Beep... beep... beep...

More random thoughts on Civ IV, now that I've played a full game. First, more negatives:

1. This game is the worst since Civ I at representing the strength of modern armies. Far too often my barely-injured Panzers would attack unfortified pikemen with a single Combat promotion standing in the desert, and the pikemen would win. Not a majority of the time, but way too often. This is frustrating, because they FIXED this problem in Civ 2, and like the Civilopedia mess they're taking a step back now.
2. I've said this before, but I'll reiterate: it takes a LOT of raw power to run this game at its full potential. My new card was running everything fine (except Wonder movies) until I started my wars, then the combat animations occasionally slowed down. Not a huge problem, just want to throw it out there.
3. Something that has always been a problem in Civ but is especially annoying now: the enemy loves pillaging. Let me ask you, have you EVER pillaged an enemy's tiles while invading? Personally, I never have. Any time I'm invading it's because I'm planning on taking a city, and I want to have that city operating at its peak; I don't want to spend the next thirty turns having a worker rebuild everything I just destroyed. Yet the AI ALWAYS pillages EVERYTHING when they invade. I'm still willing to entertain the possibility that they're better tacticians than I am, but this smells like another case of the AI being programmed to oppose you rather than advance themselves.
4. The endgame bogs down a little, though that's mainly my fault - I was grossly unprepared for the difficulty of my military campaign and so I got into an annoying habit of frequently saving and reloading. ("Hmm... can my bombers successfully attack those crossbowmen? Dang. Well, can my panzers defeat the musketeers? Arg. Maybe my mechanized infantry will be able to beat ordinary infantry? Bad word!") I expect next time I'll actually be somewhat prepared and hopefully will stick to my rule of not reloading when something goes horribly, horribly wrong.
   
5. There are a few little rule changes I disagree with, like eliminating unlimited movement along railroads (it's now a 1/10 cost instead). For the most part, though, these are just things to adapt to, especially the way you can't carry production over from one things you're building to another.

More things I like:

1. All the new features really work - they make the gameplay more interesting without overly complicating it. Great People are nice to get and can fit well into existing strategies or do one-shot cool things. Religion can be seen as another way to compete without waging war, or as a way to advance your cultural cohesion.
   
2. Culture, a good idea that has been around since Civ III, is really perfected here. Combined with the new diplomatic states like Open Borders it creates a realistic and useful way to exert control without building tons of cities. I LOVE how you can access a resource without creating a colony or building a city right next to it.
3. Notwithstanding my complaints above about the relative weakness of modern units, the combat system as a whole is more enjoyable. The promotion system makes you get attached to your units as well as offering still more strategic options. (Should I give all my Panzers Barrage so they can blitz through these cities? Or create a mix of promotions so they are more well-rounded?)
4. Lots of really nice little touches. I like the way music evolves the further you get in the game, and how it gets louder when you're looking at a city and quieter when you move into the country. I like how, when you build an aqueduct, you see the water running along a line from the nearest mountain into your city. It's neat that each civ's units speaks in their own language.
   
5. Multiplayer. I have yet to try this, but I think it'll do wonders for the longevity of this title.

I guess that's it for now. I think I'll start up my second game later tonight. I enjoyed being Frederick, so I'll probably stick with him, though I might change the name this time around. I think the next game will be on a larger world, and might or might not be of "Epic" length. We'll see how I'm feeling. I'll probably pass down a final thumbs-up/thumbs-down decision on Wednesday.

King of the world!

Just beat my first game of Civ IV! Hooray!

I had to adapt my gameplan slightly once all hell broke loose along my southern border. Once you begin a war, it's virtually impossible to achieve lasting peace with that person; I successfully fought Alexander to the point where he sued for peace, but a few turns later he attacked me again. I reluctantly concluded that the only option was to wipe him out. This was complicated by another conflict with the Incas far east and, towards the end, a surprising war with Catherine of Russia.

The Greek war was tedious but not too difficult; he was far behind me technically which made it easier. (Because I'd happily been trading science with Inca and Russia until shortly before our wars, they had units more on par with my own.) After taking Sparta I seized Athens, which split his empire in two. I brought up my panzers and infantry and focused on one city at a time, which each fell in a turn or two. Then they swung east, took the last of his cities and kept marching towards Inca. Capac must have sensed them coming because he offered me tribute to stop, even though I hadn't taken any cities from him yet. The Incan war was strange; he had Infantry in his own cities and I couldn't afford to bring enough force to bear against him, so I just harassed him with airpower and kept some defensive units on top of his critical resources.

