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Zoomba

Join Date 11/2002

+114

What We Do For Games - The Civ 4 Battle

I will not be defeated by a piece of software!

UPDATE:
I got the game working finally. Turns out there's some odd problem with unpacking the assets file on load. This thread outlines how to fix the renderer error if you have up to date drivers and directx...
http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=4090697&t=1441#post4090697

There are certain games out there that bring back a flood of memories with just the mention of their name. These games are the cornerstones of PC and video games, and anyone who considers themselves anything of a gamer has probably played them at one time or another... and very likely become addicted to them, forfeiting sleep, food, work and loved ones all to squeeze in just one more level/boss/turn. These are the games that cause us to flunk a class, to get reprimanded at work for showing up looking like something the cat dragged in, that get us in serious trouble with our significant others for not spending enough "quality time" with them.

In short, these are the games that either got us into gaming, or what keep us firmly where we are in the hobby.

Through a combination of addictive gameplay, compelling gimmicks, sometimes story, but often just depth and complexity of the game, these magical games hold a special place in our hearts.

These are my most treasured games... These are games that I pulled all-nighters for, the ones that set the gold standard for all games I played thereafter.

Myst	Warcraft (1/2)	Starcraft	Mario (All NES)
Tetris	Master of Orion 2	Mega Man (All NES)	Sonic The Hedgehog
Baldur's Gate (1/2)	Command & Conquer	Doom 2	The Legend of Zelda (all)

Then there's the game this whole post is really going to be about.... Civilization.

The Civ series is the gold standard for empire building games. You take the reigns over one of the great civilizations of history and lead them from a small tribe in the stone age, to hopefully the most powerful nation on the planet (or you get to Alpha Centauri before anyone else). Civ 1 came out well before my time as a PC gamer so I missed out on that. I came to the series for Civ 2 and was hooked. I wasted hours and hours of my evenings and weekends playing the game, never managing to actually win the game because I was too busy clicking "Turn" to build a unit and ignored the strategy of the game. Civ 2 was a blast anyway, and I played the expansions, and eventually started kicking around the Open Source clone, FreeCiv (which never quite felt like a Civ game to me... something was just missing).

Well, I spent my time with Civ 2, but like most games, time went by and I eventually uninstalled and moved on. Sometime around my sophomore year in college though, a new Civ game came out... Civ 3, and it promised bigger, better, shinier everything. So after a bit of hemming and hawing and debating whether the money would be better spent on beer, I trudged to the store in the dead of winter and picked up a copy in a nice metal tin box. It was neat.

Civ 3 rekindled that sort of obsessive "next turn" mentality that can eat hours of life but only seem like a few moments had passed. I played... and I played... and I played some more. I missed classes because I was too far in "the zone" and forgot about such minor items such as grades, exams and homework. I did this for probably about a month before I realized what was happening. Since I had picked up Civ 3, I went from an A- in Statistics to a solid D, from a B+ in Economics to a C- (for required classes, I had to pull a C or better, so the C- wouldn't fly). I was starting to fail classes because I was playing a freaking computer game! So, I did the only thing I could do, I took the CD out of my computer, handed it to my roommate and told her she couldn't give me the CD back until the semester ended.

That decision saved my grades that semester, without a doubt.

After that I never really picked the game up again, always afraid of what would happen if I got sucked in again. So, it was with mixed emotions that I reacted to the news of a new Civ game coming out this year. Civ 4 promised the bigger better newer experience again, and looked to deliver on it even better than Civ 3 did. If this game is indeed better than Civ 3, does that mean it'll be more addictive? More detrimental to my already imaginary social life? Well, being the good little gamer I am, there was only one way to find out... buy the game and play it!

So, yesterday (10/26) I headed over to the local EB during lunch and grabbed one of the copies fresh out of the UPS box. It was launch day for a major game, of course I have to get one of the first copies. So, game in hand I drive home, pop the CDs in and install.

1pm - Game is installed... pop in the "Play" disc (Disc 2) and fire the game up, ready to be sucked into this new game.

Error... unable to find game CD, please insert the play disc.
Umm... I have the play disc in. I eject and put the cd back in, thinking the drive was having trouble reading it....

Error... unable to find game CD, please insert the play disc.
Very strange... well, let me see if there's any docs on the first disc about this. Pop in Disc 1 (Install) and up comes a launcher... Odd says I, that the non play disc would have the play launcher. So I click Play just for the heck of it.

