[Freeciv-Dev] Civ4 impressions

[Per Inge Mathisen <per@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

First of all, it is clear that a good amount of careful design thought
went into this version. There are several things here for inspiration. A
lot of things that have "always been there" are removed, which in itself
may not be bad, but I am a bit puzzled about what they removed, and what
they added.

The good:
 - Very cool tribal title music.
 - Units have lots of "vs unit type" abilities (like pikemen & horses).
 - Units do not have separate attack and defense values, only one value. I
was skeptical of this when I read it, but I played it, I found that I
never missed it.
 - Unit promotions was an interesting concept.
 - No units cost population, not even settlers. Even so, there are so many
different important choices even in the early game that it becomes a real
choice what you should build, and settlers is not always the best.
 - Smallpox is not a very good strategy. City range expands as the city
accumulates more culture.
 - Tiny tax setting buttons in the upper left corner of the screen, not a
separate dialog.
 - Lots of information in tooltips which are easily available.
 - Player dialog a transparent window in the lower right corner of the
screen, the separate dialog never needed. Shows score, name, civics and
religion (civics and religion as tiny icons). Tooltip for self shows score
breakdown of score. Tooltip for others show diplomatic attitude,
diplomatic effects and helptext for war and trade. Very neat.
 - Barbarians develop cities of their own eventually.
 - Courthouse gives -50% maintenance bonus.
 - Rivers are between tiles, attacking across rivers give penalty.
 - All progress bars have a solid part (done) and a translucent part (will
be done next turn), which show speed of progress.
 - Unit command 'Gift' which gives a unit to another player whose borders
your unit is within.
 - Settlers and workers have 2 MP.
 - Timeout is dynamic with Snail -> Blazing speed settings (as I have
suggested for Freeciv before).
 - 'Fortify until healed' unit command.

The interesting:
 - Their default 3D view is top-down, not a tilted isometric one.
 - Only "Blitz" units like the Tank can attack multiple times a turn.
 - Bombardment reduces city defences a little bit each turn, making siege
a possibility.
 - Civics. Pretty much SMAC style government in five categories. While a
great approach, I did not like the options offered a whole lot.

The bad:
 - The game was S L O W, even on my somewhat fast PC, especially in the
late game.
 - The graphics were well drawn, but quickly got annoying. In the late
game, the map is so cluttered with fine drawn terrain improvements that my
eyes began to glaze over the map, not finding anywhere to focus.
 - Terrain improvements. There are a ton of them, and you will want a ton
of workers to make them. Very complex, a lot of micromanagement. Got
annoying quick.
 - Diplomacy was very interactive the first years, but got very stale
after the first third of the game, as the AIs did nothing interesting.
 - "Open borders" pact is essential to good terms and trade with AIs,
which allow them to move military units into your borders. They will do so
with great enthusiams, and march around with their explorers, causing more
clutter and angst over AI military units around my cities.
 - The in-game music was enervating
 - Lots of "filler" buildings like Grocer, Market and Supermarket that did
little. The building list got huge later in the game.
 - Great People was a pointless concept.
 - Lots of specialists in addition to working city tiles. Limits on how
many specialists of various types based on buildings. Even more
micromanagement here than in any previous version, almost felt like
Colonization. Luckily, you could just ignore it all and let the computer
deal with it (probably less optimal, though).
 - The ending was extremely dull.
 - Overly complicated tech tree.

In short, there was much to be inspired by, but overall not something I
think will last long.

  - Per