Civilization IV

[screwtype]

Really? I've been reading a bit over there and a bit on Apolyton, but there is so much traffic and I only have a bit of time, so I'm mostly speed reading the strategy forums to see what others think. Good; if people are grumbling en masse then Firaxis will see, and they might do something.

Actually, huge map size ain't so bad. I'm just getting into a huge map campaign and in retrospect the continent I'm on really is big - there's enough room for forty or more cities on it.

My complaint is more along the lines of the lack of variety of the maps. I selected "Continents" for this game but got only two mega-huge continents, which is what I got the previous game. It's all but a pangaea map. When I select continents I expect, you know, three or four of them at least. But there's no obvious way to get a map with several large land masses that I can see.

So far I'm not troubled by the size of the map, but then I've only played two learning games on lower difficulties, default map size and settings, with 4AIs a piece. When I get all 18 civs on the map I expect it will be crowded

Personally I don't like games with lots of Civs. I usually take the default number for a map size, or fewer. I like to have room to expand before encountering opposition.

I had a few bad starts in the older games, but never quite like this. I feel like I have the 'jungle' setting on, or the 'ice age' one, or both at once. From my next game on I think I may join you in dumping maps, unless I desire to play a game with a poor starting position.

I'm told there is an option called "Tilted Axis" in the Custom screen that gives you more varied starts. It's under the "maps" option apparently. I must have missed it. But I haven't tried it yet, so can't verify that it's better.

my city is about half coastal, but not quite on the coast thanks to a mass of jungle and mountains...there goes my hope of having it work the coast - not enough food to support it

Yeah, I made the same mistake in the first campaign I played. Gotta watch that one

It's not my continent I want to map via sea..It's other continents

You often had to wait quite a while in Civ3 too.

civ3, had three different types of ocean. Coast, sea, ocean, something like that.

Yeah, Civ3 had that, but it was still a gamble using your galleys to cross sea tiles, because they had about a 50:50 chance of sinking. You had to hope that another land mass was only a few tiles away.

Perhaps the big change in Civ4 in that regard is that you can no longer enter non-coastal hexes with your galleys at all. So you can't even try to explore and take the risk of losing your ship.

I doubt I will be able to do more than simple text editing type changes, due to being a modding n00b.

I'm sure there will be plenty of modding guides eventually posted at CivFanatics.

Anyone finding definite preferences for leaders yet? I find Qin Shi Huang to be mine thus far. Industrious and commercial; wonders and cash in large quantities. Louis sounds like another I might like; industrious and creative.

I always go for a religious leader with the mystical trait, because then you can found Hinduism (the AI always seems to go for Buddhism) and get the early advantage of temples and extra smileys. And then you can found Organized Religion and get another smiley and a 25% building bonus in your cities. If you start out in a game where you don't have contact with another Civ and don't have your own religion, you will soon see what you're missing IMO.

But apart from that, I think all the Civs have their strengths.