Since completing my general exam last week I’ve been slacking off from work a bit and getting back to one of my favorite computer games: Sid Meier’s Civilization IV. It is unquestionably a great game, possibly as good now as Civilization II was back in its heyday. Still, there are a number of things that I find very annoying about it:
- The notification system fails in significant ways. If I have discovered the location of a resource, lost a unit in a defensive fight, or sighted an enemy unit within my cultural borders, I want to know exactly where it is and be sure that I have dealt with it before ending my turn. A message that scrolls over the map and disappears is not sufficient for this purpose. Many previous incarnations of the series have solved this problem better, but my favorite implementation was in the Civilization: Call To Power game, which was in many other ways rather bad. An area of the screen was dedicated for a list of messages that you could read at your leisure and dismiss as you desired. Clicking on one of these messages would point you directly to the location on the map from which it was generated. The types of messages deemed significant enough to appear in this list was highly customizable.
- I like the gameplay elements added by religion quite a bit, and in fact my strategy in most games revolves around founding as many as possible and using them for their revenue generation and cultural dominance advantages. Spreading religions, especially in a large number of newly captured cities, is unfortunately very cumbersome. As you can automate workers to improve land in whatever way the AI thinks is best, I would love to have automated missionaries with a button that sends them to any city in your empire in which the religion is not present and to which no other missionaries are automatically on their way. If I could set a city to keep building missionaries of a particular religion until it has spread everywhere in my empire, that would be even better.
- The game does not automatically adjust the distribution of specialists intelligently. If I set the output of my city to Research, then any engineers would be more effective if made scientists instead. I suppose you might not necessarily want this if your purpose in having engineers is to increase the probability of eventually generating a Great Engineer, but if the AI automatically decided to create the engineers in the first place, there would be no harm in moving them.
- Running wars is still very long and time consuming. Again, I liked what Civilization: Call To Power did to solve this. You could create groups of units that would attack and defend as a group, so that an assault on a city would consist of a single battle instead of perhaps a dozen. There was also more strategy since units in a group could complement each other, which could mesh very nicely with the promotions tree in Civ IV.
- It would be nice if the Shuffle option for land mass type actually selected from all of the options instead of just four. I have been using it because I do not want to tailor my strategies to a specific game type and then have them be completely unsuitable on the rare occasion that I get to play multiplayer.
- Another automation issues deals with air units. I always thought they were much less useful than in real life in Civ II because you would have to manually move them around each turn in order to see where there might be enemy units. Civ IV improves on this dramatically by making air units have air-specific actions, such as performing a reconnaissance sweep of an area. It would have been much better still, however, if there were a way to set a unit to automatically sweep an area at the beginning of every turn.
- Diplomacy is much improved over earlier games, but there are still holes. When someone asks me for a trade that I find not in my best interests, I decline it without worry that it will substantially hurt my image with the other country. When they ask for something for free, however, I usually give it to them because I do not want to anger them. Do the mechanics actually work this way? I do not know. I think there are still a few things that the AI players can do diplomatically that you cannot, although I cannot think of a specific example at the moment.
- Diplomatic victory makes no sense. In that vote, no player who is not in the running has any incentive to not abstain. If the AI players understood the mechanics, they would never vote for anyone other than themselves. In the real world it might make a big difference to you who gets elected supreme leader of the world, but in the game there are only three outcomes: you are elected and win the game, no one is elected and the game continues, and someone else is elected and you lose.
I am thinking about buying the Beyond The Sword expansion. I do not expect that it actually fixes any of the issues above, but it sounds like it would add some other very interesting features and keep me enjoying the game. Unfortunately, it looks like I cannot buy the expansion on Steam and use my physical copy of the original game. If I do this, I will probably bite the bullet and pay $39.99 for Civ IV, both expansions, and the updated Colonization on Steam. Then again, I now have a system with a modern graphics card, and if I am going to spend time playing games there are many, many others that have been released in the last five years or so that I have missed. Among those that sounded like something I would want to play eventually are Far Cry, Doom 3, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, BioShock, Mass Effect, Portal, Crysis, Left 4 Dead, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein, Age Of Empires III, … and those are just the ones I have heard enough about to know I want to play them, and can think of them at the moment. Chances that I play through even a quarter of them in the next several years are low. Should I go for it, or move on?
Move on. Some of those I can lend you. And don’t forget about ‘Blo.
Comment by Michaluk — September 19, 2009 @ 10:43 pm
Speaking of ‘moving on’ to more modern games, I’ve nearly completed Final Fantasy 2 (US) again. I had forgotten how short the game was. 20 hours would probably be overkill. In related news, zsnes is in the (a?) linux (ubuntu?) repository. Considering going to Chrono Trigger next.
Comment by Michaluk — September 19, 2009 @ 11:18 pm
I am afraid I had to ignore your advice. The more I read about the two expansions to Civ IV the more excited I got. I love the new leader traits, civ-unique buildings, colonies and vassal states, and extra techs, units, buildings and wonders. I was not expecting this, but was pleasantly surprised that they even implemented the “automate missionary” feature that I had just been asking for, and there are several other good tweaks of the user interface as well. I am not sure what I think about corporations yet — they seem to me like they have as many drawbacks as they do advantages. Do they actually use up resources, so that if you needed them for building you would no longer have them? Do they only work on resources within the city radius? I am also unsure about espionage. For my first game, I just used it passively. Oh, and the quests and random events. I think I like them, but i have not had something truly awful happen to me yet.
