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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 than normal. For the people returning:

• Go to Worldbuilder and use reveal all tiles. Note that you’ll still have a (little) ‘dimmed’ playing field but at least you’ll be able to enjoy gameplay. Trust me: the game is worth playing, even with the playing field revealed
• Send a scout out to the center of the world (that could have been a name of a movie…) and explore from there back to your city.

There’s another solution I’ve been charmed by: make corrections in the Python code (yes, Civ 4 uses Python!). Over at Civ Fanatics a smart member came up with the following solution:

map = CyMap()
teamID = CyGlobalContext().getPlayer(playerID).getTeam()
iH = map.getGridHeight()
iW = map.getGridWidth()

# Check if we are the first team, 
# and if so put us in the middle
if int(teamID) == 0:
    return x >= iW * .45 and x < = iW * .55 and y >= iH * .45 and y < = iH * .55

Not having time to play with the code, I briefly glanced through WorldBuilder.py files and discovered other interesting things. If I have time…. only if I had time.

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 Windows to find out which MP3 file was just being played. This is actually easy to find out: Check for ‘Industrial’ in the Sountrack folder. Right-click the header, and select the column ‘Last Accessed’ and there you have it.

The title of the MP3 is just about descriptive as anything, it’s called ‘Dvorak 9 2.mp3’, which is the second movement of Dvorak’s ‘From the New World’ (or “Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95: II. Largo”). Dvorak at Wikipedia, if you feel so inclined. It’s a fitting piece for Civilization: it’d be nice if Firaxis provided complete musical data for these MP3s.

A silly aside: when entering the Modern Age, you can choose for the Civ Wonder ‘The Internet’: the programmers at Firaxis chose a highly comical icon for this wonder, referring to the inventor of the Internet. I wonder if Al Gore gave permission to use his photo.

¹. I was supposed to make a remark here.

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 [That’s medium]. Close to achieving the Diplomatic Victory, ended up (another Time victory):

• Besides the ‘Fog of War’ bug, game play is good: my laptop is a 512 MB, Intel 82852/82855 GME card (64 MB) with a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. Problematic is generally the endgame between 20 turns and 5 turns: I expect 1 GB will make a great difference. Turn off virus scanners for sure: I had problems installing the game with McAfee on.
• CivIII is a joke. On warlord level, the AI is about the same strength as Civ III. However, the Diplomacy AI is stronger than I initially expected. A couple of times I was caught with my pants down when Opening borders to ‘allies’.
• The UN features are limited. Handy to make it to Secretary-General (ban nuclear missiles is definitely the first thing you should do)
• The music is actually great. Firaxis opted to go for recorded music from major record companies: from classical [Brahms, Bach] to modern [John Adams’ ‘The People are Heroes Now’]. 440 Meg of MP3 goodness. Hey, was that ‘Edelweiss’ I heard there? Har-Har!
  The titel song is actually great for a change. It be nice to see a credit list for the music.

Next game.

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 this is a videocard issue. No, it isn’t, witness the screenshot I had posted earlier and the fact that the game I played did not end prematurely (Civ 3 generally had to tendency to ‘hang’). (Oh yeah: I won that game on points beating the Germans, who apparently all had turned to Judaism. My bunch of Atheists, however, weren’t able to sack the puny Indians.)

In the CivFanatics link above, there’s a good description what the bug exactly is and how to get around it. Next game: I’m dreaming of a clash between Taoism and Christianity.

Add 1: There’s another proof that the game was rushed out: the game comes with two disks: disk one is the install disk, disk two (presumably) is the ‘play’ disk. Guess what: to play the game you actually need disk one.

Add 2:Another weirdy: there’s a long disclaimer about the use of religion in the game’s manual. Two paragraphs, concluding with: “We mean no disrepect to anyone’s beliefs. We’re game designers, not theologians”.
Hey, did you know it’s really hard to stop religion in the game? Civ 5 should at least add the religion gene factor.

Add. 3: Re: add.2: The introduction sequence of every game details the start of life on earth according to the principle of evolution. Game rates: ESRB Everyone 10+ Violence. Watch for labels soon saying “this game is based on a theory, not a fact”.

Continues here

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: while my graphics card is obviously out of date, at the start of the game the main map was completely ‘black’. It took over 10 turns to have the map to get colours and that’s when (slowly) ‘land silhouttes’ started to become visible. It has to do with the game and apparently colours start to appear when your ‘first city’ starts to expand. Completely different than previous Civs: I almost figured it was time to find another computer to start an install (something I may consider).

The game (upto Medieval times) is good and responsive, playing with 5 AI opponents. The AI (definitely) focusses first on ‘diplomatic’ solutions. The game is reasonably fast: zooming in and out on the map goes smooth.

While I could just dive in the gameplay (experienced Civ player), I noticed that there’s a lot of ‘religion stuff’ going on in the background. In Civ 4 you can also try to spread the word of your religion, which may (or may not) be fun at the end of the game. There are several things specialized: you can for example build cattle farms, farmland, workshops, cottages and others around a city. This feels weird.

Back to the game.