Civilization 4: Teh Official Thread

I don't like war very much and like to focus on beating them at some sort of industrial or culture race so just spending that much time warring it up wears my brain out.

I played the tutorial of the demo of this. It seems quite nice (I really didn't like III, for reasons I've forgotten), but buggered if I'm getting back into this day-and-night-swallowing monster.

I think the A.I in 3 was bad compared to the rest but A.I in civ always cheats, they have codified this in 4 by giving you a little pop-up when you choose yr difficulty level saying that the computer A.I will research and produce faster than you by some amount. Noble difficulty = the computer produces etc. the same speed as you, anything above that they start getting bonuses.

My initial impression is that its not a huge improvement from the old ones. I imagine I'll play the shit out of it for a number of years like I did 3, but dont have enough time these days..

ROFFLE

Gone til Novembr.

RAMBO

or at least, i haven't found them yet.

You get the odd anonymous unsolicited nudge like 'build a lighthouse there' but I miss the angry defence guy, the hott foreign minister and Elvis. I like how 'great artists' look like Elvis though.

http://www.civfanatics.com/civ4/info/wonders/buildings0072.jpg

oh wait, here we are. and here.

Whoa, how many games use a dozen John Adams tracks?

It's not even as though I've got a low end system, bloody infuriating seeing as the game itself is great

also, not being able to hurry a Wonder is bullshit. That's how i won all those Civ/Civ 2 games.

i haven't experimented with the exclusive units much, but getting a fleet of panzers to roll across the continent is a hoot.

but: I AM TIRED. SO TIRED. in bed after 1am every weekday last week.

I tried playing this online against random people recently. I suck at it so badly.

Does everyone always start off in the same continent in this version? The only way I've found around it is to use the custom game feature and choose "custom continents - one per team", the "duel" world is far too small for me.

KEN C, i'll crush yr puny civ anytime.

http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/beyondthesword/

another exp. pack is coming out this summer

PLaying the Warlords exp. I like the additional graphics to the landscape.

Friend got a laptop, finally got to Lan it up. My life is complete.

WTF this game is so hard! I'm barely holding my own in the rear of the pack about 4 difficulty levels up.

Yeah those boys don't play nice. Only strategy I've had much joy with so far is to get armies built quick and get your bullying in early - expand through conquest in the early stages. Of course that depends which civ you're playing.

so scared to install this game

i like to build pretty things and just pray that no-one attacks me.

i like to build pretty things and just pray that no-one attacks me.

TOTALLY, ME TOO

Do I need the expansions for this to be awesomer, or are the expansions duds? What about the other games made with its engine ie. Colonization remake?

If you get the expansions, only get Beyond The Sword, it has everything that Warlords has apart from the scenarios.

I'm a passive-aggressive pacifist, leaning heavily toward the passive. I don't attack unless I have like at least 8 cities and the other guy is isolated in a corner by all of my cities and still has warriors walking around while I have electricity. I really hate fighting. I've won both of the Civ 4 games I've played so far, but I only at the lowest and second lowest difficulty settings.

Also, Civ 4 plays on a G4. I know, because...I play it on a G4.

Ha, yeah, I've always been one of those passive Civ players too. But I also tended to stay in the first two difficulty levels, too, I'm just not aggressive enough to keep expanding and fighting everybody off.

I'd really love to see them go back towards the limited unique factions/story-driven stuff they did in Alpha Centuari, but I guess that's not happening.

So lots of new civ coming out.
I enjoyed the demo of Civilization Revolution on the Xbox360 and the prospect of it on the DS has me very intrigued and very worried for my free time if it turns out to be any good at all...
I'm pretty certain I'm buying the Colonization remake on the Civ 4 engine as Colonization was one of my favourite games on the Amiga.

Colonization is one of my favourite games ever, i sometimes still go back and play the windows version. So excited by the remake.

