Sure Civ 5 would be nice but...

[oranges]

well, I have to admit - as important as gameplay is (and Civ has pleanty of that!) eye candy is still a big issue. After all, if graphics were completely unimportant, we'd all play text games...

I still occasionally play ADOM and (Ang)bands to a lesser extent.

CIV4 graphics I find perfectly fine for this type of game, but I would probably play it even with CIV 2 graphics.

If I'm in the mood for true eye candy, I'll fire up my heavily modded Oblivion, not CIV.

 

[kniteowl]

So what's the story about the Licensing? If EA only has the name couldn't Fraxis just give Alpha Centauri 2 a diffferent name, why not "Beta Centauri". You know the greek aphabet, Beta comes after Alpha lmao... although I'm guessing there's no just star or star system called Beta Centauri... ah well.. lol

 

[r_rolo1]

There is a Beta centauri system, but I think that Proxima centauri would be the better candidate ( it is the star that is nearest of the Sun, atleast in the closest moments ). I doubt that EA owns the SMAC concept, ... it is far more likely that it only owns the brand.

Other option could be extending regular Civ game to a Planet colonization era

P.S Topped with this when browsing .... It looks that EA has some will of making SMAC II if it grabs Sid again ( read: grab Take2 ). Not sure if I'm happy or not: I would love SMAC II, but from EA I'm expecting more SimSMAC "Manage a colony in a alien planet: determine their vibes.... "

 

[Swein Forkbeard]

Did you guys know that Starcraft is played as an e-sport is korea?

The game is so old that you have to play it at 800x600 resolution.


I think Starcraft is about 10 or 11 years old.

Are you serious? I can play SC just fine, along with the original Age of Empires, which is a year older.

@The Almighty DF: Warcraft III actually received good reviews, with an average of 93% at Gamerankings. I'm not saying you should agree with that, but you shouldn't say that Warcraft was DYING at the time of WoW's release!

Indeed, WC3's Expansion Pack actually won Gamespot's award for Multiplayer Game of the Year back in 2003. And multiplayer, from what I'm hearing from most people here, carries most of a game's replayability. That's not DYING, is it? Is it?

 

[Gumbolt]

I actually like the WC3 story line albeit a bit depressing to see the human city taken over by the undead. They somewhat continued the story using WOW but i lost track.

Would be interesting to see how they could take an idea like civ 4 and bring this to a mmorpg. There was a report a while ago that suggested most new games would be online games as this is the future. You think of WOW or Ghost which Blizzard were thought to be developing and you can see theres great interest there.

How many versions of Civilization do you make before the idea becomes over used? I dont want a civ 5 just for the sake of it. It needs to add something to the game that couldnt be added by another EXP pack on civ 4.

As for alpha centuri 2. I fail to see why civ 4 cant have a second world to colonize on a Alien planet. I honestly cant believe you can patent something like this? Then again legal wrangles and intel. property rights can be a pain.

I think we will have to wait for colonization to be finished and any expansion packs that brings.

All in all the game i want bought back is escape from colditz. That on a mmorpg or online game would be fantastic!!! I loved it on the Amiga.

 

[The Almighty dF]

Are you serious? I can play SC just fine, along with the original Age of Empires, which is a year older.

@The Almighty DF: Warcraft III actually received good reviews, with an average of 93% at Gamerankings. I'm not saying you should agree with that, but you shouldn't say that Warcraft was DYING at the time of WoW's release!

Indeed, WC3's Expansion Pack actually won Gamespot's award for Multiplayer Game of the Year back in 2003. And multiplayer, from what I'm hearing from most people here, carries most of a game's replayability. That's not DYING, is it? Is it?

Game critics mean absolutely nothing. Hell, Gamespot compared -Turok- to the original -Doom.- I'd sooner ask a senile old woman her thoughts on a new video game than a critic for IGN, Gamespot, Gameinformer, etc. Even X-Play has become unreliable.
And the multiplayer on WC3 is only popular because people use it to play non-Warcraft things.
RPGs and such made using the map creator.

