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.