Civ 4

Published November 09, 2005
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I bought Civ4 the other day, and overall, it's a good game, but I've got a few major gripes with it.




Rather than bore you with them, I'll just give the major one: 3D.


The game is now in 3D, and like all strategy games that went from 2D->3D, it suffers from "Can't see things that well" syndrome.


Now that everything is in 3D, I can't see the units that well. Is that a warrior? Spearman? Is that even a dude? Is he mine? Is he an enemy?

The hell should I know!



I don't understand why these games try to do 3D when it really serves no purpose to the actual game. It makes no sense. The only time you can ever figure out what the units are is when you zoom super-far into the map, and then you have such a small view of things that you end up missing shit anyways!

This is why Starcraft is 100x better than Warcraft 3; I couldn't see what was what in WC3; but I could in SC.



I want to know; is this just me, or does anyone else ever feel this way?
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0 likes 4 comments

Comments

Gaheris
Yep, the best strategy games where done with 2D graphics. Namely Age of Empires and Age of Kings (and their addons Rise of Rome and The Conquerors).
November 09, 2005 11:16 AM
Monder
I've had no trouble telling what's what in civ4.

The 3D doesn't really add anything to it, but then for me it doesn't take anything away either.

My two main problems with civ atm are it's performance and it's stability, when I'm playing a game on a huge map it can stutter quite a bit later in the game, now I know there's a lot of stuff on the map but I would've thought my machine (AMD 64 3000+, 1gb ram, GF 6600 128mb) could handle it as the graphics aren't that high-powered. I've also had it crash and freeze on me a fair few times. Hopefully a patch will be released that'll clear these issues up.
November 09, 2005 12:42 PM
Mithrandir
I haven't had it crash yet.


November 09, 2005 03:06 PM
Ravuya
If you want an example of 3D done wrong, look at Age of Empires III. You can't zoom far enough out to make it useful, the framerate chops with unnecessary simulated Havok physics (wtf) and normal-mapped water...

The only time I took place in a battle epic enough to justify the cool 3D effects is when I had my army divided into two groups and they were both on screen -- which never happens because the entire game is a tank rush. Naturally the framerate DOVE on my 6600GT.
November 09, 2005 03:21 PM
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