Post negative points of Civilization 4 here

[alva]

the number in paranthesis(?) or is it brackets --> (x) is how many you have (when you contact an other civ).
If it's says (1) and you trade it, you can't use it yourself anymore, so be carefull.

[Addled Platypus]

1. tutorial animation of Sid
2. Not being able to abandon/raze your own city

that is all

[DarthVeda]

True story. I went to the Hunt Valley mall today to pick this up. Turns out the Hunt Valley EB Games was out until they get more next week. How does a game store a stone's throw away from the developer run out of the title? Good thing walmart is a master of inventory

I enjoyed my first game, though I fell far behind because of things I didn't understand/figure out until way later in the game. I enjoyed it though. But there are a lot of wonky things with the game.

There is a serious lack of information presented to the player. And I'm not talking about empire-building info, I'm talking about gameplay how-this-works info.

1) So many of the buttons and +whatever are completely unlabeled, and have little or no help when moused over.
Examples:

• The multitude of dropdowns on a custom game start. The user is left to guess what difference they make.
• The mysterious +wealth/good/??? on the right panel of a city display. Mousing over gives me a tiny idea of what is going on.
• There are many, MANY more.

2) Finding out what tech I need for a unit or improvement is not nearly as easy as it should be. I have to find the tech first, and mouse over it. It sure would be nice to work backwards from here, find a unit I want and THEN be told what the tech is.

3) The mouseover text in this game is extremely tiny.

4) Why are all these popup menus telling me that 'such and such city has finished blah, what do you want to build next?' only occupy about 15% of my screen? It's not like I can do anything else while it's up there... It also doesn't allow for very informed decisions half the time, and doesn't allow me to queue builds.

5) It was 1500 AD before I figured out how to change my tax/science/culture rates around. Little teensy buttons in the top left corner with no labels didn't really let me on to begin with. If I were a newcomer to the genre I would be totally in the dark...

6) There is noticeable lag when the military adviser screen loads. Not sure what causes this because the rest of the game is pretty smooth.

7) I dislike the way that the building queue is handled. There aren't enough ways to manipulate it graphically. It's really hard to reorganize a list of more than 3 queues.

8) Settlers/workers don't say that they pause city expansion while they are under construction. I had to observe this effect first. They should probably say something about that in their mouseover text.

9) What's the point of the 'you have advanced to the yaddy blah age' popup screen? It's a non-animating picture and some music. Seems kind of pointless.

10) Whatever happened to trying to teach me something historical or informative while playing the game? None of the techs or units have any descriptive text. Just quotes. I miss learning about the actual history behind these things...

11) The 'Play' disk is not the play disk at all. I have to put in the install disk to play the game. Hah!

12) There is no 'exit city' button. I have to guess where I click to leave the city. Or I have to use the keyboard. That seems like a GUI copout...

13) A lot of times I found myself activating units when I wanted to just look at my city.

14) The unit portraits for units garrisoned at a city are very small. They don't tell me about the unit strengths either.

15) The unit portrait for the conquistador and the explorer are the same. That's probably a bug, I hope.\

16) When I'm in the middle of a war, the last thing I want to see is diplomacy popups from my enemy or other civs. I want them to shutup until I'm ready to talk to them. I rather like Rome: Total War's way of handling things like this, with an event queue on the left side of the screen. Every event has a mouse over, and you can just right click to dismiss them. Basically tell the event to "**** off I'm busy."

17) The first few (20-30) turns of the game are EXTREMELY boring! I should probably try looking for an auto-complete turn option...

18) Placing any terrain in the world editor is unbearably slow. By unbearably, I mean I have to place one tile, wait two seconds before my machine stops processing, and repeat. for reference: I have an amd3100 with 1 gig of memory. Considering most maps encompass hundreds of tiles, this is something I definately consider a breaking point for the editor.

19) Placing railroads/roads in the editor seems to be limited to my current civilization's explored map. That's definately not good. There's no option to switch views under this portion of the editor's functions.

20) In the editor I have to add techs to a player by icon. Tiny icons. And click each one. A list of names and a checkbox would be a million times easier and clearer.

[Mordrul]

Pretty much everything I was going to say was already covered by DarthVeda there. I found the Civilopedia very disappointing indeed, but the bizarre inflexibility of the build queue is what's really bugging me about this, and very hard. SMAC had a perfectly fine build queue setup, with a nice full-screen display of everything that can be picked from. Civ 3 was a little less easy to use, but not by much, and it was nice and intuitive. But this... I'm sorry, but the build queue in Civ 4 is complete and utter crap, period. It is sorely disappointing. I cannot stress that enough. Those doofy tiny icons combined with the inflexibility of the queue, so when you make a mistake you have to go back and delete the item, and if you don't find the mistake until you've added 6 items to the queue... then multiply this by several dozen cities, multiply that over the course of an Epic game.... Argh!

