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Civ IV vs. Civ V

I bought Civ4 complete via Steam for €10 during the aforementioned summer sale.
It runs like a dream (with all the bells and whistles) on my 24" iMac 2.8Ghz Core2Duo with 4Gb of RAM and a ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro with 256Mb of RAM : that means at full resolution of 1920x1200 with graphic details set to maximum. And it looks great !

I tried the Civ5 demo yesterday. I must admit, it's looking very slick and it's clear that it's an improvement over Civ4, but needless to say, it didn't run as nicely. I had to either lower the resolution to 1280x800 to be able to play with maximum graphical detail, or play at 1920x1200 with low detail. For me that's unacceptable (that's why consoles have unbeatable life spans :D ) . When I play a game, I want full detail. That's why I don't bother with the latest games and I always buy older games (from 2007/2008). You'd be amazed what kind of games you can pick up cheap... (provided you have bootcamp because on the mac side, cheap is a rarely used word)

I'm sure that by the time Civ6 is announced, I will have replaced my computer with a more powerful one, at which point I'll be buying Civ5 complete for €10 during a future summer sale...
 
Right... so, other than your childish bickering over systems, I think you've convinced me to look for a deal on the full Civ IV and then go up from there down the road. I don't think I'll have this machine as my primary for more than another year or maybe two, so upgrading to a better machine when Civ V is out seems reasonable.
 
kontari dasou said:
Right... so, other than your childish bickering over systems, I think you've convinced me to look for a deal on the full Civ IV and then go up from there down the road. I don't think I'll have this machine as my primary for more than another year or maybe two, so upgrading to a better machine when Civ V is out seems reasonable.
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I would definitely watch for deals on 'Civ IV Complete' ... of which there have been many during the last few months ... there are hundreds of hours of gaming there, then you can decide and have waited for a better Civ V price :)
 
Civilization IV is the best out of all the available Civilization games, five looks pretty nice too but I'm betting it will be based on the mechanics of IV, so you could jump into four now and be prepared to play five when it's released in a year or two for Macintosh.
 
Played every game since Civ II, and have to say this is the most different one yet.
The strategies I used for the other games are pretty useless. Units are more valuable here, and terrain improvements are build more slowly. I'm having even more fun than with CIV IV and thats saying a lot. Wonders are less expensive, but less important than in previous games. Barbarians are a welcome training for your soldiers now, in stead of a nuisance. Diplomacy feels better, less irrational.
I have to say its pretty buggy still, you might want to wait for a few months. Also, balance isn't quite there yet, its very difficult to achieve cultural victories. However, you could also say that it's more important then ever to think ahead and plan for a certain type of victory.
Overall I can see why the reviews online are so high, it is an incredibly well thought through successor. Maybe the first "real" sequel to CIV I. I especially like the emphasis on units, it makes every turn more important.

Saying that its the same as Civ I through IV is ridiculous. They really implemented the lessons learned in revolution.
 
miles01110 said:
Does anyone actually have the game yet? Sid Meier's last venture into computer gaming- Spore- was a huge DRM fail. Does Civ V have similarily arcane DRM methods?
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Spore was designed by Will Wright and published by EA. Different designer, different publisher.

The DRM for Civilization 5 is handled by Steam. Don't know if that's considered arcane nowadays.
 
To answer directly, yes, it is worth picking up the complete Civ IV, if only to get to grips with what is an excellent game.

I'm coming towards the end of my first Marathon game in V, and I must admit there isn't a massive amount of differences, but I'm preferring V as a whole. The biggest change is combat - it is no longer a guessing game, but you actually get a prediction of the result before attacking, and the removal of stacking makes the whole thing more tactical. Civ IV turned in to stacks of doom roving round the map, wasting cities with little effort, whereas V very much relies on smaller numbers of units and clever use of ranged/melee attacks. Scarcity of resources also comes in to play, as you don't get infinite horses (for example), meaning that you can easily only build a handful of the best units.

The other big change is simply that of simplicity. Some of the complexity is gone, which in my mind is great, as it stops the game crushing your very soul.

It's definitely worth the scores it is getting, and I'd argue it's way better than IV and III.
 
Civ 5 is very different from Civ4 in many ways.... yes its similar but there are many big changes.

overall I'm loving Civ5, much more so than I ever loved Civ4 my previous favorite game.

You can do a torrent search and just download the 3rd party Wineskin based port of Civ5 :) Its a little laggy on my 320m without using pretty low settings, but its still fun to play and no Windows needed.
 
peskaa said:
Civ IV turned in to stacks of doom roving round the map, wasting cities with little effort,
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Hehe ... that is fun in its own way, but I am glad for the new system.

peskaa said:
whereas V very much relies on smaller numbers of units and clever use of ranged/melee attacks. Scarcity of resources also comes in to play, as you don't get infinite horses (for example), meaning that you can easily only build a handful of the best units.
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It gets frustrating ... you want to build something but lack resources, and even when you get resources they are not infinite. I love the challenge they added by slowing everything down in terms of production ...
 
txa1265 said:
It gets frustrating ... you want to build something but lack resources, and even when you get resources they are not infinite. I love the challenge they added by slowing everything down in terms of production ...
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I'd argue it's more tactical - you can't just spam Swordsmen units once you find some iron, but have to decide whether to use that iron to build a handful of units to create a core of an army, or spend them on building improvements - or a balance of the two.

I also find the tactical rush for scarce resources exciting - if there are two neighbouring Civs with access to a single Iron resource... My biggest issue is that some of the resources aren't balanced - on the game I was playing there was a real lack of coal, but absolutely loads of oil and aluminium (as in, I had 35+ alu, 24+ oil, but only 8 coal!).
 
peskaa said:
My biggest issue is that some of the resources aren't balanced - on the game I was playing there was a real lack of coal, but absolutely loads of oil and aluminium (as in, I had 35+ alu, 24+ oil, but only 8 coal!).
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Isn't that LIFE, though? I am currently engaged in a peninsula campaign, with loads of water resources, but only poor doomed Stockholm had an adequate area of iron ... you should have seen the AI flocking in to try to grab the cities I was attacking in order to capture territory ... once I had that Iron I was unstoppable!
 
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