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

[Eyemaze]

you can click the green/turns red dot on the top left corner of the mini map

 

[chriseay]

5. I’d like to be able to click something to end turn.

If you click the ball on minimap dock that turns from green to red at the end of the turn, it will advance you to the next turn. It's a little awkward and I prefer hitting enter, but it works.

EDIT: Obviously, I'm a little slow.

 

[GoldenAge]

I've played the game for about 6 hours and I've loved almost every minute. I do, however, have some gripes that I think are very patchable. Many have already been mentioned, but I'll list them anyway.

1. The Civilopedia - It needs to be cross referenced and it needs to be easier to get into. Basically, anytime there's a unit, a tech or a building, or text refering to any of those, there needs to be a clickable civilopedia link.

2. City Screen - I play on a laptop, so the mouse is my main method of control. There's no way to exit the city screen with your mouse. You have to press "enter".

3. City Screen Production - The list of things you can build is poorly done. Small square icons is not how this should be done. I much prefered the dropdowns from previous versions of civ.

4. Options - There are plenty of game options, which is nice. I want to turn down graphics, as I find them to be mostly unnecessary. I don't really care to see my units animate. The problem is, there are a lot of cryptic sounding options and no help defining them. Nothing in the manual, no help file. There's too many options to simply do a trial and error.

5. Pan to unit - I'd rather the screen just jump to my next unit if it's far away than pan across the land. It's a cool effect, but it can be slow and it gets old. Maybe one of the options changes this, but as mentioned in #4, I can't figure them out.

6. Rally Points - I don't seem to be able to set rally points for new units built from a city or to be able to tell a city to continually produce a specific unit. This hampers my ramp up to major battles.

7. Military Advisor - In Civilization III the military advisor made it easy to find and activate any units you had. Last night I had a bunch of workers idle in a city because they had finished improving the land adjacent to the city. The miltary advisor in Civilization III would have helped me find this out a lot sooner. It's pretty much useless in Civilization IV.

Like I said, it's a great game, but I'm anxiously awaiting a patch to address many of these issues.

 

[reznap]

There's one thing they must chane: make AIs more aggressive and started more wars (with good reason).

I think AIs are less aggressive simply because it's too hard to take a city in CIV IV. So smart AIs just prefer not to go to a meaningless war. Even I myself had to get used to limited wars and taking only 1-2 cities once.

In order to make AI more aggressive and epic wars more likely, the designer/modder probably can simply adjust the city defense or units city attack value. Once taking cities become easier (not in MP games), we can see more wars right away.

I won’t touch bugs here, but I do see a few things that are improvable. I know there are more, but these come to mind quickly.

 

[southafrica]

There's one thing they must chane: make AIs more aggressive and started more wars (with good reason).

I think AIs are less aggressive simply because it's too hard to take a city in CIV IV. So smart AIs just prefer not to go to a meaningless war. Even I myself had to get used to limited wars and taking only 1-2 cities once.

In order to make AI more aggressive and epic wars more likely, the designer/modder probably can simply adjust the city defense or units city attack value. Once taking cities become easier (not in MP games), we can see more wars right away.

Simple question, have you used the aggressive ai option in the custom game menu?

 

[Stuporstar]

i am in agreement with those that think the problem most people have with the game is that they are stuck in the civ3 mindset. most of the issues that people have been complaining about will likely be forgotten after spending a bit more time with the game.

i played a single game last night, on normal speed, noble. in civ 3 a standard size, normal speed regent game would take me about 8 hours on average. the civ4 game took me about 4. during this game i didn't war once, i barely made any units, took the default buildings and techs as they popped up, and employed basically zero strategy. i lost miserably. now, if i were to actually employ some amount of strategy, possibly go to war a time or two, that will more than double the amount of time i'm putting into a game. so on normal speed, it appears that civ4 is still at least as long a game as civ3.

regarding the issue of getting too many techs early, this appears to be in response to the fact that to keep up in civ3 you had to trade techs with every other civ, or you'd fall too far behind to compete. if you started on a continent by yourself, that was often enough to cost you the game by itself. in civ 4, this isn't a problem. you can research everything early on yourself. in fact you have to, since you can't trade techs until you learn whatever tech it is you need to do so. you're still getting techs about as fast as you were in civ3, except now they only come from you, rather than from everyone.

regarding units being produced too slowly, this is in response to the fact that in civ3, you had to have dozens of units in stacks to wage war, which was ridiculous. in civ4, an individual unit is rather powerful and important, as you don't have the time to pump out hundreds of them.

mid and late game for techs, it seems that in a competitive game, you will need to lower your science % to support your cities and extra armies, which you will need to defend yourself. yes, you may have fewer cities to cut down on maintenance costs to keep research high, but then you have less production with which to defend yourself. so past the early stages it appears that research will slow down, although this may be compensated a bit by trading techs.

overall, civ 4 appears to be a much more strategic game than civ3. you need more than your basic defensive unit, offensive unit approach to conquest. there are a lot more options in choosing research paths, and religion and the new leaders add some interesting options as well.

i think that most people have simply not played the game enough to be able to make educated complaints about the game.

