Civ IV

I'll plug it. I've wasted WAY too much time over the holidays playing it. Yikes.

If you are into turn based games, it is well worth it. It may bore some of you to tears though if you like your gameplay fast. The games are long, but they have redone the government/culture/endgame stuff so you can combine features and play however you would like. You don't have to be a warmonger to win, but killing people is still fun as hell.

Anyway.....it's good. That is all.

 

I want this game but I hear that they are having a lot of problems with MP. I'm gonna hold out a while and let them get it patched up.

 

i've been playing mp with my brother-in-law. we have to use the direct ip connection to get it to work over my lan, but whatever. i'm not usually a turn-based guy, but it's kinda fun. the earlier part is funner than the later part.

 

Are you having any synchronization problems?

 

you mean like the game filing becuse it's out of sync? no.

but i do notice that things happen at different times for each of us. like he'll learn about somebody starting a war before i learn about it. i figure this is just the turn-based nature of the game rearing its head, tho, not an inherent flaw.

what REALLY annoys me in multiplayer is that shit goes down while you're being asked what you want to build next or research next. it's very frustrating to be anticipating a large battle and then have the build queue thing come up and take over your ui. it should do that at the end of the turn, not at the beginning. i suspect even if i turned off the assistant (which i think is the thing that brings up the build screen) all battles take place simultaneously anyway -- so you can't watch them all. not like watching them means anything, but when you're bombarded with important messages about enemy troop movements and battles, it's really obnoxious that it doesn't zoom in to each successively and instead just sort of assumes you'll remember what's going on.

maybe that's why i like the early part of the game more than the later part.

 

Over on the official Civ 4 forums in the MP section there are a lot of people talking about getting out of sync messages on their screen quite often. They say that if you stop stop the MP game immediately and then restart that one person will end up playing one game while the other plays one that plays out completely different. I don't fancy the idea of having to start and stop the game 50 times in a night.

 

A few folks are going apeshit (at the Civ forums) over memory problems too. I haven't seen any problems. I have not tried MP yet though. We were gonna try it over last weekend but my HD crashed.

 

well, it's only been two players on my end. i know if i try to start a lan game it complains about not being able to open a socket or some shit, so i have to do a direct ip game. i'm sure it has something to do with my... uh... install of the game, if you catch my drift.

it does seem to bog down memory-wise on my 512mb system -- mainly towards the end of the game. in fact, last game didn't finish because at the last turn, the 512 machine quit responding.

 

I read somewhere that you have to modify the ini file and that the ports have to be set differently for each pc in the game over a LAN. Is the direct IP game hard to set up? I don't believe that I have played an MP game using that setup before.



I have one machine sitting here with a gig of memory and the other has 1.5 so if I start having memory problems I'm going to be pissed. Then I'll probably just buy some more. :banginghe