CONTINENTAL CONGRESS.

http://images.eurogamer.net/assets/articles//a/1/4/9/0/8/5/ss_preview_3.jpg.jpg?slideshow=true

is it racist? it looks like it might be a bit racist. it certainly made me very uncomfortbale the first time i encounted these 'barbarians'. i am hoping that there is more variety to the barbarians in the full game and we get some beardy Gaul types etc. then i would feel a tiny bit better about blow pipe dude.

otherwise, the demo gets the big thumbs up from me. after micromanaging Civ 4 to stupid degrees to try and compete on the top levels i am loving the idea of playing Civ for fun again. it's slick and smooth and entertaining. i like the exaggerated civ bonuses and all of the new concepts they have introduced so far seem positive to me. i think this game will seal my defection to the consoletard camp.

Yeah those boys don't play nice.

yeah they'll jut start wars for no reason even if theyre "pleased" with me, so after about 0ad, im pretty much at a constant state of war. ugh

The difficulty levels are weird. The one right before the one I'm on is way too easy - the computer doesnt start any wars at all, etc. i used to be ablet o beat civ3 on fairly high difficulty levels.. oh well, ill go practice some more

to borrow a phrase, Civ4 has a difficulty curve like hitting a brick wall.

I have seen "braveheart" style barbarians in the demo, so presumably there are multiple barbarian types.

ok, that makes it less of a slur and more of an ill-conceived parody. post-bottleopener white middle class guilt assuaged for now.

what did you think of the game?

so this is out today yeah? anyone got it?

I've played the demo twice and enjoyed it as a lightweight conquest oriented version of Civ.
I'm probably going to wait and see if the DS version is any good rather than buying the 360 version though I am putting it in my rental queue.

The main result of playing the demo has been to get me back to playing Civ 4 on the PC.

the advisers in the demo make me want to throw something through the tv

ahem, advisors

advisors will get old reeeeal quick, no doubt about it.

the conquest-oriented bias is a result of the demo itself more than the game, i think - having a shortened time span and offering only the 2 easiest settings. i like what they've doen with tying culture to the population size more, and the new target-settign appraoch to non-violent winning seems like a very good idea for this version of the series.

because US release isn't until July i got a copy ordered to my folks' house back in England and they're mailing it over to me, so with luck I'll have it middle of next week. perfect timing, as just about done with GTA sp.

I didn't mind the advisors but the demo just made me want to put down the controller and play some Civ IV. It just feels, as I thought it would, more clunky, more restricted, and a bit less open ended than I hoped. I think I liked the Battlefield demo more and I don't even really like FPSes.

i guess i should underline that the big attraction for me here is that, afaic, Civ4 can go fuck itself in the eye with a barbed dildo. i have definitely had enough of grinding against the poorly balanced harder difficulty levels and am ready to enjoy myself playing a Civ game again.

That's fair, I guess what I REALLY want to do is just play me some Galactic Civilizations II which maybe the best 4X game to come out in like a decade.

pah i have gone and ordered it anyway. i'll blame you guys if it sucks!

No you won't. You'll love it, narration especially.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3141/2519389972_da6424fe4e.jpg?v=0

I took this photo in the Civ:Rev booth at MCM Expo this year. I like to think that dude has never played Civ before, but the thought going through his head right there and then is "I should really go do something else. One more turn."

I'm gonna play again this weekend, it has been too long.

damn you amazon!

Civ on a console just seems odd; maybe just the lack of a mouse.

I think I had Civ 2 on the Playstation, maybe even before I'd played it on a PC. It worked okay.

surprisingly nice interface on Civ Rev with the pad. they obviously paid a lot of attention to getting it right.

of course, i can only speak of my experience with the demo becasue my copy still hasn't arrived from the UK yet, a week after sending. not time for panic stations yet but if it got 'lost' in the mail i am going to storm into the post office and hurl my shit at them like a chimp.

lol

I played some Civ 4 the other day and had fun! Also played GalCivII and had fun! sure it's a bit same-y (civ4) but imo, if you want more of a challenge w/o jumping up a diff. level, make the map smaller and add more dudes or something, or make yourself beat the game by conquering instead of going to space or whatever.

but yeah the worst part of that game imo is the fighting. i never win even when i have musketeers vs longbowben yaaaargh.

