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Civ4: Beyond The Sword - Awesome

Did you play Alpha Centauri? If not you need to play that, it's a true classic.

If you did, you can safely skip to Civ4. I had a ton of fun with Call to Power 2 back in the day as well.
 
I installed Fall From Heaven 2 last night and played until 6am. Now I'm looking for a reason to ditch my girlfriend for the day so I can finish my game.

Civ is worse than heroin.
 
Fragamemnon said:
Here's some more info on the scenarios in the expansion, courtesy another, far better place on the internet than this console-ridden shark pool.
Fall from Heaven: A popular fantasy mod for Civilization IV, improved for the expansion.
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Looks so very, very good. Rhye's and Fall is a more historically accurate bend on Civ4 (not up to Europa Universalis historical, but still good), and FFH is a fantastic fantasy mod.
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I got extremely excited reading this, as FFH2 is easily the strategy game I've played most hours of over the past year or so. However, it makes me wonder is how much of it will be included. One reason why FFH(2) has such a wealth of content is that, as a free mod, they make extensive use of "fair use" of copyright-protected artwork (and music).

From the forum the only official statement of the team lead is that yes, there will be some form of FFH included and that they've been working on it with Firaxis for over a year. Anyway, although I think it won't be able to replace the free FFH2 - which is still only half complete but already MASSIVE - I'm still excited about this "official" version.
 
I played Civ4 around release and thought it was okay, but no Alpha Centauri. At the same time, I promised myself to check it out again once a bunch of mods/patches/expansions were released--looks like I'll get back into it with Beyond the Sword.
 
I've been out of the Civilization picture for a while now. The last one I played was Civ 2 back in college (around 1999). I'm not much of a PC gamer but that game sucked me into it so bad. :lol (and the only PC games that I have really played since then have been Starcraft and Civilization 2). Instead of really looking hard for a job I was playing these two games. I remember starting Civ 2 around 7:00 a.m. and before I knew it it was already dark outside, and this was summertime. No game has ever been like that for me. Time flies with that game!

So here I am ready to get into it again. I was at Circuit City picking up Kingdom Hearts 2 and noticed Civ IV on sale for $20 and picked it up. Am I ok without the expansion packs? I want to have a great experience but I don't want to get knee deep into it again. I'm actually kind of worried that this game is going to suck up too much of my time, esp. with me playing Metroid Prime 2, Pokemon and Zelda on the side.

The funny thing is that because of the Starcraft 2 announcement, I'm experiencing a love again for PC gaming and I'm now playing the original and trying out Rise of Nations, lol. (only 5 bucks at Gamestop!) And now Civ IV? Too much good gaming. And I still have games like Alpha Centauri, Baldur's Gate II, Diablo 2, and Heroes of Might and Magic V that I still haven't gotten around to playing, but picked them up because of the good reviews. Still just collecting dust. This whole family and kids thing really invades on your gaming time, lol.
 
Chairman Yang said:
I played Civ4 around release and thought it was okay, but no Alpha Centauri. At the same time, I promised myself to check it out again once a bunch of mods/patches/expansions were released--looks like I'll get back into it with Beyond the Sword.
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Fall From Heaven 2 is really good if you're willing to give it a spin.

My big complaint with Civ4 is that it really peaks with early/middle game military conquest and it's all downhill from there. If I want a game of conquest, I've come to prefer the Paradox games over Civ. That's my big hope for this expansion (outside of the scenarios, which are always fun)-that it'll level out the game's "powerband" more broadly.
 
From play.tm:


How will the new expansion tie in with Warlords and will it include any of the code from that expansion?

Beyond the Sword will include some of the code from Warlords - specifically the stuff that impacts the core game functionality. The assets and code from the scenarios in Warlords will not be include
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No need to buy Warlords to play BtS. Thought it's probably worthwhile if you've had your fill of Civ4 and want to play some of the current Warlords-required mods.
 
