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Thought I'd give a little info about BTS for those of you who have not been able to get your hands on it yet:
Picked it up after work tonite (Colorado, USA), installed it, and started my 1st custom game (noble diff., fractal map, standard size, normal time). Immediately noticed the graphics were...blah. Oh, yeah...give me my Blue Marble Terrain, please! I noticed that right away! Loaded that Mod forthwith (yep, it's already available for BTS) and started a new game....hmm, some extra new Blue Marble features since the last time I downloaded it; well, that's pretty cool.
I opted for a random civ for this game and drew Montezuma. Founded a city, did some exploring and discovered that Isabella was right next door....hmmph. OK, let's keep an eye on the (w)itch and check out this new passive spying feature. I upped my spy slider (this slider pops up as soon as you meet a rival Civ) by one notch to hopefully out-spend her in the spying department and went on my way.
After some additional exploring (meeting 4 other rival Civs on my continent) and the founding of 2 more cities, I find myself at 925 BC and have managed to create an EP (espionage point) gap of about 35 or so with Isabella, in my favor. At that point, up pops a new addition to the Civ score display (the one that is shown in the bottom right corner of the main game screen). This new addition tells me what Isabella is researching and how many turns to complete said research! Ohsocool, I'm liking this spy stuff, so far.
Some other points of interest:
1) I had always been frustrated that it was not easy to discover which cities could pop rush a build (and how many pop. it would cost). I find that this is relatively easy to do in the city management screen (F1) by selecting the city with a mouse left-click; on the bottom of the screen it will show the build status along with the pop rush options: you can hit the pop rush button right away if you want and then go on to the next city if you so desire. (Note: my testing shows that this feature was available in Warlords, also).
2) I've had a look at the "Foreign Advisor: Tech" screen to have a look-see at some tech-trading and I am not so sure about the change to this screen at the moment. It does show some additional info about rival Civ tech wants/tech availability but I can't easily ferret out how far ahead (or not) I am, relative to the other Civs. This was pretty easy to do in the former implementation of this screen.
3) I have already noticed the Civ-specific unit graphics for some (all??) of the Civs. I like this feature.
4) I like to have the grid turned on, along with 'show yield' and/or 'show resource' at different times during the game. The game does seem to save these settings in the save games.
5) Despite what other people are saying (relative to graphics speed), I have noticed a distinct delay between hitting the hot-key for a status screen and the screen actually popping up. I don't recall this delay in the earlier versions of CivIV. It's not bad, but it does seem slower. I have a P4 2.8GHz Pentium with 1GB of SDRAM. Oh, and a 7800GS vid card.
[edit] An additional note: by hitting Ctrl-E (or hitting the Espionage button on the top-right of the screen) you can assign your passive EP points to different civilizations via +/- buttons. After I got a good EP gap with Isabella, I changed these settings to maintain the EP advantage with Isabella while generating more EP points against another rival AI. Pretty sweet. [end edit]
Picked it up after work tonite (Colorado, USA), installed it, and started my 1st custom game (noble diff., fractal map, standard size, normal time). Immediately noticed the graphics were...blah. Oh, yeah...give me my Blue Marble Terrain, please! I noticed that right away! Loaded that Mod forthwith (yep, it's already available for BTS) and started a new game....hmm, some extra new Blue Marble features since the last time I downloaded it; well, that's pretty cool.
I opted for a random civ for this game and drew Montezuma. Founded a city, did some exploring and discovered that Isabella was right next door....hmmph. OK, let's keep an eye on the (w)itch and check out this new passive spying feature. I upped my spy slider (this slider pops up as soon as you meet a rival Civ) by one notch to hopefully out-spend her in the spying department and went on my way.
After some additional exploring (meeting 4 other rival Civs on my continent) and the founding of 2 more cities, I find myself at 925 BC and have managed to create an EP (espionage point) gap of about 35 or so with Isabella, in my favor. At that point, up pops a new addition to the Civ score display (the one that is shown in the bottom right corner of the main game screen). This new addition tells me what Isabella is researching and how many turns to complete said research! Ohsocool, I'm liking this spy stuff, so far.
Some other points of interest:
1) I had always been frustrated that it was not easy to discover which cities could pop rush a build (and how many pop. it would cost). I find that this is relatively easy to do in the city management screen (F1) by selecting the city with a mouse left-click; on the bottom of the screen it will show the build status along with the pop rush options: you can hit the pop rush button right away if you want and then go on to the next city if you so desire. (Note: my testing shows that this feature was available in Warlords, also).
2) I've had a look at the "Foreign Advisor: Tech" screen to have a look-see at some tech-trading and I am not so sure about the change to this screen at the moment. It does show some additional info about rival Civ tech wants/tech availability but I can't easily ferret out how far ahead (or not) I am, relative to the other Civs. This was pretty easy to do in the former implementation of this screen.
3) I have already noticed the Civ-specific unit graphics for some (all??) of the Civs. I like this feature.
4) I like to have the grid turned on, along with 'show yield' and/or 'show resource' at different times during the game. The game does seem to save these settings in the save games.
5) Despite what other people are saying (relative to graphics speed), I have noticed a distinct delay between hitting the hot-key for a status screen and the screen actually popping up. I don't recall this delay in the earlier versions of CivIV. It's not bad, but it does seem slower. I have a P4 2.8GHz Pentium with 1GB of SDRAM. Oh, and a 7800GS vid card.
[edit] An additional note: by hitting Ctrl-E (or hitting the Espionage button on the top-right of the screen) you can assign your passive EP points to different civilizations via +/- buttons. After I got a good EP gap with Isabella, I changed these settings to maintain the EP advantage with Isabella while generating more EP points against another rival AI. Pretty sweet. [end edit]