I picked Civ 4 back up the other day after not playing it for a while and have been having a lot of fun with it. Does anyone else play? I haven't tried any multiplayer games but I think it'd be cool to play over the internet or email with some Lusternians.

I've got the game, but I can't play it. Installation freezes about halfway through. I supposedly need a better processor.

My girlfriend bought it several months ago, and also had problems during installation.

Looks like a fun game, though.

I got it. Barely play it anymore though, I liked CivIII better. But then again I haven't gotten around to getting the expansion packs yet, and a new one comes out next month. Maybe that'll get my interest running in it again.

Ick, how could you like Civ 3 better? Civ 4 just seems superior in every way.

I don't like Civ 3 late in the game. It takes several minutes for even the visible enemy units to move because they have so many, not to mention that your own orders become tedious.

I want to buy Civ 4, I just haven't gotten around to it. :/

I have it, and would be willing to play an online game sometime...

Uh, I had the same problem, but I don't think it's the processor. I tried installing it, but it kept failing halfway. I decided to try putting it in the other cd drive on my computer, and voila, it worked. Don't know why that helped, but it did...

Eh, it barely runs on the computer it does, and I don't play it too often. I suppose if I had some of the expansion packs I might play it a little bit more, but it just gets stale after awhile.

Yeah, that's one of the things I hated about Civ 3. There's hardly any lag like that in the endgame in Civ 4 (well, obivously it'll be slower if you have a lot of troops to order around, but you don't have to watch the other people move unless they're attacking you).

I also like what they did with pollution (that is, got rid of it, and replaced it with an infinitely better system).

Have it and love it.

Have Civ III and hated it with a bitter passion.

Had Civ: CtP, but lost it. That was a good game too. Civ 4 is better, but CtP was soooooo much better than Civ III. Culture was the one and only redeeming factor of that stupid, stupid game.

...what was wrong with Civ 3? I greatly preferred Civ 2, but 3 wasn't terrible.

Have and enjoyed both. Still play Civ 4 Warlords a lot, like trying out the different Civilisations and see how the different specialties effect my style of game.

It's the other way around for me. CivIII works like a charm, while CivIV is incredibly laggy on a computer where it shouldn't be laggy.

Excessive corruption mechanics.

Extreme micromanagement, especially in workers. Automating workers made them stupid and destructive.

Combat system prone to outliers and flukes in great abundance.

Heh, alright. I was never much of a "play to win" type with Civ3 so I guess I wouldn't have noticed things like that. I treated it more like a toy.

EDIT: Has automating your guys ever been a sound strategy in any TBS, come to think of it? I -always- get better results manualling things.

And the costs from the cities in CivIV is better?

Automating workers has never been the smart move.

I find the CivIV combat system more prone to flukes than CivIII ever was.

The costs from cities in Civ 4 is astronomically better. In Civ 3, you couldn't build cities on another continent and ever get more than one shield and one gold from it. In Civ 4, you have improvements that make a substantial difference, plateaued city costs (based more on empire size than distance, so you can build or conquer wherever you need), civic options that make city costs extremely low...yeah. You 1) have options, and 2) don't get shafted for playing wrong.

The combat system has several more variables, large cities are possibly more difficult to capture, but it's less prone to flukes simply by having a reasonable HP level. Rolling three times produces more outlying results than rolling 100 times.

Now I want to buy this game.

I've found that Civ 4 has relatively few flukes in the combat; when you do the mouseover to command one unit to attack another, it displays the odds of victory (ie. 18.6 vs. 13.2) and if the odds are largely in your favor then you'll almost always win. I think (?) it gives some kind of advantage to units from later eras, too; I haven't seen any "spearman defeats tank" stupidity yet.

Anyway, probably the thing I like best about the game is how many options it gives you - you can win by obliterating all your neighbors, or you can win quite viably without being in a single war.

Civ IV makes my life.

Now I need to go find it again.

India ftw.