Hey all, I didnt see a "Review" thread, so I wanted to post my comments on Civ 4. And as you can tell by the subject, I'm fairly dissapointed.
A little background on me:
Been playing Civ games since their start, including Colonization and Alpha Centauri, loved them all, must of put thousands of hours in each game.
As far as Civ 4 goes, I really loved it at first, but then as I played it more and more I just wasnt sure. After having finished roughly a dozen multiplayer games, a few single player epic games, and at least three times as many normal games, I'll have to say this is the first Civ where it's just not compelling to play at all... It's pretty much downright boring.
Let me start from the top with graphics, I dont really care about graphics, in fact, I still play Civ 3 to this day and think its fine graphics wise, so I hold no real opinion. Althought, I do find the camera extremely painful sometimes and glitchy, always zooming out, or around in weird views all the time. In fact, Im not even sure if the Show friendly/enemy moves option works, as the camera always seems to stay in one place, and never really moves to center on anything. That is a really painful thing to me.
Sound - Simple enough, love Baba Yet, sets a new standard for PC music, only thing close is the Rome Total War menu music.
Now on to my biggest peeve, the gameplay. In past Civs, mostly Civ 3, I loved what the AI stood for, I loved how it acted. Even on warlord mode, If i was sitting on the only Iron resource, and a Civ needed it, you could be damn well sure that he would declare war on me to get it. What I've seen so far in Civ 4 leads me to believe nothing like this exsists yet. I've actually put the AI's on aggressive, sat there and watched the other Civs do absolutely nothing but expand their cities in a mundane fashion. I can also say that there is a same pattern for every Civ, that is, contact me, ask me to open my borders, contact me again and trade a resource, and then that is all I will hear from them till I win a space race/diplomatic victory. Ive never been declared on, or much less have seen another Civ goto war with another Civ. Its downright bad, and this is on Noble difficulty. Now I know, I could always up the difficulty, but I dont want to, I wanna play it on the difficulty I set it to, so that the other Civs dont start to get advantages over me. Also, the game is just downright slow pace wise, at least in Civ 3 there were compelling things to do at the start, like the resource and expansion races, in this there is just mash the spacebar over and over and over watching my worker do his thing. I would get started on religion and bombardment, but I think those have both been covered in other posts, needless to say, they are downright horrible in my opinion, not really in idea, but in execution, they just do nothing...
All in all, I still plan on playing Civ 4, and Im hoping with patches that they will get the AI right, but until then Civ 3 is clearly the better, more compelling, more established game. Anyone else feel like me?
-Chris
A little background on me:
Been playing Civ games since their start, including Colonization and Alpha Centauri, loved them all, must of put thousands of hours in each game.
As far as Civ 4 goes, I really loved it at first, but then as I played it more and more I just wasnt sure. After having finished roughly a dozen multiplayer games, a few single player epic games, and at least three times as many normal games, I'll have to say this is the first Civ where it's just not compelling to play at all... It's pretty much downright boring.
Let me start from the top with graphics, I dont really care about graphics, in fact, I still play Civ 3 to this day and think its fine graphics wise, so I hold no real opinion. Althought, I do find the camera extremely painful sometimes and glitchy, always zooming out, or around in weird views all the time. In fact, Im not even sure if the Show friendly/enemy moves option works, as the camera always seems to stay in one place, and never really moves to center on anything. That is a really painful thing to me.
Sound - Simple enough, love Baba Yet, sets a new standard for PC music, only thing close is the Rome Total War menu music.
Now on to my biggest peeve, the gameplay. In past Civs, mostly Civ 3, I loved what the AI stood for, I loved how it acted. Even on warlord mode, If i was sitting on the only Iron resource, and a Civ needed it, you could be damn well sure that he would declare war on me to get it. What I've seen so far in Civ 4 leads me to believe nothing like this exsists yet. I've actually put the AI's on aggressive, sat there and watched the other Civs do absolutely nothing but expand their cities in a mundane fashion. I can also say that there is a same pattern for every Civ, that is, contact me, ask me to open my borders, contact me again and trade a resource, and then that is all I will hear from them till I win a space race/diplomatic victory. Ive never been declared on, or much less have seen another Civ goto war with another Civ. Its downright bad, and this is on Noble difficulty. Now I know, I could always up the difficulty, but I dont want to, I wanna play it on the difficulty I set it to, so that the other Civs dont start to get advantages over me. Also, the game is just downright slow pace wise, at least in Civ 3 there were compelling things to do at the start, like the resource and expansion races, in this there is just mash the spacebar over and over and over watching my worker do his thing. I would get started on religion and bombardment, but I think those have both been covered in other posts, needless to say, they are downright horrible in my opinion, not really in idea, but in execution, they just do nothing...
All in all, I still plan on playing Civ 4, and Im hoping with patches that they will get the AI right, but until then Civ 3 is clearly the better, more compelling, more established game. Anyone else feel like me?
-Chris