Catherine was the most dangerous opponent yet; she had trained SAM infantry and was starting to deploy gunships into the field. Once that war began I rebased my air force onto my one city in her mini-continent, and airlifted some veteran mehanized infantry in. I weathered a long wave of mixed units she threw against me, everything from SAM infantry and cannons to knights. Once the ground around Frankfurt was clear, my heavily-promoted mechanized infantry rolled north. Backed by massive airpower, they pounded on St. Petersburg for several turns before finally taking the city.

In parallel with all this, I had begun building the United Nations around the time I started seriously crushing Greece. With the help of Nikolaus August Otto, a Great Engineer, I was able to finish it in a handful of turns. My first priority was banning nuclear weapons - I was pretty sure nobody else had the capability to build them, but didn't want to be surprised. It passed unanimously. With that out of the way, I started maneuvering for a diplomatic victory.

There are a variety of ways to win the game. Besides your standard conquest and space race, you can also win by domination (control the majority of the world's population and landmass), culture (three cities with "legendary" status, which must be difficult - even Berlin, a cultural juggernaut, never reached this level), or diplomacy. To win this last victory, you must get 2/3 of the votes for supreme ruler. I knew I had a majority - I was one of only two possible choices, along with Catherine, and I had Washington, Mansa Musa and Ashoka on my side - but I wasn't sure about the actual numbers. Everyone gets a number of votes proportional to their population, and I knew Catherine and Huyana Capac were fairly large. Sure enough, I fell about 50 votes short (out of around 550 votes total).

Business at the UN continues, and while I was swallowing up Alexander's cities in hopes of pushing my population high enough, I continued passing resolutions boosting free trade and a global currency. (As a fairly large nation, I stood to benefit more from these agreements than other civilizations.) Finally, once Alexander's last city fell, I called another vote. You don't immediately learn the results, so I spend an anxious turn fighting in the desert south of St. Petersburg while awaiting the results.

Finally they came in - just ONE VOTE short! I was angry, but optimistic - after pounding on Petersburg it was close to falling, and that seemed enough to push me over the top. I called for a repeat of the resolution and continued to press in.

And so it was that, in the year 1962, Frederick was finally elected the supreme ruler of the world. And there was much rejoicing!

So that was fun. The very end of the game is... well, I don't want to give it away, but it's very evocative of Civilization I. Which is a good thing.

One more post about my thoughts on my game quality, then I'm taking a break for the rest of the afternoon before diving in on my Prince game. :-)

Reviews Galore

Gamespot: 9.4 (out of 10). "If you have even a passing interest in strategy games, world history, or getting less sleep at night, you owe it to yourself to give Civilization IV a try."
IGN: 9.4 (out of 10). "The only reason to stop playing Civilization IV is to tell other people just how good the game is." (That's been my experience, too! - ed.)
Gamespy: 5 stars (out of 5). "Civ IV gives the classic turn-based strategy franchise a much-needed overhaul, with streamlined gameplay and a great multiplayer mode."
1Up: 9.0 (out of 10). "Civilization IV's thoughtful turn-based take on conquering the world will have you under its spell late into many a fall night oblivious to the changing seasons outside."
Yahoo! Games: 4.5 stars (out of 5). "The latest in the series is its greatest yet."
Metacritic: Critics: 94 (out of 100), "Universal Acclaim". Users: 9.7 (out of 10). Several quotes, my personal favorite is: "If you're an AOE fan but never thought you had the brain for CIV, then this is for you." I think they meant that in a more complimentary sense than it came out.

My very next post will have lots of info on my current game. I'm holding off until my official review, but I'm inclined to agree with this range of scores, with the important caveat that your experience will be less if your computer cannot run the game.

Lords of War

Boy, do I feel foolish! After all that angst and worry, it turns out that the problem was amazingly simple: I neglected to plug my video card in to the power supply. Now, in my defense, my installation guide specifically said that this model did not have a power connector, and so I never looked for it. I guess this provides another opportunity for everyone to mock me for always reading the manual. Anyways: I attached it, got through POST, reinstalled my drivers, and everything works great.

I tweaked with the settings a little bit to get them where I wanted. It looks like I can run the game perfectly at maximum settings, provided that I have a lower video resolution set. At my preferred resolution of 1280 x 1024, the stutters return to the videos. I still get hiccups during the World Wonder screens, but the rest of the game is gorgeous.

