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My first week with Civilization 4.
Hello everyone. Last post here was November 22, 2002, that is almost 3 years ago 
I'm usually never very active on forums where I can't contribute or have anything to ask really. 
Anyway, I've played C4 for like a week now, and I must say, its a great game, very good. I really love the look of the game and that you still need to enter the .ini file to change some settings like movies=off and winmode, so very C3
The new UI is great, but has some major problems I think (I'll get to that later), its a nice feature being able to select between two different leaders (in most cases) for your country.
I don't want to get stuck rambling about how good the game is, you already know that. I however want to recomend you people to try the Highland script, its awesome! Just GREAT! My and my friend played C4 in a LAN with this laptop, and we played 'team continents' but after a few games, that got pretty boring, and after a while our small LAN session had to end. When I later felt like playing mysef I also felt that the island and that was pretty boring, so I tried the Highland script, with a dense, ridged pattern, and large lakes, damn that was fun. The thing with the mountains being impassable all the time is a great strategic feature in this game, espec in maps like these. The screenshot below (where the UI dosen't show, another problem, also later), shows a good example, where one of my cities (the 13 to the right) is totaly out of reach for me, except if I use a boat to transport them over the lake, air lifts them, or gets a open border deal with India so that I can travel on thier lands to reach my city. Later when the war came upon me, I of course lost the town, cause I couldent get my troopers there fast enough (you must hate when the comp just declares war when you are the least prepared).
No over to some of the problems I have with this game, the problems are really minor, but annoying, its when C3 came, and when Sim City 4 came, the games didn't feel complete until after the first expansionset, for C3 that is after two (C3C). I've made a little list of things that I found annoying, or might just be plain bugs.
# The Scroll speed, damn that is slow, if you don't use the mini map to scroll around it gets very tidy after a while. Why is it that I can't change it? If I'm not wrong here, wasen't it possible to change this in the ini to C3? Or atleast in C3C?
# When playing in 1600 or more, it feels that its to long to constantly look down the left corner when you need the hower info, a info panel that is glued to the mouse would have been much better. This could also be a setting I think. I found that I prefere to play in 1024 in the beginning just because of this. Sad.
# Sometimes, when I zoom out to the globe view, the graphics looks just awfull, this must be a Civ-bug that some people might have, I have a 6800GT card with the latest drivers, no other game have problems, so I just bet the problem is with Civ.
# The Civiliopedia, whats the deal with not having better links and cross sections, it sucks so hard that one must click up the civpedia and then navigate through those annoying icons (where is my text?!) just to find a unit, when it would have been much easier if I could just rightclick the unit and choose, like, 'Check Civpedia info' or something.
# When I need to change production in my town, it was much better dealt with in C3, this iconsystem (again) is damn annoying, and also, when playing in 1600, its so far down to look, damn, why not just have a context menu where I could enter a submenu with the structures nicly organized with text?
# How does one remove the 'build settler' thing? I don't want to be reminded that I need to build settlers all the time, espec when I feel that I don't want to.
# Where do I see what resources I have? Why can't I access a town from the 'F1' menu, this is damn annoying, espec when playing with a civ where you don't recon the names and might remember where yo placed them. So you need to navigate the entire map, reading on every cityname to find the correct. There is a alot of these advisor things that need to be improved bad.
# Seems my view and grid settings dosen't save when I quit, ok, not all to annoying, still a easy thing to implant. I play with a view almost as C1.
# When outputing screens as TGAs, the GUI dosen't show, it does however show as BMP and standard JPEG.
# There are some settings that I want to improve the speed of the game, it just to slow watching the enemy attacking, even with all settings of, but I need to have the 'display defence' thing (or what ever its called now) on, if I turn that off, then I will never see what happens, only a little icon that tells me that I've been attacked and where, and a text in the chat area that says what happend. It would have been much better with a quick setting that actually took me to the attacker and showd me what happend, fast not slow as it is right now. If you defend a city and someone attack you with ~15 units, then you can go and make coffee and watch a episode of Law and Order before you can do something usefull.
Well, thats all.
My score for this game is 9/10, 10/10 when I get the things I mentioned fixed. I shall tell you that my score for AoE3 is about 7, also because important things were missing or just annoying made (but so much more than civ).
