Utterly disappointing....

[karambunai]

Though I just started playing Civ 4 about a week ago, I am not an entire noobie to the game. I have been playing Sid Meier's Civilization series since the first civ back in those Microprose days. Never before has Sid disappointed me like the release of Civ 4. I put such a high hope for the game and it turned out to be...to be...I don't know. Seemed like Firaxis had taken a step backward instead of forward. The game's problematic, my computer keep crashing, the graphic horrible (in relation to the previous Civ 3), the tech tree haphazardly drawn, and the game was dragging badly on my PC. My specs :

AMD Althlon 64 2.8 GHz
256 MB Nvidia FX-5200
I GB physical memory (RAM)
Window XP SP2

I thought this is suffcient for any game currently in the market. But apparently people at Firaxis are expecting us to get a supercomputer to play this game. I have already set the detail setting at medium but sadly it is still insufficient. And considering the built icon inside the city's interface look like 16-bit, this is a bit too much. Some of the facts in the game are wrong. The building featured as 'The Kremlin' is actually 'St. Basil Cathedral' in Red Square. The building featured as 'Masjid Al-Haram' is actually 'Masjid Al-Aqsa' (Dome of Rock). M A Haram is in Mecca while M A Aqsa is in Jerusalem. As for other wonders, some of them are not even wonders. What is so special about Scotland Yard and West Point???? And the game depicted Scotland yard as the hotbed for spying as spies can only be created in the city that have Scotland Yard. Graphically, the only improvement made by Firaxis is the meaningless zoom in-zoom out feature.

As for the tech tree, I have never been as confused as this before. Some of the tech got arrows pointed at them from the previous tech but they can be researched without having to research the previous tech. Yet others, like Flight have no arrows coming from anywhere but in order to research Flight you need to have Physics. Farms can be built without the benefit of water. (after you discovered Biology) This is the best joke. Farming without water? You go figure. Why is oil revealed much earlier then the technology required to obtain it? (land pump - combustion, sea derrick - plastics).

Unit upgrading is also haphazardly done. Why is one allowed to built so many type of units when the ultimate upgrade for all of them is the Infantry? If all units ultimately will become the Infantry, then what is the point? Ship upgrading is another foul-up. Why is that one can upgrade a frigate (wooden vessel) into a destroyer (iron vessel) and a destroyer could not be upgraded to a battleship (another iron vessel)?

There are a lot of other foul-ups, f***-ups, and proof showing that this game is rushed into the market as a work-in-progress, not a final product. Because I don't believe the people at Firaxis who had brought me hours of entertainment through their previous products such as Alpha Centauri, Civ3 and Sid meier's Pirates! are this incompetent. Think whatever you like of me, I don't care. CIV IV SUCKS BIG TIME!!!!

 

[automator]

To begin, you have anger problems. Civ4 is a videogame, and if you don't like it, just realize it was only $50 spent. Since you've been playing Civ forever, I assume you make enough money that $50 isn't so much that you had to choose between food and entertainment for the month, so you're loss is pretty minimal.

As for the computer issues ... you've gotta look at the competition. Every game on the planet now has a powerful 3D engine. I think it's B.S., but I long for the return of the side scrolling action shooter. I just found out that Prince of Persia has changed to a 3D game, and I call that blasphemy.

Sure, fact checking could have been a little more precise, but I don't think a mislabeled wonder is quite enough reason to hate a game. And your point about West Point not being wonderful enough is simply lame. It's a National Wonder, and not a World Wonder. So yeah, it's wonderful, but not quite wonderful enough to draw crowds from around the world.

As for the tech problems, I don't think Biology allows "farming without water" ... I believe the intention is that Biology allows for better irrigation techniques, or perhaps large-scale hydroponics. I'll admit that I'm a little confused over the timing of oil revelation, but getting scientific method gives you a window to where you should expand next (assuming you have no oil).

Upgrading can be a non-issue if you just use the units you build. And destroyers don't upgrade to battleships because they are both modern naval units necessary to have an effective navy. Have you noticed that they each have distinct advantages?

 

[ellie]

Relax mate, ok im dissapointed with the game as well, but not upset by it..that gains nothing.

Do what im doing, go back to c3c for a while and wait for a few patches.

At least civ games are supported, many arent.

 

[chriskjel]

karambunai,

Your video card blows, why a $50 card on an otherwise decent system?

 

[Reg Pither]

Karambunai, this might be an obvious question, but have you patched the game to the latest version, 1.52? It makes a lot of difference to performance for most people and adds a few useful extras.

 

[ZippyRiver]

Not all units upgrade to infantry. And limiting yourself to only infantry units is not a very good start. Gunships eat infantry, so you want to upgrade a few units to SAMs. Cavs upgrade to gunships. Not very logical from an equipment POV, but for game play I would rather cavs upgrade to BB than become totally useless. I also don't upgrade every single unit. Onlythose that haved been promoted well "deserve" the upgrade. namely because of the cost.

Biology does allow building farms without ground access to surface water, and gives even more food (iirc) if there is access. This is fine also. Hydrophonic farming is still small scale compared to the massive land farms, but not unviable.