And it does make a difference. It fixes that bug with the Yield Display I'd complained about before. And it's cool to see the world come alive. I discovered the Scientific Method, and then watched in glee as oil began spurting from the desert soil. I skirmished with the Greeks and watched as our forces shot and swung at one another, falling as their numbers decreased. Good stuff. I still think that, given some more programming discipline, they could have achieved the same results with lower requirements; but I've never programmed a game at that scale, and could easily be wrong.

The game is going well. I'm leaping ahead in science, building a dominating lead in the industrial technologies. One of the most revolutionary changes in Civ IV is that, rather than each technology requiring one or two pre-requisites, you generally need to discover only one of several possible options to access it. For example, to research Writing, you need Priesthood OR Pottery OR Animal Husbandry. (Later techs tend to have more traditional prerequisits. For Artillery, you need Physics AND Steel AND Rifling.) This means it's possible to specialize and jump way ahead in the tech tree if you want, though this will require much longer waits between advances and possible problems if you're neglecting an area severely. Even though I'm on the verge of building Bombers I haven't bothered to discover Gunpowder yet, so I'm glad my war with Alexander is under control.

I think that particular conflict benefits from me playing at Warlord; I get the feeling he would have invaded by now otherwise. We were actually friends early on, but I was maneuvered into an opposing bloc and he cut me off. Relations deteriorated and there was some light fighting, but for the last few centuries things have been stable; he doesn't even demand technologies from me any more, he just masses his armies at the border and stares menacingly.

Resources, while introduced in Civ 3, are absolutely brilliant here. It's a great new incentive for tactics. I've discovered that I have access to a single Oil and a single Uranium supply, which are not necessary now but will be crucial in the endgame. Both, unfortunately, are on the very edge of my Greek border. This has forced me to make sure my nearby cities continue to exert strong culture, so that those borders don't slip over to the Greek side; it also means I've thought ahead to the possibility of one day needing to defend those resources. Not that I'll necessarily need them so much as I can't afford to allow Alexander to start building nuclear missiles. Like I said, it opens up some great strategic elements to gameplay. Oh, and unlike in Civ 3, resources don't need to actually be in your city radius or a colony; they just need to be in your territory and connected by a road.

This is just my first game, but so far I'm not impressed by the map. I've finally started sailing around (didn't found my first port city until around 1000 AD), and it looks like there are two landmasses on the whole planet: six civs on one continent (joined by a penninsula) and one civ on a large island. I vastly prefer the classic civ maps where there's a variety of lands, including some islands that support one or two cities. I took all the default map options for this game, my next one will probably be on a larger map and I'll see what difference that makes.

It's been fun to evaluate and change things as the game continues. For a long time I practiced Organized Religion, which makes it easier to build missionaries and helps you construct buildings more quickly (think of cathedrals in the Middle Ages). Now that we're moving towards the modern age, I'm thinking of switching over to Pacifism (think Tibettan Buddhism), which loses those abilities but is a lot cheaper and provides a "great people" bonus.

While I'm still loving my current game, I'm building a huge list of things I'm going to do differently the next time around, and will need to see if I can stick through this one to the end. High on the list is rethinking my city strategy; I put way too much improvement into my capital, which provided some great benefits (all my bonuses stack so it produces more of everything than the rest of my cities), but almost all of my Great People are born in Berlin and they're almost all Religious. Don't get me wrong, Moses was awesome, but I'm running out of good uses for them. In the next game I'll try and be more specialized - religion (just one this time!) in one city, science in another, etc. - so I can count on greater GP variety.

I also want to see YOU! If you pick up this game and wants to try some multiplayer action, either quick or epic, grab me. This isn't an official endorsement yet - I want to give myself a week first, so I can list all the caveats and stuff - but if you already have it, I'd love to play.

You know, it ain't about punk. And it ain't about "the scene."

Irony!

I've been helping Andrew make decisions as he gets ready to build his own computer. (I'm not doing that great a job at it - flubbed a CPU/Motherboard combo.) Since it's been two years since the last time I was really looking at hardware, I learned a lot while doing some groundwork for him. PCI Express? I had no idea it existed.

I also caught the upgrade bug, between Andrew building a PC and Pat shopping around for a TV. So it really didn't take all that much prompting for me to head out myself. I've more or less convinced myself that the video card is the one thing holding back my Civ IV experience. As previously blogged, Civ IV is very playable on my current setup, but there are some annoying audio skips and I'm not getting any of the nice video effects (animated units, combat scenes, dynamic terrain, etc.). So, I figured, what the heck. I haven't splurged on anything since I moved out here two months ago, so I'd go ahead and get a card.

