What SMAC fans say about Civ IV?

[Marid Audran]

The game has now been released en masse for about 10 days now and I'm sure a fair share of SMAC/X die-hards and fans alike have procured a copy.

I didn't buy Civ III because its reviews were mixed to begin with, but the backlash in the SMAC community was nearly universal derision.

Now there's Civ IV, supposedly a more complex and fine-tuned heir.

Even though there's a whole gaggle of Civ IV forums, I'm interested in a review of the game from a SMAC/X fan's point of view, because that's what I'll be comparing the product to in my mind.

So are there any here who would share their thoughts?

[Maniac]

Badly balanced IMHO.

[BlackCat]

HRMPH !!!!

It sems that they have wasted a lot of good programmer sweat on graphics instead of game - I haven't bought it yet because I seriously doubt that I can run the darn program with my HW.

I'm afraid that the bugger is just another Cap II - lots of fancy graprics but not better game - maybe even worse.

[Chaos Theory]

So far I'm satisfied, though I've only begun to determine what strategies to use. It's disappointing just how often it crashes, though - it's worse on that than SMAC. Certain changes to basic rules are huge improvements, whereas others are annoying.

[Darsnan]

My computer is on the low side of system requirements (1.3GHz, nVidea 5200) which essentially means I can only play the game on small maps. Even then I experienced CTD's, with one CTD resulting in my computer refusing to boot up - took me 3 hours to get my system back and working on that occasion. I am now waiting for the first patch to come out before I try and run the program again.
As far as cIV is concerned, why it doesn't seem to have those same hooks that completely absorbed me the way SMAC(X) does: there's no backstory or interludes, and the wonder movies IMO do not rate as highly as their SMAC(X) counterparts. As far as gameplay is concerned, why I haven't played enough to really offer a good opinion here. I will say though that from what I read I do like the spy system better than SMAC(X), as well as the "fortify" command, and forts themselves.
I've also played around with the Scenario Designer a little bit: the Scenario Designer does seem more intuitive to me than its SMAC(X) counterpart. I haven't really stressed it though to see really how dynamic it is. Just playing around I discovered I was able to place a ship on top of a mountain, and if there was an adjacent water square I was then allowed to move the ship off the top of the mountain into the water square. I could also place ships on a land square, and it would stay there as a viable unit turn after turn. I also tried giving wild animals to a civ: they behaved nicely, except that if there was unit from the same civ adjacent to the NL unit, that the NL couldn't move because of the ZoC rules!?! Could be a problem for the C4:AC mod team in our quest to make C4 over into SMAC. I also noticed there weren't any aquatic NL vectors in the game, either, meaning we'll have to write the script for the IoD's and Sealurks ourselves.

So, to summarize: gameplay has some plus's and minus's, and currently I'm waiting on a patch before exploring further. Also as far as the Scenario Designer is concerned it really has some promise, and once I start experimenting with AI tendencies I see some really nice game ideas coming out of this!
Hope this helps!


D

[Maniac]

Originally posted by Darsnan
Just playing around I discovered I was able to place a ship on top of a mountain, and if there was an adjacent water square I was then allowed to move the ship off the top of the mountain into the water square.

Can you move units with the world builder activated?

[Darsnan]

Originally posted by Maniac


Can you move units with the world builder activated?

I didn't try that - just placed them where I wanted them, then went back to SP mode.


D

[Maniac]

I can't move any unit or see any mouse-over help while in worldbuilder mode. Which is very annoying.

Also as for the world builder / scenario designer being more intuitive, I guess that's true if you know all the unit, building, tech graphic icons by heart, but currently it's rather annoying to have to find a specific item - a textbased worldbuilder in addition to the graphic based one would be useful IMO.

[Verrucosus]

I'd reserve judgment until I have more experience with the game. So far, I like it a lot.

SMAC influences are there. Mainly, there are gameplay changes that have adopted SMAC concepts that had been ignored by Civ3 (social engineering, special unit abilities). On a more anecdotal level, the Oracle movie uses the same music as the Xenoempathy Dome and the scenarios include a Map of Planet.