no sign of CR yet. fucking amazon cunts

so i finally got to play the full game yesterday. having played the demo a couple of times i figured i was up to speed on the gameplay, but i didn't want to be too cocky so i played the 2nd hardest difficulty level not the hardest. took about 3 and a half hours to play a game through and my initial thoughts are:

1. it's a lot of fun and very intuitive and easy to play
2. they went a little too far with the simplification - not having unhappy citizens or hunger improves the flow of the game, but takes the 'management' element out of city management somewhat
3. it really REALLY fucking easy vs cpu. unless Deity is an enormous leap up (not impossible given my personal bugbear - the ridiculously steep rise in Civ 4) then this will have close to zero replay value on 1 player after about a week.

i think it could be top fun on mulitplayer though. so if anyone finds themselves at any point in the future with a PS3, this game, and time on their hands, let me know. in the meantime i need to convince my two IRL Civ-playing friends to trade in their 360s.

talkin baout Civ Rev, obv

I like that it plays "sneaky music" when a spy walks anywhere

I felt a bit bad for nuking Delhi. would also prefer to just be able to carry on after winning to see how things pan out.

yeah, was disappointed that i couldn't play on and revel in my glory after winning. also, no stats is :( even if they were often opaque or pointless on previous versions.

i got a free nuke so i had to use it. i was pretty annoyed at having to share my continent with Moscow by that point, so even though we were on good terms i still fucked them up. i thought i read that nukes had some consequeces, like it limited the ways you could win or something, but i didn't notice anything like that.

i like the naval support thing, which makes being England pretty sweet (lol embarrisngly hardwired reflex patriotism causing me to choose England on first go)

I did this too. Had London and Brum as my only native cities then ended up with loads of places like Beijing and Thebes that I apparently couldn't rename. I don't think I knew about naval support.

Think nukes fuck up the surrounding area and damage your culture rating, never really got to face the consequences cos I won the next turn, even though Gandhi was still giving it all this "I'm taking that pile of mutant-infested rubble back real soon, son" shit

It is kind of stupid that you click stats and all you get is reverse ordered descriptions of milestones, interspersed with painfully slow scrolling credits and repeated messages about how you beat the game

that whole recap thing is bullshit. that's the kind of thing you expect on a demo version, interspersing the credits like that. the whole throne room thing is pretty dumb too.

i got a culture win shortly after nuking Moscow so it can't hurt that much. maybe i was too far along already. i could've won an economic victory (20,000 gold not much of a challenge when you have one city producing 1,300/turn) much earlier in the game but i wanted to play some more.

I played this game forever before I finally went ahead and tried to nuke something. So hardwired against doing so.

I did a cultural victory with Germany yesterday. It seemed easier because they had so many automatic military bonuses I could defend my places from American military aggression while I built culture-inducing things in them, dunno if this is true on the highest difficulties.

The highlight was probably finding a remote island with the fortress of the Knights Templar on it. They kindly built me a Panzer tank which I used to liberate Fyodor Dostoevsky from Teotihuacan.

I loaded the Panzer tank onto a galley

lol. i found Knights Templar early in my first game and only got a Knight, but I still managed to take Minsk with him. i had the same unit to the end, with every available elite upgrade and transformed into a Tank by Leonardo's Workshop. it was an unstoppable wrecking machine by the 1700s.

started a game on Deity last night and am pleased to report it is at least a challenge this time. not a great deal of landmass so we're in each other's pockets and dudes keep declaring war on me. i'm currently the 3rd strongest civ a short distance behind 1st and 2nd who are kind of on a level. the two weaker civs are spending all their time warring with me, leaving the top dogs free to get on with it. if it's a deliberate strategy by the cpu i'm impressed.

on my second game I started off trapped in a corner by an inexplicably massive English civilization, which made peace with me and then immediately wiped me out with longbows

there's a culture-related XBOX achievement for this called "...Embiggens the Smallest Man"

the exaggerated abilities of the different civs and the era-specific bonuses are a great touch, i think. with England, having longbowmen with the extra 1 defence was really handy early on, but then having +1 naval attack and double naval support had a big influence on the direction i followed later and proved to be pretty powerful.

i'm using Greece this time round (lol ancient history degrees) and you get a nice Ancient era boost, appropriately, with hoplites, which are the same as longbowmen but you get them right off the bat without bronze working, and democracy. however, once that early advantage levels off they are pretty dump (also appropriately, you could argue).

