alternate solution might be a larger control panel at the bottom that auto-hides or auto-expands when you mouse over it.

One more minor thing I don't like is the panning from unit to unit. It works well when the units are close together, but is annoying when they are not. Ya'll folks with beefier video cards may be getting a faster zoom than me, so I'm not sure this is something "wrong" or just local performance issues.

 

[troytheface]

"most boring CIV I've ever played "
well thats an interesting comment. I have held off on this game for a variety of reasons. The pre release info made it look really good, however,
if the balance is really good this could bring about another issue...still waters.

 

[sunsetz28]

There's no Earth map that has every civs starting location on it. I'm very dissapointed in that. Otherwise I really don't have any complaints.

 

[Soryn Arkayn]

I haven't encountered any bugs yet and I've played for the game for about 12 of the past 24 hours.

I agree about the Civilopedia. I think the main problem is that there are picture icons and no names -- you have to mouse-over the icon to figure out what it is. Sure, they're in alphabetical order so if I'm searching for "Warrior" in the Units list I know it's near the end, but they still should be names, not merely icons. There's too many annoying little problems with the Civilopedia to list -- basically it needs to clone Civ3 in this respect, because it was very simple to use and understand.

As for your point about the Science Advisor -- there isn't one anymore. There's just the Technology Tree. Personally, I don't think it's that bad but I wish you could access the Civilopedia from the main screen when it gives you a list of the techs to research next, without having to enter the Tech Tree. And yunno the little icons that show what the Tech allows (like new buildings, wonders, civics, etc.), I wish you could look up those things in to Civilopedia by right clicking them instead of having to look up the tech first. It would save 1-2 steps if you could just right-click to the Civilopedia. It sounds minor, I know, but this early in the game when you're trying to figure things out you're doing this A LOT so it's a persistent problem.

I agree about Religion -- it seems kinda pointless. It's basically like Culture except instead of another Civ admiring your Civ's culture, they convert to your Religion. I wish the religions would differentiate themselves from one another by bestowing certain benefits and penalties, but I suppose the Devs didn't want to upset people's sensitivies by giving some religions advantages over others and spark controversy.

The biggest problem I have is Domestic, Finance, Foreign, and Military Advisors. Domestic, Finance, and Military are practically USELSS and don't do much of anything. I especially hate the Military advisor because all of the features from Civ3 are gone. I can't locate units by type or by city. It just gives you a list and number of your units, and it'll highlight them with blurry squares on the ad's mini-map. But you can't select a particular unit and jump to it from the Military ad, like if I wanted to activate, fortify, upgrade, or disband it. The new Military Advisor IS TERRBILE!! The Foreign advisor is good and bad. It's great to be able to see what Resources and Technology other Civs have and whether or not they're willing or unwilling to trade them, but for Resources, it doesn't show how many sources are available. This is a problem because Civ4 doesn't preserve one source of a resource for your Civ's use, unlike Civ3. In Civ3, if you had only one resource, your Civ would use it and it wouldn't be available for trade. But in Civ4 you can trade away all your resources if you choose. I encountered this problem early when I traded my Iron resource and soon after couldn't understand why I couldn't train Praetorians anymore. Then I realized that the 1 Iron resource I had was traded to another Civ. The saving grace is that you can now cancel deals at any time (you're not locked in for 20 turns) so it was easy to correct this problem. Still, I wish your Civ would preserve resources for your own use, but it gave you the option of overriding this. For example, in the Diplomacy screen under resources it would show ALL your resources: if you only had 1 source of a resource it would be grayed out with a 0 (zero) in quotes, whereas if you had two it would show up as 1 (without quotes). The former would mean you have that resource but it's reserved for your Civ's use, but you could decide to trade it anyway. The latter would mean you have 1 spare source of a particular resource so you're free to trade it. This would be a lot better because then you'd know exactly what resource and how many you have available, so you won't accidentally trade something you shouldn't.

Also, I had a little bit of problem with Units and promotions. My main gripe is that it's very difficult to anticipate what you'll use the unit for and promote accordingly. Sometimes it's easy, like using Longbowmen as city garrisons and promoting them with City Defence bonuses, but for offensive units it's harder. Like do I want to give my Praetorians City Assault promotions or bonuses fighting melee units, or Musketmen bonuses fighting archers or gunpowder units. For Musketmen, I was at war with a Civ without gunpowder units yet so I opted for Archers, but I was kinda upset because it about 20 turns those bonuses will be negated because archers will be obsolete and I'll be fighting all gunpowder units. Also, upgrading unit strength is kinda pointless early in the game because the initial bonus is 10% combat strength, but all early units have <10 combat strength so it's not even single integer gain; I think it gives you some kind of fraction to indicate how much of a combat bonus you'll get, but I'm a history major and haven't used math since high school, so I don't understand what it means. My guess is, for example, if a Warrior with 2 combat strength is upgraded with 10% strength bonus it'll be like it's "1/5" or maybe "6/5" meaning that it's upgraded combat strength is slightly higher than 2. Like I said, it's confusing, but I suppose that in time it'll become easier to understand. The problem is that the manual isn't any help in this regard. Sure, it gives a list of the promotions and what they do but it doesn't explain what I did above, like how because early units have <10 combat strength a 10% strength bonus won't register yet. I had to figure it out for myself.

