A new Civilization game has been announced.

[pevergreen]

Warlords added new leaders and factions to the game, combat remains unchanged.

[TevashSzat]

The civ games are coming out too fast IMO, I remember getting civilization 3 gold and then not too long after that, civ 4's release date was announced and released. Haven't even bought civ 4 now and civ 5 is coming out already.

[Midnight]

Give me a worthy successor to SMAC and I'll be very, very happy. After Civ4 though, I'm not excited.

[Mithradates]

I doubt it will be civ 5 more likely SMAC or another revamped older game.

[Lehesu]

Eh, GalCiv2 + DA has quenched my previous desire for a new Alpha Centauri game.

[TinCow]

Give me a worthy successor to SMAC and I'll be very, very happy. After Civ4 though, I'm not excited.

Really? I've played every single Civ game that Sid's put out, including SMAC, and I've found Civ4 to be far better than any of them. SMAC was indeed great, but it had many, many flaws (Infinite City Sprawl alone was so aggravating it made long games unenjoyable.) Civ4 seems to have achieve what I thought was unachievable: Great SP and great MP. Massive games that take a week or more to play, and quick games that you can finish in a couple hours. It's the swiss army knife of Strategy games!

[econ21]

Off-topic: I agree about Civ4 being excellent. In terms of my Civ addiction, I recently learned that in the UK, heroin use has increased because of "brown heroin" which you can smoke rather than inject. To me Civ4 is the "brown civ" of the genre. Civ2 was horribly addictive, but strangely unfulfilling - so playing it was like sticking a needle into your body to get a fix. Once you had gone cold turkey, getting back into it was eminently resistable (I put it on my shelf with a label marked "poison"). By contrast, Civ4 is just as addictive as Civ2, but also rather fun. So even when you don't have "one more turn" to get through, the prospect of playing it is rather pleasant and attractive.

Fortunately, my computer keeps cutting out and threatening to melt down when I play Civ4, so my habit is under control. (Although now it has a taste of power, I fear for what my computer will do next when I get back into M2TW after the coming patch.)

On-topic: too soon for a Civ4, but I'd be interested in what other Civ product is produced.

Thinking about how they could improve Civ in the longer term, one thing that occurred to me - beyond hiring CA to do the battles - would be to develop the role-playing aspect. We now have great generals and interesting talking head AI rulers. Why not develop that more, to have families - dynasties - and move a little into roleplaying territory? It's one of the improvements in the TW series - the way the avatars have become more prominent and characterful.

[pdoan8]

One strange thing about the Civ series: it wasn't my favorite game, but everytime I played, I had to forcefully remove myself from the PC. Really strange. That's why I skipped Civ4, uninstalled Civ2&3 and locked up the CDs in the basement.

[CountArach]

Civ 3 was alright, Civ 4 was brilliant, Warlords just made it so much better.

I am so there!

[caravel]

Off-topic: I agree about Civ4 being excellent. In terms of my Civ addiction, I recently learned that in the UK, heroin use has increased because of "brown heroin" which you can smoke rather than inject. To me Civ4 is the "brown civ" of the genre. Civ2 was horribly addictive, but strangely unfulfilling - so playing it was like sticking a needle into your body to get a fix. Once you had gone cold turkey, getting back into it was eminently resistable (I put it on my shelf with a label marked "poison"). By contrast, Civ4 is just as addictive as Civ2, but also rather fun. So even when you don't have "one more turn" to get through, the prospect of playing it is rather pleasant and attractive.

Fortunately, my computer keeps cutting out and threatening to melt down when I play Civ4, so my habit is under control. (Although now it has a taste of power, I fear for what my computer will do next when I get back into M2TW after the coming patch.)

On-topic: too soon for a Civ4, but I'd be interested in what other Civ product is produced.

Thinking about how they could improve Civ in the longer term, one thing that occurred to me - beyond hiring CA to do the battles - would be to develop the role-playing aspect. We now have great generals and interesting talking head AI rulers. Why not develop that more, to have families - dynasties - and move a little into roleplaying territory? It's one of the improvements in the TW series - the way the avatars have become more prominent and characterful.

I was also a Civ2 (and Civ) addict, and I know exactly what you mean by "unfulfilling". For me the game had no longevity and this killed the addiction eventually. I have often wondered over the advantages of Civ3/4 over Civ2. Is it purely cosmetic or are they somehow more of a game? I haven't played a Civ game since Civ2 so I'm totally in the dark as to their progress.