Ah, but there's the difference. You're playing at normal speed. At normal speed the game is balanced much better. Believe me, I've played at all three speeds already to test this out. The fast game was one of the most fun.

The problem is with the epic game balance. It just doesn't work to make EVERYTHING go slower. What most people seem to want to get out of epic speed is having lots of early war (well a lot of war in every period), lots of time to cover a huge map with tons of rival civs, and enough production per turn to be able to keep everything flowing smoothly. What seems to make that flow better is having a slower tech pace with everything else paced normally. Modding that is so easy once you figure out how!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not really complaining about the game or how it was made at all. (the only complaint I had was they didn't add that little "accelerated production" button or equivalent to the game options interface) They made this game great because we CAN change the things we want like that. And that's not always the way I'm going to play either. It's just nice to have the option.

I haven't had much time to play my epic slow-tech mod yet, so I don't really know how the balance is for the later eras in the game.

 

[Misch]

I don't think anyone else posted this yet, but if you have, I'm just adding my $0.02 to it:

There's no easy way to deal with gold on a trade/diplomacy screen. If you want to eliminate gold from a screen, it seems like you have to remove everything else (like resources/tech/etc...), then go and deal with the gold. There's no simple way to just delete it either (at least nothing I've found yet), you actually have to go into the sub-display, and set the amount to 0.

That's just my $0.02 worth...

 

[reznap]

Simple question, have you used the aggressive ai option in the custom game menu?

Never tried but I will. However,most people will not even bother to try a variant, so in order to make the game better, probably you have to do st, in normal settings.

I do notice that "aggressive" CIVs can start wars themselves. Once when I was attacking my neighbour, another civ stabbed her back, revenged a culture-flip long time ago and actually helped me winning. I didn't see this happened in CIV series before, unless I manipulated them into my side.So AI is more realistic this time.

 

[Englander]

2. City Screen - I play on a laptop, so the mouse is my main method of control. There's no way to exit the city screen with your mouse. You have to press "enter".

You can click on the screen! I cant remember if you left click or right click, but if you click outside of the city it will exit.

 

[snepp]

There's no easy way to deal with gold on a trade/diplomacy screen. If you want to eliminate gold from a screen, it seems like you have to remove everything else (like resources/tech/etc...), then go and deal with the gold. There's no simple way to just delete it either (at least nothing I've found yet), you actually have to go into the sub-display, and set the amount to 0.

Or click the "clear trade" button. But I agree, it is highly annoying.

 

[VeniceBeach]

Overall, the game is a vast improvement over 3. I personally like every new concept and the game interface is much improved...except:

1) Civilopedia - This has been covered repeatedly. This is a tool for beginners, but until you memorize the various graphical representations, it's cumbersome, and the people who learn the graphics have probably played so much that they don't need the Civilopedia.

2) Random terrain generation - Deserts should not exist next to jungles, unless there is a mountain range in between!!! While I love the increase in map variety, someone forgot to input realistic terrain distribution. Even under "tropical" there are one or two tile deserts all over the place. If the game were to randomly generate the Earth, it would have desert in the Eastern USA and in Europe. Desert exists under certain conditions...in large swaths due to air and sea currents and on the leeward side of tall mountain ranges. Although this doesn't "break" gameplay, it offends my sense of realism and asthetics.

3) Custom continents - I'm sure this is hard one to program, but I've noticed that when you make more than three continents, they are all blocky and quadrant based, again as you can tell, I like good asthetics.

4) I like the unit animations, but as others have said, there is too much lag between giving commands and movement.

 

[Undertaker798]

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?

I know how to solve this problem:

1.Open up control panel from the start menu.
2.Open the display and click the "Settings" tab.
3. At the bottom right corner there should be a button saying: Advanced, click this.
4. You will be presented with another screen, click the: Troubleshoot tab at the top of the box.
5. There should be a slider in the middle, mess around with this until your problem is solved.

Good luck!

P.S. If this doesn't work i am not sure what will.
P.S.S. If you put it on a lower setting it might not let the game run, due to "Low computer needs." If this happens just go back to a setting that will work.

 

[oldStatesman]

"I want to be able to write triggers so that Christian cities go through anarchy in the renaissance if they don't have a Temple built or if the Sistine Chapel hasn't been built in a friendly city! ...But I want to be able to just click a checkbox to get it!"

