If you haven’t heard this everywhere else yet, the minimal and recommended requirements for the game are…wrong. That’s the best word for it. Wrong. Not merely incorrect.

I’ll cut to the recommendations, since even those prove incapable of handling this thing. A 1.8GHz CPU. Half a gig of RAM. A 128meg videocard. DirectX8. DirectX7 soundcard. CDRom drive. 1.7gigs of drivespace.

Then there’s this computer, doubling half of those numbers. And the game didn’t work.

Curiously, when I gave the doomed plan of installing it on my laptop, with its shitware onboard videochip, the game did run. Unfortunately, the 3.0GHz laptop overheated and shut down in selfpreservation before I could get more than a millennium or two into the game.

Finally, a few days ago, Firaxis released a 24meg patch. The patch covered a number of issues, they say; in my case, it mostly just allowed the game to load beyond the startup timewaster [Leonard Nemoy blathering his way through some modified version of Genesis, and reminding me painfully of SeaMan for the Dreamcast] and assure me that, bugfixed or not, the graphics still weren’t working correctly.

In the end, I got the game working long enough to beat it with a Normal Map; the Huge Map still has the weird blackouts and mislayered elements to it.

When I say that it ran long enough to let me beat it, I mean pretty much just that. The game is officially over in AD2050, despite the ‘one…more…turn’ option. Given that option, I’m now in the year AD2159, which is about as far as I’m able to get; and I got that far by pulling the autosaved file up and getting as far as 2162 before the game puked again. Not that I was expecting much more beyond 2050 than popups asking whether I still wanted to be in charge of the UN [granting how many electoral votes I have, I now control every election except the two-thirds majority to reelect myself] and the assignments for the few newer cities I’ve been able to build now that I’m out of room on this damned Normal Map.

The game took just under two hours to beat. Though it took about the same number of actions as Civ3 took. The difference is that A) if you don’t want to build workers, they won’t get magically built anyway, and B) what workers there are won’t arrest the damned game for thirty minutes at a time while they repave your fully developed country for no reason. That’s an improvement.

Another reason why Civ4 is so easy to beat is…that it’s easy to beat. It reminds me a little of SimCity4: far better graphics, but totally altered gameplay. The difference is that SC4 became harder to play, abandoning the original SoftwareToy concept of the first one. Civ4 became easier. Granting that it had little in common with Civ3, so I had no real idea what I was doing going into it, I was able to click pretty much everything the popups suggested and beat the runnerup by twice its score. I think I went half an hour without touching the keyboard.

There are some new elements I happen to like. At least, I think they’re new. Civ3 was the first one I’d played; Civ and Civ2 always looked like a boring mess, to me. Some of the new elements are Reacting Animals. I’m not sure what else to call them. Little panthers and lions and things, officially allied with the barbarians, which will wander up and kill your settler to death. The barbarians themselves, apart from training large cats, have also learned to build and steal cities. And I like that a lot: not only do they no longer just crash a city and reset your progress on building a guard, but they also hand you cities premade for your guys to go in and take, without fear of retaliation since you’re already in a technical state of war with these morons.

From what I’ve seen, when they work, the graphics are far better than ever before. The overhead snapshot horses and whales have been replaced by randomly moving wireframe creatures. And that’s actually something I’m suspecting for one of the bugs: in Huge Map mode, while my city is invisible, the moving horses sitting beneath it can still be seen. A bugfix to remove and replace those with a simple horses_live_here marker would save some power, I think.

All things considered, Civ4 is about the most disappointing game I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen worse games, of course. But, the probability that Civ4 would be about the best game I’ve seen, at least within this genre, if only it actually worked correctly…it’s irksome.

Provided that there’s ever a real patch, which gets the thing working even on its minimal, prehistoric 256meg, 1.2GHz, Video64 requirements, then we might have something here. Until then: don’t expect the game to work on anything but the system it was playtested on…whatever in hell that thing was.