Who has come back to Civ IV after playing Civ V?

[TheVampire]

Picked up Civ5 box. Saw the word STEAM. Promptly stuck all boxes of Civ5 behind the boxes of "Billy Bob's Bass Fishing 2005". Went home and kept playing Civ4.

 

[Ataxerxes]

Picked up Civ5 box. Saw the word STEAM. Promptly stuck all boxes of Civ5 behind the boxes of "Billy Bob's Bass Fishing 2005". Went home and kept playing Civ4.

You have saved yourself $50 and a lot of frustration. I'm staying with IV until VI and will be suspicious of VI when it is released. Mandatory Steam was one of the first things i disliked about the game. A lot of other people found a lot of other things to dislike about it.

 

[Skallagrimson]

Graphics. It's all about the graphics. Civ5 was supposed to be a step up but to me it was a giant leap back, all the way back to Civ1. I see fuzzy paint splotches on the screen, amorphous green and brown that are supposed to represent "land" and cloudy blue that supposed to be "ocean", and... this is what they brought on extra teams of graphics gurus to accomplish? Seriously?

And I would have been able to get past that and "just play the game", but halfway through my graphics card, which is middle of the road and not bottom-dollar ancient by any means, choked. So now it's not good enough to have to endure eyesore graphics but I have to throw $1,000 at Nvidia's gang of thieves for the privlege? SHOVE IT, Firaxis!

I used to have a lot of complaints about Civ4, but if the result of those complaints is Civ5, I'm gonna just keep my mouth shut, keep patching my XP machine, and quietly sit in the corner, playing a game that I can at least somewhat enjoy playing. Civ2 was the best of all the releases IMO but I've misplaced that CD, maybe I'll find it on a warez site and live happily ever after.

 

[Doctor Phibes]

Graphics. It's all about the graphics. Civ5 was supposed to be a step up but to me it was a giant leap back, all the way back to Civ1. I see fuzzy paint splotches on the screen, amorphous green and brown that are supposed to represent "land" and cloudy blue that supposed to be "ocean", and... this is what they brought on extra teams of graphics gurus to accomplish? Seriously?

And I would have been able to get past that and "just play the game", but halfway through my graphics card, which is middle of the road and not bottom-dollar ancient by any means, choked. So now it's not good enough to have to endure eyesore graphics but I have to throw $1,000 at Nvidia's gang of thieves for the privlege? SHOVE IT, Firaxis!

Absolutely. I just don't understand why Civ5 needs such a high graphics card spec, it's not refreshing textured polygons at a gazillion frames per second, for heaven's sake. I also agree that Civ4 graphics are aesthetically superior (it seems many disagree - maybe people just got too used to them), especially with Blue Marble (I haven't tried BAT mod yet, must). At least they fixed the insane 30-second wait between turns with the first Civ5 patch (on a quad-core machine that is), don't think that was graphics related, just rubbish pathfinding is the main theory people have. There was, and still is, some seriously bad code in there.

I used to have a lot of complaints about Civ4, but if the result of those complaints is Civ5, I'm gonna just keep my mouth shut, keep patching my XP machine, and quietly sit in the corner, playing a game that I can at least somewhat enjoy playing. Civ2 was the best of all the releases IMO but I've misplaced that CD, maybe I'll find it on a warez site and live happily ever after.

Yeah, be careful what you wish for. I remember thinking that the obvious next move would be using hexes - and why on earth hadn't they been used in Civ yet? Well, here we are, and if that's the price to be paid, I'll stay with a square grid, thank you.

And you can find currently Civ2 (and Civ1) on http://www.bestoldgames.net/ Not warez, I hasten to add, they're a pretty ethical site. But there is a lot of argument about whether particular titles there constitute 'abandonware' or not, sometimes they have to withdraw a download. It's a legal grey area, a lot of stuff that, while it is still copyright, isn't readily purchasable.

To be completist, I just found that Civ3C is going on Amazon for £1.99. Crazy, the P&P could end up as more than the product...

 

[Skallagrimson]

Civ2 crashes in WinDoze7 apparently. I'll give it a try on XP, last ditch...

 

[Skallagrimson]

Yaaaaay, runs on XP! Haha...

 

[Peregrine]

My experience w/Civ2 on Win7 is that, if you attempt to name or rename a city, it crashes to desktop. Also, some mods/scenarios won't run but will also shoot you out.

 

[GT_OKEZ]

Civ 5 was lacking in fun for me but it did re-spark my interest in IV Bts. I'm a lot worse of a player than I used to be but I'm getting my grove back

 

[lymond]

Yeah, besides suck gameplay, the CiV graphics did not wow me at all. In fact, after a while it really just starts to hurt my eyes. It might have better resolution due to a more modern engine and be all fluffy and stuff, but what I boiled it down to is that the graphics in CiV are not "tangible" and immersive. In Civ4 I feel I reach out and touch those hills and forests. When my army attacks I see and feel it. Furthermore, I know an Archer is and Archer or and Axe is an Axe without those stupid redundant icons - man I hate those unit icons. Yet you need them in CiV as in normal view it's hard to make out the units. They have no character. Anyway, CiV is epic fail. The fact that it's seems to be a marketing success is just baffling beyond belief.

 

[antidrocefalo]

Civ V is much better for some aspects(unit control) ,but I still prefer Civ IV+exp

 

[Left Foot]

Jumped back to Civ 4 yesterday. Tried a game with a leader I had never played before (my bad) and I had so much fun!

Civ 5's flaws for me are summarized in one word: boredom

At the end of the day, the game, for many reasons expounded and put forward already, is just too frigging boring. Pre and post patch.

Will keep playing 4 until Civ 6 is hopefully released. Can't see an expansion rescuing a broken concept.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

For those jumping back to Civ 4, and at the risk of sounding like a salesman I'd mention that civfanatics is still running Civ4 (and Civ3) Games of the month (GOTMs) where you get to play a game on a specially prepared map, and compare/discuss how you did with other people. I'm probably biased because I'm one of the GOTM staff but I always find those games a much more fun way to play Civ4.

http://gotm.civfanatics.net/ to get the latest games, or url=http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=85 for the Civ4 GOTM discussion forums.

One of the frustrations of Civ5, and another gripe against it that I have, is that (unbelievably) the game hasn't been set up to allow for single player competitions (for example Civ4 came out of the box with a basic ability to lock down a game, eg. by password protecting it to stop people using worldbuilder to edit it while playing - pretty essential if running a competition, as it'd hardly be fair of someone just used worldbuilder to give themselves a couple of tanks when they start playing! In Civ5, the lack of any support for locking down games means that, although several of the GOTM staff are very keen on holding Civ5 competitions and have put in a lot of work to try to make it happen, it's simply proved impossible to do it so far, and the best we've managed are informal 'training' games.