Civ 4 is being released tomorrow

Ubiquitous · Post by **Ubiquitous** » 2005-10-27 10:30am

DAMMIT - release has been put back until 4/11 over here! Bastards!

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2005-10-27 10:37am

The Civ 4 boards are full of angry people bicthing about the game not booting up with certain ATI cards. The general consensus is that the game was rushed out the door. Added to that was the blunder of certain games in teh US shipping with a French Canadian tech tree chart.

Sounds like they have a point. If I had known all of this I might have held off on preordering this game. Still having checked out some reviews and people's walkthroughs I am excited to play this game - if it works.

I swear someday some company will pay the price for this bullshit move of releasing games before they're truly ready. Its a blight in the PC gaming community.

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2005-10-27 10:52am

Stravo wrote:The Civ 4 boards are full of angry people bicthing about the game not booting up with certain ATI cards. The general consensus is that the game was rushed out the door. Added to that was the blunder of certain games in teh US shipping with a French Canadian tech tree chart.

Sounds like they have a point. If I had known all of this I might have held off on preordering this game. Still having checked out some reviews and people's walkthroughs I am excited to play this game - if it works.

I swear someday some company will pay the price for this bullshit move of releasing games before they're truly ready. Its a blight in the PC gaming community.

Okay, I preordered this one, but I just canceled it.

I have a ATI card, if I cannot play the game. Why buy it?

mjn6172 · Post by **mjn6172** » 2005-10-27 11:23am

Stravo wrote:The Civ 4 boards are full of angry people bicthing about the game not booting up with certain ATI cards. The general consensus is that the game was rushed out the door. Added to that was the blunder of certain games in teh US shipping with a French Canadian tech tree chart.

Sounds like they have a point. If I had known all of this I might have held off on preordering this game. Still having checked out some reviews and people's walkthroughs I am excited to play this game - if it works.

I swear someday some company will pay the price for this bullshit move of releasing games before they're truly ready. Its a blight in the PC gaming community.

I'm in the same situation as those people. Here I was, all excited about getting the game yesterday, and the fucking thing doesn't run. So far I've reinstalled Direct X, updated all of my drivers, and tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game. There had better be a fix for this sometime soon, I'm not buying a new graphics card just for one game.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-10-27 11:29am

mjn6172 wrote:I'm in the same situation as those people. Here I was, all excited about getting the game yesterday, and the fucking thing doesn't run. So far I've reinstalled Direct X, updated all of my drivers, and tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game. There had better be a fix for this sometime soon, I'm not buying a new graphics card just for one game.

There will probably be a patch out sooner or later, but did you try installing DX via the game installer and uninstall the ATI drivers before reinstalling?

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2005-10-27 11:30am

mjn6172 wrote: I'm in the same situation as those people. Here I was, all excited about getting the game yesterday, and the fucking thing doesn't run. So far I've reinstalled Direct X, updated all of my drivers, and tried uninstalling and reinstalling the game. There had better be a fix for this sometime soon, I'm not buying a new graphics card just for one game.

The Firaxis apologists - and there are many on the Civ Fanatics board are coming out of the wordwork saying "Be patient there will be a patch." some even going as far as saying "You can't expect a game to work perfetctly on all systems right out of the box." Of course when pressed as to whether the game worked for the apologists they all admitted that it did.

The angry crowd are rightfully saying that how can you release a game that doesn't work with a popular (and expensive) video card? An insider posted that Take 2 games forced Firaxis to release the game a month early for qaurterly profit reporting reasons.

I just received mine as I wrote this. I will load this with trepidation. I don't have an ATI card but with all the hubbub I'm wary.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-10-27 11:32am

Stravo wrote:The angry crowd are rightfully saying that how can you release a game that doesn't work with a popular (and expensive) video card? An insider posted that Take 2 games forced Firaxis to release the game a month early for qaurterly profit reporting reasons.

Ugh. I remember when Interplay forced Black Isle to release FO2 six months early - entire segments of the game were never released and the bugs in the game were never entirely resolved.

