I've Got It!!!!!

[d_dudy]

I JUST GOT THE GAME! and you guys know i wouldn't be screwing around. i'm gonna go install it, i just wanted to let everyone know (because it looks like i'm first-i didn't see any other threads with a title like this and poly is slow for me today)

i think i'll get on before i go to bed to give you guys first impressions and so my girlfriend doesn't think i've died (because i'm always on the net)


LATER!!!

[Wiglaf]

Congrats! C&B isn't so bad after all.

Be sure to post those impressions (especially any hardware issues).

[Txurce]

I'm looking forward to thye report, dd. I decided to wait till it hits the local Apple store, and that won't be until later this week.

[d_dudy]

here it is

i'm on 333mhz imac with 96mb built in memory

the game is remarkably smoothe on my machine. on occasion everything will pause, acting like a freeze up but after a few moments full control is restored. why this happens i don't know.

like i said, the game runs better than i had hoped-so far. i'm nearing the industrial age on the standard earth map with 5 opponents and i don't have to wait very long between turns yet. the slowest part is when i go to the differant advisors, that takes some time. and when i'm on the foreign advisor it's real slow. if i want to talk to someone i have to make sure i double click right on them so it'll come up instead of getting slow for a few seconds like it does otherwise. saving the game takes even less time than ctp.

i'm on chieftan and haven't had any problems with the ai players, they've been pretty friendly except for a few demands. so, i haven't seen the ai's warfare prowess yet but i can tell you they build a good infastructure, connecting all they're cities. and they really do spread all over the place, encompasing all land worth having. so far they haven't been particularly smart about building they're culture up but this is the easiest level.

needing a fresh water resource is a bit annoying, i will say that. if i hadn't gotten to some lakes near iran (i'm the germans and started in germany, but oddly enough all my opponents didn't start in they're home areas. a little annoying, but not much) i would have went to war just for a source of fresh water. then i had to create an elaborate system of irrigation from the middle east all the way to the pyrenness, which block irrigation to my city in the iberian peninsula.

this game is so much better balanced than ctp it's almost laughable. my opponents are decent (and this is just chieftan) and i don't speed through advances like in ctp. it's a gem of a game.

brad did a great job i don't see any problems with the game at all. it didn't lock my up or anything, just those little freezes, whatever they are. i suspect they have to do with my old computer more than anything.

so basically, go get this game guys, it's awesome.

[- Groucho -]

I, too, received my copy yesterday from C&B and now I'm sitting at my desk at work paying for it. I got maybe three hours of sleep.

I'm running it on an iMac 600Mhz with 256 Mb ram in OS X.1 and everything is going quite smoothly on the pure technology side - with 8 civs there are really no pauses between turns until the industrial age and even then they are only a 5 -15 seconds (depending on whether the AIs move units into your LOS and you have to wait while they move around). There are a few glitches with unit sounds not always playing and I did manage to hang it during hour seven. I was in the military adviser screen control-clicking on each of my units to upgrade them to riflemen and my sleepy prodding at the keyboard lead to some weird click/key combination that made the mouse stop responding. I could still use keyboard commands to save and exit though. It actually came as a bit of a relief because I had to get to bed and the game had its hooks in me (damn those Babylonians!). Overall, the minor glitches are nothing I'm not used to in games so I'd give it an 8 out of 10 on that front due to the sound issues.

On the game play side it was great. I was playing as the Persians on the second lowest difficulty level so I could muck around without worrying about having the civs around me getting too aggressive. Even so, while I was distracted and playing with my workers and getting used to how to optimally place cities (with their ever expanding city boundary and the increased importance of resources it isn't as cut and dry as it used to be) I suddenly realized that the Babylonian to my north had rush built galleys and transported settlers south and west of me. He had effectively surrounded my civ with a ribbon of his own cities, cutting me off from easy expansion. So while I had to spend time moving to a war footing and punching a way through his encirclement, his furthest cities were pumping out settlers and filling up the parts of the continent I was cut off from.

Pretty clever for an AI.

There are all sorts of new strategies to learn as well. I researched Gunpowder only to find that nearly everybody had Saltpeter but me. I was a republic though and was getting tired of war weariness causing unrest and screwing up my wonder building so I didn't want to go to war to get the resource. Instead, since I was in the lead in culture, I kept building towns on my border near a source of Saltpeter until my border grew to encompass the resource. I quickly built a fortress on top of it and stocked it with a trio of newly drafted Musketmen and ta da, the resource was safely mine. Word to the wise though, it seems that you are only ever guaranteed that a resource will stay in your city radius if it is in a square immediately adjacent to the city (and maybe not even then). My only source of horses, a key early game resource, suddenly ended up in Zululand when he took out a Babylonian town that was closer to the horses than my nearest town and his culture was strong enough to push the border one square closer to me. Goodbye horses, hello war with the Zulu when my fortress and Immortals who were guarding the horses suddenly were on the wrong side of enemy lines.

Needless to say, I give the game itself a ten.

Hope you guys get it soon!

[Wiglaf]

Great to hear it works on your machines! Ddudy especially (no real doubts on yours, right ech? ). Short port, good performance.

So how much of an improvement (besides in the graphics department) is it to civ2?

[d_dudy]

maybe too good of an improvement. i guess i didn't have enough cities because i ran out of time on my game. i didn't have the tech for the spaceship (but i was close) when 2050 came around. so i tried to do the un thing first but everyone voted for shaka and i lost before 2050 even.

i wonder if you get techs faster on small maps? i need 'em. i'm gonna try a small random map now (since no one but yourself starts in their real positions on the earth map)

the game did get slower in the late stages on my machine, but never too bad and no lock ups. fun game, i hope i can beat it on chieftan this time! (it's sad to lose and have you opponents say "go back to chieftan" when that's what you're on)

[Wiglaf]

How's the diplomacy/culture/corruption model? Sounds like great stuff to me (can't order it for two weeks or so ), nice to hear the good first impressions though.