Archive for Lost Muse Studios Now expanding to include all of the comics Tyto and Kavi make. The official Lost Muse Studios forum.
|
omegavoids
|
Civilization IV-PC And mac. BIG PAGE WARNINGWARNING : Users with less than 90 IQ and/or have no tactical mind should leave now or else have a losing experience when they try the game
This game is awesome,i got it since it came to life and then got every expansion there,AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME
great strategy game that involves diplomacy,wars and wonders,you can play with Gandhi of India and still fight Genghis khan of the mongols and ally with Washington against the "vile"British Churchill who is allied with Ramses II of Egypt , you have lots of ways to conquer the world by conquest,domination,space conquest,culture,time, and getting elected as the ruler of the world.
the graphics are great,using videos for contacting other civilizations and wonder and religions.
sound is AWESOME,detailed,great music for every era and civilization.
game play is great too,very detailed and easy at the same time,though you need to think if you want to win.
And perhaps the best thing in it is that you can alter ANYTHING in the game and i do mean anything.
Oh and,the game have an encyclopedia in it,showing you everything the game has,its history and its part in the gameplay.
for more information check here
or check here for an online encyclopedia of the game
and as you guessed from the two links this is a fan site(the best one)which i use for downloading modifications of the game.
SCREENSHOTS AND CONCEPT ARTS:
Now here is a preview,done by a player(on my favorite gaming site,gamefaqs.com)
ANOTHER WARNING:BIG WALL OF TEXT
| Quote: | Review by grasu
"Drugs don't have anything on Civilization 4"
The sad thing about PC gaming is that, much too often, developers mess with a proven formula to try and create something new. Examples of this abound, but perhaps the most poignant is 2003's Heroes of Might and Magic 4 which turned out to be a disastrous "reinvention" of the series. It's no wonder that when gamers heard about all the new and "improved" features in Civilization 4 they were ready to perform hara-kiri on themselves. Luckily for us they didn't have to, because Civilization 4 turned out to be one of the best games in the series.
In the world of gaming the "Civilization" name has quite the resonating thuddd to it, thanks to its simple premise yet hopelessly addictive gameplay. This hasn't really changed in the latest itineration of the series, which challenges would-be world rulers to lead a nation from the early Stone Age to the bright and sunny future of space exploration. While on the road to victory civilizations deploy new weapons, learn new skills, discover new technologies, forge alliances and destroy enemies as well as expanding their own borders through the use of religion or culture. Of course, things are never as simple as they seem, and Civilization hides layers upon layers of complexity beneath what seems like a simple exterior. Those layers are essentially what has been changed in Civilization 4.
No sooner will gamers install Civ 4 than will they notice changes in everything from interface to music. After watching the game's CG intro players are presented with a digitized picture of Earth and a simple, yet intuitive, menu. The background music is much different from the sober and foreboding sounds of the first 3 Civilization games, being replaced by a slightly "happier" tune accompanied by vocals in what seems to be some sort of African language. From here on, selecting a game and playing is an easy as clicking on the first option and then selecting a personality, the new "face" of the nations in the game. Civilization 4 does away with specific nation names and replaces them with different personalities, which define their civilizations, rather than the other way around. For example the Americans have George Washington and Frederick D. Roosevelt while the Greeks have Alexander the Great as their leader. Each leader has any two of eight attributes. Some of the attributes are pretty self explanatory (such as Aggressive or Financial) but others, such as Creative (which grants a civilization +2 culture per turn) are a little harder to guess without the use of a manual.
After choosing a leader, and adjusting the game's parameters to one's specific needs, the game is ready to begin. The shock and awe that most gamers will feel when gazing at the graphics can only be truly understood by long-time Civ fanatics. For a TBS game these graphics are simply amazing; rivers flow freely through the land, birds fly away when soldiers enter forests, and the animals on the map graze freely. The zoom feature allows a birds-eye-view of the whole globe but it also takes the place of the City View, allowing players to zoom in close enough to see even the smallest details of their cities. Everything is beautifully animated and most units now receive "battle damage", by either being slowly ripped to pieces or by losing one of the contingent's soldiers (most units now come in packs of 2 or 3). Once settled cities now sprawl out through the land, taking over more and more land as workers build improvements, mines or pastures; in a word everything is simply breath taking.
Along with the graphics, the authentic sounds for each nation (English soldiers answer in English while Roman ones in Latin) along with the good use of sound effects, which are neither muffled nor lost in the perfect timing of the music, greatly enhance gameplay. The music is also a throw back to the older days of Civilization, as Civ 4 uses remixed tunes from Civilization 1 during diplomacy and during a number of other sequences in the game. While technically the game is an astounding cutting edge achievement in its genre, it's the gameplay that clearly distinguishes Civilization 4 from other TBS games.
