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I've just finished my first game of CIV.
I haven't played any of the Civ games in a while (yeah, heresy, i know...), and I wanted to try and get both re-acquainted with the general dynamics as well as get a taster for what's new with this iteration. So, did an epic game on a huge/continent map on settler difficulty. For point of comparison the gaming rig is an X2 4400, 7800GTX o/c-ed to 490MHz core/1.31 GHz memory and 1GB of PC3200 played at 1920x1200.
Finally finished after 10hrs 46min in one sitting with a Space Race victory in 1856AD, a normalised score of 18073 and 20 cities built.
First thoughts then. I like the new look. It works for me. There are some interface quibbles that I'll touch on later but that's more about the feel than the look. It all ran smooth enough (should do...) with one irritating exception - Wonder Movies. They stut..ter...real...ly...bad...ly...at...times for no discernable reason. I'm just going to play with them off in future. End game performance didn't bog down in the same way I recall Civ3 doing, and even at the end the AI turns passed swiftly by.
Game wise, there were no wars. None. Nada. Not even a hint of them. In fact, the AI seemed shockingly civilised. This did mean that I didn't have too much about getting to know the changes to the combat model so I could play around with the other changes and leave combat for another game.
From what I've seen on the new culture/religion model, I like. A lot. It seems to make a lot more sense.
The Great People seemed to work well. Possibly a little too well, as the Great Artist is as effective as multiple armies at taking over enemy cities. I used two to great effect to rapidly link five small cities I'd built in quick succession as part of a resource grab to my cultural core and to culture-bomb (and eventually flip) four cities to my side. Looking at the end game culture graph, it was blatantly obvious when I'd set off this bomb. I can already think of some very nice strategies to exploit just how powerful they are.
On to my gripes about feel (which I mentioned earlier). There are just some odd interface issues. Maybe I missed it, but there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to do an upgrade on all units of a certain type. In Civ3, being able to quickly upgrade them via the military advisor screen made left much easier so it seems odd for this to have gone walkabout.
In addition, the mouse-over tooltips seem to be temperamental as hell as to whether they're going appear or not. When in the city screen I could tell that I had sufficient funds to rush production on a unit/building etc but with the mouseover tooltip choosing not to appear a lot of the time then I had no idea how much it was gonna cost.
Also, the Civilopedia. Why? Non-obvious icons, highlighted text which doesn't link when you'd assume it would, other things which irritated me about it but I'm too tired to recall. Look, it's getting towards the better part of a decade since SMAC was released yet not one single game has come anywhere near to having an integrated help resource which is as good. SMACs help system is how they should be done.
Anyhow, I'm tired. Just one more go metamorphosed into the 'uh-oh, is that the sun peaking through the window?' so it obviously is initially satisfying. I'm actually thankful that the game does run through so much faster, as I don't particularly think my employment status or social life could handle doing twenty-four stretches. So to bed. And I'll probably end up dreaming CIV...
I haven't played any of the Civ games in a while (yeah, heresy, i know...), and I wanted to try and get both re-acquainted with the general dynamics as well as get a taster for what's new with this iteration. So, did an epic game on a huge/continent map on settler difficulty. For point of comparison the gaming rig is an X2 4400, 7800GTX o/c-ed to 490MHz core/1.31 GHz memory and 1GB of PC3200 played at 1920x1200.
Finally finished after 10hrs 46min in one sitting with a Space Race victory in 1856AD, a normalised score of 18073 and 20 cities built.
First thoughts then. I like the new look. It works for me. There are some interface quibbles that I'll touch on later but that's more about the feel than the look. It all ran smooth enough (should do...) with one irritating exception - Wonder Movies. They stut..ter...real...ly...bad...ly...at...times for no discernable reason. I'm just going to play with them off in future. End game performance didn't bog down in the same way I recall Civ3 doing, and even at the end the AI turns passed swiftly by.
Game wise, there were no wars. None. Nada. Not even a hint of them. In fact, the AI seemed shockingly civilised. This did mean that I didn't have too much about getting to know the changes to the combat model so I could play around with the other changes and leave combat for another game.
From what I've seen on the new culture/religion model, I like. A lot. It seems to make a lot more sense.
The Great People seemed to work well. Possibly a little too well, as the Great Artist is as effective as multiple armies at taking over enemy cities. I used two to great effect to rapidly link five small cities I'd built in quick succession as part of a resource grab to my cultural core and to culture-bomb (and eventually flip) four cities to my side. Looking at the end game culture graph, it was blatantly obvious when I'd set off this bomb. I can already think of some very nice strategies to exploit just how powerful they are.
On to my gripes about feel (which I mentioned earlier). There are just some odd interface issues. Maybe I missed it, but there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to do an upgrade on all units of a certain type. In Civ3, being able to quickly upgrade them via the military advisor screen made left much easier so it seems odd for this to have gone walkabout.
In addition, the mouse-over tooltips seem to be temperamental as hell as to whether they're going appear or not. When in the city screen I could tell that I had sufficient funds to rush production on a unit/building etc but with the mouseover tooltip choosing not to appear a lot of the time then I had no idea how much it was gonna cost.
Also, the Civilopedia. Why? Non-obvious icons, highlighted text which doesn't link when you'd assume it would, other things which irritated me about it but I'm too tired to recall. Look, it's getting towards the better part of a decade since SMAC was released yet not one single game has come anywhere near to having an integrated help resource which is as good. SMACs help system is how they should be done.
Anyhow, I'm tired. Just one more go metamorphosed into the 'uh-oh, is that the sun peaking through the window?' so it obviously is initially satisfying. I'm actually thankful that the game does run through so much faster, as I don't particularly think my employment status or social life could handle doing twenty-four stretches. So to bed. And I'll probably end up dreaming CIV...
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