10 New (Old) Screens!

[Locutus]

Gaming site GamesRadar has had a secret it hasn`t been sharing with many for the last month: they`ve had some screenshots that most of us hadn`t noticed before. If you visit their image gallery and look under June 24, you can see 10 screenshots we had not noticed before or seen anyone discuss in our forums (along with 4 that were more widely known).

They show off a colony that appears to have expanded to the point where it occupies 3 tiles, some artwork of a shipyard, two shots of French ships exploring near native settlements (Incans in one, Sioux in the other), two shots of French colonies, a Dutch ship near an Incan island, a close-up of a Dutch colony, natives attacking a colony and finally a shot of more naval combat.

Thanks to the just-launched Civ4: Colonization fansite Hooked on Colonization for making us aware of these screens!

[Locutus]

You can get more and higher quality shots from the GamesRadar gallery, but some eyecandy:

[Niptium]

I don't understand why shots of colonies stacked next to one another ar so frequent... I do not understand such a strategy...

[Locutus]

A combination of:

1. It's a game feature now apparently, according to one preview (don't remember which): large colonies will expand to take up multiple tiles.

2. It's done for PR reasons: the marketing folks get paid to spend waaaaay too much time thinking about how to get the most value out of their promotional material, which leads to them manufacturing artificial screens that have as much 'cool stuff' crammed into them as possible. Empty maps aren't very sexy, so they throw a ton of stuff in there that often makes little or no sense, which is also why you see rather unnatural numbers of ships in some of the coastal screens. Most/all of these screens were clearly made in the World Builder.

Take my word for it, every single piece of promotional material for any game produced by publishers/developers is very carefully manufactured and/or screened, it's almost never just the result of 'natural' gameplay. You always have to take this kind of stuff with a bit of a grain of salt.

One of the most extreme examples I've ever seen of this was actually for Civ4: there was a pre-release screenshot that showed off a city sprawling out over 20+ tiles with massively oversized wonders, which looked really awesome but is obviously not possible in the game -- it requires significant messing around with both the World Builder and the XML files. This was especially nasty as it created the false impression that you could actually have something like that in the game, and people ended up disappointed upon learning you couldn't. (Edit: screenshot in question)

It's not coming from a bad place really, but some of these marketing folks tend to get a little over-enthusiastic from time to time

[Niptium]

Most probably an employee of Firaxis or a videogame journalist lurking on the forum of Civfanatic has posted this screen (scroll to the bottom). He said the onslaught of informations will be on Friday - because journalists have an embargo until then...

The screenshot is pretty revealing though... we see that there is Israel Putnam, a great general that has died on the battlefield...

and his big inland town is producing ''military points''