Gameplay still follows the same flow as before: Players build a city, and then either chose to improve it or they continue expanding by purchasing more settlers. What makes Civ 4 different is the way it handles expansion and tile-improvements: There are now numerous resources that can only be gathered by building structures on the map using your workers. Technology also takes a far more important role in the way your workers go about their business. In Civ 4 workers don't start out with a plethora of skills such as mining, irrigation, or the ability to cut down forests; everything has to be discovered before workers can perform ANY sort of action outside of building roads. Water tiles also fall into this new category with special workboats and resources that need to be exploited by employing small workboats. Even the properties of the tile improvements have drastically change: It's now fairly useless to build a huge network of roads covering every square inch of your empire as roads don't bring as much commerce as in previous Civilization games.
Expansion has also gone through some serious changes: Corruption and city revolts have been removed. In their place each new city costs a certain amount of money to upkeep. The farther the city is from the capital the more money it cots to supply it. The only way to make these cities into gold producing cities is to raise their population or build courthouses or other buildings that reduce the cost of maintaining these cities. City revolts have now been replaced by a new unhappiness system, which slows down production if citizens become routy, and the new health system, which horribly slows down growth (and makes cities a serious liability). Building temples or churches to boost happiness and aqueducts or hospitals to boost the latter can solve both of these problems. Finally, workers can also gather resources, which can boost either happiness or health in any city connected, by a road or other trade route (such as a sea port) to that resource.
Another huge change has to deal with building orders: Mostly everything in the city screen has changed. You can now build settlers from cities with 1 population without losing the city, however cities completely stop growing while building either settlers or workers. No longer can you transfer credits from one building or unit to another: Now, if you switch half-way through the completion of a warrior to a temple for example, the warrior is placed on hold and the temple starts from zero. In the case of wonders you're given a financial compensation if someone beats you in the race for the completion of a wonder. But perhaps most importantly nearly ALL of the buildings in Civ 4 have been revamped: Aqueducts no longer fuel growth they provide health, courthouses no longer decrease corruption they decrease the cost of maintaining cities, forges are now pre-modern factories, lighthouses increase trade routes, etc. Wonders have also gotten a major touch up, with many name changes as well as effect changes: Old favorites such as the Pyramids or J.S. Bach Cathedral return with new names or effects. Furthermore, now there are "religious shrines" which can only be built by the founders of a specific religion and they bring in +1 gold for every city in which that religion is present. Finally, the city view has been removed and the building interface is now clearly split up between different sections such as military units or wonders.
Religion is probably the single biggest addition to Civ 4 and while it's not perfect, it's not nearly as atrocious as it was in Activision's Call to Power. Civ 4 has 7 religions including Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. They all have the same powers and advantages so no religion is superior to another. The main uses of religion is to either keep your people happy with temples or to spread it around the world in order to get a bunch of goddies such as gold bonuses, culture bonuses or diplomacy bonuses. Religion can be spread with the use of missionaries, which can only be built a few at-a-time so that the map isn't overflowed with them. The reason why religion works in Civ 4 is because the game really doesn't put too much emphasis on it: The main reasons for religion being in the game seem to be to add a new layer to diplomatic relations, governments and to provide players with another way to earn culture and gold. Keep in mind however that it's fairly hard to win a game of Civ 4 if you haven't founded a religion, by discovering it before everyone else, as funding religions gives you the ability to spread them and build the religious wonders. It's also nearly impossible to win a culture or score game without spreading your religion, which can be both a blessing and a pain in the ***** (no pun intended, IN EITHER CASE).
Perhaps the second biggest change to the Civilization universe comes with the new "civics system" which replaces the old government system. Now, instead of selecting a government, which binds you to a strict definition of what your morals and political inclinations should be, you are able to choose those morals. The civics system allows players to chose how to deal with religion, whether to encourage freedom of religion or whether to organize a democracy, how to elect leaders and even how much freedom to allow their people, from slavery to emancipation. This is yet another addition that works wonderfully and allows players to govern how THEY want, not how the government they chose says. It also opens up new possibilities in diplomacy allowing you to "convert" people to a specific civic (such as Free Speech).
Civ 4's deep diplomatic system also makes a return with a few much needed additions. The most important additions to diplomacy are the ability to negotiate open borders, which makes those pain in the ***** AI settlers, and/or warriors walking all throughout your territory a thing of the past. Additionally you can now also see WHY the AI hates you so much. An intuitive list of pros/cons of your diplomatic relationship with the AI can easily be displayed by scrolling over their leader-head. And speaking of AI, Civilization 4 definitely brings some improvements in that department: The AI is far more reasonable in diplomacy and far more apt at building and sending spaceships to Alpha Centaury than ever before. It also builds barracks now and actually takes the time to upgrade their forces from prehistoric warriors to more modern soldiers. Needless to say that the AI is also as ruthless as ever and it can just as easily and psychotically turn on you after hundreds of years of peace as it did in other Civ games.