[English assassin]

Well, its all incremental. I have or had Civ 2, CTP and Civ 3, and I would say Civ 3 was certainly a worthwhile upgrade over the earlier two. Strategic resources were good. Diplomacy worked better. So I would guess if you jumped straight from Civ 2 to civ 4 you would feel the same, only more so

There's no getting away from the fact that its basically the same game though. Either you get excited moving little men about the grid and fiddling with a tax rate or you don't.

As a recovered "addict" who knows exactly what Econ21 means I am not in a hurry to get any more Civ, personally. its too much like work.

[econ21]

I was also a Civ2 (and Civ) addict, and I know exactly what you mean by "unfulfilling". For me the game had no longevity and this killed the addiction eventually. I have often wondered over the advantages of Civ3/4 over Civ2. Is it purely cosmetic or are they somehow more of a game? I haven't played a Civ game since Civ2 so I'm totally in the dark as to their progress.

CivIV has some significant improvements over Civ2 (I found CivIII horrible and did not play it much at all):

(1) Perhaps the main thing is that the combat is rather satisfying now. I found Civ2's combat about its worst feature. My short experience with CivIII just underlined that: moving a mass of single units one square a turn for 100 years; it was excruciating. By contrast, in CivIV, combat centres around a few combined arms stacks of units - real armies - and seems faster paced. There is a decent RPS system in it, as well as a trade-off between stacking and greater exposure to bombardment. Units earn experience and get promotions, which make you care about them much more than you ever do in TW as well as make you customise your army in interesting ways. One of my most fun experiences was trying to fend off Catherine the Great's tanks with no oil; I felt like the 1941 Wehrmacht trying to cope with T-34s and KV1s. The brown underwear time only abated when I managed to get a few marines the AT promotion. The quality vs quantity issue (aka how can a spearman kill a battleship?) is very well handled: high tech gives you an edge, but the fuzzy-wuzzies will overwhelm you if you push it too far. For some reason, wars in the Ancient and Medieval period are more viable now - in Civ2, they tended to be too slow and costly to be worth pursuing. Plus the AI is rather nice - often it will emerge from the fog of war with several massive stacks and you are scrabbling to cope. I still don't play Civ as a warmonger (although this seems required for higher difficulty levels - I don't understand this: why call it "civilisation" if warmongering is the ultimate strategy?) - it is still too slow to be bothered with. If I wanted to conquer the world, I'd play TW which obviously has vastly better combat (those amazing battles). Still the combat is pretty decent - especially if you are peaceful turtling player, who has invested in tech and has a weak army, then must fight for your life.

(2) The silly OCS (one city sprawl?) strategy of Civ2 is gone and without the hateful cultural penalty to growth of Civ3. Often you want about 8 cities on large as your core; more are just extra. This makes the gameplay more relaxed - more about quality than quantity. The national wonders increase the emphasis on specialising your cities - commerce, science, production, military, religious, Great person etc. It's fun nurturing them.

(3) There is no "right way" to win. In Civ2, at one stage, I could win Diety by just picking a particular path (centred around OCS and particular wonders). Every game would play out the same. In Civ4 at moderate difficulty levels (Prince), there are multiple ways to play and no one Wonder is essential (in fact, they are probably not that worthwhile - but I just like them for flavour).

(4) The diplomatic AI - which even in Civ2 had fun distinct personalities - is even more characterful and this adds to the diplomacy. Dealing with Ghandhi feels different from surly Stalin, which feels diferent from psycho Monetzuma etc. There are quite a few diplomatic options and you can always see how you are regarded and why. It's very well done and TW could learn from it.

(5) The game has more rewarding historical flavour. I really like the element of religion - spreading it and how it affects diplomacy. The Great People are great fun - it is just so cool to be rewarded by having Elvis spawn allownig you to perform a culture bomb near an enemy city or having an Einstein who can establish a science academy. You can play so as to get more of these people and affect their type, or you can ignore them. The variety between factions is nice too - their traits, their unique unit and building.

It still sucks a frightening amount of time if you play it, as I prefer, on huge with terra. But for the above reasons, I usually end feeling it's time well spent. By contrast, in Civ2, I'd feel like I've just lost a weekend or two. I'm still not in a hurry to go back to it though. Too all consuming.