Civilization 4
January 7, 2008
I wanted to give a brief explanation of what has been sucking every spare moment out of my life lately.
For the last several years, I really hadn’t played any computer games. Then I bought Half Life 2 just before Fortress Forever came out, and The Orange Box
So Team Fortress 2 has been eating up a bit of my time since.
Then, along comes Civilization 4
Civilization is a terrific strategy game where you are responsible for, you guessed it, a Civilization. You determine what technologies you are going to pursue, you found your cities, build improvements, and military units.
You also deal with other civilizations, trade technology and resources, and wage war.
These games are just so much fun because of the millions of ways that a game can go. You can play online, you can play with your wife or significant other over the LAN, or you can even play by email.
The game is a steal at $35.00, you’ll be playing forever. I skipped right over Civ 3, because about every 9 months to a year, we’ll break out Civ 2, install it, and play like crazy for a few months. I didn’t even realize there was a Civ 4 until recently. I bought a copy for my wife, then I became hooked again, and I bought a second copy for me. I’m seriously hooked now.
Seriously, I wake up in the morning and check my email to see if any of my email games have come in. If they have, I play them and send them off. After the kids go to bed, I play it all night, until I can force myself to turn it off. Then I lay in bed thinking about Civ.
I know, it’s sick. I’ll get through it though.
I need to put myself on a Civ Diet.
Did You Need Any More Reasons to Buy It?
Civilization is one of those gateway games that you can use to get your non-game playing spouse into, and then turn them onto other games. My wife never played any computer games before we were married, but I introduced her to Civilization (I think the original), and that’s all she wrote. Give it some thought. Today it’s Civ 4, Tomorrow it’s Quake 8.
OK, maybe not Quake, but how about Starcraft 2?
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January 8th, 2008 at 8:40 am
Email games are pretty cool, because you don’t have to sit in front of your computer for hours playing. On the other hand, they can take forever to play, as we found out. It’s best to start the game in one of the later ages for the sake of moving the game along.
For those times when you’re playing a regular game, the Civ team thoughtfully included an in-game alarm clock to alert you when it’s time to go to bed.
That should help with addiction, unless you catch the “Just one more turn!” syndrome.
Yes, Starcraft 2 is going to be sweet. I wasn’t ever very good at the first one, but I had a lot of fun playing it anyway.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:12 am
I don’t use the alarm much, but I do turn on the clock. I’m constantly looking at the year, so I see what time it is too.
I’m really looking forward to Starcraft 2, but I don’t want to fall into the same syndrome I did with Diablo II. I checked the Diablo II News sites every single day, at least once, for the 2 years before it was released. It was really scary. Heck, I even ordered 2 copies from different sources so that I knew I would get one on release day.
I agree with the email games concept, I’m hoping that having more than one going at a time will give me more to play, without eating up all of my time.
Thanks for the comment Art!
January 8th, 2008 at 10:52 pm
Oh man, you’re going to make me dig out the discs and start playing again….
I love me a civ game but it is a huge time draw – I know the “just one more turn” very well
SB
January 9th, 2008 at 12:58 am
Maybe we can get Scott in on the other email game we’re about to start.
January 9th, 2008 at 6:24 am
That would be cool with me. Any interest Scott?
January 9th, 2008 at 6:29 am
I like the Play By EMail (PBEM) games, because you can only do one turn at a time. I was thinking of limiting myself to them.
One thing I’ve noticed is that I’ll decide to go to bed, and I’ll start getting all the “What would you like to build next” screens, and you can’t pause it until you’ve worked your way through them. Then by time I get through them all, I forget that I wanted to stop playing.
It’s a vicious circle.
January 9th, 2008 at 7:56 am
Sounds great but I’ll have to see if I have a PC that can run it – I recall having trouble on my laptop and my gaming PC has been re provisioned to my wife after I started my business.
SB
January 9th, 2008 at 8:27 am
That would be pretty cool. Let me know if you can run it. Art and I were getting ready to start one here soon anyway.
January 9th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
It is pretty demanding of your system resources. I had a lot of trouble with it until I installed the first update, which was 1.6.1 or something. Performance greatly improved after that.
1.7.4 is now the current update. Be warned, though, you may need the latest DX9 runtimes to get it working. I had no end of troubles after I updated to 1.7.4, but updating the DX9 runtimes fixed everything.
June 28th, 2008 at 4:04 am
[...] game spending is probably somewhere around $100, at most. I think the last game I bought was the Civ 4, and that was way back in January. Before that was the Orange Box, so it looks like I’m [...]