Civilization IV is out...

[Fig]

...and is goddamn awesome. There seems to be difficulties with getting it to work on certain computers, but once you can play, it's an awesome game experience, MUCH superior to the previous versions.

Every fan of Civ, Alpha Centauri and other such Empire Building games should really check it out

 

[Murgatroyd]

Now I just wait for the Mac version. Any word on when it'll be out?

 

[Fig]

Not yet, unfortunately.

Let's hope they don't decide to shaft you guys over.

 

[Murgatroyd]

Maybe I should see if I can figure out where my old Civ install discs went. And then find out if it runs on my current system.

 

[Fig]

In other news - one has got to give big props to the team at Firaxis on setting up the atmosphere for this game.

I mean it. Seriously.

Take the opening track. It opens with only the most primitive percussions and voice - a very african style - slowly bringing in more complexes percussions. The lyrics are in an african language, although they are a translation of some of the most famous (and most frequently) spoken words in history - the prayer of the lord. Then as the tunes evolve, they roll in violins, brasses - it's the kind of music that makes you feel history is unfolding before your eyes.

And it doesn't end there. Thsoe of you who played Civ I will remember an opening text - "In the beginning, the earth was without form...". Well, that's back to pass the time while your scenario loads up, except this time, it's a full voiced-out speech, and with the infamnous Leonard Nimoy doing the narration - another appropriate choice there.

And then there's the soundtrack as a whole. We're not talking slouchy game soundtrack here : we're talking seventy-six musical tracks totalling nearly eight hours of music. And we're not talking some randomly made-up pieces : though there are some custom-made tracks, the vast majority are (public domain) classics from all the masters - Mozart, Bachs, Saint-Saens, Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov, Beethoven, etc - providing the renaissance and industrial eras soundtracks, where the middle age turn more toward gregorian chants (among other things*), and so forth. The end result is an immersive soundtrack that takes a long time to get repetitive.

*Archaic : if you read this, I'm dead certain that at least one of those other track was also used in EU II :-D.

 

[Zhen Lin]

They got Spock to read Genesis? How... illogical.

So. Tell me, this game, it spans a DVD at least?

 

[Juputoru]

Great. Now I REALLY want to get this :X Well, more than I did before. D:

I guess I'll live with Civ II and III for now :/ Tell me one thingo things go more like Civ II or Civ III in terms of how fast the turns go? Because the turns in Civ III take FOREVER after several centuries pass in-game...

 

[Fig]

One DVD in Europe ; dual CDs in N-AM.

And it's more like Civ II as far as the flow of the game goes. There is no moving hordes of workers around to fix polutions (for the obvious reasons that polution is NOT a whack-a-mole game anymore; what it does now is simply to make health in your cities worse, thus eventually causing slower population growth, if not outright starvation).

In general, every nation will have fewer cities, but MUCH better developped ones. That's because, instead of the old system (where having many cities simply made your later cities less productive due to corruption, but you still got money et al out of them ; whereas city improvements always had a maintenance cost),, the new system gives CITIES a maintenance cost (so founding extra cities can actually lead to you making LESS money), but improvements have no maintenance costs.

What this translates to is, building a handful of well-developed (city improvements) cities is FAR superior to City-spam in Civ IV (ie, found as many cities as you can, as fast as you can).

The direct corollary to that is that fewer cities means fewer units to attack, fewer units to defend, and thus, FAR less slowdown in the later game.

Oh, and another thing to mention - Barbarians do NOT build camps anymore, this time. They get Barbarian Cities (and can capture extra cities). Which means that attacking those barbarian camps is all the more valuables - it can net you a new city without having to build a settler.

And, given that settlers are a LOT more costly than they used to be, and htat your cities does NOT grow when building a settler (or worker), free cities are generally a good thing (as long as you are planning to bother upgrading the city)

(And no Zhen - it may START like Genesis, but the full speech is decided NOT Genesis-esque. I'm PRETTY sure Gen doesn't mention Bacterias and Dinosaurs)

 

[Juputoru]

Less emphasis on madly expanding your number of cities, eh? Probably a smart change, and shorter turns are always good...

After digging through the flood of info that's sprung up, seemingly overnight...
-There are a ton of new variant options, including...One City Challenge! Maybe I can be more convinced to try it now that there's an option to make sure I don't back out of it ^_^' And Always Peace looks nice, considering that I'm generally a peaceful player anyway.
-You can get experiance from goodie huts now. And it looks like there are XP points now. An improvment over the "hope their rank goes up in battle" thing, I guess. And it look like you can pick different promotions, which grant different bonuses.(for instance, you can upgrade a warrior to Combat I, which increases overall strength, Woodsman I, which increases strength in forest and jungle terrains, and City Raider I, which increases City Attack. And Woodsman II gives the Warrior an extra movement point in Jungle and Forest tiles!)
-Borders seem to mean more this time around. Hmm...I wonder if that pesky old "AI civ settles in that tiny hole in your borders" thing is gone now?
-Religio...er, Spritiual civs once again have a lack of Anarchy. And they have a head start on researching religious techs.
-Converting from one religion to another apparently causes anarchy. Which makes sense...
-Religions do quite a few things; I'd post the list I found, but I want to keep this post semi-short. Most notable is that you need a religion to build temples, cathredrals, etc.
-You have to research basic worker actions like Mining and *road building* this time around.
-If you start building one thing and switch to something else: Good News - You don't lose your work on the first thing since its shields are stored. Bad News - You seemingly can't transfer shields from one project to another, ala pre-builds.
-It looks like you can see the exact benefit/harm a given thing is doing to your relationship to another civ.
-High culture levels provide a defense bonus?
-I've come across my first piece of corny dialogue. Caesar:"Care for some salad? I made it myself." Now really...
-Your untis can now share a space with units from another civ instead of having to kill the other units. Yay.
-You can see which tiles are being worked right from the main game screen.
-Similar to buildings, if you change from researching one thign to another, the research on the first tech is stored. Hurrah.
-Civics is basically Civ4's form of government. The catagories are Government, Legal, Labor, Economy, and Religion. Changing them brings anarchy with it.
-In order to produce Great Leaders, er, Great People, you need Great Person points. There are different kinds of points for different Great People, and which ones you get vary depending on the specialists and Wonders in a city.
-Remember The Oracle? One of those wonders that wasn't very useful before? Now it grants a free tech of the builder's choice!
-If you get beaten to a wonder, the shields built up for it are given back to you in the form of gold.
-Roads don't increase commerce anymore. Instead, you build cottages, which can grow into hamlets, then villages, and then towns.
-You can't pay Gold for things until reaching Currency...which is a thir dof the way up the tech tree.
-The AI remembers if you were helped it out early in the game. 8D

