Free Candy For Everyone

See my Civ4 review here.

I finished my second full game of Civ4 this week and thought I’d post some more thoughts up here. I bumped the difficulty up two levels from my first game and promptly got my ass handed to me when two AIs decided to attack me at once. So I restarted and was a bit more giving in my diplomatic relations and managed to squeeze out a Space Race victory in the final few turns of the game.

Here’s the final scoreboard. You can see this and the previous game I played. Turns out Noble difficulty is a lot harder than Chieftain. Go figure.

So you can see that I also tried out the “Quick” game speed. Quick! Haha. Here’s a screenshot showing my total time played.

6:52. Six hours, fifty-two minutes. Admittedly, that is faster than then 9+ hours for my first (normal speed) game. But still, that’s a lot of time! Though it was definitely noticably faster. I honestly can’t imagine not playing on the quick game speed. I just don’t have the time for it, and if all else is equal, I’d rather get through a full game experience.

Just a few more screens to chart my progress:

And finally, my place in history.

I was talking to my friend Lars, and we both agree that the end game seems really short. Basically, there’s this really short period of time when you go from Long Bows to Riflemen to Marines (yes, even on the normal pace game). During this time, I just don’t want to bother upgrading my troops or attacking when something better is just around the corner.

You know what I really miss from Civilization 2? The ability to change terrain types. I loved that late in the game, all those desert tiles could actually be transformed into plains. The arctics could be made over into habitable lands. Now, maybe that isn’t very environmentally friendly. Maybe the polar bears wouldn’t like us taking their homes from them. Which is why I’m not suggesting that we do it in the real world, of course. But it was a fun game mechanic that made the late game more variable. Instead of having every piece of the land covered by about an hour in with no changes until game end, there was a late game expansion period. Or why not take a tip from Call to Power? They let you build underwater cities in the future period. Why not? I almost always play on Pangaea maps because I don’t want to have all that silly wasted space (and because I really don’t like building transports, but that’s a different issue). Why not let us colonize the ocean? Come on, it could happen.

I just want more changing gameplay. Basically, there’s just this huge portion of the game where you aren’t doing anything new. You’re just waiting until you get to a critical tech at which point you can start to attack, or press your cultural advantage, or you’re just trying to get to the end techs so you can build the wonders needed to win.

In this game I just finished, I knew I couldn’t win by any mechanism except the space race (or maybe the United Nations, so I had that building as a backup). But basically, I just rushed through the last 50 turns, setting all my cities on research so I could get the technology needed to build all the spaceship parts. Everyone else in the world was fighting and trying to pull me in and I just kept buying them off and staying out of it. It wasn’t really fun. But it was the only way to win given the limited number of turns left.

What’s with the game ending at a specific number of turns anyway? Is it just because the technology tree runs out? It’s so arbitrary. I don’t like it. But there’s really no point in playing after the score stops. I just have no desire to do that.

Ok, I have no major insights here, just sort of some picky gripes. I’m not in love with Civ4. Yet I still keep playing it for lots of hours. So. Something is right. Though it hasn’t really pulled me away from World of Warcraft. So it’s just not right enough. Maybe the modders will come up with something really cool to tackle the things that bug me. Ok, here’s what I want.

1. Fill in the late period tech tree with more stuff - more military units, more depth
2. Move some of the really useful wonders earlier in the tech tree. They all seem to clump at the end. Why are spies so late in the game? By the time I can get them, the game is almost over!
3. Add some future tech stuff - changing terrain types, future tech weapons, underwater cities
4. Actually make the different religions give different benefits. I know this would be a very touchy subject and there’s no way that Firaxis would have wanted to do this. But for a modder, with no political repercussions, maybe they’d do it. No one can boycott something that’s free anyway

That’s all for now. If I think of anymore, I will return.