Civ 4

[BDC]

Civ will be great, but it needs some proper combat ala TW series, better scale and stuff like that. I want a proper 3d map, where you see cities sprawling out and can see huge armies looking like tiny dust mites moving across the board and setting up defences and things like that. I want to see refugees streaming from war zones and huge swarms of locusts eating crops. This just doesn't realise it. However much I like Sid Meier's games, they need some more new blood.

[English assassin]

Civ will be great, but it needs some proper combat ala TW series, better scale and stuff like that. I want a proper 3d map, where you see cities sprawling out and can see huge armies looking like tiny dust mites moving across the board and setting up defences and things like that. I want to see refugees streaming from war zones and huge swarms of locusts eating crops. This just doesn't realise it. However much I like Sid Meier's games, they need some more new blood.

For me, I don't really care about the graphics and I am Ok with the fairly abstract combat. For a Civ game I want to run my empire not be a general. I'd like to see the micromanagement reduced (Civ 111 was a bit better but your cities still did things like starting to build frigates when you had a perfectly good fleet of battleships if you didn't watch them), diplomacy improved, and the "pace" of the game worked on. There were quite a few little things about the Civ 111 interface I didn't like and I think Civ 11 was better there.

Some of the changes seem to be improvements (more detail on governments, hopefully the AI not wandering into your empire every two minutes) some definitely do not (units getting special abilities like "good in jungle? Woot now I can spend half an hour looking for the special jungle unit in case there is a battle on a jungle tile I don't think so. and "oh good" spies are back, along with lawyers and diplomats the most tedious units in the game. ) The big one (will the AI be reasonably inteligent and maybe stop fielding spearmen against your panzers in 1950) I have very little hope on, if they are spending their time working on graphics.

One thing that would be good would be being able to set the end date and length of turns, so if you want to play the whole game a year at a time between 4000 BC and 3000BC with only ancient technology, you can. I'd buy it if you could do that.

Wait and see I guess but this looks like a brush up of Civ 111 for people who didn't buy it.

[Kraxis]

I'm between very impressed and not very impressed with the screens.
They simply look cluttered with people, and if you notice there aren't that many units considering the number of civs close to each other.
But I do like the little farms and the new mines, but they can't make up for the claustrophobia I get when I look at those screens. The cities look too small, at least that was better in Civ III.

I like that the wonder-movies are back, good. But what about the small wonders of Civ III? They were good in making those slightly backwards civs being able to compete with the fast ones.

Two leaders with traits... Fair enough, and a nice consideration. And I like the political/religious ability as with Alpha Centauri, that was great fun. And here you have many more abilities, so it is easier to tailor the civ to your taste.

All in all I might buy it, but I won't buy right away, not by a longshot.

[The_Doctor]

An other preview at IGN:

http://pc.ign.com/articles/616/616871p2.html

You can select which era you start in.

[doc_bean]

moddable AI ...

[The_Doctor]

moddable AI ...

I hope the AI will use artillery.

[kiwitt]

I am still playing CivIII:Conquests. I will be buying CivIV. CivII introduced me to RTS and I have enjoyed the genre ever since.

MTW: With it's Province Building is Similar to Civ's City Building (and If I want to do do just City Building, I have CaesarIII, SimCity 4). I still think MTW with it's agents, leaders, troop types and the period "Medieval" will keep this on my HDD.