Category Archives: Civilization

After many moons of playing Civ 4 (all posts on xsamplex), I finally found out who sings that brilliant opening tune: It’s the Talisman a cappella, a group of a cappella1 singers and students operating from Stansford University. The song … Continue reading →

Earlier today, I decided to update my Civ 4 version (1.09) to the latest patch, which is 1.61 (earlier). And yes, this is true (from the readme notes): “v1.52 is a major upgrade to Civ IV and includes numerous optimizations … Continue reading →

After playing a couple of quick rounds of Civ4, I noticed that the latest patch had been released last month: version 1.61, which you can grab from the 2K Games site (maps can also be downloaded separately, Europe, US, Asia, … Continue reading →

The Civilization patch is out! Uh. Wait. It was, but it actually isn’t anymore. Due to a bug that slipped through, Firaxis has put the patch on hold. If you installed it, you can uninstall the patch by using the … Continue reading →

More good news: The Civ IV patch is supposed to come out really soon. Says someone at Civ 4: Some of the highlights include multiple AI improvements and tweaks, worker behavior tweaks, MANY game play improvements (ex Animal Husbandry reveals … Continue reading →

I thought this was pretty significant: most of the visitors finding xsamplex are looking for the Civ IV T&L problems described on this site. It’s awfully quiet over at the Firaxis developer blog.

I have a long night programming behind me: hacking a file format of a DOS based accounting program. Fair enough: no game for me today. I did notice that my entries here about the black tile problems get more views … Continue reading →

Yesterday, I ‘har-harred’ about ‘Edelweiss’, the oh-so-pretty-sugar-song1 from ‘The Sound of Music’, which I thought I recognized in Civilization. Guess what, it’s a music theme triggered when the player enters the ‘Industrial Age’. This had me go promptly back to … Continue reading →

Playing the second rounds of CivIV, this time trying to stick to a religion and spread it, I ended up founding not 1, not 2, but 3 (three) religions, meaning I was generally ahead of my competitors in Warlord level … Continue reading →

Finishing one game of Civ4, I did another try and ended up with an ‘endless’ black map. I gave up at 1200 AD: the blackness, it hurts. What the heck: it’s a bug. Over at Apolyton some are convinced that … Continue reading →

Managed to get ‘Civilization 4’, the long expected successor of (ha, you guessed it) ‘Civilization 3’. According to EB Games, the game came just in today. Short overview: I had a hard time at the start after installing the game: … Continue reading →