[Maniac]

Some reasons why Civ4 is badly balanced IMHO:

• Navies suck once again. Galleys only have 2 movement points and cost double as an archer???
• The concept of inflation sounds really lame. The more gold you produce, the more you will have to start paying to inflation if I understand correctly. Sounds to me like they found out that players had too many gold in their hands, so instead of reducing the ability to get gold easily at the source, they just pasted inflation on the game afterwards.
• In previous games you had to ICS in the beginning to be succesful. Now it's impossible to expand widely and be succesful. So they've created the opposite problem and strategic variety hasn't increased at all. If not reduced: at least you could popboom as an alternative in SMAC.
• Some civics have an upkeep cost. It varies: no, a low, a medium or a high upkeep cost. This upkeep cost increases as difficulty level rises, while the benefits remain the same. As a consequence some civics will become much better than others on higher difficulty levels: there doesn't seem to much balance in the civics system. I bet that when people become a bit more familiar with Civ4, there will soon be a golden combination discovered such as Demo/FM/wealth in SMAC.

[NanoDingo]

I heard the Civilopedia is really buggy...not really a game-play fault, I suppose, but still important; sometimes I load up SMAC/CivII just to peruse the 'pedia.
-

[binTravkin]

Maniac, add one reason to your list:

The traits reduce building and wonder costs by half.
It is not necessarily imbalanced from the first sight, however as people learn the game they will learn that some civilisations have edge over other because they can spam a certain building much faster than others.
To see which sivs would be those, look out for the most expensive buildings with the highest benefits.
E.G. courthouse will be a miracle maker on high levels, halving the same upkeep Maniac was talking about.
And I am not even talking about wonders - some civs might get them mighty fast if they manage to get also the 'required resource' (which halves the cost) for that particular wonder.

[Chaos Theory]

The "industrious" trait gives +50% minerals when constructing any wonder, which, without other bonuses, is effectively 2/3 the cost. If you have materials that give +100% minerals, then the +50% extra reduces the time to build the wonder to 4/5 of what other civs would take (with the same resources).

At first glance, all traits look pretty nice:
Industrious = more wonders
Creative = new cities get to radius 2 without effort
Expansive = better able to handle flood plains, large cities
Organized = extra gold/turn when running costly civics
Spiritual = switch civics without penalty
Financial = able to make better use of cottages, sea tiles
Aggressive = free combat I promotion without increasing the cost of later promotions (combat I opens up lots of options)
Philosophical = roughly 40% more great people

[Minute Mirage]

So far, I'm loving the game.

Positives:

- Reduced micromanagement. In previous Civs and SMAC micromanagement was key to optimal play but it was tedious as hell, especially at the later stages of the game. In Civ IV there are several changes that reduce the need for MM like no more city riots, full production carryover and more intelligent automatic assignment of workers on city squares.

- No more ICS. Maintenance costs based on number of cities instead of number of buildings means that you can be very competitive with just a handful of cities. I always hated having to manage dozens and dozens of cities, especially in the late game.

- SMAC social engineering style civics. This should have already been in Civ 3, but better late than never.

- More terrain improvements. Windmills and such add variety to the game. Also, no need to build roads on every square, which reduces the tedium of worker management especially with workers moving 2 squares pre turn.

- The games seem to be faster on normal speed which suits me fine.

- More choices in the tech tree since you have alternative requirements for technologies.

- Religion and the great people add new strategies and seem to be fun.

- Promotions makes for some interesting choices and give character to your units.

- The game is apparently very moddable.

Negatives:

- Civilopedia isn't that great, more hyperlinks are needed.

- Various perfomance issues, hopefully the patches will help.

- The AIs have seemed a bit too peaceful in my few games so far, but I haven't tried the aggressive option yet.


Unknown at this point:

- AI in general. I haven't played the game enough to know how well it performs.

- Game balance. Is there a strategy that trumps all?


At this point, I really don't feel like going back to playing SMAC.

[Blake]

I'm instally now. I'll probably make my own review of my first games, with the serious SMAC fan slant.