(Note, there was evidently a production error that resulted in a bunch of CD sets being mislabled, if you get Civ 4, the first disc is the one you need to have in the drive to play.)

Well, it fires up the initial load box to let me know that the game is loading the XML file definitions, initializing audio, network etc. Then it says "Init Engine" (initialize renderer engine), the screen goes blank to load the game itself now, flickers, the BAM, back to the desktop I go.

Error: Failed to initialize renderer: Check your video drivers and DirectX version
Weird... I know I have the latest version of the ATI drivers (5.10) and DirectX (9.0c) so that shouldn't be a problem. I try a few more times to make sure it wasn't a weird glitch, but it always dumps with the same error. So, off I go to the forums to see if there might be a patch or some known bug.

For the next 3 hours I sit on the CivFanatics and Apolyton forums talking with other people who are having the same issue as I am. Turns out, everyone who is having trouble and getting the renderer error are ATI card users. The only nVidia card user who came on the thread was running an old GeForce 2 that didn't meet minimum requirements. We all tried different driver versions, tried reinstalling DirectX, everything we could think of in case it was an error on our end of things, like maybe we botched a driver install at some point and that's killing the game.

I tried installing Catalyst 5.7, 5.8, 5.9 and 5.10, as well as a few of the OmegaDriver sets. No luck
I tried reinstalling DirectX from the game CD. No luck.
I called TakeTwo phone support and got nothing back of value from them
I turned on logging in the game's ini file hoping to get a meaningful error message back. Nothing useful.

It was now around 5pm and I had spent 4 hours working on this problem (so much for work huh? Well, I did meetings via the phone while reinstalling drivers and rebooting) and onto the one thread about all the driver reinstall attempts (it was 6 pages long at this point) comes the lead designer of the game from Firaxis, and he suggests we all install the latest ATI drivers (5.10).... which was what the ENTIRE THREAD was about and how it didn't work. I don't think he read any of the thread before posting, and it honestly pissed a lot of people off. It's like calling your Cablemodem support line, they ask you if you've reset the modem, you say yes, then they tell you to again anyway, as if they don't believe that you did it, or that you're capable of doing it properly.

Just to humor him, I did it again, and still no luck. I posted my results back. The fix didn't work for any of us, and we knew it wouldn't since it was the first thing everyone had tried hours earlier. After all the driver reinstalls I figured the only thing that had remained constant (aside from my Windows install) was the game install, so I uninstalled and reinstalled that.

Fired up the game again to see if that fixed it.

Error... unable to find game CD, please insert the play disc.
I had the right CD in, but just for fun I put the other one in. Still no dice. Great, now not only will the game not render, it won't even find the CD! I was digging deeper and deeper. I uninstall and reinstall a few more times, and it's still not working. Finally, after chatting for a while with a Firaxis developer (Trip, you rock) I try rolling back my drivers.

On the last driver install, I got 5.10 with the Catalyst Control Center stuff. This time to make it quicker I downloaded the 5.8 DRIVER ONLY installer and out that in. Boom, the CD worked again. Something between SecuROM 4 and the Control Center had botched things up and left me unable to even start the game.

But I was still at the render problem.

At 10:30 last night, I gave up and went to bed. Chatting with Trip, we learned that this problem seems pretty random for ATI cards and they haven't been able to reproduce the problem internally yet. He told us Take2 and Firaxis were going to be kicking it into high gear first thing in the morning to get the problem resolved fast since this was affecting a significant chunk of the customer base. Hopefully a hotfix will be coming down today or early tomorrow... I really want to play this game!

As I was shutting down for the night, I realized that I had just spent five and a half hours pouring over driver installs, dll files, directx readmes, SecuROM info sheets, forums and had been in regular contact with developers on the game team trying to fix a game I had just bought.

I was doing *work* to play a *game*

THAT my friends, is the sign of an addiction

gaming

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Weeeell, sounds like I'll be waiting for the first big patch before I buy. Been waiting for a while for civ 4, I hope they get their shiznitz together.

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I remember playing the first civilization, that was a good game. And here I thought you were older then me, oh well. Working to get games started can be a fun adventure or endless torture. Here's hoping you enjoy it and manage to get it playing soon.

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Well... other than the French tech tree and the mislabeled CD's, and the video stuttering, and the strange volume on music, the performance drop after about 4-5 hours of play...

I played my first game yesterday... about 45 mins to get the game up and running, then about 7 hours in game before grabbing 3 quick hours of sleep.

Sigh... I can't wait for the mod teams to start releasing.

