Congratulations Firaxis on a great game!

[Dis]

Just showing my appreciation. You have my thanks, along with my money . I don't like to see too many negative threads.

I was a little iffy my very first game. But I'm loving the game the more and more I play it. I stayed up way too late last night playing. The problem is I don't have a clock near my computer. Maybe I will activate that in game clock. I think that's a neat feature.

The builder game is very fun. But I'm having even more fun conquering. At first I thought it would be too difficult. But as the Aztecs, I'm not doing so bad. I had to cut my initial conquest short though because support costs forced my entire army of jaguars to be disbanded. But that initial push was important, it allowed me to have the largest empire by far. It just took a while to recover my tech rate. I'm still not sure how such aggressive combat will fare on higher levels and larger worlds. But for now I'm having fun. I may mod some things later if I need to. As I like to wage aggressive wars. Although my style would be more of a hybrid style to be accurate. Combat is more fun because you are forced to use units such as naval units and bombers to reduce city defenses and weaken the enemy. Civ2 was fun, but using howitzers to take over the world came too easily.

[Fitz]

Meh. Better than Civ3, still worse than SMAC. Only reason I played Civ3 over SMAC was that it was less buggy (not surprising given it's obviously simple minded programming), and that I was a little played out on SMAC (5+ years).

I still don't see myself playing this over Battlefield 2 or Rome Total War on a regular basis, although I'm sure my craving for a decent TBS campaign mode (ie not RTW) will draw me back from time to time once I finish my 2nd game.

[Brutus66]

I have to be honest and, judging by the hours of playing time I have been seduced into, go with great.
So many nuances and variations...
I really liked Rome Total War too, but the tactical battles got repetitive after a while.

[-Ab-]

your more generous than i would have been

the more i played it, the more irritating the AI became and now after perhaps 10 games i dont play it at all

i will look at this game again after the (supposedly) soon to be released patch

[LordShiva]

Great, but only insofar as any Civ game (yes, even Civ3) is Great. There are conspicuous areas of the game in which I'm disappointed.

[Kinjiru]

Good, not great.

SMAC is leaps and bounds better. But IV is defintely a much better game than III.

[Brutus66]

Man, you guys are tough.
Kinda reminds me of the joke with the three Jewish mothers having lunch at a restaurant, and the waiter comes by after the meal and says "Was anything to your satisfaction?"

[-Ab-]

i have been a bit down on civ 3 but after playing civ 4 im thinking again
anyway you liked rome total war so your obviously easy to please

[Tiberius]

Almost great.

A masterpiece in some areas, disappointing (at least for me) in others.

I loved all Civ versions, but coming to think of it, I had the most fun with Civ2.

[Boris Godunov]

Great, IMO. It has easily replaced all previous Civ incarnations so far. Sure, it's not perfect and some things weren't what I wanted them to be, but that's all part of people making different design decisions than I would. Overall, it's a blast to play and totally engrossing.

[Koyaanisqatsi]

It's been great for me. The only flaws have been technical, and while I know those have been severe for some people, they haven't been for me. I just turned movies off (which I'd probably have done soon anyway) and all is well. It's as addictive for me as CivII or SMAC, which I consider the high points of the series and some of the best games ever made.

[GodSpawn]

Great so far for me. Only played four game so far though.

I imagine when the patch comes out, it'll be even better (I'm not getting any bugs other than things like the Ironworks not working, but I'm anticipating some fine tuning in the game balance with the patch).

[Dis]

The game of course is not perfect. But I feel they put forth their best effort. And it's pretty damn close. Most people don't feel it's perfect because some game features are not to their liking. Sometimes we have to live with the designers decisions about what's in the game. Impassible peaks for instance.

The ai could still use some work of course. I sometimes see cavalry holed up in cities not attacking my tanks. But then the next game I see knights out in the open attacking my more powerful modern armour and mech. infantry. Yeah I was attacking a backwards civ. They had the tech for grenadiers, but they still had a lot of knights running around. In fact, I was attacking the russians. I didn't give them military tradition on purpose (because of their uu). But I would have figured they'd have researched it by now, or got it from someone else.

[Aro]

Great game. Awesome.
In fact, the best Civ ever, IMHO. Of course, I dont know Civ I...

But still, the middle game just flies. I could spend more time in medieval era...
Maybe I should try an "epic" game.

[Montesquieu]

My current computer won't run, I've not played it yet, and... what else is bad ?

But Civ4 may be just eye-candy. I like Civ3 and Civ2, and I've heard bad experiences from most of the people who tried to run it. Several problems, from video card problems to "Please insert CD-ROM" messages. I guess that they put too many graphics on it and forgot about the rest of the game .