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.

I was surprised that, by only raising the level of difficulty by one, the computer opponents in civ4 began to fight each other. In this instance, it was to my advantage because Washington of the Americans attacked Peter of the Russians, who I was planning to attack anyway. I think I will play my fourth game also at this difficulty level or I fear they may annihilate me. I’m not quite ready for that yet.

I’m a couple of days late, but - the patch is out! Click on advanced -> check for updates.

Civfantics.com has the details of the patch.

My second civ4 game is over and I did MUCH better this time! I won a Space Race instead of just having the highest score upon end of turns like last game. This earned me a score of # - Neville Chamberlain!

Here is my save file if you wish to add it to your Hall of Fame.

I’ve got a little more than 100 turns left in my second game ofciv4. As my first game served to teach me many new concepts in the civ series, I have fared much better. One of the key concepts I’ve learned is that barbarians are everywhere, even in Settler mode. Previously, in the easiest difficulty level the barbarians did not attack too much. In fact, I remember being shocked about how often they came when I went up one difficulty level in civ3. So, until barbarians stop appearing on the world map, it is extremely dangerous to send settlers to build new cities without first protecting the cities. Take the extra few turns to send at least a warrior (preferably a bowman of some sort) to protect the newly founded city. Also, if you are building near the edges of your boundaries, be sure to send the unit along with the settler to ensure its safety as it makes its way to the new city site.

Here’s a save file from my first civ game. All you need to do is load up the game and hit “enter” to complete my turn. This will give you something to compete against in your Hall of Fame - unless you’re way better than me. My brothers and I started doing this with Civ3 sine we each had our own computers so the score from the others wouldn’t show up in our Hall of Fame. It’s fun to compete against yourself, but not as much fun as competing against others.

If you think that my review of Civ4 was a bit too rosy, check out this review by Tara, who has a review close the middle, but a little more towards the negative side. A verteran civ gamer, like myself, she found herself basically feeling something was different without quite being able to put her finger on it.

One thing we both noticed was that the huge map is much smaller than a huge map in civ3. I felt as though the map wasn’t as large, but I wasn’t sure if it just felt that way. Good to see someone else agree. Check out the review - it’s well written and have even more screen shots!

Here are some more screenshots from my first Civ4 game.

Above you see some of my cavalry units preparing for war. This unit has a lot of cavalry on the map representing the upgrades in defense I have given it.

In the above shot you can see both the industrial era worker as well as the rifleman.

Here I am in the midst of a war with cavalry against spearmen. You can see the gunblast from the cavalry units.

Another area where civ4 has become more balanced for me is in the role the sea and air units play. Although I was always primarily a winner by culture in civ3 and space race in civl/2, whenever I *was* faced with aggression, it was usually my armies that did the heavy lifting. I almost never had a navy save for the purpose of transporting units around. Since my rivals didn’t have navies, I could let my tranports roam the seas unattended.

A score of 3447 in Settler mode is enough for me to no longer have the leadership skills of Dan Quayle, but of Ethelred the Unready. “The Unready” - doesn’t sound like much of a promotion, eh?

In Civilization 4, one of the most significant changes outside of the civics and religions, is the expanded role given to workers. Previously, it was very easy to know what to do with your workers. If a mountain or hill was involved, put a road and mine; otherwise irrigate and road. Jungles and forrests had no purpose except to make your cities sick or deprive you of an irrigation spot. However, if you eliminated them, you would miss out on certain key game resources which only appeared in jungles and forests. So you had to just deal with the sickness and hope that a resource would appear nearby to validate your city’s sufferings.

Welcome to my first look/impressions of Civ4. As you can see, I began the game with a settle and a warrior. The first things you will notice are that they have changed the icons so that a unit is represented by three units instead of one. Although, considering how many units are used in a war, defend a city, etc, it’s obvious that a unit still represents many more units than three. However, it’s pretty neat to watch battles now. Also, there are cows and horses on the map! You can make pastures for these and they will provide you with health/food/etc. If you irrigate or anything else, you lose the animals.

Wondering if anyone else has experienced the following with civ4 special edition. According to the manual and discs, it says that disc 2 should be the disc to play from. However, on my computer it only loads off of disc 1.

Second, I read the terms of usage (the license) when I was a little bored today on time off from work. Did you know that to use a drive emulator like Alcohol 120% or others is against the license? I didn’t know that!

Civ4 was amazing to play yesterday and I took a bunch of screenshots. However, right before I was about to save and quit the game for the day, my video card died and shut down my entire computer. This was the same thing that happened when my cpu/motherboard died freshman year of college so I was very worried at first. However, I unplugged and replugged the computer and it came on, but there was no picture. I swapped in the video card from my wife’s dell and it worked. So it seems the problem was the video card. I’m really ticked because I just bought that PNY nVidia card around one year ago. I checked my power supply and it’s 330 W and the video card asks for 220 W if I have a lot plugged in. So I am pretty sure it was a faulty card. Things usually don’t fail so quickly for me, so I don’t have the warranty. (I know, that’s MY fault) I’ll be buying a new BFG nVidia card - it’s all I can afford for now and is equivalent to the one that just died in terms of power - and as soon as I get my computer back up, I’ll post the screenshots and descriptions.

Here’s what I picked: -continents –temperate climate -medium sea level -huge world

I picked the japanese because I’ve played them since Civ2. Tokugawa is the emperor. He is aggressive and orgnized. We start with fishing and the wheel! Excellent since you can’t build roads without wheel.

I picked settler difficulty since they’ve changed a lot since Civ3; I was amazed reading the manual how much had changed.

I picked normal game speed.

Here are some things I noticed while reading the civ4 manual at work:

1. there are now worker boats to improve the ocean squares! 2. settlers move 2 squares now 3. you can now move on the same square as an enemy and not attack them!!! 4. mounted unites can’t fortify 5. you can fortify til healed 6. other civs can’t go in your territory until they have open borders treaty with you 7. you can have mult religions present in a civ 8. cottages give you commerce on a square now - not roads 9. frams are like irrigation 10. also camps, pastures, plantations, watermills, quarries, etc 11. You can have a jewish temple, christian temple, etc

I came home for lunch and am now the proud owner of Civ4 Special Edition! The special edition is awesome! The cover is amazing and the …. wow! I’m installing it now. Look for in depth coverage when I play after I get back from work!

It’s been confirmed by BigRedJeffdom and others - Civ4 has been pushed by one day at the retail stores. It makes us civ fanatics angry, but it’s life. At least it’s one day - not a week or even a month.

Civ4 has not shipped to any maryland best buys or EBs!

Reading on the Civilization IV developer’s blogs, I gleaned the following great tidbits!

On Great People:

“Great People are created at the city level, as each city can generate “great people points” based on conditions and structures in the city. You can affect the amount of people points generated in several ways. One very dramatic way is through the creation of a great wonder. For instance, building the Pyramids will make it more likely the city will generate a Great Engineer, while building Stonehenge will make the city more likely to generate a Great Prophet. You can also generate more great people points by taking city population away from working the land and turning them into specialists. Certain Civics choices can work to make your specialists more productive and that can also have a positive effect on your great people point production.

Just reserved my copy of Civilization IV Special Edition at EB. You can bet I’ll be all over that sucker tomorrow after work. Hope to have a more substantial blog post later. q;o)

Oh yeah, people are coming back to my blog! About four hundred unique visitors have come in the last couple of weeks.