If you exclude WoW, Diablo and Starcraft are still Blizzard's most popular and best selling franchises. Diablo had two games and an expansion pack, Starcraft had one game, an expansion pack, and a port. Warcraft, the least popular of them, had... 3 games, two expansion packs?

Of course the true reason why they made WoW instead of WoD or WoSC is because most of the people behind Starcraft and Diablo were either fired or quit to form other companies. Mainly Guild Wars and Hellgate: London.

 

[CheScott]

I actually like the WC3 story line albeit a bit depressing to see the human city taken over by the undead. They somewhat continued the story using WOW but i lost track.

Would be interesting to see how they could take an idea like civ 4 and bring this to a mmorpg. There was a report a while ago that suggested most new games would be online games as this is the future. You think of WOW or Ghost which Blizzard were thought to be developing and you can see theres great interest there.

How many versions of Civilization do you make before the idea becomes over used? I dont want a civ 5 just for the sake of it. It needs to add something to the game that couldnt be added by another EXP pack on civ 4.

As for alpha centuri 2. I fail to see why civ 4 cant have a second world to colonize on a Alien planet. I honestly cant believe you can patent something like this? Then again legal wrangles and intel. property rights can be a pain.

I think we will have to wait for colonization to be finished and any expansion packs that brings.

All in all the game i want bought back is escape from colditz. That on a mmorpg or online game would be fantastic!!! I loved it on the Amiga.

I think the MMORPG thing is over-blown. Before that it was what? Counter Strike. That's not to say it's become unpopular, but the MMO's came in and became the 'next big thing'. The Multi-Player FPS found it's niche in the marker (albeit a large niche).

With the recent uber-populization of the Video Game market, I think a lot of the opinions floating around out there are the opinions of people who are more familiar with stocks then with video games. Quite a bit of the feedback can pretty easily be ignored.

MMO's aren't the future. MMO's are now and have their place in the future, but something bigger and better always happens. Any serious gamer can look at the market and see it being flooded with game after game that is loaded with the exact same content. Granted, these are popular for now, but even John Q. Gamer is going to get his fill of shooting Nazi's and slaying Trolls.

I believe that towards the end of this Generation of Systems life span, we will begin to see a break in the market and, while there will still be a large market for Nazi shooting, there will be a shift towards games that are better designed, more thoughtful and more interesting.

I tired with MMO's fast, myself. There's no real diversity or much creativity really going on, which was unfortunate because all my friends play them. I still talk to them and, I don't know... They seem like vagrants. Squatting on one server until they tire of it and move on to the next. I really don't see longevity in this model.

No system is static.

 

[The Almighty dF]

I think the MMORPG thing is over-blown. Before that it was what? Counter Strike. That's not to say it's become unpopular, but the MMO's came in and became the 'nest big thing'. The Multi-Player FPS found it's niche in the marker (albeit a large niche).

With the recent uber-populization of the Video Game market, I think a lot of the opinions floating around out there are the opinions of people who are more familiar with stocks then with video games. Quite a bit of the feedback can pretty easily be ignored.

MMO's aren't the future. MMO's are now and have their place in the future, but something bigger and better always happens. Any serious gamer can look at the market and see it being flooded with game after game that is loaded with the exact same content. Granted, these are popular for now, but even John Q. Gamer is going to get his fill of shooting Nazi's and slaying Trolls.

I believe that towards the end of this Generation of Systems life span, we will begin to see a break in the market and, while there will still be a large market for Nazi shooting, there will be a shift towards games that are better designed, more thoughtful and more interesting.

No system is static.

The death of MMOs is already dawning.
People are having to rip off WoW, like with the Warhammer MMO. Note, I know Warhammer existed first, I used to play Warhammer. I'm not saying the plot or the races or any of that are ripped off, I'm saying the look and the gameplay are ripped off.