I just received mine as I wrote this. I will load this with trepidation. I don't have an ATI card but with all the hubbub I'm wary.

I've not heard any problems regarding nVidia cards so far, so you should be good to go.

Grandmaster Jogurt · Post by **Grandmaster Jogurt** » 2005-10-27 12:46pm

Crap. I have an ATI card...

Oh well, at least now I don't feel so bad about not being able to pick up a copy of this game for a while.

Laughing Mechanicus · Post by **Laughing Mechanicus** » 2005-10-27 01:14pm

Working as a QA tester, I can tell you it is almost certain that the developers and publishers knew about this issue - the most basic test we run on a game is installing the software on a bunch of systems with different common hardware configurations and checking it installs, boots up and can run the game.

Don't blame the Firaxis however, they will have been strong armed into an early release by the publishers - that’s just par for the course in this industry. I can guarantee there are many very unhappy folks at Firaxis right now about the way this has gone down, but there is very little they can do about it other than work on a patch like crazy.

Publishing companies are one of the few instances where something is as bas as its reputation. Their greed knows no bounds, pressure and financial threats will be levelled against the developer of the game, and ruthless cost cutting will be made at every opportunity. It's common to hear things like "So long as they buy the game it's not our problem anymore", it's an in-joke for them that they can make a shit game and it will still sell millions of copies just because it is from a certain franchise.

They are aware that the majority of fans "know" that the developer is responsible for the game and hence will blame any defects with it on them rather than the publisher, of course what most people fail to realise is the publisher is usually the one who covers the QA testing of a game looking for issues just like this (unfortunately it should be the developers doing this, but publishers prefer to do it because they can pick and choose what they would like to have fixed).

Sadly, they've run the numbers and they know the vast majority of people who bought this game and have had it fail will simply wait until a patch is released rather than return it - so they will continue to do it in the future.

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2005-10-27 01:32pm

Aaron Ash wrote:Working as a QA tester, I can tell you it is almost certain that the developers and publishers knew about this issue - the most basic test we run on a game is installing the software on a bunch of systems with different common hardware configurations and checking it installs, boots up and can run the game.

Don't blame the Firaxis however, they will have been strong armed into an early release by the publishers - that’s just par for the course in this industry. I can guarantee there are many very unhappy folks at Firaxis right now about the way this has gone down, but there is very little they can do about it other than work on a patch like crazy.

Publishing companies are one of the few instances where something is as bas as its reputation. Their greed knows no bounds, pressure and financial threats will be levelled against the developer of the game, and ruthless cost cutting will be made at every opportunity. It's common to hear things like "So long as they buy the game it's not our problem anymore", it's an in-joke for them that they can make a shit game and it will still sell millions of copies just because it is from a certain franchise.

They are aware that the majority of fans "know" that the developer is responsible for the game and hence will blame any defects with it on them rather than the publisher, of course what most people fail to realise is the publisher is usually the one who covers the QA testing of a game looking for issues just like this (unfortunately it should be the developers doing this, but publishers prefer to do it because they can pick and choose what they would like to have fixed).

Sadly, they've run the numbers and they know the vast majority of people who bought this game and have had it fail will simply wait until a patch is released rather than return it - so they will continue to do it in the future.

No matter, I say fuck em!

+1 for piracy in my book, there is no way I am buying this before I am 100%sure that it works and it is in the bargin bin.

I do not support shitty developers

KrauserKrauser · Post by **KrauserKrauser** » 2005-10-27 01:49pm

Did you just call the makers of Alpha Centauri, Civilization and other such god enspired games shitty developers?

Hang your head in shame!

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2005-10-27 02:04pm

KrauserKrauser wrote:Did you just call the makers of Alpha Centauri, Civilization and other such god enspired games shitty developers?

Hang your head in shame!

They cannot live on past glory, they are only as good as their latest product.

When it is crap they are crap.

