Okay, I bought the game, and first impressions are not that good.

To start with, my CD player will not recognize the disk at all! - the first time this has ever happened. But I think I've read that other people are also having this problem.

Fortunately, I also have a DVD writer, and was able to install and play it using that.

As for the game itself, well I've only fooled around with it for a couple of hours, but I'm finding it a lot less intuitive than Civ3. The method of moving units in the new game seems especially clumsy - you have to select the unit, then select the "move" icon at the bottom of the screen, then click on the map where you want the unit to go. In Civ3 all the units are auto selected for you one after the other and you just click on the map where you want them to move. I didn't notice any prompts to move my units at all with this game.

The other thing I don't much like is the game is eerily quiet. I always play games with the music off but there don't seem to be many audio cues to add a little flavour or help you out. And much of the personality is gone - you still have "advisors" but they are no longer human beings that pop up and talk to you about stuff in little speech bubbles, now the advisor is just the info screen itself, which sucks.

So I'm just not finding the presentation very engaging, which suprised me because I thought the presentation could only be enhanced with the improved graphics.

Also, in spite of the supposed great moddability of the game, there appears to be no way to mod the number of turns, which again in my opinion deeply sucks. And there don't seem to be as many options you can set regarding the sort of world you want to play in, or if they are there they are again not presented in a straightforward way.

Anyhow, as I said these are only first impressions, it's early days yet and I'll have to play it for a while before coming to a definite conclusion.