Hehe, It’s installing. I am now better than some of you. Best Buy on Colorado in Denver has a couple left in case anybody cares.
Now I go to fulfill my destiny as RULER OF THE WORLD. bwahahahaha!
Left work early to hit stores. Five stores I went to.
None in stock.
Dammit.
I picked mine up (I preordered through EB) around 3 today. It’s 7:30 now and I don’t know what happened. Why is it dark outside? The stars look very different today.
So far, this is without a doubt the best version of Civilization there’s been yet. Presentation is just perfect – the music, the art, the globe view instead of world map view, the foreign leaders, even the tutorial. I loved Civ 3, but all the annoyances are gone (corruption, etc.), there’s more to do as far as city improvements and researching technology and religion, and it really feels like building a civilization instead of playing a game. And I haven’t even had any military encounters yet!
This is going to be bad.
I found a copy easily enough, but now the damn thing isn’t working. It installs on one computer, but it keeps crashing and restarting on the menu screen. It won’t even install on 2 other computers. Lazy bastards don’t have any support info posted on their website either. I’m currently trying some tricks from my EA tech support days, but without proper support info I won’t be able to do the more advanced stuff.
Although I haven’t tested at home, I’m pretty sure my PC won’t handle this game either. So I’m gonna have to spring for $130 on a new video card, and hope and pray that the PCI card I’ve got my eye on (I have no AGP slot) will handle it.
I’m so jealous.
A little skeeved out by cervaise, but still jealous.
Dammit.
Here’s a thread Exploding Kitchen started in the Pit expressing their opinion on the game.
Okay first impressions.
First game. No good it started me in the middle of shitlandia, with one crappy little area of good terrain, few resources, and vast deserts in the to the North and west, sea to the south and east. Ther’ll be time for challenge later. restart.
Second game, much better. Randomly country got Egypt, Good land started well. The game goes much quicker. Workers and Settlers are much harder to build, and tons of cities discouraged I only have 3 cities by 0 A.D. Without micromanaging tons of cities the years click by, And the workers have pretty good automated AI, so I let them run their own lives. Also no Riots, less corruption, :). Religion is much bigger, but I havn’t quite got a handle on using it well yet. Tech is different too. Rather than a largely forced path you can shoot to whereever you want, skipping some early stuff. I need to think about that as well. I missed some very simple early techs, which would have made life much easier. 
Didn’t get much into the civics on the tech path I took, but I like the looks and the idea of the system.
All in all. I have a much better first impression than I did on civ III. It’s just a lot more fun and a lot less bookkeeping. I got arrogant and started way too hard a difficulty, and in year 780 A.D it looks like I’m going to lose pretty soon, to a Chinese army with much better troops. It’s amazing I got that late in a couple hours. 700 A.D took 5-6 hours game play in Civ III. I’m gonna have to swallow my pride and start at a more moderate difficulty till I get a handle on how things work.
I’m sure the game will be absolutely wonderful once all the crippling bugs and issues with not being able to load get fixed.
Unfortunately, if it’s not fixed within a couple of days, I will be returning the game, and warning my gamer friends to no longer purchase any Firaxis made or Take Two published (that includes GTA) games.
Release now, patch later is not tolerable.
I got my install working. If anyone has the same problem as me, what happened was I got a CRC error on one of the files. The fix was to go to Program Files\Common Files and rename the InstallShield folder to InstallShieldOld. (What is it with InstallShield anyway? I hate that damn thing.)
Now I want to know what the blue circles are for when I have settler units selected. Is the game suggesting good places to build cities?
Yes. See the walkthrough linked above.
Well, I’ve got an ATI Radeon X800 XT, and it installed and plays perfectly.
Too perfectly, since I’ve been playing for about 10 hours straight and just feel kind of gross now.
Just ordered my copy for pickup today.
I KNOW I’m going to have install problems. I just KNOW it. I was never able to install the Conquests upgrade for Civ III because of various directX problems during the install (paraphrased):
Computer: DirectX not detected, would you like to install?
Me: Yes
Computer: Could not install directX as a previous version was detected.
Civ4 kinda sounds fun, but I thik that Civ3 never lived up to expectations (not even with al the exp0ansions, and moreover, I don’t like the direction they’re taking the game in. I don’t want to have a handful of cities: I want to builda vast, sweeping empire of might and glory. And with every edition, they’re making that more difficult, without much in the way of countering factors for most players.
The new religion sounds nifty, though.
So much hippie crap rage. No local copies around.
Emailed Amazon the following:
Their response:
My reaction:
Amazingly, my order is allegedly being prepared for shipment with an estimated arrival date of October 31st. Just in time for the 1.01 patch to arrive. 
And we’ve shipped. I guess Amazon gets to live another day.
Curse you all!
I started with the original Civilization on floppy discs loaded into my 386 Wang. Then to Civ II, then Call to Power. Life stopped Children grew old, seasons turned and I lapsed in personal hygine and eating habits. My antique computer couldn’t support Civ III so I never played it.
I’m very soon buying a new computer after I finally get a check from my side job.
Must stay strong.
Curse you all for awakening what I thought was a vanquished addiction.
::: shakes fist :::
Well, mine still hasn’t shipped from Amazon yet. They must have only fixed lno’s order specifically. I sent them my own little email.
For those who ordered from EB games –
Did you wait until they called you?
Did you call them about it?
Did you just show up at the store?
thanks 
/S
Dropped by on my lunch hour; CompUSA still doesn’t have it. They even searched the back room for me.
Nuts.
Luckily for me, I went to the EB games store at the mall right after work yesterday and picked up their last copy (after having stopped in on Tuesday and being told it wasn’t released yet). Went home and it installed just fine (though as mentioned, the install and play discs are mislabeled…the install disk is also the play disc; the second disc is just a data disc as far as I can tell.
So I sat down at my computer and was with the game from 6PM to 1AM. I assure you it’s as addictive as its predecessors. I couldn’t even be bothered to get up to turn off Adam Corolla’s awful show. Some thoughts:
The tutorial seems pretty worthless if you’ve already played other Civ games. I’m sure that once you get to step 5000 of the tutorial there might be some useful advice about the religions and civics but I couldn’t be bothered to wait that long. Somebody asked about the blue circles…I believe those tell you the optimal spots for cities or for workers to develop.
As far as the voice overs…I thought that was Nimoy!!! How cool. I kinda like the music. The World Wonder videos they rave about are largely just pointless fluff in my estimation though. There’s a really nice zoom in/out function on the map just by using your scroll button on your mouse.
Land improvement is different in a weird way. There are these new buildings like pastures that you need to exploit a cow resource and you have to build fishing boats to exploit a fish resource (or crab or clam…yup, lots of crazy new resources).
Cities seem much easier to deal with. I believe it when I see it about the pollution management being better or nonexistent (haven’t read the manual, so who knows how that’s handled).
Cool new “barbarian” units like panthers and lions in addition to your traditional barbarians.
Caravels can’t carry settlers!!! So if you’re planning to colonize overseas, you need to hurry along to the caravel.
The religion and civics things are pretty complicated, but seem pretty cool. In the long run, I think this will be the greatest contribution of this edition of the game.
All right, I’ll shut up now. Sorry for everybody that’s having tech problems and problems getting their copies.
Sid Meier…you’re still a genius.