And for Joe and Jane Sixpack, the average users, that's a bad want?

 

[oldStatesman]

I've only been playing for about 6 hours now, but I just lost two gunships and a Panzer to a Longbowman. A man with a stick and some twine with an arrow...

Combat just took a step back to CIV original where a battleship could be wiped out by a galley.

I've had two warriors destroyed or seriously wounded by lions...I thought that animals only could hurt unarmed settlers or workers????

 

[VeniceBeach]

I've had two warriors destroyed or seriously wounded by lions...I thought that animals only could hurt unarmed settlers or workers????

No, animals can hurt normal units, it's just that they have less than 1 strength so it is less than 50/50 chance of killing your warrior.

 

[Ravinhood]

I must say modding the speed files for the epic game and the world map size of huge maps has made this game finally playable and enjoyable for me. Takes 400 turns just to get to 1ad now. Heh, this is a blast and I'm watching the research which I doubled to 200 to tweak it so modern tanks aren't in the picture until at least 1900 (yeah still kinda early but only 150 turns left in the game at 1900).

Setting the ai to aggressive has definitely put them on the offensive not only towards me, but, each other as well. Clubmen and Archers an Axemen are abounding, it's actually more action packed than CIV III in that respect now.

My game has 960 turns at the moment, this will adjust up or down based on research I'm sure, and as someone else said below, yeah there are many of us who want games like this, long slow playing big arse wars in each era, not a mad dash to modern tanks and battleships.

I have 9 (did have 10) cities in 2600 ad Monarchy difficulty and the ai's all have 5 or 6 themselves with still several places they can settle. Using 14 ai's is a blast, I never know which one is gonna come a calling next. The wars are fantabulous though and I have lost a city so the ai is definitely better than before.

And with the maint of cities it's great it's got my tax/research at 60/40 just like despotism should be with 9 cities or more I think. And to keep building my army of axemen up that research is going to come down even futher until I get something to make my people happy so I can grow so I can get something to increase income/taxes. I don't even have temples yet. lol Or currency. This is great. 1400 years equates to about 140 turns so far I've played. 140 turns in a normal game would be near 1ad already, and that was borrrringgg.

 

[Tobyoneknobi]

I'm pysched about Civ IV now. I was pretty disappointed last night, but going epic with modded research speed seems like the way to go...now if I can only get outta work....

 

[Matte979]

I think Firaxis went a little conservative on the EPIC mode to not make it to long. I think the ratio between cost of building and research is off by at least 50 %

Ravinwood: Did you increase the research to 200 on EPIC mode? And what is your map size settings?

Some of us fanatics expected a EPIC mode thats truly EPIC including me.

We should create a new offical TRUE EPIC mode for MP games.

 

[Ravinhood]

Well look on the bright side it is Friday, so the weekend is upon many that can't wait to play CIV IV all weekend long.

I hope I can find someone to perhaps play a PBEM game with my mod after I'm done. In fact if I could find 14 dedicated players who like long games that would be even better. I'm not much of an online player (dialup n all), but, I do play a bunch of different PBEM games a lot.

 

[glothar]

"I want to be able to write triggers so that Christian cities go through anarchy in the renaissance if they don't have a Temple built or if the Sistine Chapel hasn't been built in a friendly city! ...But I want to be able to just click a checkbox to get it!"

And for Joe and Jane Sixpack, the average users, that's a bad want?

Yes, actually. It's like asking for a car that can tow a flatbed of steel I-beams and get 60 mi/gal while doing it.

You can't have infinite complexity and idiot-proof simplicity at the same time. Now, I'm not saying we can't have tools to help with some of this. It's easy to create a pretty tool to let us add new units or change the different resources.

But people want more than that. What should Firaxis do? In Civ III they exposed all the attributes to the users and what was the response? "I want more." They added more, and what did the Civ modding community say? "That's it? Couldn't you give us more?"

Firaxis gave us more. But what we asked for was so complex and powerful that any tool they might design would cripple the capabilities of the system they gave us. To use another metaphor: We asked for the ability to make anything, and they gave us a toolbox. Now people are looking at the toolbox and complaining: "Hey! Where's the wrench that makes gazebos?"

If you want to do simple things, there will be simple ways to do them. But if you want to get complex things done (Reorganizing the UI, changing how religion works, adding tactical nukes) you're going to have to do a bit of learning about game mechanics.

Basically, it's silly to ask for everything. I wish I had a car that got 120 mi/gallon in the city and off-road while making no noise and carrying both 1 and 12 people in equal comfort. But it's simply stupid of me to ever ask that of a car designer.