Cheers
/J
I'm usually never very active on forums where I can't contribute or have anything to ask really. Anyway, I've played C4 for like a week now, and I must say, its a great game, very good. I really love the look of the game and that you still need to enter the .ini file to change some settings like movies=off and winmode, so very C3
The new UI is great, but has some major problems I think (I'll get to that later), its a nice feature being able to select between two different leaders (in most cases) for your country.
I don't want to get stuck rambling about how good the game is, you already know that. I however want to recomend you people to try the Highland script, its awesome! Just GREAT! My and my friend played C4 in a LAN with this laptop, and we played 'team continents' but after a few games, that got pretty boring, and after a while our small LAN session had to end. When I later felt like playing mysef I also felt that the island and that was pretty boring, so I tried the Highland script, with a dense, ridged pattern, and large lakes, damn that was fun. The thing with the mountains being impassable all the time is a great strategic feature in this game, espec in maps like these. The screenshot below (where the UI dosen't show, another problem, also later), shows a good example, where one of my cities (the 13 to the right) is totaly out of reach for me, except if I use a boat to transport them over the lake, air lifts them, or gets a open border deal with India so that I can travel on thier lands to reach my city. Later when the war came upon me, I of course lost the town, cause I couldent get my troopers there fast enough (you must hate when the comp just declares war when you are the least prepared).
No over to some of the problems I have with this game, the problems are really minor, but annoying, its when C3 came, and when Sim City 4 came, the games didn't feel complete until after the first expansionset, for C3 that is after two (C3C). I've made a little list of things that I found annoying, or might just be plain bugs.
# The Scroll speed, damn that is slow, if you don't use the mini map to scroll around it gets very tidy after a while. Why is it that I can't change it? If I'm not wrong here, wasen't it possible to change this in the ini to C3? Or atleast in C3C?
# When playing in 1600 or more, it feels that its to long to constantly look down the left corner when you need the hower info, a info panel that is glued to the mouse would have been much better. This could also be a setting I think. I found that I prefere to play in 1024 in the beginning just because of this. Sad.
# Sometimes, when I zoom out to the globe view, the graphics looks just awfull, this must be a Civ-bug that some people might have, I have a 6800GT card with the latest drivers, no other game have problems, so I just bet the problem is with Civ.
# The Civiliopedia, whats the deal with not having better links and cross sections, it sucks so hard that one must click up the civpedia and then navigate through those annoying icons (where is my text?!) just to find a unit, when it would have been much easier if I could just rightclick the unit and choose, like, 'Check Civpedia info' or something.
# When I need to change production in my town, it was much better dealt with in C3, this iconsystem (again) is damn annoying, and also, when playing in 1600, its so far down to look, damn, why not just have a context menu where I could enter a submenu with the structures nicly organized with text?
# How does one remove the 'build settler' thing? I don't want to be reminded that I need to build settlers all the time, espec when I feel that I don't want to.
# Where do I see what resources I have? Why can't I access a town from the 'F1' menu, this is damn annoying, espec when playing with a civ where you don't recon the names and might remember where yo placed them. So you need to navigate the entire map, reading on every cityname to find the correct. There is a alot of these advisor things that need to be improved bad.
# Seems my view and grid settings dosen't save when I quit, ok, not all to annoying, still a easy thing to implant. I play with a view almost as C1.
# When outputing screens as TGAs, the GUI dosen't show, it does however show as BMP and standard JPEG.
# There are some settings that I want to improve the speed of the game, it just to slow watching the enemy attacking, even with all settings of, but I need to have the 'display defence' thing (or what ever its called now) on, if I turn that off, then I will never see what happens, only a little icon that tells me that I've been attacked and where, and a text in the chat area that says what happend. It would have been much better with a quick setting that actually took me to the attacker and showd me what happend, fast not slow as it is right now. If you defend a city and someone attack you with ~15 units, then you can go and make coffee and watch a episode of Law and Order before you can do something usefull.
Well, thats all.
My score for this game is 9/10, 10/10 when I get the things I mentioned fixed. I shall tell you that my score for AoE3 is about 7, also because important things were missing or just annoying made (but so much more than civ).
Cheers
/J