I played some Beyond the Sword this weekend.  First game was my first civ game in what has to be at least half a year.  I’ve just been busy with other hobbies/games.  This was the first time I was actually able to have a Corporation.  I built the Sushi and Cereal corporations.  Pretty interesting concept.  And I founded one or two cities in my neighbor civ and they opened branches all over their land.  (More money for me!)

Will be out either tomorrow or wednesday. Gamestop says tomorrow and Best Buy’s website says Wednesday. I played one last Warlords Game and did pretty well. I think this was my third best score in the expansion pack. So you can download it and play this last turn and add it to your high score if you want something to beat or something to laugh at. Eric XI of the Chinese would be happy!

Just finished my first Warlords game and I won a domination victory with my highest score ever! 12108!! Got ranked as Charlemagne! Save file to uploaded in the future.

There is a new, war oriented opening movie that kicks butt! The opening screen no longer plays the happy Lion King-like theme, but a more ominous one. Instead of a nice happy world in the background to the main menu, we have an impatient looking warrior who likes to twirl his sword. Impressive!

Before I get to playing civ4: Warlods, I wanted to share my best high score ever in civ4. It was as the Eric-Chin IV of the Chinese. My final score was 7217 (the next one is 5699! as the japanese) and I finished in 1988 AD with a Domination victory in Chieftain difficulty. I might have finished earlier and had a higher score if I had realized I wouldn’t have my domination victory with the civs I was fighting. If only it had been a Warlords game, I’m pretty sure I could have had some vassal states which would have allowed me to have finished earlier! I can’t wait to buy, install, and play Warlords. To add this game to your hall of fame, just right-click the link below and click save as. Play my last round and it will record my score.

Today is the official release of Civ4: Warlords! Go get it, but make sure you leave me a copy!

The computer kept declaring war on me and finally I got sick of being on the defensive. To speed things up, I declared war on EVERYONE! It still took a few turns! This time I’m playing as my original civ, the Japanese. Let’s see if I can lead the Japanese to victory at Warlord setting.

Finished my German game in civ4 and now onto warlord. I’ve never been this high up in civ before. Hopefully they don’t crush me!

I’ll post my file from my last game soon. Just started a new civ4 game with 2 new elements. First of all, I’m playing pangea so boats are irrelevant. Second, I’m playing Germans which have some differences from previous civs I’ve played (Japanese and Chinese). One primary difference is that the German special unit comes much later in the game. The Chinese get theirs very early, allowing me to kill the Japanese very early on before wars take too long. Japanese get their Samuarai mid-game which can be good as you’re trying to expand that last bit of land. But I chose Frederick because of his creative side which gives extra culture (I’m a big culture person and always win a bunch of cities from the opposition on culture) and philosophical which helps in Wonders. Execellent! I’m still Cheiftan, but I think next game I will go to War Lord. I still won my last game by a large margin.

At first, Civ4 seemed not to play much better on this computer with twice the stats of my old machine. Yeah, the game didn’t take 15 minutes to load, but it wasn’t as close to instantaneous as I’d hoped. But then I slowly began to see the places where Civ4 was much better on this computer. The first thing I noticed is that the Wonder videos are no longer out of sync with the sound, so I was able to watch them and enjoy what the programmers had put together. Then I noticed that the scrolling was much, much smoother than it previously had been. Finally, I was able to talk to other civs without that causing me to have to wait 3 minutes for the other civ to load up. I finished yet another game, this time as the chinese, and I’ll be uploading that soon.