Ooh, I'm so going to play the Mayans and high tech weaponry.

This really does seem to be the "alpha and omega" of Civ design. I wonder what Firaxis will be tp to next. I think maybe something about the future of mankind in space might be a decent idea, even if they can't call it you-know-what.
 
IGN has a Fall from Heaven interview up. It seems the Beyond the Sword scenario will not incorporate all the FfH features and will be a slightly different experience than the main mod. I'm glad to hear Firaxis has helped them with the AI as that's one of the reasons I've yet to seriously play the mod. I imagine a new version will be released shortly after BtS. Considering the expansion makes the game even more moddable, I wonder if the subsequent releases will require BtS.

As to what it adds, the scenario has several new features. One of my favorites is the active climate. Blizzards roll across the map from the west, damaging units, destroying improvements and changing the terrain. Tiles are affected by the blizzards and will begin to change from plains to tundra to snow based on how much snowfall they receive. Trees become covered in snow; lakes freeze over. And it's more than just an art change. All but the heaviest units can travel over frozen lakes, so if blizzards do freeze a body of water, it may open up new areas to explore or new ways for the enemy to get to you

Players also have the ability to affect the climate through their actions and events. Mountains block the blizzards, creating small habitable regions on their east side that become hotly contested city locations for all civilizations.


...

The AI in Beyond the Sword is so much better that I had to drop the difficulty level I play at. It was embarrassing to get routinely beaten at my own scenario. Blake, one of the community members, has been working with Firaxis on the AI since just after Warlords was released and it has made a huge difference.
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syllogism said:
IGN has a Fall from Heaven interview up. It seems the Beyond the Sword scenario will not incorporate all the FfH features and will be a slightly different experience than the main mod. I'm glad to hear Firaxis has helped them with the AI as that's one of the reasons I've yet to seriously play the mod. I imagine a new version will be released shortly after BtS. Considering the expansion makes the game even more moddable, I wonder if the subsequent releases will require BtS.
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Wow, that shit sounds ****ing awesome. Kinda weird that changing global climates were already explored in Alpha Centauri and only now getting a more realistic reappearance in Civ IV eight years later. Cool, cool shit.
 
ElectricBlue187 said:
you gotta have a pretty fast processor for Civ 4's number crunching, does dual/quad core have any effect on that or just raw speed?
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I think graphics card has more of an effect on the game's speed than processor; just make sure you have something that supports Shader Model 3.0 and you should be golden.
 
Danj said:
I think graphics card has more of an effect on the game's speed than processor; just make sure you have something that supports Shader Model 3.0 and you should be golden.
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Nah, its definitely the horsepower necessary for the AI and turn processing. Towards the end of the game it slows to a crawl on some underpowered systems - not because of graphics, but because the CPU is being overwhelmed with rule processing.
 
I am loving the sound of this expansion. While I love Warlords, I also felt tthat they could have done way more things with that expansion. Now it seems that the tricky bastards reserved them for this new expansion pack. And I will buy it day 1 :D

Still, I think that there are many issues, specially balance issues that haven't been adressed, and I really can't understand why, we are not talking about rocket science here:
- Lack of modern wonders in comparation with the tons of ancient period wonders
- Why they haven't thought about including new civics? There are tons of new goverment types / society organizations, etc, that could have been added in order to spice things up.
- Why no new civ traits?
- Some civilizations that needed a new leader badly like Spain or Japan, doesn't have any other one, while civs with already a huge number of leaders like the US gets an extra one and irrelevant civs like the Celts gets another one as well. I do not like when marketing beats game balance, really.
 
Couple of news bits here:

- Game hits stores next week. You can preorder/preload through Steam and it will work with your boxed copy of the game.
- The latest issue of PC gamer has a demo on the disc.
- There should be another demo released tomorrow through FilePlanet that allows you to play the space-based "Final Frontier" tomorrow.
 