Laughing Mechanicus · Post by **Laughing Mechanicus** » 2005-10-27 03:00pm

Faram wrote:
KrauserKrauser wrote:Did you just call the makers of Alpha Centauri, Civilization and other such god enspired games shitty developers?

Hang your head in shame!
They cannot live on past glory, they are only as good as their latest product.

When it is crap they are crap.

Apparently you didn't pay any attention to my post - do you seriously think the developers of a game spend fucking years making a game only to ship it with some mind numbingly stupid bug because they couldn't be assed to fix it?

Certainly this kind of crap slipping out into release PC games is infuriating, but in my experience blame for this almost certainly lies with the publishers rather than the developers. The publishers will probably have told Firaxis to get the game finished by X date, otherwise they would start fining them for each week it is "overdue".

Dominus Atheos · Post by **Dominus Atheos** » 2005-10-27 03:07pm

phongn wrote:
Stravo wrote:The angry crowd are rightfully saying that how can you release a game that doesn't work with a popular (and expensive) video card? An insider posted that Take 2 games forced Firaxis to release the game a month early for qaurterly profit reporting reasons.
Ugh. I remember when Interplay forced Black Isle to release FO2 six months early - entire segments of the game were never released and the bugs in the game were never entirely resolved.

And let us all not forget the very decent KotOR II, at least until the last quarter, when there was so many questions and sub-plots were left unfinished.

But at least some people are trying to fix this.

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2005-10-27 03:16pm

Aaron Ash wrote:Apparently you didn't pay any attention to my post - do you seriously think the developers of a game spend fucking years making a game only to ship it with some mind numbingly stupid bug because they couldn't be assed to fix it?

Certainly this kind of crap slipping out into release PC games is infuriating, but in my experience blame for this almost certainly lies with the publishers rather than the developers. The publishers will probably have told Firaxis to get the game finished by X date, otherwise they would start fining them for each week it is "overdue".

You are right I missed that part.

But I cannot see any information on the http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/home.htm
or
http://www.firaxis.com/

About this problem, they do not inform their customers about a showstoper and a known problem, that makes them scumbags in my book.

Laughing Mechanicus · Post by **Laughing Mechanicus** » 2005-10-27 03:48pm

Faram wrote:But I cannot see any information on the http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/home.htm
or
http://www.firaxis.com/

About this problem, they do not inform their customers about a showstoper and a known problem, that makes them scumbags in my book.

I would agree, it seems from the foot note that the Civ4 website is run by Take Two (publishers again usually handle websites for games); the chances of them reporting something that would adversely affect sales are near non-existent. Firaxis could of course post about it on their website, but that would likely lead to them getting punished in some way by Take Two, probably in the form of a lawsuit of some sort. The industry is a very strange one and even an old and well respected developer like Firaxis could get seriously fucked up if Take Two took it upon themselves to do so.

Aeolus · Post by **Aeolus** » 2005-10-28 12:06am

Stravo wrote:The Civ 4 boards are full of angry people bicthing about the game not booting up with certain ATI cards. The general consensus is that the game was rushed out the door. Added to that was the blunder of certain games in teh US shipping with a French Canadian tech tree chart.

Sounds like they have a point. If I had known all of this I might have held off on preordering this game. Still having checked out some reviews and people's walkthroughs I am excited to play this game - if it works.

I swear someday some company will pay the price for this bullshit move of releasing games before they're truly ready. Its a blight in the PC gaming community.

It works fine on mine but my brothers far superoir comp wont play it. It is the best civ game yet.......by far

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2005-10-28 12:24am

Found this fix, might help for those that have problems.

Long Link

Post by **Vympel** » 2005-10-28 03:59am

How typical- another game that doesn't work on ATI cards

Seriously though, are there any game related bugs I should be aware of? It doesn't come out in Australia till November, so I'm buying it here in San Francisco before I leave (I was gonna buy it today but it was sold out at the EB near Union Square).