The second we end up with MMOs that are just rip-offs of earlier MMOs (There's even one MMO out now that's even a rip-off of SWG. Not SWG when it was good, but SWG after Sony beat it to death with an ugly stick and then urinated over its mangled corpse) is the second the MMO market will start to fall.
It's what happend with platformers as well.

 

[Turquoiside]

I'd prefer to see another expansion pack. Something that would make certain traits no longer suck (Spi, Prot, and Imp), something that would add a large amount of new civs and some more leaders for existing civs (Why does Japan only have one leader still? Japan and Spain are like the only two Civ4 vanilla civs to still have only one leader.)

Sorry for randomly inserting this but, what about Mali, Inca, Aztecs, Arabia,which 33% of the vanilla civs.

 

[CheScott]

The death of MMOs is already dawning.
People are having to rip off WoW, like with the Warhammer MMO. Note, I know Warhammer existed first, I used to play Warhammer. I'm not saying the plot or the races or any of that are ripped off, I'm saying the look and the gameplay are ripped off.

The second we end up with MMOs that are just rip-offs of earlier MMOs (There's even one MMO out now that's even a rip-off of SWG. Not SWG when it was good, but SWG after Sony beat it to death with an ugly stick and then urinated over its mangled corpse) is the second the MMO market will start to fall.
It's what happend with platformers as well.

Exactly, look at the Grand Theft Auto ripoffs. Now, GTA4 came out and I'd like to play that, myself, but how many ripoffs are we seeing? Few, and why? Because they quickly discovered that, while really hyping a ripoff will turn a profit, the barrel gets scraped out quickly.

 

[The Almighty dF]

Sorry for randomly inserting this but, what about Mali, Inca, Aztecs, Arabia,which 33% of the vanilla civs.

Mali: ...Doesn't really deserve another leader. As I've said elsewhere many times before, their empire was more or less just a quick blink of power.

Aztec: It'd be hard, but I guess another leader could be found for them. If accuracy isn't much of an issue.

Incans: Sadly, we don't really know enough about them to accurately add another leader. Hell, Huaya Capac's traits aren't even based on himself as a leader, they're based on his civilization. You can blame the conquistadors lack of popular philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli for that one.

Arabia: Could use another leader, I'll admit to that one.

Spain and Japan, however, we know a lot about. I mean we can easilly, and very accurately, add in another leader from any point in their history.
Japan especially.

 

[SharpMango]

Civ4 BTS as a game is quite an achievement to be honest. sure one can ALWAYS have better AI, but it is quite a landmark in the civ series and it feels like one...

HOWEVER the only one thing i would like improvement on is the actual downtime between turns. I have a 2gig ram computer, this game should have the capability to minimize that downtime. i hate having my frame rates drop down with 1-2 minutes between turns in huge maps..
this game is civilization...
i do want to be able to play on a 450 city map with 20 seconds down time between turn...yes i am aware that what im asking for is quite a lot...but....
thats the only thing i want. i want to be able to play ridiculous huge maps and know that 75 percent of my time wont be devoted to watching that compass thingy rotate..that really isnt too much to ask is it?

so if civ5 comes along which plays a lot smoother, in the same way that civ1/2/3 did....that'd be great.(i think civ1 played really slow on some comps,lets ignore that for now for it slightly ruins my point)

 

[Willem]

i hate having my frame rates drop down with 1-2 minutes between turns in huge maps..

If you're waiting 1-2 minutes between turns, then your CPU is too slow. I'm running an AMD X2 6000 and I seldom have to wait more than 30 seconds at the end of the game, if that. The only time I have to wait awhile is when I'm at war and I have Show Enemy Moves turned on. The amount of RAM you have has very little to do with that aspect of the game, it's all about the number of calculations it can accomplish at once.

 

[The Almighty dF]

If you're waiting 1-2 minutes between turns, then your CPU is too slow. I'm running an AMD X2 6000 and I seldom have to wait more than 30 seconds at the end of the game, if that. The only time I have to wait awhile is when I'm at war and I have Show Enemy Moves turned on. The amount of RAM you have has very little to do with that aspect of the game, it's all about the number of calculations it can accomplish at once.

