5

[Scott of Hyperborea]

They finally did it and announced Civ 5. Expect me to take a loooong leave of absence from here sometime this fall
http://ie.pc.ign.com/articles/107/1070111p1.html

[Cho'Gall]

I JUST PISSED MAHSELF

[Allot]

OH. MY. GODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHh

[Eldwood]

I would have died reading this, but I realized that if I did I wouldn't ever get to play it. So I refrained.

[Ryan]

Very nice. I suspect I'll need to get a new pc just to support the graphics.

[Harvey Steffke]

Not sure why they're remaking the same game five times, but sure. Every dollar Firaxis makes is more hope of seeing a SMAC 2.

[Erik Mortis]

Do they add features or anything?

And yes.. SMAC 2!!!

[Allot]

Not sure why they're remaking the same game five times, but sure. Every dollar Firaxis makes is more hope of seeing a SMAC 2.

BLASPHEMY

[Ryan]

SMAC 2!!

*falls over*

[Kaiser Malarbor I]

Hex grid

[Erik Mortis]

What's wrong with Hex? I like Hex. Makes movement easier. Though it does present it's own problems since you get no right angles...

[Ryan]

Hex grid reminds me of the Operational Art of War game series.

[Kaiser Malarbor I]

Oh, I don't actually disapprove of it. It's just that chances are Apolytoners are going to spend the next five years trolling each other about it.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

Is there a law of diminishing returns with the Civ series I wonder?

[Harvey Steffke]

I dunno. I could only discover the wheel so many times before it stopped being magical. Like, about four.

[Erik Mortis]

The sad thing Ari... you're probably right.

[Erik Mortis]

After playing Civ 4... I pronounce it no better then Civ 2 or SMAC... in fact.. SMAC had better movies for projects... and the space elevator letting you do orbital insertions rocked.. and satalites letting you scout the world...

[Harvey Steffke]

We must dissent!

[Erik Mortis]

That one was creepy!

[Ryan]

I like the animated units and greater detail to the terrain, as well as the enhanced diplomacy options. But as far as being user friendly and easily customizable, it blows.

[CJ Miller]

We must dissent!

DISSENT! MALARBOR DEMANDS IT!

[Scott of Hyperborea]

I like Civ4 because it eliminates a lot of what was annoying about Civ2 (pollution, civil disorder) and adds a few new interesting game mechanics (culture, resources, religion). The best part is the mod-ability - you could never make something Fall From Heaven level awesome on Civ2. I admit it's not a quantum leap forward, but it is just an all-around better game.

I read an interview with a Firaxis guy who said there will never be another SMAC because of complicated legal issues - a bunch of different people own parts of the rights and they don't want to cooperate with each other.

There is, however, always these nice people

[Ryan]

Don't those add-ons require the BtS version of Civ4?


And hopefully Civ4 will be what Colonization was to Civ1 and 2 ~ a go-between upgrade.

[phineas elastopon]

I like Civ4 because it eliminates a lot of what was annoying about Civ2 (pollution, civil disorder)

Lolwut. Annoying? Well, it wasn't some weird-ass bug, and they weren't overly prolific. Those things were WAD challenges and I'm annoyed they took them out.

[Scott of Hyperborea]

The problem with how Civ2 handled those things was that they were always at a certain background level, and then occasionally and randomly they interrupted into a "you have to stop everything and deal with this now in a boring way" event. For example, pollution would occasionally appear on a nearby square, and then you'd have to interrupt what you were doing to build a settler and send it over to clean up, or find a settler somewhere else to move over. Alternately, you might go the whole game without getting pollution at all, just because you got lucky.

Civ4 still had a pollution system, but it was always operating invisibly in the background. The more pollution you had, the more it was a threat to health. So you had to control pollution, but you had to do it as part of a long term strategy of determining what level of pollution was acceptable and how many resources you were prepared to invest in stopping it, not just occasionally interrupting an important war or space race to make some mindless clicks that cleaned up a tile near your city.

Civil disorder was the same way - it's a question of whether you want happiness to have a constant, graded effect on city production that you have to strategically manage, or whether every couple of turns you want to get a "New York is in civil disorder!" message, have to zoom to the city, make one guy an entertainer, switch production to temple, and then get on with your turn. Have you even seriously played Civ4?

There are lots of good mods for non-BTS Civ4. I recommend this one - make sure you download from the link marked "vanilla Civ4 version"