My other major problem, and for me this is a major problem, is one I'm rather surprised to see not mentioned yet. When you have 20 or 30 cities, keeping them straight is a PITA. Having those goofy little popup messages off on the left of the screen every turn doesn't really help one little bit (especially when they apparently "stack up" over the course of many turns, so if you move on to the next turn before they're all finished displaying, then it keeps on showing the old messages before moving on to the new ones; thus I end up thinking something just got built when it actually happened 10 turns earlier!). In SMAC and Civ 3 I could just open up the city manager window and look for the city in question, then double-click its name and it would open up the city governor for me and let me make the appropriate changes. This is especially invaluable when a civ just declared war on me, so I want to locate my 5 or 10 best-producing cities and turn them into war machines. BUT... you can't do that with Civ 4!! No matter how many times you click on a city's name, nor where you click, it does nothing but sit there and look stupid. This is EXTREMELY aggravating.

And one last problem I have with Civ 4. In SMAC you had nice neat rules text files that were very straightforward and easy to manipulate to your heart's content. In Civ 3 this was part of the World Builder, as a separate function, so that you could create a scenario that simply changed the rules of the game, without doing things like setting up a specific world layout, or whatever, if you wanted to do that. The World Builder being a nice separate program from the game itself. Well so far I cannot find anything like that with Civ 4. The only way I can find to get at the World Builder at all is to start a game, and then running it starts to edit my current game. Either I'm completely blind, or they decided to throw out half of the reason to play this game.

Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of good things to say about this game (which of course don't go here), but those are minor things. For me, these problems are very very very major things, and I am very disappointed.

[asleepathewheel]

spreading missionaries of relgions can be very tedious, if you're spreading multiple relgions.

why have religion as a major part, but no religious victory?

espionage is weak

should be able to nuke own territory

military advisor is

environmentalism civic is nearly useless

auto workers start working tiles that my citis can't work, even though there are other tiles that should be prioritized.

[Urban Ranger]

Re: Memory!

Originally posted by nyquisj
Also, I don't know if this is normal or not, but one of the games I started I chose 'Terra' and 'Huge' and sometime during the Middle Ages I alt-tabbed back to my desktop and noticed the game was chewing up well over a gig between physical and virtual memory. I think it was somewhere near 950mb just in physical.... multiple hundreds in VM.

From what I recall on one of the 'normal' sized maps that I tried, memory consumption wasn't anywhere near that.

Good thing I added an extra gig to the gig I had.

Newt

It could be a memory leak problem. Try exiting the gme, restart, and restore your saved game. If the memory footprint becomes much smaller it is a memory leak.

[Arnelos]

Originally posted by asleepathewheel
environmentalism civic is nearly useless

And not nearly useless enough!

[enoeraew]

game hangs on world creation...forces me to listen to spocks story longer than I need to...

Babylonians and Zulus are classic civs that missed the cut ?

Why do some civs have 2 leaders and some have 1 ? Is this another publishing thing that the players are going to have to pay for via an expansion ?

Maps sem really small...even on the largest setting

[Electrius]

My only real problem is the low framerate I'm experiencing with a GeForce FX5200, even with everything set to low. Other than that, it's a great game!

[JFLNYC]

Disappointed

First let me say that I know some of my disappointment is the result of losing the familiarity of CivIII and that I'm not trying to change anyone's opinion here. But, I'm disappointed.

First, even in quick mode the game is slow. It's slow to save, slow to load, slow to move units, etc. My MO with CivIII was to play in a huge world with about 9 or 10 other civs and I could finish a game in 12 - 14 hours. I don't know if I'll ever finish a CivIV game because: (a) it's so slow; and (b) it keeps crashing. I just completed by first wonder and first it crashed the game, then my whole computer (blue screen of death).

Overall, despite how nice the graphics are, the playability leaves a lot to be desired IMHO. It's nice to have flocks of sheep and beavers, etc., animated, but they're too small. If I've got to get to horses, I don't want to have to be Sherlock Holmes to find them. Give me the un-cool larger icons of CivIII for playability. The units also look very similar and paler colors and translucency of the game as a whole make it much more difficult to figure out what's going on.

I play the game at 1600x1024 res on an Apple 22" Cinema Display, but the display shows too little of the overall map. And, as my civ grows, it's even harder than CivIII to move around to the various cities -- and CivIII was hard enough.

I've got other little grips, similar to what has been written by other. But overall, it seems to me that playability has been sacrificed for bells and whistles.

[Zayxus]

civ 4 - BUG TO REPORT - Movies are choppy

Movies are choppy.

Sound cuts out during Wonder movies
an during loading intro movie.

CPU: 1,92 GHz
512 MB RAM
Soundcard: --> sound cuts and movie is interrupted
or
Onboard: --> sound cuts
Graphics card: (Nvidea GeForce FX 5200), 128 MB
Resolution: 1024*768, 32 Colors

[Dinner]

So far seems a mixed bag.

[beeper917]

Advisors are completley useless....the Civ2 ones were better

[beeper917]

The game telling you "X has cancelled Y trade agreement" then the lag that ensues when the leader pops up to tell you the exact same thing.

[omninode]

The civilopedia needs to be easier to use.

You should see the name of each item displayed next to the icon, whereas now you have to mouse over the icon to see its name.

Which brings be to my next point: You have to move your mouse over items to get information, but sometimes (at least for me) this doesn't work at all. Either no information is displayed, or its information about a terrain tile or something else completely random.

Annoying.