 

[quail]

I guess my main problem with religion is that I was sort of expecting religious wars, not wars based on other civs liking me a tad less for being a wrong kind of believer. That is a sort of struggle over which religion gets control over which cities and so on. As far as I can see whenever some foreign religion spreads to my cities I`m all "whop-de-doo, who cares".

I wouldn't want religion to make too much of a difference; it'd just change the game too much. But it WOULD be cool to have a game option at the start for other civs to either really like you or really hate you based on your religion, just for fun.

 

[Mujadaddy]

I wouldn't want religion to make too much of a difference; it'd just change the game too much. But it WOULD be cool to have a game option at the start for other civs to either really like you or really hate you based on your religion, just for fun.

I bet the modifiers are more punishing at higher difficulty levels.

 

[Thistletooth]

I'll be brief and stick to my main gripe:

Production times are way too high. On Epic mode (the only mode where the game doesn't fly by in the blink of an eye), unit production costs are insanely high, meaning that your first warrior takes 15-20 turns to build, then another 15-20 for your first worker (which also prevents your tiny capital from growing). Your first settler is even worse! Long story short, after almost 4000 years have progressed, you have maybe four cities and three buildings, and have never even had the ability to wage a war had you wanted to.

There is no early game beyond exploration and researching automatic techs. That's a killer. Just skip right to the dawn of the Christian era while you're at it, and leave the poor Egyptians, Greeks, and Persians behind if you're going to do that. I think the Babylonians, Carthagineans, Hittites and Sumerians saw this coming, so they made other plans.

 

[Oddible]

Agree on the Tech Tree issue. The white lines between techs seem to be pretty much meaningless. I'll click on a tech and things not even connected to it will light up as a prereq - dunno what in the world happened there.

I LOVE the promotions. Valuing each unit more and mixing armies of specialized units. Agree tho that the military advisor is pretty much useless in finding that +25% City Attacker when I'm about to go to battle.

Screen real estate is my biggest gripe - I keep wanting to zoom back further and still have my units on the map - and this at 1600x1200.

Oh, one more - maybe there's an answer - How can I easily see if a city has an airport to know where to send units for an air drop? Do I REALLY have to go into each city to see it? No handy icon on the map???

 

[Greek Plunder]

The good thing is there will eventually be mods released that strike a nice balance between Normal and Epic.

 

[Adam7Eight]

I gotta agree with most of your guys' complaints.

Plus I think they tried to get too fancy with the interface. It was fine before. There was no need to modernize it and make it confusing, time consuming, and jumbled full of clutter. And yes, some of the advisor screens are now pointless.

 

[Lord Chambers]

Overall I'm dissatisfied with the interface. I don't want pictures for everything. Pictures should not replace words, they should suppliment them as icons.

The Civilopedia is close to bad. It's harder to get between categories, partially because everything is a picture and you have to mouse over them all, but also because the historical entries require a button press. If they're going to be read they should be visible at all times, like how the Religion entries are.

 

[Ravinhood]

You want to play a really boring game, play with 15 civs like you could/did in CIV III and tell me it isn't boring for the first 4000 years. I even played on normal speed, and it's still boring because even though it has HUGE maps, the size of the terrain squares are near double that of them in CIV III, thus, you don't have as many settlement squares to really settle. I went from a game with 10 to 20 settlements per civilization of 15 players to maybe maybe 5 settlements in CIV IV if you are lucky and 3/5ths of those are horrible placement areas with 1000's of years of work to be done to clear out all the crap in them.

The is what happens when you make a graphics candy update, goto that RTW 3D style of game maps that require "more space" for the graphics and "less space" for the actual game play.

I believe people are enjoying the game, I don't believe these people are playing max civilizations on the maps though, probably playing the large/huge maps games with standard civilizations of 7 and yeah I can see that being fun, can get probably 10 or 15 settlements in that setup, but, not with maxed out civilizations like you could in CIV III. No way bubba.

I was happy to find the option to go back to one unit per stack and a health bar. I didn't like the 3 units in a stack feature at all either.

It's has it's good points, the options that is allows are excellent, the always war, always peace, aggressive ai, those things are welcome, but, sadly if one wants to play a full blown maxed out game, it's the most pitifully boring game you'll play.