I get that when I do Rhye's, or late in game on a huge map with a lot of civs.

I've got a 3.0GHz cpu, 2 gigs of RAM, an 8800GTX video card...

This is why I really don't want them to do Civ5, and instead focus on adding to Civ4.
At least wait until AMD releases that god-like CPU they've been talking about.

 

[Gumbolt]

MMO's aren't the future. MMO's are now and have their place in the future, but something bigger and better always happens.

I agree something new will always come along. Doing a game online allows firms like Blizzard to open new revenue streams. To be fair I have never touched WOW but I have read enough stories saying how addictive it can be. I think they had taken warcraft 3 as far as it was going to go as a RPG.

I think MMO are at an early stage in their lives. As technology develops more opportunities will arrive. Look what the wii did to the console market by introducing a motion dector controller.

Lets just hope civ 5 doesnt make the mistake of having addictive game play. I have a life too you know (NB They have not announced they are even making it yet.)

 

[Balderstrom]

MMO's are glorified MUDs. Except MMO's generally don't have half of the underlying game mechanic's that a good Mud had. It's eye candy.
MMO's will never be as complex as a MUD could be, due to the visual limitation that things/equipment must look different.

 

[SharpMango]

If you're waiting 1-2 minutes between turns, then your CPU is too slow. I'm running an AMD X2 6000 and I seldom have to wait more than 30 seconds at the end of the game, if that. The only time I have to wait awhile is when I'm at war and I have Show Enemy Moves turned on. The amount of RAM you have has very little to do with that aspect of the game, it's all about the number of calculations it can accomplish at once.

good for you. play giant earth map mod (about 3 times the size of a huge map with europe about 3/4 the size of the public map alone) with 34 civs, try to make it to the industrial age, then get back to me =p.
im sure it can be done with some clever programming..but not right now.....
and yes it does have to do with RAM...windows XP can only delegate about 2gigabytes of RAM maximum to one application, so once civ4 uses more than about 1.4gig of ram, the system does slow down a lot...
and i do think it is crazy that 1.4 gig of ram is required..
i still find it hilarious that the original starcraft uses only about 25 mb of RAM

 

[Mesix]

I'm always worried when a new sequel comes out for a great game series. I am very pleased with Civ IV, and might have finally found a game that has brought more hours of enjoyment to my life than Railroad Tychoon 2. I always hold off on the latest sequel until I hear first hand reviews from my friends. I got burned with my preorder of Master of Orion 3 and I don't intend to get that excited about a game that fails to deliver.

Bring on Civ IV: Colinization...maybe someday the engine will be to dated and Civ V will become a necessary improvement. That day is not today though.

 

[Willem]

good for you. play giant earth map mod (about 3 times the size of a huge map with europe about 3/4 the size of the public map alone) with 34 civs, try to make it to the industrial age, then get back to me =p.

If you're trying to play a scenario that's way bigger than what the designers recommend then you can't very well blame the game for being unpresponsive. You're pushing things far beyond the parameters the game was set up for so of course you're going to have issues, it just stands to reason. I play on a slightly larger than Huge map with 12 civs and have no problems with it. 30 seconds tops between turns unless I'm at war, then I have to watch my enemy move all it's units around.

 

[SharpMango]

If you're trying to play a scenario that's way bigger than what the designers recommend then you can't very well blame the game for being unpresponsive. You're pushing things far beyond the parameters the game was set up for so of course you're going to have issues, it just stands to reason. I play on a slightly larger than Huge map with 12 civs and have no problems with it. 30 seconds tops between turns unless I'm at war, then I have to watch my enemy move all it's units around.

im not 'blaming' the game. gosh, that is the one change i would like in the future, to be able to play a bigger game, if i want. i dont expect it to perform like that now. However, just for the record, on the civ2 and civ3 game engines, such things were possible.