Still a good game, I like a lot of the mechanics. In Civ III your optimum attack mode was a mega stack of units that the enemy could peel back one by one, but not before you took their city. In Civ II if you stacked units and one died, they all died. I had forgotten that this version was the start crazy stacking era. It looks a bit it raw, but my current CPU meant that processing computer players during their turns was no big deal, so things went along quickly. It also took a few tries to get it to launch and it crashed out to desktop… a completely resized and reorganized desktop because of screen resolution, something I will never stop complaining about… so once again we’re reminded why auto-save is a default option in the series. Today a lot of the UI feels really dated… not bad, but much closer to the earlier games in view an concept… and it has to be played full screen at a resolution that means all the open windows in the background will be completely messed up. I only have the base game, so my quick replay used that. It also looks fairly good the UI doesn’t look like it was from Windows 3.1, Oh, and actually supports the Steam overlay so you can take screen shots, though there are no achievements. Plays fast and smooth… more so that Civ V I would say. My memories of it are also of a much more complicated game than previous versions… doesn’t that apply to every title in the sequence… but today it seems oddly light and sparse. Maybe it was always there and I missed it back in the day. They did eventually add a windowed mode, which has been a part of the series ever since. I wrote to their support about the issue and they told me I shouldn’t tab out of the game. I think my main bias against this version is that at launch it ran VERY slowly on my system and was part of the three game generation that insisted on being full screen and would crash when I tried to alt-tab out to look something up. We are now in the pre-Steam era, though I recall I bought my copy online and downloaded it over what passed for the internet back then, some flavor of ADSL. Maybe my second favorite version of the game, interesting choices, the end of massive unit stacking, though still prone to some quirks and not as fast as I would expect a title this old to be.Ībility to play today: 95% Civilization IV – 2005 It is, as noted, a title I have spent a lot of time with, it has Steam achievements, scenarios, and the things that make Civ fun. Overall, a solid if somewhat divisive entry in the series. There is also a ton of Steam Workshop mods and scenarios for the game. They are okay, but like a lot of Civ expansions they completely changed how the game felt. There are two expansions about which I am less than thrilled. The base game is generally available for cheap during any sale. I was able to get through a medium size game in an afternoon and evening. It runs at a sprightly pace now, the computer opponents being very quick until you get into deep late-game with tons of units on the field. A re-install fixed the issue and I was able to play. I had to re-download it because the copy I had on my drive, last played in 2019, simply refused to launch. It is still there and playable, though it can be a bit problematic. It didn’t really stick with me, feeling like a watered down Alpha Centauri mixed in with the almost maniacal love of unnecessary graphical detail that tends to grip the series. I suppose, as a side question, is any of the DLC worthwhile? Does it improve the game? My impressions are all from the base game, which was unexciting enough… I am really not interested in how my cities look as long as they are producing units for war as an example… that I went back to Civ V.Ībility to play today: 100% Civilization: Beyond Earth – 2014 But for just me to play for maybe 2 hours… not so much. If we got the one-time “strategy group” back together for Friday night games or some such I would grab it. That isn’t a huge amount in this day and age, but it is more that I was willing to invest in going back to play it. While it probably runs better on my current machine than it did on the one I had when it launched, it is also 16+ GB to download.
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