A PC IGN review stated that the old "spearman beats tank" crap is still there. For fuck's sake, why do they keep making this dumbassed decision? If you're a shit enough player that you have bloody warriors and the enemy has main battle tanks and mechanized infantry, you deserve to be bloody wasted with no effort. Pfft.

Faram · Post by **Faram** » 2005-10-28 04:05am

Well the scumbags have released some info on how to fix this.

http://www.2kgames.com/civ4/support.htm

Damn hard fix IMHO I really want to see the average computeruser try this one, disater will follow!

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-10-28 08:32am

AFAIK, the dev team is working on a proper fix but this was pushed out in the interim so that the more tech-savvy could try and resolve it. Apparently the ATi drivers don't like something related to the 300+ MB packed art file.

I did it myself and it was quite painless -- most of the guides even have pictures to help guide the user. I also ran into a problem where my USB soundcard wasn't compatible, so I threw in my ancient SBLive! to get it working.

Vympel wrote:A PC IGN review stated that the old "spearman beats tank" crap is still there. For fuck's sake, why do they keep making this dumbassed decision? If you're a shit enough player that you have bloody warriors and the enemy has main battle tanks and mechanized infantry, you deserve to be bloody wasted with no effort. Pfft.

It's a probability issue, IIRC, though the GameSpot reviewer said that they didn't encounter the "spearman beats tank" scenario.

Stravo · Post by **Stravo** » 2005-10-28 10:58am

Initial reactions to the game:

First it took 45 minutes to install. I was cursing the whole time wondering if I would be one of the 'lucky' ones that wouldn't have his game play. The install kept hanging on the dialogue screen to install the second disk.

FINALLY got it to work. With some trepidation I loaded her up. She loaded like a dream, nice and smooth and fast,

The variety of options you can choose in a custom game are quite amazing. You can even choose things like SIngle City Challenege. You can choose to disable culture flipping, you can have war always on, peace always on, you name it the option is probably there.

The huge maps are indeed HUGE. And best of all there is a zoom feature that allows you to zoom out all the way so you see the map as a globe and your nation's position there. Yes, no longer a flat map but a globe or you can zoom it in all the way to see individual improvements in a city and the garrison inside.

The gameplay is stellar. I definately suffered from just one more turn syndrome last night.

The tech tree is vast and no longer forces you into certain tracks like Civ 3. YOu have multiple branching trees and you need to research things like farming and mining whereas before you started knowing these things.

Resources are vitally important perhaps even more so than Civ 3, for instance spearmen cannot be built unless you have access to a copper or Iron mine unlike Civ 3 where you could build a spearmen right away. And you actually have to build a mine to access this resource not just link it to a road.

Graphics are really nice. The battles ar emuch more dynamic, with animated combat between your units and the enemy. And let me tell you barbarians in this game are nasty. I watched in horror as one of my cities was suddenly approached from all sides by hordes of barbarians out of the fog of war. Just as in Civ 3 you really need to push your borders out to keep the barbs at bay. My advice is keep a rapid reaction force ready in the early portions of the game to sorty out and deal with the incoming hordes. Later on in the game simply post a few units on your borders and they should be able to intercept anything coming your way.

According to the manual barbs can now capture cities but I haven't experienced that yet.

Wonders are very well done and quite diverse. Also Wonder movies are back but unfortunately they're the CGI movie variety and not nearly as well done as the wonder movies we were treated to in Alpha Centauri. A small gripe - the wonder movies could at least give us a small breakdown of what the wonder does. Its sort of annoying that I built the Hagia Sophia and have no idea what it does unless I mouse over it or check the civipedia. Its nice to get all that info right there in the wonder movie - but that's just a small gripe.

A note on research. There's a pop up that gives you a blurb on the new tech you discovered and it is narrated by Leonard Nimoy. Very nice.

The AI civilizations are much more aggressive diplomatically but I haven't noticed if they're more aggressive militraily. That may be because my Civ (Egyptians) currently has gunpowder weapons and these guys are just getting around to medieval footman. But I definately notice a tone down in combat and more diplomacy and trade. The Civs want to trade with you badly.

