This Christmas I got my son Railroads!, my husband Civ 4 and my daughter Tycoon City: New York. I checked system requirements for all and not only did the computers in question meet minimum requirements, they also met the recommended requirements.
Tycoon City works fine on my daughter’s laptop. The other two games? No go. On Railroads, the only playable mode is Table Top and even in Table Top it takes at least 10 minutes to lay a section of track. It is unplayable.
We won’t even go into Civ 4. Because we never got it to run-- we gave up after 40 minutes of the game trying to load-- on 3 seperate occasions.
Tycoon City is not a Sid Meier game, so I’m blaming him.
Anybody else have the same problems we did? Did you find a fix? Is it really Sid’s fault?
Civ 4 requires a graphics card with hardware T&L (whatever that is) and the onboard graphics on your average lappy ain’t going to cut it. As to why what is basically a glorified boardgame can’t degrade it’s graphics requirements to run on a less powerful rig is one you’ll have to ask Sid.
Civ 4 out of the box is very, very buggy. It didn’t work on many DESKTOPS. Refer to their web site and get the patches, and you may well get it working.
T&L stands for Transform and Lighting. I’m still not sure why they decided to make Civ IV (or Pirates! for that matter) even require a 64-bit graphics card with those capabilities. Don’t get Civ III, as that game is busted in gameplay.
Can you tell us what the specs are on the laptop? Unless you’ve got a gaming rig, I doubt you’ll be able to play anything that requires Hardware T&L and several other systems one finds on a higher-end graphics card. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t run those games on my laptop because I’ve got an integrated chip (specifically, an Intel GMA 950) even if I wasn’t running Mac OS X (Parallels isn’t set up for gaming and I don’t have anything at the moment that will work with BootCamp.) It’s questionable because Intel claims they support T&L through software, but I don’t expect much out of it. I didn’t want a laptop gaming rig since I’ve already got my desktop.
Laptops still aren’t really meant for gaming. Heck, the way I see it, for gaming one still needs a CRT and not a LCD.
Well, maybe they patched all the problems, but when I played it my roommate had gotten it right when it came out. The corruption and the pollution made the game close to unplayable. The corruption due to distance was like saying LA or any other city far away from Washington produced absolutely nothing. Taking a city destroyed basically all improvements. Combat was often screwed up–there is no way a phalanx should be able to take out modern armor.
There were a couple of patches addressing these problems, and plenty of user mods too, but I guess that’s a lot of hassle that should have been avoided out of the box.
I have a low end Sony Vaio laptop that we purchased strictly for web browsing in the living room, as we got sick of running to one office or the other whenever we wanted to quickly look something up on the web. It plays Civ IV just fine. I’m not sure of the specs on the video card, but we purposefully bought a simple, non-gaming machine.
Having railroads everywhere and several workers helps with the pollution problem, as does the building of Mass Transit and Recycling Centers in your major cities as soon as they’re available.
This is why you want your Palace to be on on side of your country and your Forbidden Palace on the other. I believe there was a bug in the corruption calculations, though, and this has been addressed.
I run CIV IV on my lap top and my desk top. No problems with either. My desk top is home built which should run even the most current of games from late 2004. My laptop handles Civ IV with no issues (IBM Thinkpad T60).
