I just bought The Sims 2 and Civilization Complete for $13 a piece (with shipping) over Ebay. I’m still kind of in disbelief.
Anyways, Space Empires 4 is pretty darn fun, however its got a pretty steep learning curve, and its not as easy to pick up as Civ3 is.
Well debates on fun are rather ethereal and tricky, so I’ll just respectfully disagree. I found Civ3 very fun, for a lot of the same reasons all the other Civ games have been fun. I’m a builder at heart, so I love building up a huge rich empire with awesome technological research and then sending my hordes of tanks and planes to crush my foes . . . in the 1800’s! I also always use nukes whether the situation calls for them or not :)
True. Ever try playing it on the higher difficulties though? Man.
Other posters have mentioned the classics. With a few creative interpretations of the genre, my ranking of them is:
What about the Total War games? I guess Rome TW could be classified as 4x can’t it?
Moo2 is probably my personal favorite, but I have to agree that SMAC is probably the best 4x game ever. Good acronym too, for when you realize that you want to play four more turns and it’s 2:45am - and you get up for work at six.
Thanks for the input, Quarterketeers!
Except you, McMaster, you bath guy. I couldn’t even get MoM to run on the first Win95 box I built back in college. I think I might have one of those old Casio calculator watches in a box somewhere that might run it though, but that’s about it.
I guess I’m kicking around the idea of MOO2 and Civ2, but the thought of having to get DOSbox up and running in order to have them play okay is less than appealing.
Still considering GalCiv, but I’m leaning towards Alpha Centauri or Civ3. I researched those a little, and was surprised to find this review of Civ3 by some out-of-work actor and one of Alpha Centauri by some out-of-work fighter pilot over at gamespot. I guess all the real game journalists must’ve had the day off when those were due. :)
(Actually, those were great reviews, guys - I think I’ll try both, but I’m going with AC first because I think I’m more familiar or comfortable with science fantasy stuff than I am with historical stuff. Ah, the wonders of a private education.)
Thanks again, everyone.
Dosbox? Moo2 works just fine in XP.
For reals? Music, sound, and everything?
I’d agree with all the above. They’re all fun games (well, maybe I’m not
entirely sure about MOO3, having not tried it…)
How is the singleplayer AI for Space Empires IV, especially as compared to Gal Civ?
I was going to recommend that, but its tutorial is pretty crummy (maybe its just me), and though its overall concept isn’t that complicated, its still got a pretty mean learning curve.
But, I’m having fun with it.
Yes. If it occasionally crashes with this one error; I can’t remember if this happens in XP or just in 2000. You can fix it, though. Download the application compatability toolkit from here:
Hunt for some sort of “don’t crash on invalid memory access by adding padding around all allocations” type setting to apply to the game. Might not have to bother though.
As has been mentioned, MOO2 will work in WinXP with no issues. It was one of those peculiar games to have both a DOS and Windows 95 version on the same CD (like Quake and Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries), and the Windows version still works fine in this modern era.
Civ2 will also work in Windows XP, though it’s possible some fudging will be needed. It should be noted that Civ2 was originally a Windows 3.1 game; it uses a library called WinG that is quite obsolete, but which I think it just installs invisibly when you install the game. I got it working on my laptop (WinXP) without issue.
Also, Civ2 runs in a window. When you start it, it will attempt to scale the text and graphics to look proper on whatever your current desktop resolution is, but the graphics really only look right when they are “zoomed” to their original size. Bitmap scaling is ugly. Mess with the ‘z’ and ‘x’ keys to fix this, if you like.
Civ1 will probably need DOSbox if you for some reason decide to try it. (Or you could find the SNES version, but it is somewhat more annoying to play than the PC version.)
And no discussion about Civ2 would really be complete without mentioning Freeciv.
Civ2 Gold, SMAC, and GalCiv are all you need. Well, OK, MOO2, as well.
–scharmers
AoW:SM is a pretty good proxy for MoM. As for SMAC, the expansion pack can be hard to find. Of course, there’s some debate on how much it really adds to the game. (I like it because it makes probe teams viable in the late game.)
Except that the tactical combat is animated super, super-fast, so you really need to use other means to scroll around the map than the mouse. (or, at least, this was happening for me – very annoying. :evil: )
Other than that, everything works OK. Great game. :)
Except that the tactical combat is animated super, super-fast, so you really need to use other means to scroll around the map than the mouse. (or, at least, this was happening for me – very annoying. :evil: )
Other than that, everything works OK. Great game. :)[/quote]
I have this problem too, but I don’t think it’s too much of a hassle to use the minimap for scrolling. It is a bit of an annoyance at times but I can overlook it. :)