I am trying to use the Aztecs' ludicrous immediate healing powers to get an economic victory on Deity difficulty on the Beta Centauri everyone-in 2050-with-tons-of-technology scenario

Basically once you have one infantry army with a couple of upgrades then no amount of tanks, artillery or bombers will shift your capital city, but then you have to hope you get lucky with the great people and the £££ rolling in. I got within three turns of the World Bank and the Greeks, who invented gayness, built the fuckin UN

Also this game is kind of relaxing but the way the computer just constantly declares war in really snide terms even when you're just off being polite and cultural in some remote corner of the world just sort of subtly reminds you that people are dicks, all the time

totally pwn3d alpha centauri yesterday which means i'm on track to have my first go on CR sometime around 2017

haven't even looked at the scenarios but that sounds worth a look.

won regular game on Deity but it was no picnic by any means, and several civs were going fo a win - a Spanish spaceship was already en route to Alpha Centauri. i got an economic victory, which so far certainly seems the easiest.

following that i tried ther Game of the Week on Deity and i got my arse kicked several times over. CPU pretty brutal, constant war. i was scrambling for research and armies and i neglected culture, which put me in a corner, with a couple of cities starting to blink. i try to baalnce buildings with troops, but the CPU always seems to bring one more army than i can cope with.

so fucking close on game of the week. just a couple of turns in it. still getting a feel for how things work. went all out for culture this time and that is some powerful shit - three cities flipped to me. tough to get 20 great people/flips/wonders - you need 5 or more wonders, i think, and i only got 2 late on. too busy keepign my head above water to buld costly wonders. might've been right first time and money is the way to go. probably depends on the Civ you use but it's not obvious which direction to take the Greeks. love having hoplites with 3 defence early tho.

BRAGGIN'

http://i32.tinypic.com/212brwo.jpg

ProfessorKlaw, in with a bang at 8. the scores aren't listed and the scoring isn't explained, so i'm not entirely sure how you go about getting a higher score but i could make an educated guess based on past games. having being logged off the network towards the end of an earlier game, i was just desperate to actually finish it.

i'm pretty pleased with myself.

what is this game of the week

they put a regular single player vs CPU game up on the network each week. you play it like you would a regular game and if you beat it your score gets compared with the rest of the world (or region, i dunno). i guess they realised that coordinating a 3+ hour block of multiplayer time to play the game online might be tough for a lot of people so they wanted to include a different approach.

if North American dudes are thinking of picking Civ Rev up, here is list of incentive gifts by store:

GameStop/EB Canada:
Xbox 360 and PS3: Pack-in card redeemable online for a Voucher or Token code for Wonder & Artifact Pack: The Mythic. Included are: Ancient Wonder: Lighthouse of Alexandria, Medieval Wonder: Leaning Tower of Pisa, Industrial Wonder: Scotland Yard, Modern Wonder: SETI, Artifact 1: Camelot, Artifact 2: Tower of Babel

Target:
Xbox 360: Pack-in card redeemable online for a Token code for Wonder & Artifact Pack: The Eternal. Includes the following Wonders and Artifacts: Ancient - Trajan's Column, Medieval - University of Sankore, Industrial - Eiffel Tower, Modern - Cristo Redentor, Artifact 1 - Pharoah's Needle, Artifact 2 - Tesla's "Peace" Ray

Best Buy (US and Canada):
Xbox 360 and PS3: Pack-in card redeemable online for a Voucher or Token code for Wonder & Artifact Pack: The Iconic. Includes the following Wonders and Artifacts: Ancient - Coliseum, Medieval - Taj Mahal, Industrial - Statue of Liberty, Modern - Sydney Opera House, Artifact 1 - Terracotta Army, Artifact 2 -Sphinx

Circuit City:
All platforms: Aiden Hughes Lincoln poster, 16X20, folded

if anyone is playing on PS3 and wants mp let me know.

