Civ II was awesome in its day and I invested an unbelievable number of hours into it, but I’m happy the sequels came along and I’d never go back to playing it. If you don’t want to jump into Civ V (I like it; others don’t), then Civ IV is fantastic, and probably fairly cheap by now. At least give it a go.
Honestly, I loved multiplayer on Civ II so when III didn’t have multiplayer to begin with, I was disappointed but when I tried to go back I couldn’t do it. Civ II just didn’t cut it anymore. That was 14 years ago. The game has evolved so much further since then.
Man, I miss her in the later editions. Without “Sir, my sources tell me zat our allies hold us in ze highest regard… I suggest we exploit zis opportunity”, it just can’t compete.
Civilization V Complete (includes both Brave New World and Gods & Kings expansions) is 50% off at $24.99 today from GetGamesGo. I realize that’s likely outside of what the OP was looking to spend but we’ve had a couple questions about Civ games lately so thought I’d mention it. Says “Mac” but the game is Steamplay and will work on both Macs and PCs.
Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there I’ve been eyeing this game for weeks now and was about ready to start asking if anyone had played it.
Not IV, but I’ve played III and CK2, by the same company, and I really enjoyed them. Very complex, with a tough learning curve and bad documentation on how the game mechanics work, but I’ve never played better strategy games and the map is absolutely massive, with thousands of individual territories.
I tried, a number of times, to play Paradox games, but I never could. Too grognardy, too much stuff going on with too little in the way of help or tutorials, and the “aimlessness” turned me away.
Yeah, any game where the fans say “Well, if you watch four hours of YouTube tutorials before you play…” isn’t a game I really want to invest myself in. Too bad because it sounds fun but I just don’t want to put the hours required into it for even slight competence.
There’s an autoexec section at the bottom of Dosbox.conf.
The virtual drive is just whatever regular folder you tell DOSBox to mount. You can create and edit text files using any text editor from the host OS. But there is a type command.
DosBOX is an emulator that lets you play old games in a modern computer without the graphics going every way but up, the speed being ridiculously fast, etc.
If you get any game from GoG that happens to need it, the game gets installed along with DosBOX, you don’t need to worry about it any more than you need to worry about your DirectX install. It just happens.
I also like Civ 4: Colonisation a lot (you play a European Power colonising America; you have to deal with natives and other Powers whilst making money trading back with Europe; eventually you declare Independence and have to defeat the King’s army.)
Finally I’m 60 and I got Dosbox installed with no problem.
I’ve played all Civs and loved most, but if you can find the dollars for Civ V (and the downloads) you wouldn’t be disappointed I feel. I had to go back to Civ IV when my computers were stolen but it did lack something (IMHO).
Basically, I think there are things in every Civ version which I had wished they had kept.
It’s always disappointed me that being a stereotypical Banana Republic dictator (corrupt, kleptomanical, completely ruthless, fond of making dissidents disappear) isn’t actually viable or possible in any of the games, despite what you’re led to believe.
Sure, you can keep arranging for your political opponents to have “accidents” or get imprisoned on trumped-up charges, but there’s always someone who will step up to take their place. Avoiding elections for too long always seems to trigger some sort of coup or piss off one of the superpowers and basically doing anything except trying to run a democratic, fair educated country (where you can stuff your Swiss Bank Acccount balance) seems to be a one-way trip to fleeing an angry mob in a DC-3.
As for Civs, Civ V has improved a lot with its recent expansions but I just liked the general “feel” of Civ IV Complete better.
I bought CK2 last year on Steam and frankly, I find it unplayable. If EU4 is from the same people, I think I’ll save myself the $40 and the hours of trying to figure out what the fuck is going on and what I’m supposed to be doing (and how in fuck to do it). Any game that requires more than a 10 minute tutorial to teach the basics of the game is likely a shitty game, IMO.