This actually is a difficult psychological step for me. More than any other computer upgrade, graphics cards make me angry. The only reason to get a good graphics card is for gaming; even complicated movies and most rendering runs fine on a basic card. And any time you look at cards you realize why consoles are dominating the industry. A top-of-the line graphics card will cost you SIX HUNDRED dollars. This is a pure status symbol; nobody needs that much power, even for Doom III or HalfLife 2. And even at the lower level the price makes me pause. The card I settled on cost about $150; for the exact same cost, I could buy an XBox or a PS2 or 1.5 Gamecubes. Yeah, this card will generate better graphics than any of those, but getting a console takes you completely out of the regular upgrade cycle and into a much more reasonable 5 year stability period.

I only buy graphics cards when I need them to play specific games. I don't know whether this makes me a smart consumer, for delaying my time between upgrades, or a dumb consumer, for spending money on something when I will end up playing very few games on it. For a while I'd considered swearing off PC games altogether and switching to console-only, which would drastically reduce my system requirements, but things like Civ IV remind me why I game.
Anyways. The first card I ever bought was a Voodoo 3. This was back in the early 2000's when Ultima: Ascension finally came out. I've been a huge Ultima fan for a while (despite [or perhaps because of] never playing VIII), and I was stunned by everything I saw. When the game was released, I spent some time hitting up the message boards, and found that everyone with a Voodoo card got great graphics, while those with ATI or a small new company called NVidia were slow or crashing. So that's why I bought a Voodoo. The game ran great for me; for the first time Britannia felt like a real living world, and the wonderful immersion provided by the graphics went a long way towards assuaging my despair at the poor quality of the game itself. I was also pleased to see HalfLife looking better than ever before.

I built my new Linux-only PC in the summer of 2002. Everything I had read told me that Nvidia was the only company with even adequate 3D drivers on Linux; by now Voodoo was defunct and ATI just didn't seem to care about Linux. So I got a Geforce 4 MX, which at the time was a mid-range card. I play very few 3D games so I didn't feel like I needed a Ti, but I did want to at least run 3D games and have some acceleration for RTSs and other Linux games. This card served me very admirably through my stable of Linux games: Call to Power, Soldier of Fortune, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Myth II, and countless free downloaded games (which, granted, tended to not put much strain on 3D). Ever since the summer of 2001 I was increasingly doing my gaming on my PS2, and as time went on and requirements climbed, I deliberately tended more towards the PS2 rather than risk getting a game that didn't run well.

I finally installed Windows on this PC a few months ago, due to some Windows-only software I needed for work. Since I had it, I finally started messing around with some Windows-only games that I'd been meaning to play for a while, like Medieval: Total War and Deus Ex. Everything ran great, but these were REALLY old games by now. I still enjoyed them because of the gameplay, but was hardly wowed. I also bought Morrowind after seeing the XBox version at a friend's house. I've covered the game itself elsewhere on this blog, but once again I was kind of surprised by how crummy the graphics looked. Not because of any lack of power in my card, just because the game was that old (about four years!) and had not kept up with the advances seen in my PS2.

So I was a little surprised when I finally encountered a game that pressed the limits of my three-year-old card. It was Sid Meier's Pirates!, an extremely thoughtful Christmas gift. I still need to blog about this game, it is absolutely wonderful and fills me with nostalgia, but for the purposes of this pots, for once I wasn't able to set all the graphics sliders to maximum and had to endure the occasionally jerky animation (although at least the sound worked in that game!).

Still, it was extremely playable once I got the settings right, and I never seriously considered upgrading. Now, since Civ IV is so very important to me, it was time to bite the bullet and do it.

Video cards are probably the single most complicated component to evaluate. Most components have at most three primary variables to consider: with RAM there's the form factor, speed and capacity; with hard drives there's the seek time, capacity and transfer rate; with CPUs there's the bus speed, slot size and clock speed. With video cards, though, there's an incredible variety of factors to consider. There's the actual chip; there's the onboard memory; there's the speed; there's the output connectors; there's the slot type. Add to that the incredible variety in software support and things quickly get hairy. There are people with four-year-old Geforce 3 cards that run Doom III with flying colors but can't even start Civ IV; these cards have plenty of raw power but lack the latest pixel shaders used in Direct X 9.

I considered the following questions when selecting a card.

