Icevulture said:
One thing I don't like about the game is how all these people seem to hate what the game is going to look like in the end. Too many are forgetting that the game is in a pre-alpha stage (or are they in alpha now). I think the leaderheads are great. In civ 3 the only thing that changed was the mouth. WOW, how lifelike. Now the head actually moves, eyes are blinking, there's a lil body language in there; much more of a pleasure to see. Of course the maps look like crap; they've probably spent most of their time programming the AI, rather than worrying about how cute and cuddly the map looks. I won't be making judgments until I see a very late stage version of beta, or I'm playing the retail version.
The unit size I don't see as a problem. The bigger the better. I get to see more detail. With all the people not liking the unit size, I recommend adding a toggle in the options menu to change the size of the units from small, to regular, to large.
Why do game companies show their unfinished games in events like E3? To see what people think about the game, before it is released. So, hearing some criticals and ideas is not bad, as there may be time to correct and tweak a lot of things. People are putting here most of their complains, so someone at Firaxis could read it (I don't know if any Firaxian reading this forum these days) or someone would collect most complains and send it to Firaxis' e-mail.
I agree with some points already written and I wll add some more:
- Units are too big in the map, while horsemen are even bigger;
- Leaderheads really look cartoonish, as their heads look big - maybe reworking proportions they can look better;
- Mountains are terribly ugly - I think mountais don't reaaly need to be so high and rounded as they appear;
- Forests must have more variety of trees - tree species could vary accordingly to latitudes;
- Few civilizations, comparing to Conquests - ok, it's hard to set all of them, make them have different traits etc, but everyone has at least one existing civilization avaiable in C3C that wishes in Civ4. Known "missing civs" that I would like to see again: Incans, Celts, Portugueses, Carthagians, Ottomans.
Ok, you'll say that some of these civs will appear in a very possible expansion pack, right? I don't want to buy a game knowing that it will have an expansion, because it looks like "the game is not finished". Civ3 had two expansion packs and it's unfinished yet, because there are several bugs that must be fixed. I bought Civ3 only when PTW was released - bought Civ3 and PTW together. While the game will be released here one or two month after most countries, I'll have time to see first impressions in this forum, which will surely have influence in my decision to buy the game when it is released or to wait the release of a expansion pack, as I did before.
In my opinion, expansion packs must exist only when they are really required, adding many features of the game, most of them requests of consumers - not like game industry is doing now: releasing an unfinished product to sell its "missing parts" (pay half game now and half game next year). In PTW, the main "feature" was the missing support for multiplayer. In C3C, there were some good features, like AA units and the scenario pack, called "conquests". Of course, new civs and units appear in both exps. But as far as I know, nothing is said about Civ4 having AA units or scenarios like in C3C.
. They're talking bout the leaderheads shown in that Gamespot video, particularly Ghandi I believe. 
