Civilization IV
A 4 days LanParty in my home and the main game played was CIV IV. First, for the ones of you that don’t know, CIV is a strategy game with a lot (but i mean a LOT) of similarities with board games.
Is a turned based game where you objective (in the mode i played) was total annihilation of the enemies. In this type of game, you can win by war or by diplomacy.
It has thousands of little details (like the several options in diplomacy or the huge technology tree) that can make the game loved by ones, hated by others.
The game presented some problems, especially in the latter parts of the game when you know where your enemies are and the battles already started. Maybe because my computer is a little old (PIV 2,8 with 1GB of RAM, a GeForce 440go with 64mb of ram) but the turn usually took 30 secs or more to pass. This, of course, is not normal. The problem could be from my graphics Card, by we are talking about the turn pass, a time where no graphics are needed, only calculations are made.
I found this site where the guys at firaxis give the player some solutions to the problem. Let’s say i did them all and the problem with the lazy turns continued.
Finally i found a guy that made a performance analysis to the game. Main conclusion: Civilization IV needs a lot of processor! You can find the analysis here.
Apart of the performance issues, CIV is a good game for the fanatics of board games. Has a lot of features, options and strategy. The learning curve is medium (1, 2 hours tops). Is a good game to play in a weekend with your friends (if you have a decent computer of course :)).
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My name is Nuno Silva and I am the author of this blog. I am a Computer Engineer and have a passion for game development.
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Ah! The good old Civ. I’m a Civ fan since the beggining of the series. With Civ III and IV I played a lot of network games with my wife.
From the design point of view it is interesting to see how the game expands more and more without loosing its original traits.
It’s a fantastic game that even if you hate it, should be at least tried out by any game designer, just to get the feel of it. You can learn a lot, from combat algorithms, to simple design decisions concerning AI, balance and so on.
Kudos for the post mate!
Yes, the game was full of the details. At some point i didn’t know if the details were excessive or not. Unfortunately i only played until about 70% of the research development, and, if we excluded the laziness of my computer, the game becoming very interesting.
One thing i liked a lot: the diplomacy. It is excellent. Trade resources, technologies, rare resources, declare wars, demand resources. You even can make another player your vassal. All of this using a simple interface.
The battles are very simple. Unfortunately you can only make a battle between 2 units, and not between armies. I think this features would speed up some things (at least it would prevented me to click my mouse button 20 times in a turn)
Many ideas came up from playing CIV. Now we must digest them
And I can say more, I play for about 500 turns and the game became unplayble, unless you are watching TV and the 5-10 minutes between turns don’t bother you!!!