Ikael said:
Still, I think that there are many issues, specially balance issues that haven't been adressed, and I really can't understand why, we are not talking about rocket science here:
- Lack of modern wonders in comparation with the tons of ancient period wonders
- Why they haven't thought about including new civics? There are tons of new goverment types / society organizations, etc, that could have been added in order to spice things up.
- Why no new civ traits?
- Some civilizations that needed a new leader badly like Spain or Japan, doesn't have any other one, while civs with already a huge number of leaders like the US gets an extra one and irrelevant civs like the Celts gets another one as well. I do not like when marketing beats game balance, really.
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There are quite a few high quality mods that add all that and more to the main game. This expansion seems to mostly focus on scenarios.
 
Playing the game right now. Got it from a warehouse connection I have. Its alot of fun. The space scenarios they have are a bit of a galactic civiiation II rip off though.

Im not sure how I feel about it overall. It plays pretty much the same as the original and the big changes arent really that dramamtic. basically Early on you can build the Vatican which allows whoevers the "Pope" at the time to choose different resolutions to propose and the civs vote on them. very much like Gal Civ 2.

Later the vatican is "obsolete" and the UN takes its place doing same thing.

Most of the tech is identical and not much really changes. I dont think tis overall that big of an improvement
 
Fragamemnon said:
Couple of news bits here:

- Game hits stores next week. You can preorder/preload through Steam and it will work with your boxed copy of the game.
Click to expand...

Excellent, will the Steam version of Warlords also work with a boxed version of vanilla Civ4? Or is the Steam version priced too high compared to what I could find in a store?
 
I really liked the Final Frontier mod that was the demo of the game. It really did still feel like Civ, but offered a totally different sort of experience and was a really well-done way to show off some of the diversity in gameplay in the expansion. It's no where near the league as a dedicated 4X space game like GalCiv2, but that's not what it was trying to do.

I preordered this through Steam yesterday, so I'll unlock it on the 24th when the game is released. Note that I have boxed copies of the other two Civ4 games, but Steam assured me that the Steam version of the BtS expansion will work with the boxed versions just fine.
 
A good graphics card will definately help this game feel more bearable, if you play maps larger than small the late game will feel quite laggy with anything less than a 6800 (my old 6800 still felt slow compared to my current x1950pro). But yeah, this is mostly processor oriented, 10 sec wait between turns might not seem much but in the late game you might be spending a lot of turns just pressing end turn cos all your cities have things queued up.

This new expansion pack definately helps though, I'm using a dual core which may or may not factor into it but turn times feel a lot quicker, I'm even playing large maps instead of standard and it feels the same speed.

I will say though, it's perfectly playable even with a sempron 1600mhz 1gb, geforce 4mx440 64mb, I had to use that machine for a couple of months recently.
 
Ok guys...I have Civ IV but never grabbed the first expansion...do I need to grab that one also? Will there be a pack with the 2 expansions?
 
Jirotrom said:
Ok guys...I have Civ IV but never grabbed the first expansion...do I need to grab that one also? Will there be a pack with the 2 expansions?
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beyond the sword has the 1st expansions stuff built in
 
Jirotrom said:
Ok guys...I have Civ IV but never grabbed the first expansion...do I need to grab that one also? Will there be a pack with the 2 expansions?
Click to expand...

Beyond the Sword gives you all the core epic game features of Warlords. You don't get the scenarios, though. I would pass on Warlords and get BtS, and only think about getting Warlords if you really want the extra scenarios it has after playing through the BtS content.
 
oh god civ "tower defense" is in BtS:

Civ Defense

This scenario uses the Advanced Start option and continues to do so throughout the scenario. You start off with a small amount of cash that is just enough for a single city. You are than confronted with a wave of enemies who will attempt to capture your city. As you weather each wave of attacks, you will be granted gold. You'll than be sent back to the Buy phase to buy new units, cities, and technology before the next wave of attackers. It will continue like this, with each wave getting more and more difficult over the course of twenty waves. You must survive them all to be declared victorious.