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Zoomba

Join Date 11/2002

+114

I thought the french tech tree was pretty funny... the CD label issue, annoying but harmless.

The countless crashes and performance bugs I've been hearing about? Less than amusing.

Thankfully, my experience so far with the Firaxis guys has been top-notch. Those guys want to fix the problems and they're working dilligently to get the game working.

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Zoomba

Join Date 11/2002

+114

Oh and Danny, I think you might be a year or two older than I am, but the reason I missed the original Civ was because I didn't own a PC until 1996, prior to that it was Mac-only and I don't remember there ever being a Civ port for the Mac at that point.

I missed out on a lot of games while I was a Mac user.

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The Civ games were always ones I watched from afar. Never really got into them simply because I didn't play them. Perhaps now that Civ 4 is out I can pick up Civ 3 with its expansions for cheap.

Hope you get it working soon.

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Zoomba

Join Date 11/2002

+114

Civ 3, while it sucked me in for months, is not the game to pick up if you're coming new to the series. Try and dig up a bargain basement copy of Civ 2 with expansions for that. You'll be much happier.

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I'D Rather play EE2 or EE1 than the CIV seris im used to Classic Eco RTS War games... well its gonna be another MOO3 eh? Sigh there goes another branch now about the sims seris... *5 Years later....* Will Wright: we now realse the sims 3 now featuring "live play" (don't ask!). *Lowa11 loads up sims3 and computer explodes into a furious flame* *about 4 billion other ppl do same thing and world becomes giant wildfire*

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Hm... I think 1st Civ was great , 2nd ... mediore , 3rd - total failure ...
now comes the 4th , this time it looks like a brake in a bad luck but ... bugs , bugs ...

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" Hm... I think 1st Civ was great , 2nd ... mediore , 3rd - total failure ..."

Kind of a ridiculous statement, really, considering III was wildly successful and people were basically addicted to it for the last few years. I've wasted entire work weeks on Civ3. There's always people who are so nostalgic that they can't accept the new version of anything, granted.

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CIV III is indeed very addictive but i get mad every time i play it due to the highly cheating AI and the micromanagment nightmare it becomes when you progress....it's a love-hate relationship for me. I just wish someone else would make that type of game too...

As i did with CIVIII, i'll wait at least a year before i buy CIV IV.

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I personally have had no problems using Civ4. The game works find. I knew about the disc screw up by reading it on the forums....so....

I think Civ4 is great. Looks great, plays great....I came home from work last night....loaded up the game around 12:30 (even though I knew I shouldn't)...and 2 minutes passed, and it was 3 am.....2 minutes!! I swear it was only 2 minutes!!

Anyways....really enjoying this one. I had civ2...I played Civ 1 many years ago....I had civ3....But I personally, so far, think Civ4 is the best in the series....not just pretty graphics, but the gameplay works good.

Civ 3 to me....i liked the game....but there were some very annoying things. The most annoying to me was the fact that any nation could just waltz through my territory at any time....that was just SO unrealistic to me. Civ 4 fixes that with Open Borders

Like I said, the game is great....but, I do have an nVidia card....never cared for the ATI cards....

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Zoomba

Join Date 11/2002

+114

The ATI card issue has been cleared up (as noted in the update to the article). The problem was in fact NOT with DirectX OR the ATI drivers themselves. Something strange was going on with 256MB ATI cards (not all, but some) where the game was unable to unpack the assets.fpk file in the game assets directory when the game launched. The solution was to grab the PAK tool from Firaxis and to manually unpack the assets and then remove the fpk file from the directory. That way, it wasn't trying to unpack anything.

I'm currently sucked into my second game where I've got a solid handle on the world and it's only 1710AD

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Glad I have NVIDIA

Sounds like another great Sid Miers classic. I will get it after I finish moving this week.

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Well I have NVIDIA too and except for the starting movie that instead of playing minimizes the game

it plays fine.
The game is actually fun to play and I ordered it after 2-3h of playing.

The other annoying thing was stupid copy protection that refused to run with "Virtual CD emulation software detected" error witrhout even giving a hint on what program it talking about untill I uninstalled poor CloneDVD that actuall has even nothing to do with "CD emulation" - it's a disk copy program

( not to mention that I run pirated version with Alcohol 120% + AntiBlaxx without any problems

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As with any game that comes out this time of year, I will wait till I get it from some relative for the holidays. I'm not allowed to buy such things till January... Here's to desperately awaiting xmas... sigh.

