Impatience is no virtue

Although I live in Belgium, I buy most of my computer games and books from Amazon in the UK. The reason for that is language, I want the English versions. Computer games in Belgium come in two flavors: French game with French manual, or English game with Dutch manual (the poor Dutch aren't numerous enough for somebody to translate the game as well).

So I ordered Civ4 from Amazon UK, together with a couple of other games and books. I usually bundle several things in one order to minimize shipping cost. Although Amazon is supposed to wait until they have everything on hand and send it to me in one big bundle, sometimes they split my order up into several parcels, at no extra cost for me, for reasons of their internal logistics. And while I was desperately waiting for Civ4 to arrive, I get several parcels with all the other games and books from my order, but not Civ4. Grrrrr. According to their e-mail, two parcels, one with another game and one with Civ4, have been sent to me over a week ago. I received the other one already last Friday, but not the Civ4.

The sensible thing to do would have been to wait another week, and then contact Amazon to make them either find the lost parcel or to replace it. But I'm leaving on a business trip on Sunday, and I really wanted to have Civ4 on my laptop for that. I was just running out of patience, and couldn't wait. So when I passed by a shopping center yesterday, I bought the Dutch version of Civ4 here. The game is in English, and nobody reads the manual anyway. :) Actually I ended up downloading the Civ4 manual in pdf format from ReplacementDocs, and the Civ4 tech tree poster from the official site. The in-game Civilopedia is worse than previous versions, because it doesn't have a search function. When one of my cities revolted, I was unable to find information on "revolt" in the Civilopedia, but searching for it in the pdf manual worked quite well, and much better than searching for it in a paper manual.

I started playing Civ4 with the tutorial, which is well done. Not that I really would have needed it, most concepts are still the same as in the previous games. But Civilization is a complicated game, and the tutorial should go a long way to make it accessible to people who haven't played the prequels. I had to laugh at a virtual Sid Meier trying to explain me the concept of a "turn-based" game, obviously targeted at people who had only played real-time games before.

After the tutorial I started my first real game, and played until well into the night. I like Civ4, it is both similar enough to the old games to have the same magic, and new enough to be interesting. The area a city controls is not any more depending on its population, but on a new stat called culture. You can even occasionally get special units which are able to boost the culture of a city by a large amount, effectively dropping a "culture bomb" which pushes forward the borders of your empire. Talk about cultural imperialism. There is also a new concept of religions, you can now discover new religions on the tech tree, and create missionary units to convert cities to your favorite religion. I still need to read up on the details of this, right now I have some cities with several religions, and I'm not sure whether that is good or bad.

I haven't encountered any bugs yet, and the new graphics are nice. So Civ4 is pretty much what I expected and hoped for. Life will probably punish me for my impatience by putting the parcel from Amazon in my letter box today. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 8:34 AM Permanent Link