Name: Paul Sch. Email: - About: - I've had the game for about a week now and I'm hopelessly addicted to it. My only significant complaint so far is that the corruption system seems to be completely broken. Government type and whether or not you build a Courhouse appear to have almost no effect on corruption. Far away cities are effectively useless because they are reduced to 1 shield and 1 commerce no matter what government type, city improvements, and terrain type are involved and no matter how big the city is or how happy your people are. Corruption should increase as your empire expands, but Democracy should have a significant effect on reducing corruption and there's no way a large empire on a huge map should be stuck with over half of it's cities producing only 1 shield due to corruption. Communism doesn't have the effect on corruption that it's description says it should either. It's supposed to give make it so all of your cities have the same (significant but manageable) level of corruption. Instead it leaves all the far flung cities with the same 1 shield and 1 commerce they had before and adds more corruption to the cities closest to your palaces. I found a player made mod that adds the same corruption reducing benefit that the courthouse has to several different city improvements and am currently using that until I see a patch that does a true fix for it. It's not really a fix for the problem but it makes the game much more fun and makes large empires feasible. I also like the changes they made to the combat system. There's much more strategy involved in combat now with some units able to retreat from combat when they get damaged, other units able to bombard heavily fortified units that are prohibitively expensive to take out otherwise, defensive bombardment when cities with artillery are attacked, no more silly instances of huge stacks of units being wiped out by a single attack just because the defenders all occupied the same square, etc. The fact that your units are slower and unable to heal in enemy territory is cool too. I assume it's supposed to represent resistance from the local populace. You wouldn't have the same freedom of movement inside enemy lines or access to all of it's infrastructure (hospitals, stores, etc...) I do wish they would either make leaders more likely to appear or change the small wonder that allows you to build armies without a leader so that it doesn't require you to have gotten a leader and won a battle with an army first. I've played complete games before without ever having the chance to get a leader or an army. I love way they handled luxury and strategic resources. It adds a lot of focus to your drive for expansion. Rather than simply going out and conquering your weakest enemy, you have to either make some lopsided trade deals with a rival (in their favor) for resources, or be forced to go to war with a neighbor that might be stronger than you are. The way they changed trade so that routes are automatically set up with roads, harbors, and airports is also much preferred to the tedious ferrying of caravans all over the place. It also makes roads even more strategically important than they were in Civ 2. I also like the fact that they made it impossible to hurry a wonder by just buying it. Now there's a tradeoff between building the wonders you want before the computer or using that same production for expanding your empire. With 4 or 5 of your most productive cities all building wonders at the same time it tends to put a damper on your expansion for quite a while, but if you get them all built before the computer you tend to get a rather significant boost out of it. My favorite change though is the addition of culture. It makes for a much better system to decide national borders and makes it much harder to completely neglect infrastructure in favor of all out war. The idea of peacefully expanding your empire through cultural influence is very cool. Not nearly as fast or effective as military conquest, but it tends to solidify your gains because cities you conquer won't switch back to the other side and cities your rivals conquer frequently switch back to your side. I've heard that coastal fortresses and fighter interception don't work, but I haven't been involved in many air or naval battles so I am just assuming people are right about that. Anyway I'm loving the game so far and I'm hoping the first patch fixes the few problems that exist. Reviews Index