Wow, didn't expect Civ5 to get trounced quite that badly. Guess it still needs several expansions and patches before it's worth getting.
III and IV are the only ones I've played the full games of, and I prefer the former. But with all expansions and patches, IV isn't a bad game. In Vanilla, IV was pretty disappointing compared to III (Vanilla or Conquests). Some of my major complaints with IV include map size (lack of epicness), hard limitations to enforce fairness (such as not being able to pay GPT for technologies, because you [or the AI] might DOW one turn later), and some of the combat options (such as buildings being invulnerable to planes, and the way artillery worked [especially in Vanilla Civ4 where you could more or less make your entire army artillery and still win]). That said there were some things I liked in IV, such as the more fluid tech tree.
I played some IV earlier this year but in the past month have only played III.
I've also played the V demo, but wasn't enthralled by it as I was with previous Civ versions when I first played them (even Civ4 Vanilla). Didn't seem worth spending lots of money on at its current state.
The best part about Civ 3 was the immensity of the maps. Civ 4 felt like it was too cramped. You met everyone too fast, and the world was pretty much settled by the time the Renaissance came around. It was possible to enter the Modern Era in Civ 3 and still have not explored, much less settled, the edges of the world.
*scratch his head*
You can make maps as big as the ones in Civ3, so I don't really get your point here.
I agree with Cheezy, and while you technically
can make maps as large as in Civ3, there's a major issue with that in Civ4, called Memory Allocation Failures. Take a 220x220 Extra Large map in Civ3, and it has about the same # of tiles as a 192x120 Extra Large map in Civ4 (isometric view accounted for). Civ3's AI turn times will probably be pretty slow in the late industrial/early modern ages, but it won't crash. With Civ4, you'll probably start getting crashes at some point due to inadequate memory. With later Civ4 versions it won't happen as early, but it will probably still happen. And I'd much rather have somewhat slow turn times than crashes. I don't even know if Civ4's turn times would actually be noticeably faster, either.
If you went with the largest possible Civ3 maps at 65,000 tiles, I'm not sure you'd even be able to start a Civ4 game with an equivalently large map (320x200), but there's entire scenarios with that large of Civ3 maps. I don't play them due to the turn time issue, but there definitely do have followings.
Corporations and religions are always fun. 2 is good fun too, because it's straightforward.
