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Considering the glitches CivIV apparently has with several graphics cards, I think it's a good time to talk about the importance of graphics.
To me the main role of graphics is to let you understand what a unit is, that there are mountains there. Thus it helps gameplay by letting one understand the game world. ASCII art is a bit short there, but 3D graphics are not necessary.
I believe the graphics improvements made in Civ3 over 2 and 4 over 3 (or GC2 over GC1) are really only eye-candy. This eye-candy will appeal to more (casual) players. However, we see that, in order to get such an eye-candy, you need more and more powerful graphics cards. Civ4 has had many glitches with this, and I am not sure they got more players from the new graphics than they lost from the "it won't run on my pc" mob.
And about graphics, I also have an edge against the newer games: They use 3D, which means you can't edit the graphics with, say, paint. Which means you need more work to mod the graphcis and get less mods to change what you don't like.
Should civ games run only on high-end, or a limited subset, of graphics cards?
Should they run only on high end computers for that matter? I don't know how much memory is used by the graphics engine and how much by the game (ai) data, but I'd rather require memory for the ai than for the user interface.
To me the main role of graphics is to let you understand what a unit is, that there are mountains there. Thus it helps gameplay by letting one understand the game world. ASCII art is a bit short there, but 3D graphics are not necessary.
I believe the graphics improvements made in Civ3 over 2 and 4 over 3 (or GC2 over GC1) are really only eye-candy. This eye-candy will appeal to more (casual) players. However, we see that, in order to get such an eye-candy, you need more and more powerful graphics cards. Civ4 has had many glitches with this, and I am not sure they got more players from the new graphics than they lost from the "it won't run on my pc" mob.
And about graphics, I also have an edge against the newer games: They use 3D, which means you can't edit the graphics with, say, paint. Which means you need more work to mod the graphcis and get less mods to change what you don't like.
Should civ games run only on high-end, or a limited subset, of graphics cards?
Should they run only on high end computers for that matter? I don't know how much memory is used by the graphics engine and how much by the game (ai) data, but I'd rather require memory for the ai than for the user interface.
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