The gameplay areas that have probably received the least amount of changes are the research and the military. For the research portion, this is quite good because this part of the Civilization series always worked well as it was. Despite Firaxis saying that players now have a greater degree of freedom when choosing which technology goals to pursue the system is still pretty much linear, which is great because this is both realistic and it streamlines the process to perfection. Outside of a few name changes, a few additions and a few reorganized technologies the tech tree is as intact in Civ 4 as it was in the original Civilization. The military portion on the other hand, could've used a few crucial tweaks. While Civ 4 has a boat load of units ranging from archers, to knights in shining armor, to elephants or tanks they're all seemingly unable to beat an ancient age spearman when need be. It doesn't matter that Firaxis removed the veterancy system replacing it with a new "ability" system that's even more useless than the previous system as it features such "abilities" as 10% extra strength (which is useless for 3/4ths of the game), it also doesn't matter that they fused attack and defense into one strength value, nor does it matter that they now give you a clear cut statistic of how likely you are to win or lose a battle because a modern age helicopter can still be taken down by a spearman. And the thing is that this happens in Civ 4 just as much as it did in Civ 3 and it's just as irritating to see tank after tank lose to 600-year old gunpowder infantry. Until this balance issue is fixed Civ 4 has a nearly deadly flaw.
Luckily however military conquest is not the only way to win in Civilization 4. Players can attempt to grab a victory any number of ways including cultural domination, winning the space race or winning the UN elections. The changes to most of these victory conditions are minimal and they're clear reflections of the actual gameplay changes: For example religion has become a huge role in culture victories and you can now propose a series of resolution for the UN instead of just ending the game with your election as general secretary. Everything can still be customized from the main menu including victory conditions, size of the map, climate and even whether or not nations are always at war or peace. Finally, players can also dive into one of a handful of scenarios, which try to replicate real world or fantasy maps such as Earth or Circular World.
Multiplayer Civilization 4 is still as fun as ever... if you're playing with friends around a computer. The hot seat games have remained the staple of the series and they're loads of fun. The Civ 4 multiplayer experience itself is still as tense and epic as ever with players racing for technologies, rushing or trying to explore the map in order to place their enemies on it. Online however is still a dream that's not very likely to come true. Not only were a few promising features such as a permanent Pit Boss, which would keep games running for long periods of time and allow players to come and make their moves and then leave, but the whole concept simply isn't working out. Civ 4 is best when played with friends and with people who have patience for long drawn games that might take hours to finish, not with the trigger happy gamers of Gamespy. And while Firaxis desperately tries to please them all with 3 game lengths ranging from short 2-3 hour games to "Epic" day or week-long games it's still not enough to change the fact that people go online to play Counter Strike for 30 minutes, not Civilization for 3 hours.
Civ 4 is one of the few happy examples of a series which was able to improve, if not reinvent itself, yet still keep the fun and recognizable nature of past games. While Civ 4 is not a perfect game it's one of the best PC games you can buy and it's the premiere modern TBS game. With a few more expansion packs, and perhaps a few patches, maybe even the battle system will improve and the permanent Pit Boss might actually make online multiplayer fun but even as it is, Civ 4 is a stupendous game that shouldn't be missed.
Gameplay: 9/10
Graphics: 9/10
Sound: 9/10
Overall: 9/10
Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 02/27/06 |
|
64Cheese
|
Eww, gamefaqs is your favourite gaming site?
Aside from that, I was thinking of picking up a Civilization game. There's Civilization Revolution on PS3, maybe I'll get that.
|
omegavoids
|
EWW? WHY?
anyway,i got civilization revolution too,so if you buy it,get wi-fi,play me.
|
64Cheese
|
You have a PS3? Or is Revolution on PC?
|
Kavi
|
Ug, I liked stronghold/settlers bettter
However, this had tons of history in it
|
omegavoids
|
you like stronghold better?i am offended.
|
Kavi
|
Sorry! this one was just.... boring, for me that is:P
|
omegavoids
|
| 64Cheese wrote: | | You have a PS3? Or is Revolution on PC? |
i have it on DS
|
64Cheese
|
Well I wouldn't be able to play it against you from PS3 to DS.
|
omegavoids
|
You can,it was intended to be like this.
|
64Cheese
|
Really? That's cool. I'm gonna have to read more into this...
|
omegavoids
|
if you have free time,I'm ready to play you anytime(i will lose though)you can send me an e-mail and appoint a time.
|
|
|
|