This came with my new computer, and it's awesome. Far and away better than the previous games, the changes add a ridiculous amount of variety. So basically this means I stay up all night playing it.

My girlfriend plays this a lot; not enough explosions or gorillas wielding machine guns for my tastes.

Religion is too important in the game and the political correctness with which they treat it kinda ruins it for me.

I do love the complexity and the great AI. The technology paths are better and units diversity is excelletn as well.

Download the Total Realism mod from CivFanatics.com. They totally revamped the religion, and make it much more realistic and fun. It improves the game in every conceivable way, really, except for the occasional crash-to-desktop.

The mod for vanilla Civ IV is a little buggy, but they are supposed to release the Total Realism for Warlords next week, and it has solved (supposedly) all of the CTD errors. I'm very excited.

I remember when this game first came out. My brother-in-law got my brother and i hooked on it. and my brother-in-law would build this harmonious wonderful peaceful cultures that were so scientifically advanced, and when my brother and i would come to visit, we'd take over his game and make the civilization a police state massively producing nuclear weapons and intimidating other cultures. just a begin war machine. ahh, the memories...

I like this game, except it crashes a lot for me.

The Warlords add-on is much more stable.

It's not difficult at all to find this for a very low price online, if you dig.

I see what you're saying.

Thanks!

Thanks for the recommendation

The thing I always hated about Civ games (even though I generally love them) is the way in which corruption worked. You'd do a bit of colonial expansion on the other side of the world and then discover that your settlement can hardly generate any shields are taxes because it's too far away from the capital. I always found that unrealistic. Does Civ 4 address this at all?

Yup, their is no more corruption... at least not in terms of shields(which are called hammers now). Corruption was replaced with maintenance costs. Each city has maintenance costs which are higher the further from the capital they are and there are also costs for the number of cities you have.

Ah that sounds a LOT better. Thanks.

It's a big improvement, but at the same time, you can't have a ton of cities or grow your empire too fast.

Everyone I know who plays this, and everyone's opinions I've seen posted around when the game came out said that the changes really affected the way they had to play the game, but not me. It's weird, the style I play, Civ IV seems to work very nicely for. I also remember people saying that you simply can't build every improvement in every city anymore, and that you have to diversify your cities to specialized tasks, but I spend a lot of time later in the game just building wealth or culture waiting for the next scientific advance so I can build the next building. The game seems geared towards peaceful builders as opposed to militaristic conquerors.

Do you guys like Age of Empires III? I have only played the original Civ and was not really impressed by it back then, i am sure much has changed obviously... but the AOE gets my vote for being the best.

Just bought this on Thursday and I'd like the last 4 or so days of my life back

You may (or may not) have noticed my complete absence from RM in evenings and on weekends for the past few weeks, and this is due entirely to Civilization. Hell, if I could play at work, you wouldn't see me on RM at all.

I can't play Civilization out of the box anymore, since there are so many vastly superior mods to the game available at places like Civfanatics and Apolyton. Right now playing Total Realism Mod for Civ IV Warlords (build 2.1.1a gold). It's superb.

Download it here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfile ... _id=493406

I loved CIV 3 and the expansions for it...and I'd love to get CIV 4 but I probably won't get a damn thing done between that and my xbox 360.

id probably lose my job and my gf if i started playing that game.

Interesting... I might give that a go, thanks

What level do you guys play this at? I'm stuck on Noble at the moment and trying to break through to Prince.

I've never really liked the way that "levels" are done in Civ. Noble, I believe, is the level where everything is balanced with the AI, and Prince gives the AI a slight statistical advantage. I wouldn't mind if it was just a battle advantage, but they give the AI such a tech advantage that it's virtually impossible to ever catch up at higher levels, and I play a tech-centric game.

I usually play at Noble. I can stay in the game at that level even if I'm not dealt a good hand at the start.