Quote Originally Posted by ah_dut
I've got Civ III and the expansion and quite liked it...I just got really stressed with a) corruption and b) ridiculous military stuff like axeman defeating rifleman
CivIV really isn't that much different from CivIII, so I would hesitate to pay full price (as I did) if you already have that. It is however, imho, a better game than CivIII, so i don't regret buying it.
Now about:
a) corruption has been replaced by other factors like health and unhappiness, infaltion, civic upkeep and a cost per city in order to keep you from spawning cities like cray. pretty much all of these can be countered by adopting the right civics, chosing a leader with the right traits or building some wonders. Iy's still a bit of a hassle to manage a large empire though.
b) The combat system has been completely revised as you probably know. It makes victories a lot more predictable. That said, a rifleman still blew up my modern armour in my last game (no city defense bonusses), it seems like those high powered units don't really live up to their stats to me (winning is one thing, how strong your unit is after the battle is quite another).

Quote Originally Posted by Simon Appleton
After that, the game got a little dull - no one tried to make any serious moves. I remember finding the last few centures of Civ2 tedious as well - once you get past a tipping point, you are so strong anyway the AI is unlikely to stop you.
The AI does seem less aggressive than it was in civIII, barbarians seem to your main concern in the early turns, and in the later turns civs will rarely attack unless you're culture-absorbing them.

Quote Originally Posted by Screwtype
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.
That's how I remember CivII to be too, I even got a Pangaea map once when I had selected continents (there was a small landbridge). Other times there were 2 huge continents and a couple of islands, the civs on those islands didn't stand a chance to begin with, I think that's what they were trying to address in CivIV.