The achievements feel tacked on but at least it might make me play as the other civs once in a while. I tend to pick one (English) and stick with it.
I think I’m going to have to ignore this thread until the 24th now. I can’t be watching you lot all having fun (and arguing) while I sit here twiddling my thumbs. It’s too unbearable.
I watched the video with the Firaxis devs playing the game and they continually referred to the Tuesday release date. Damn them!
Took the rest of this week off (for different reason). Wife is already planning scheduled interventions to ensure I get food and sunlight at regular intervals this week. Got it pre-loaded from Steam (I hate physical media). Don’t think it unlocks until noon EST though, which means not only do I have to get through tonight, but I have to find something to entertain myself with until lunchtime tomorrow.
I like some of the changes as described. Others I’m not so sure about. Either way, it’s pretty much certain that I’ll spend a few hundred hours sitting there saying ‘One more turn…’
It’s 1pm EST now, the streamer at Steam says it unlocks in ~21 hours. So that’s… 10 am?
Good. Now I don’t have an excuse not to go to class tomorrow.
Mine situation is even worse… Used some free eCerts to buy this from WalMart.com (wouldn’t have done so otherwise) and the current status says: “Will arrive between Wednesday, 09/29/10, and Friday, 10/01/10.”
Uuuuugh!!!
In this review at around 4:20 they mention Pitboss mode will be added in a later patch, is it possible you’ve confused Pitboss and Hotseat?
I got an email saying that it was shipped today and is estimated to be delivered on the 27th. Interesting. Still, if it’s being shipped today I’d expect that it’d arrive in fewer than 7 days unless by “shipped” the mean moved to a room to sit until we’ve punished the Free Shipping users enough.
I may return it if the tracking data seems to reflect a week wait, we’ll see. Best Buy or Steam. Hmm.
The fine print says that the return reason is “Missed estimated delivery date” which means that if it arrives on or before September 27th Amazon will make me eat the return shipping costs. How desperate am I to play this game tomorrow versus playing it next week? Is it worth $20 to me (return shipping plus local sales tax)?
Ohh how I long for the days when the original Civ came out when I was in college, and I could put the better part of three straight months playing 18 hours a day.
Stupid-cruel-adult-responsibilities-job-needing-to-pay-rent-and-having-only-2 days-of-vacation-which-I-Need-to-save-in-case-I-get-sick world. :mad:
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I bought it through Steam. 
Can you buy it at Best Buy and then return the copy you receive from Amazon to Best Buy?
Maybe, depends if Amazon has some special hassle free packaging or if I can swap the Best Buy pricing label without destroying it. Probably not worth the risk of being stuck with it. Once it’s opened no one will take it back.
Hear hear. Once in college I fired up a new game of Civ 2, on one of the easier levels, after dinner and landed on Alpha Centauri as the sun poked through my windows. I really only intended to play for an hour or so.
Out of curiosity, can anyone compare and contrast the 512MB ATI Radeon 4350 Graphics Card I’m running to the recommended Radeon 4800 series that the game calls for? As far as I can tell I should be fine running it at nearly max settings, but I’m curious if there’s a case to be made for upgrading my Video Card for the game. (I’m already tempted to upgrade my monitor to a 23" widescreen from my current 19" standard)
Also, I see in the manual that LAN multiplayer games are possible. Do you need 2 copies of the game to play head-to-head games in the same household? I’m guessing that you do but it’s not spelled out explicitly in the manual for the game.
With a 4350, you’re looking at low settings across the board. It’s a bottom of the barrel card from two years ago.
You can only sign into a Steam account on one computer at a time, so you’d need two copies of the game. Maybe you can get away with one copy and exploiting offline mode, but you should just buy two.
Huh? I know the 4350 isn’t a powerhouse or anything but the listed minimum requirements are just a 256 MB ATI HD2600 XT. My card blows that away and is a heck of a lot closer to the recommended requirements than the minimum ones.
I’m stoked about the game but miffed about the different release dates.
I like every single change I have gleaned from reviews, specially the hexes and improved combat system. Awesome.
According to this chartyour card is quite a bit below the 2600XT which is listed in the minimum requirements. So is mine in fact. Still I wouldn’t be too surprised if we are able to play on small maps on low settings which would largely be my preference anyway. I guess we will know soon when the demo is released.
Well shit, silly me for thinking that the ATI cards were in anything resembling numerical order. 2600 is better than the 4350…naturally! How important is the onboard memory component?
Yeah those video cards can be confusing; I had mistakenly though my card met the minimum requirements too. IIRC a decade or so back, the MB on the video card could be used as a proxy for the power of the card but those days are long gone and a 256MB card can easily be much more powerful than a 512MB card. But fortunately that hierarchy chart by Tom’s, which I discovered just a couple of days ago, makes it fairly easy to figure out where your card stands relative to the requirements of a particular game.