I'd go on, but I think you get the point. Now I really, *really* want Civ IV ;_; They've improved on so much...

 

[Fig]

After digging through the flood of info that's sprung up, seemingly overnight...
-There are a ton of new variant options, including...One City Challenge! Maybe I can be more convinced to try it now that there's an option to make sure I don't back out of it ^_^' And Always Peace looks nice, considering that I'm generally a peaceful player anyway.

And "No Razing" is a godsend for scenario-making. Seriously.

-You can get experiance from goodie huts now. And it looks like there are XP points now. An improvment over the "hope their rank goes up in battle" thing, I guess. And it look like you can pick different promotions, which grant different bonuses.(for instance, you can upgrade a warrior to Combat I, which increases overall strength, Woodsman I, which increases strength in forest and jungle terrains, and City Raider I, which increases City Attack. And Woodsman II gives the Warrior an extra movement point in Jungle and Forest tiles!)

Someone's seen Sulla's walkthrough :-D.

-Borders seem to mean more this time around. Hmm...I wonder if that pesky old "AI civ settles in that tiny hole in your borders" thing is gone now?

I certainly have yet to see it! This time around, instead of people being able to enter your territory and you having to kick them out by diplomacy, they actually have to ask you BEFORE entering.

-Religio...er, Spritiual civs once again have a lack of Anarchy. And they have a head start on researching religious techs.

Spiritual is probably my favorite trait so far. I always hated anarchy (even if it's only one turn for the non-spiritual civs too, this game)

-Religions do quite a few things; I'd post the list I found, but I want to keep this post semi-short. Most notable is that you need a religion to build temples, cathredrals, etc.

Most notable is the way religion affects international politics. Picking your religion has a large impact on who's friendly to you and who isn't.

And then of course, there's the Shrine Wonders, which provide you with +1 gold for every city of the matching religion in the world. Provided you can get a GReat Prophet to build them, and I STILL have to goddamn get one, which is pissing me off because most of the world is Confucean, and I got the Confucean Holy City.

-You have to research basic worker actions like Mining and *road building* this time around.

Not road-building, I don't think. Not that it changes much.

-If you start building one thing and switch to something else: Good News - You don't lose your work on the first thing since its shields are stored. Bad News - You seemingly can't transfer shields from one project to another, ala pre-builds.

And even better new : NO MORE GODDAMN AI WONDER CASCADES! If you're the only nation building a particular wonder for 10 turns, you will NOT get the AI switching from another wonder to the one you're building just in time to snag it from you.

-It looks like you can see the exact benefit/harm a given thing is doing to your relationship to another civ.

Yes, and that's very useful.

-High culture levels provide a defense bonus?

Yup.

-I've come across my first piece of corny dialogue. Caesar:"Care for some salad? I made it myself." Now really...

I don't know. I always liked those little bits of dialogue. Especially "I'll show you mine if you show me yours..." (for world maps) in C3...

-Your untis can now share a space with units from another civ instead of having to kill the other units. Yay.
-You can see which tiles are being worked right from the main game screen.
-Similar to buildings, if you change from researching one thign to another, the research on the first tech is stored. Hurrah.

All true. Worked mines have light inside them, worked mills are turning, etc.

-Civics is basically Civ4's form of government. The catagories are Government, Legal, Labor, Economy, and Religion. Changing them brings anarchy with it.

Unless you're spiritual, in which case you get to flip-flop in ways John Kerry couldn't begin to imagine. :-D. And of course, different combinations of civics serves completely different types of strategies.

-In order to produce Great Leaders, er, Great People, you need Great Person points. There are different kinds of points for different Great People, and which ones you get vary depending on the specialists and Wonders in a city.
-Remember The Oracle? One of those wonders that wasn't very useful before? Now it grants a free tech of the builder's choice!

Yeah, it went from Boring-Ass wonder to a Lite version of one of Civ II/III's most broken wonders (Theory of Evolution/Darwin's Voyage).

-If you get beaten to a wonder, the shields built up for it are given back to you in the form of gold.
-Roads don't increase commerce anymore. Instead, you build cottages, which can grow into hamlets, then villages, and then towns.

Or you build a variety of other improvements - windmill produce some trade as well (and some food too), and so forth. There is a lot of choice in how to improve land, now.

-You can't pay Gold for things until reaching Currency...which is a thir dof the way up the tech tree.
-The AI remembers if you were helped it out early in the game. 8D

Oh yes. I'm up at +12 or so relations-wise with Peter (Russia) and Alex (Greek), and not far being with Genghis because I've been nice to them.

Hatshepsut, OTOH, hates me.