I've been playing the Civ series since 1, plus Alpha Centauri (I love it still!!), colonization...and generally anything that Sid graces us with. Even managed to pick up his board game version of Civ, signed by Sid

I'm a fanatic.

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OK , after laying Civ4 some more here are "problems" I have discovered :

1. Like with many such games at advanced levels (time) if you build a new city you have to spend a lot of time buildinga lot of very old stuff. Its logical (in most cases, not when you build Colosium in atomic age) but very anoying.

2. Sometimes ifyou build or research something that has "obsolite effect" its hard to tell how this will actually effect you.

3. Civs, religion and such - "higher upkeep" - it coold be nice to know how much higher (in %) before maing decision .

4.It's pity that they did not implmented "religion specific" bonuses or events .

5. "Pentax versus Tank" problem not solved completely I still saw cases when macemen defited helicopter that btw another thing - I think helicopter is air unit should not be atacked at all by macemen orkst case may be archers

6. Too few diferent techs when it comes to modern war (tanks and such) or naval war and they all discovered in "batches" - no way or time to actually "enjoy" each tech.

7.I understnd that thy limited number of turns probablybecouse of multiplayer but it could be nice to have control over it in options- sometimes you want to play more/less.

8.Somehow adding to build queuee in city and electing a city is very laggy.

9. Espionage is very limited .

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"1. Like with many such games at advanced levels (time) if you build a new city you have to spend a lot of time buildinga lot of very old stuff. Its logical (in most cases, not when you build Colosium in atomic age) but very anoying.'

Don't know where you live, but towns still spend millions building a coliseum in the US.

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Don't know where you live, but towns still spend millions building a coliseum in the US.

And make gladiators fights too ?

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And make gladiators fights too ?

Football? Ice hockey?

Anyway, Civ4 still uses that retarded "strategic resources" system where you can't build quite vital units unless you have access to a randomly placed resource that pops up only after you invent the unit in question. That's what killed Civ3 for me (that and the French). Civ 1 and 2 were somewhat fair, which made them fun. Each nation had its own little details, but overall it was rather balanced. Civ3 got rid of that by effectively cutting you off from necessary units (musketeers) and having really unbalanced special units for each nation.

So no Civ4 for me. I want games to be somewhat fair, and I definitely don't want to depend on resources that appear out of nowhere after having spent 20 hours in a game.

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i like the strategic resources concept. I think it works....and works good.

If you do not have access to the resources...you either have to make the diplomatic moves for it....or take it by force....makes sense to me....

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Football? Ice hockey?

OK , I see the problem is that english not my native lang and I was reffering to the image shown of the Rome Colosium, the thing you talked about is stadium for me

i like the strategic resources concept. I think it works....and works good.

I like the strategic resources concept too , the only problem with this is that "advanced resources (like oil and uranium) appear only after you discover some tech. Prevents you from political planing.

Another thing I did not liked - no oil drils

it could be nice to place them in sea and protect them and ... damn forgot it's civ not warcraft

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Yarlen

Join Date 01/2005

+369

Actually Civ IV does have oil drills at sea. You build a Work Boat and construct an Oil Platform over them (requires Plastics tech I think).

The strategic resources work much better in Civ IV than in III, IMO. They made it so that most units can now be built with one of two strategic resources, so players are bound to have one of them within their borders. Only a few units require access to specific strategic resources and they're pretty powerful (i.e., nukes).

I would agree that the Modern era is short. You spend so much time in each prior era that you kind of expect the Modern one to last longer than it does. I'd certainly like to see Firaxis flesh that out in an expansion pack.

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Zoomba

Join Date 11/2002

+114

Play the game on "Epic" game speed and you'll get a longer Modern Era. Combine Epic speed with a lower difficulty setting (anything short of the middle setting), and you'll get a LOT more play time at the upper end of the tech tree. I had The Internet around 1860

The only time I had trouble with Strategic Resources was when I played with turtle tactics (take a small chunk of land and fortify the hell out of it). Nearer the end of the game when I needed resources like uranium and oil, it was mostly just outside my borders, and I refused to have an open border with anyone, so I couldn't take the resources unless I took an agressive stance, which I wasn't built for in that game.

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You can trade resources btw , it does not have to be "usless" rice and cows only .

P.S.: now I know why Beta4 was delayed

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What We Do For Games - The Civ 4 Battle

What We Do For Games - The Civ 4 Battle

I will *not* be defeated by a piece of software!

I will not be defeated by a piece of software!