World wonders. This was funny. I seriously doubt China decided to build a wall for the purpose of it becomming a world wonder. It was built to keep "barbarians" from getting away with the loot, and keep new ones from getting in. It was not considered a wonder of the world for quite some time. Westpoint, 350 years from now, might be considered a "world wonder" by future historians. No way of knowing. (so might Fort Knox).

Sure, then game might have been a little rushed, but this is not a new thing. I think Firaxis did a good job addressing a lot of issues. Sure, some bugs slipped through, but this also is not unexpected. They knew there were going to be complaints about how they chose to balance the(ir) game, and designed it so the player, if they so choose, can modify it to suit thier own tastes.

As with any new game, one must keep in mind that "it is what it is", and not necessarily what the purchaser wants it to be. We all have hopes of an uber-tbs game. And when you get something other than that, it is normal to feel frustration. This does not mean it's a bad game. Try and look at it like it was the very first TBS game ever made, and you have to learn all the ins and outs of a new genre. with no preconcieved ideas of how you would have designed it. IMO, the game is a lot of fun. It's hard at first, but thats a good thing. namely because before you can learn to play and enjoy the game you have to unlearn your past experiences and remember this is not your ultimate fantasy game. I would have done a lot of things differently, but I am not going to let that ruin my actual game play experience on this title. If I really really want my "perfect game", I will learn to program and make the damn thing. (I have contemplated this a long time, lol)

 

[calyth]

And I thought I need to be on Prozac.
Icons not matching names aren't that big of a deal - pure uranium isn't green, but it allows you to see it easier (without the resource tag that I normally use).
Funny how you complain about being able to see oil, but not to know how to use strategically (i.e. put a well). In the beginning you run across what you know to be cows, or pigs, but if you don't have animal husbandry, you don't really know how to use it. This isn't all that surprising. I'm sure there are plenty of resources in the ancient world where they've seen it but don't know what to do with it.
Arrows could be interpreted to be progressions from one technology to the other. When you discover alphabet, you can progress to have commerce (to be able to deal diplomatically in cash, cause you can finally write that IOU) or have math, simply because you need to write the stuff down. Whereas Flight is something totally new, but without knowing Physics (like Newton's laws, or Bernoulli's principles) you're much less likely to fly, but to make a joke out of yourself, like so many others recorded to have done so on black and white movies.
All units does not become infantry. Upgrading Cavalrymen leads to Gunships. This shows that you're haste in making your claims. And having many of them converge to Infantry made sense. Sure, one could argue that armies didn't stop using Grenades, but in history, sometimes Infantry (I think they're taking the view of WWI/WWII infantry here) use Grenades. They don't particularly animate the Infantry using a Grenade, but the progression isn't exactly irrational.
You can't upgrade a Frigate to Destroyers to Battleships, well it is kinda artificial. But Destroyers and Battleships are basically of the same era. You can't exactly upgrade Warriors to Swordsmen either. I speculate that the point was Swordsmen have abilities that weren't seen before (i.e. City attack [too little bonus IMO]), and same could be argued for the Battleship.
These alone doesn't really make the game "sucks".
There are many indication that the game is unpolished, and the developers need to take responsibilities. Many ATI gamers had problem. There are many UI quirks that are still not addressed in 1.52 (like the inabillity of the UI to remember any settings, or having the unit/building/wonder list jump around like crazy once you select one of them). The developers do lurk these forums, and I think there has been enough complaints around here to make them feel pretty bad about it. They also rushed in 1.52 right before Christmas.
The game itself is very resource intensive, and should be address. Because of this, it will stress out machines pretty badly, and if they're unstable when stressed, it will crash very badly. There's a good indication (aside from the ATI bugs) that some of the gamers suffering from severe crashes/CTD/BSODs may have unstable computers. When I was messing with my computer settings, I accidentally OCed my AthlonXP 2500+ to a 3200+. Guess what, I was playing Civ 4 and it BSODed on me. Then when I reboot I realized that I OC the computer beyond its stability limit.

 

[Zekrazey1]

AMD Althlon 64 2.8 GHz
256 MB Nvidia FX-5200
I GB physical memory (RAM)
Window XP SP2

I thought this is suffcient for any game currently in the market. But apparently people at Firaxis are expecting us to get a supercomputer to play this game.

My computer is worse than yours and it runs it fine...

What is so special about Scotland Yard and West Point???? And the game depicted Scotland yard as the hotbed for spying as spies can only be created in the city that have Scotland Yard.

They're abstractions...

As for the tech tree, I have never been as confused as this before. Some of the tech got arrows pointed at them from the previous tech but they can be researched without having to research the previous tech. Yet others, like Flight have no arrows coming from anywhere but in order to research Flight you need to have Physics.

You should look at the tech tree poster, instead of the tech tree in the game, it shows all the arrows unlike the in-game one. You can still see the pre-requisites in the in-game on by hovering over the icons, just not all the arrows. Also, this demonstrates that you havn't even educated yourself on some of the fundamentals of the game before this little rant of yours. They've introduced either-or paths through the tech tree. For example, Pottery requires The Wheel and only one of either Agriculture or Fishing.