1. Do I need to upgrade at all? The reason I'm doing this is for Civ IV, and I probably won't buy many other PC games in the future. I decided that, while I didn't NEED it, I wanted it enough to justify a fairly thrifty upgrade.
2. What chipmaker to use? The serious choices are ATI and Nvidia; Ati sells complete cards while Nvidia just makes chips and lets other manufacturers build the cards. I opted for Nvidia, because I'd like to retain the ability to play games in Linux.
3. What slot size? Here's where it gets tricky. I have an AGP slot, but AGP is a dead-end technology, and newer motherboards don't offer it. Did I really want to spend $100+ on a card that wouldn't work in my next board? The alternative would be PCI Express, the future of graphics cards; these cards are actually cheaper than their AGP counterparts, but would require a new motherboard now. But if I got a new motherboard, I would want to get one that also supports 64-bit processors. But those boards aren't backwards-compatible with my Athlon, so I'd need a new CPU too. I did some mental math and decided it made sense to stick with AGP; the rest of my PC is running fine (I upgraded my CPU about 18 months ago), and I can afford to defer this painful upcoming upgrade cycle.
4. What chip? Here I hit the boards and dug around a bit. While older cards are cheap and provide plenty of raw power, I wanted to get a newer one that supported pixel shaders and other snazzy technologies. Again, since I'm getting this card specifically for Civ IV, I want something that will look good on it. At the same time, I absolutely refused to pay for a cutting-edge card. The 6600 seemed like a reasonable choice. It's well-reviewed, has the latest Direct X 9.0 support, comes with plenty of power, and is overclockable. It's also quite a bit cheaper than higher-end AGP cards, so it hit the sweet spot of price and performance.
5. What manufacturer? My last Nvidia was from PNY, and I haven't had any trouble with it, so I decided to buy from them.
6. Where to get it from? As always the cheapest prices were online. However, if I bought in a store I could use it this weekend. I found a Comp USA deal that, with rebates, gets me close to the online price, plus a free 256MB flash drive. Done and done.

This is the first time I've bought components from a big-box brick-and-mortar store since 2001, and I'm not eager to repeat the experience. It took me ten minutes for someone to open the case where they keep the good cards, and there was just one cashier handling everyone, and one person was returning an item that probably cost $5 and it took them nearly ten minutes to process the return; and finally, almost 45 minutes after I'd entered the store, I was setting off the alarm on my way out. I'm sorry, Newegg. It won't happen again.

So I got home around 9PM last night, when a horrible thought hit me. Did my motherboard support AGP 8x? It took some searching online and I found contradictory answers (the manual said no, just 4x; the boards said yes, 8x), but finally, I found a post on Nvidia's site saying it would run in 4x mode if it detected the Mobo was limited to that. So I smiled, tore open the cellophane and took out my card.

Installation took approximately 30 seconds. It still isn't working. I can get to POST, and by typing blind get into Windows, but the monitor never gets a signal. This is, of course, very frustrating. I've upgraded all my drivers and flashed everything I can except for my mobo, which requires a 3.5" floppy disk. Who still has those? (That's a serious question. If you do, and you're in California, can I borrow one?)

The only credible explanation I've heard is that my power supply is insufficient to run the card. That seems unlikely to me, as the card requires a 300W supply and that's what I have. The more I think about it, though, that might be the issue. While I don't have a TON of extra stuff, I do run a full case with five drives and an Audigy. I tried unplugging some of that stuff to see if it would help. It didn't, but I still think I'm going to get one. The power supply was the next thing on my upgrade list before Civ IV came around anyways; my current one was a cheap $30 stopgap employed when my previous unit died. It (my current PSU) annoys the heck out of me, it is incredibly noisy, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if it's putting out less than the advertised amount of power.

So, my current plan is to swing by Fry's after the birthday party at work today. I've checked out some PSUs and there are a few promising ones. I had originally considered getting a Phantom 350, an ultra-sweet totally silent power supply, but my prior splurge for a video card gave me the backbone to reject this as unnecessary. Plus no store around here has it. I'm leaning towards a few 430W supplies that are well-rated on Newegg and available for pretty cheap. I'll see what Fry's has in stock, pick it up, then mutter fervent prayers under my breath as I install it and power back on. IF all goes well, my life will fill with joy and I will see pictures on my computer screen. If there are problems, I will cry, then watch my recorded Colbert Report programs, then decide whether to buy a new motherboard or call PNY's technical support. I know companies occasionally ship defective products. It's entirely possible I got one of them.