Also borders are very well done now. The AI can't incur on your lands without declaring war or getting an open borders treaty. I heartily recommend giving them open borders because of the trade and more importantly you can send scoutrs and stuff into their territory to check them out. They cannot pull a "send an army in to their capital and declare war right on its outskirts" idea because as soon as they declare war all units are punted outside your borders. I like that idea very much.

On civilizations in general. The traits aspect of Civ 3 is still there. A little more fleshed out added to that each leader has traits as well so as the Americans you can be Aggressive Teddy Roosevelt or more Financially oriented Washington.

Governments are now handled in a fantastically better way. Instead of just choosing democracy or Republic you now have civics. So you can choose several aspects of your government broken down by Type of government (Monarchy, Democracy) Type of labor (Slavery, serfdom) Type of Religion (Theocracy, Organized Religion) and Mercantile oreintation (Free Market, Communism)

It really can open up some interesting possibilites.

Religion. This is handled extremely well in the game. You can research certain religions and if you are the discoverer of that religion you are the founder. Thus you get a great prophet further down the road and a bonus to the spread of your religion. Your religion helps make your people happy (and all religions have the exact same bonuses) and you can even spread it to opposing empires helping in culture flipping.

Build a shrine in the discovering city and watch the gold pour in.

Great people. Before where you would get a great leader either in combat or being the first to discover something now you get them based on many factors including wonders. Instead of them appearing at random you get a graph that slowly builds up over time that when its full created a great person for you. And there are several different classes of great people: Mercantile, Scientists, Artsists. They can be used in several different ways: you can sacrifice them to create a soecial buidling in your city so a Great Artists might create a master peice that pumps a ton of culture out of your city, they can be sacrificed to finish up research. Two great people can be sacrificed to initiate a Golden Age.

I think I've written enough here, buy this game ASAP. It is witout a doubt the best Civ game to ever come down the pipe. The tech issues are annoying for the people suffering and I would hold off until there's a patch but if you think you can run this game now, please buy it. You will not regret it.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-10-28 11:04am

Stravo wrote:The huge maps are indeed HUGE. And best of all there is a zoom feature that allows you to zoom out all the way so you see the map as a globe and your nation's position there. Yes, no longer a flat map but a globe or you can zoom it in all the way to see individual improvements in a city and the garrison inside.

Zooming out, the graphics greatly reminded me of a lusher Civ1 since it goes from an angled to a flat view

According to the manual barbs can now capture cities but I haven't experienced that yet.

I know that barbarians could capture cities in Civ2 and the animated battles are indeed nice. I was in the tutorial and watch as my warriors duked it out with some lions, 'twas neat

Its sort of annoying that I built the Hagia Sophia and have no idea what it does unless I mouse over it or check the civipedia. Its nice to get all that info right there in the wonder movie - but that's just a small gripe.

I still think Civ2 had the best wonder movies and its Civipedia had much more information on it.

Governments are now handled in a fantastically better way. Instead of just choosing democracy or Republic you now have civics. So you can choose several aspects of your government broken down by Type of government (Monarchy, Democracy) Type of labor (Slavery, serfdom) Type of Religion (Theocracy, Organized Religion) and Mercantile oreintation (Free Market, Communism)

Oh hell yes, I was waiting for this. It was one of the features that was descended from SMAC and it looks pretty nifty.

I think I've written enough here, buy this game ASAP. It is witout a doubt the best Civ game to ever come down the pipe. The tech issues are annoying for the people suffering and I would hold off until there's a patch but if you think you can run this game now, please buy it. You will not regret it.

Civ4 is pure binary crack.

Ubiquitous · Post by **Ubiquitous** » 2005-10-28 12:01pm

That's for that review Stravo its the first good thing I have heard since the release of the game and I feel much better in my choice to pre-order it now.

I just hope it works with my GeForce 4 440mx.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-10-28 12:26pm

ALI_G wrote:I just hope it works with my GeForce 4 440mx.

It should work but it might not be too fast.