Farms can be built without the benefit of water. (after you discovered Biology) This is the best joke. Farming without water? You go figure.

Farming without open channel irrigation, what's so unbelievable about that?

Why is oil revealed much earlier then the technology required to obtain it? (land pump - combustion, sea derrick - plastics).

Why not? One minute you're complaining about lack of realism, next you're complaining about something that is entirely realistic. Humans have often known about a resource before having the technology to extract it in any meaningful fashion. People have known about oil for a long time, mass extraction and utilization is a recent thing.

 

[Patriarch]

Looks like someone forgot to suspend their disbelief before double clicking that Civ 4 icon.

 

[pdathert]

To the Original Poster

*applauds*

Absolutely spot on, every last word.

Firaxis have forgotton what Civ is about, i.e. GAMEPLAY and gone foolishly in my opinion down a route that is too graphics intensive for the genre!

 

[ZippyRiver]

Yes, it's very graphic intensive for the genre. A genre that has been dying a slow death because the majority of new gamers like the eye candy. I can get used to the eyecandy, and all the frustration that entails, if it means more TBS games in the future. (I umm.... strongly dislike rts).

The warrior said "I don't want one of those new fangled swords, I like my wooden club!"

 

[bob_the_insane]

Well my personal experience is that it is great fun... My system is AMD64 +3200, 2GB RAM, GF6800GT 256MB (and so on...). It runs very well with only a hint of stutter while I zoom out to see the whole world (running at 1280x1024 with everything on high plus FSAA) and the only crashes I have seen in the hours of play since a picked up CIV4 the other day was the tutorial crashing out. The game proper has been great and stable. Now I did go straight to the 1.52 patch as soon as I installed it so my experience has not been marred by any earlier version instability.

Playing the game I find to to be fun and it makes the hours rush past, which is the core of any Sid game. It is recognisably CIV with all the abstractions and simplifications that go along with that. And as for all the variety of old units upgrading to Riflemen, well is that not just a comment on the development of a modern military. At least you aren't force to still have pikemen running around....

I am not trying to be arguementative as your opinion is your own and perfectly valid and fair, but as it is posted in a public forum I have to say that I disagree...

 

[TerraHero]

The maker of this topic should get a beter videocard, thats for sure.

But on the otherhand, why does a game from the Civ series all of a sudden need a good videocard? Its always been about gameplay. And now its about graphics, wich have brought alot of problems to many people.

 

[cthom]

AMD Althlon 64 2.8 GHz
256 MB Nvidia FX-5200
I GB physical memory (RAM)
Window XP SP2

I thought this is suffcient for any game currently in the market. But apparently people at Firaxis are expecting us to get a supercomputer to play this game. :

my specs are quite minimal (slower, smaller) and it worked straight out of the box. are you running other progs at the same time as the game? I've never had a crash with the game- original or with patch 1.52

 

[MarcoPolo]

Get an Nvidia 6600GT or better and you'll notice a big improvement in game performance. It took me a while to adjust from CivII to CivIII. Now I'm adjusting from C3C to Civ4. You just have to play through a few games to completion to get used to the new graphics and game concepts. Civ4 is a pretty descent game that has some room for improvment. They have changed a lot of things but the basic foundation of the game is still there.

 

[Zekrazey1]

I'm running it with a geforce 3, 64MB (old old old old) with no problems. The only thing I can't do is play on huge maps because I only have 512 MB RAM.

 

[Xenocrates]

Just remember this is Civ you're talking about not some computer game

 

[Older than Dirt]

This thread was obviously posted in jest. Note that the quote at the end is from one purported "King Phillips of Macendonia." Was a king of Macedonia ever named after a moving van company in the USA or given a Welshman's surname?

 

[lord_graywolfe]

well my system stats are in my sig and while i had some problems at the start since the 1.52 patch came out the game works great now, i imagine if i upgrade to 1gb of ram that it would run even better. as to some of your other issues. as has already been stated there are national wonders in this game which are the same as the small wonders from C3. the upgrades of the units i actually like the way they did it this time as on many units you have 2 choices on what to upgrade to. it makes sense to me that as technology improved that most of your foot units would end up as infantry, they did the same in C3 ending up with infantry and marines. as to the naval upgrades the only thing i ever found wrong with them was that the frigate could upgrade to the destroyer but not to the ironclad. the tech tree is much improved over C3 as it allows multiple paths through it and blending of ages. all i could ask of them there is to make it bigger by adding in more techs.

 

[ellie]

Ive tried it on 2 machines

1) XP 2600, 768MB ram, 9250 ATI card (128Mb)

2) Athlon 64 4800+ brand new, x800 card, 1GB ram


1) Was unplayable. Should have worked imho as within Specs.

2) Took tweaking to get it to work then ran ok.

Anyway i have a question for those who played C3C first.


I tried this game, and was dissapointed as the origonal poster was. I hated the graphics / slooow camera swing etc sooooo much.

So for my 30 pounds ive had several hours of tweaking machines, and 30 mins of civ IV gameplay.

Should i give it another go?. Is there a great game in there if your willing to persevere?