There are some variant rules though. First, units that are stacked together will be weakened proportionally to the number of units in the stack. Plus units are suited better for a certain type of tile, meaning forces will need to be arrayed wisely.

Staying inside your city isn't neccesairly the best thing either, as each new round will include a number of random goody huts that can grant you substantial cash bonuses. Once the attacks start to intensify, you're going to need every dollar you can get just to keep the enemy from overrunning your defenses.
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[quot]cool...thanks guys...i'll be picking up Galactic Civilizations 2 Dark avatar also. Pay day is this Friday![/quote]

If you need any tips with Galciv drop me a PM or make a thread. I must of put 100+ hours into the game+expansion this year so far.
 
Fragamemnon said:
If you need any tips with Galciv drop me a PM or make a thread. I must of put 100+ hours into the game+expansion this year so far.
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Heh, I have that game and I suck majorly at it. Haha, any general tips?
 
Fragamemnon said:
oh god civ "tower defense" is in BtS:



cool...thanks guys...i'll be picking up Galactic Civilizations 2 Dark avatar also. Pay day is this Friday!
Click to expand...

If you need any tips with Galciv drop me a PM or make a thread. I must of put 100+ hours into the game+expansion this year so far.[/QUOTE]
What are your thoughts on the game in comparison to Civ 4?
 
Jirotrom said:
What are your thoughts on the game in comparison to Civ 4?
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Civ4 is a smart, agile game that (amazingly) manages to not fall into the traps of most empire building games-the turns move at a brisk pace throughout much of the game, the interface is easy and quick to navigate, and the game is, for the most part, 100% intuitive.
It doesn't hold any punches when it comes to depth or sophistication, though, and players who adapt to situations with pertinent strategies and exhaust all of their available options will find themselves rewarded greatly. It's also very much a "pretty" game and has a unmatched-in-the-genre mod scene.

Galciv2 is a bit rougher-the presentation isn't as slick, and some mechanics are not as intuitive as they could be. However, it does have a really great (IMO) interface and offers the best diplomacy model I've ever seen in a 4X game that wasn't made by Paradox and features some of the best racial differentiation in a 4X game since Brian Reynolds' Alpha Centauri. The game also moves pretty quickly-rarely bogging down in my experience-and again rewards smart, adaptive thinking and exhausting of all player options in order to really shine. The metaverse function is also really cool and is the best way to do 4X mutliplayer (though it does need some tweaking and better refinement of stats into player classes to prevent gaming the system).

Both games are AAA-quality strategy efforts and really are giants of the genre, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend either game to fans of turn based strategy games.

BTW, today's the last day for Steam preorders of BtS. Hop in now to save some bucks.
 
p.s. beyond the sword is great.. it makes civ very playable right from the start, and is tuned like some of the popular mods... it is seriously really good and must-have addition to any civ fan.
 
spwolf said:
p.s. beyond the sword is great.. it makes civ very playable right from the start, and is tuned like some of the popular mods... it is seriously really good and must-have addition to any civ fan.
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does it have Carthage, Celts, Korea, Ottoman Empire, Vikings, or Zululand included?
 
ElectricBlue187 said:
does it have Carthage, Celts, Korea, Ottoman Empire, Vikings, or Zululand included?
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My understanding from reading CivFanatics is yes, you get all that with just BtS. The only thing that you don't get in BtS that was in Warlords are the scenarios.
 
Fragamemnon said:
My understanding from reading CivFanatics is yes, you get all that with just BtS. The only thing that you don't get in BtS that was in Warlords are the scenarios.
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I can confirm all those various peoples are playable since I have th egame. as said the missing segment fromw arlords is only the scenarios which arent that great of a loss.
 
Heres some screens of the Civilizations so people can see them.

civ4btscivs1.jpg

civ4btscivs2.jpg

civ4btscivs3.jpg


Scenarios to expect
civbts2.jpg
 
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