What you want to say is that zsnes is in the repositories for the particular version of Ubuntu that you are using. I’ve probably been through Chrono Trigger 5 times — enjoy. By the way, I am still up for some multiplayer Civ IV whenever you are in the mood.
Comment by chadhogg — September 21, 2009 @ 10:50 am
From the list of games you missed, I can attest that Oblivion, Fallout 3, BioShock, Mass Effect, and Portal are all fantastic. Portal is really short, maybe 5 or 6 hours for the first playthrough, and totally worth it. Oblivion and Fallout 3 are both great, but have a very similar feel (both being from Bethesda and using largely the same engine) — if gaming-time is at a premium, I think Oblivion is the better of the 2. Fallout 3 and BioShock also have a similar atmosphere, and I think BioShock is the better game, especially if you love shooters. BioShock is probably also the deepest (hooray, a terrible pun!) of these games in that the story has an actual message about objectivism. Mass Effect is probably the most D&D like of this set of games in terms of game mechanics. From a plot perspective, it’s a pretty open-ended space drama with a great story. I loved it too, and hope to have the time to play through it again (playing as a bad guy this time) before the sequel comes out for PC. Doom 3 is a big meh — graphically beautiful (for 2005, still pretty good looking today), but not much fun in my opinion. Crysis is similar — astounding graphics if you have the hardware, but not a spectacular game (though it was more fun than Doom 3). You could get almost all the enjoyment there is to be had from Crysis or Doom 3 with a weekend rental, if you one day have a console that they become available for. Left 4 Dead I haven’t played, though I know people who really love it. If you like zombie movies, you’d probably love it too. I can’t offer any useful input about the other games on your list (Far Cry, AoE III, and the 2 Wolfenstein games), I haven’t played them or heard much about them.
Ever watch the old Batman: The Animated Series, that was on Fox in the early 90s? I loved that show. I’m now playing Batman: Arkham Asylum on PS3, and it’s like a dream come true for a fan of that show. So far, it’s lots of fun, plus it has most of the voice cast from the old cartoon (Mark Hamill is fantastic as the Joker), and the writing is superb. It’s available for PC, too, if I’ve piqued your interest at all.
Comment by Chris — September 21, 2009 @ 12:05 pm
Civ 4 has a lot of nice features, and I think it is much more balanced and fun than Civ 3 was (even though I spent hours upon hours playing civ2 and civ3). Unlike Civ3, they balanced the cultural borders a lot more, making it harder to flip enemy cities. However there is still an issue where having cultural borders on multiple sides of a city can make it yours easily.
I have always been somewhat of a micromanager in the Civ games (although with civ-4 I don’t tend to micromanage the placement of the people in my cities as much, except in my great person farm), so managing missionaries myself is always a task I want to do, just like managing my workers myself (until the mid game where I fortify most of them until railroads come along). I also don’t always want to spread my religions to neighboring civilizations, depending on the strategy I want to go with. Often times, it is useful to have an enemy along your own borders as it gives you someone to conquer. Make friends with the other civs on their borders however, and they will help in your attack. Religions in the game really add a lot, and make it much more dynamic, and realistic. Just beware if Isabella has a different religion than you. You can guarantee that that will spark a war.
As for trading with other civs, it normally will be a raw deal for you. However it helps relations, and if you get a new tech, and can trade it to two or three civs immediately, it works out for your benefit. You just need to be careful who you trade with and who you have relations with. Trying to be friendly to all civilizations on the map will end up in a situation where you have no friends, but a bunch of civs who don’t like you very much. Religion is really the best way to make friends in the game.
I have only played the warlords expansion for the most part, but recently tried out beyond the sword. Makes quite a few improvements, but haven’t played with the corporations yet. I will say that the AI seems much improved in BTS. I used to be able to beat the AI on Emperor somewhat regularly, and now I find even prince difficult.
The one thing I will say about Civ 4 that differentiates it from the others is that it will alter your play style if you used to go for peaceful victories. I used to do that, and it just doesn’t work on the harder levels in Civ 4. Civs will declare war on you if you’re seen as weak (no matter how friendly you are with them), and if you don’t manage to gobble up more land early, you will be destroyed in the tech race (early expansion only works so far, as you can easily cripple your economy, and the enemy expands faster than you). My best games often involve conquering 3 or 4 cities in the early game (when I first get iron working), and mopping up the remainder of that civilization in the medieval era (conquering them completely early on is a bad idea as you’ll cripple your economy too greatly). Just beware of war weariness, and use the whip to keep your citizens happy.
Have fun!
Comment by Phil — September 22, 2009 @ 5:24 pm
Yeah, I enjoy i much more than Civ3. I am a “peaceful victories” guy all the way, only declaring wars to capture strategic resources that I lack or to push up my score at the end of the game before building a spaceship or hitting 3 legendary cultures. I am realizing that BtS + Warlords specifically requires you to be more militaristic than the original game. See the thread I created at http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=336342 for more details.
Comment by chadhogg — September 24, 2009 @ 11:11 am
Wow. My interest in Civ was increasing as I read your posts, but then I read your civfanatics post and one other post on that forum. It’s safe to say my interest has died out completely.
Comment by Michaluk — September 26, 2009 @ 11:25 pm