Industrial Wonder: Scotland Yard

pfft

so I got this and am loving it, but I wonder: wtf @ submarine? It has a movement of 2, and doesn't hide or whatever, and has a defense of 2, so cruisers, which are earlier on the tech tree, can easily chase down and destroy subs. So why are subs in this? Why would anyone build them?

btw am talking about Civ Rev

i keep thinking that the developers must've had some kind of cunning application in mind for subs but i haven't been able to figure it out if they did. they do seem to be completely useless. at a stretch you could stack a sub army on the same tile as a battleship army so that you didn't have to attack with and risk your defensively-stronger battleships, but that then effectively reduces your battleship speed to 2.

if they were invisible to all ships except cruisers or something than I could understand it. as it stands, it's a mystery.

I agree. Maybe they'll patch this later.

I guess you could use them to guard your cities' ports from the dreaded naval support. I still haven't had much pushback from the enemy, though I've only played three games, at chieftan lol, warlord, and king. In the king game I was surprised to see the Egyptians begin the spaceship---how dare the AI be competent!---but due to mad conquering I had a lot of great people and pulled out a cultural victory.

I still haven't won a tech victory. This one has the problem of earlier Civs, that it's tough to take advantage of the end of the tech tree, because if you make it that far with enough production to build those units/wonders, you're going to be in a position to win, and why put it off when the enemy is still around?

I guess you could just leave one enemy capital, and go tech nuts, but this is lame and tedious play.

tech victory has never occurred naturally for me. which is to say, i have only ever done it because i decided to when other options would've been faster.

the end-of-tree techs and wonders are especially wasted in this version. they have never really come into play for me.

well the wife pulled off a very tedious tech victory last night, and I guess to be fair there aren't any significant new units after artillery, as far as I can tell. Well, she didn't build a nuke, which I now want to try to do.

I want to go for a blitz victory now, one of those where I win in BC. Never in Civ 1, 2, or 3 have I done this, but from looking at the Game of the Week scores, lots of people pull this off. I tend to want to bunker down and get a tech advantage, then systematically destroy the enemy with e.g. tanks. But to do this in BC I'll have to use legion or something. We'll see.

You guys have never pulled off the thrilling tech victory, "rush to space as every other country steamrolls all your cities"? Then again, I was never greatest Civ player and rarely played above the first difficulty setting.

I'm a geek, so I always chose to dump my funds into research. Shit, i do this with damn near every one of these games I can play(Master of Orion, AoE, etc).

I'm finally trying out the Final Frontier mod and it's actually kinda fun. It makes me wish for an alpha centauri sequel.

Man, the Colonization redux of this game is awful. I spent a solid amount of time playing the original this weekend and it still holds up.

I've had CivRev for about four weeks (had many a sleepless night due to I and II back in the day) and am really enjoying it -- playing on King level atm but might shift up to Emperor and see how that goes. Some of the civs are so superior to the others it's embarrassing -- like the Romans, once you get going on building wonders there's no stopping the culture victory.

Only criticism so far is that archers are such a good defensive unit, it seems pointless going to war in the early stages of the game. I just defend til I get combustion then crank out tank armies and twat everyone.

I love this game (Civ:Rev). I just won on emperor for the first time, and it was def. more challenging than king, because the enemy civs get so much of a tech boost early in the game. Re. the waiting on tank strategy, my wife does the same thing, and loves it, whereas I get antsy and load up on knights. Still, by the time I end up winning, it's with tanks to clean up the lingering huge cities left.

I wish the endgame were longer, so I could benefit from the late-game techs and wonders more, but some of the scenarios help with that (e.g. Beta Centauri).

Yes, I've never managed to launch my spaceship yet, because I've always won a cultural or dominance victory way before then and can't be arsed to keep going just for the sake of it.

i finally beat this thing on Emperor. i'm not even going to try any harder levels - i'm retiring until CIV V comes out!

i have issues on Warlord, even