No, it's the original and it's significantly different than AoE... for one thing it's turn-based. Essentially you have a world map, and you start out with one "settler" unit, which represents a tribe of people. You use this unit to start your first city, which can then manufacture both units (workers, settlers, scouts, and types of soldiers) and city improvements (aqueducts, granaries, libraries, harbors, etc). You build more and more cities and your nation grows as well. Each city has a domain of influence, and as you build more cities this domain congeals into national borders. Other civs are expanding at the same time, so you eventually border other nations, and start trading or warring with them. If your culture is greater than theirs, you can get border cities to defect to your civ without warring at all, though this sometimes pisses off the civ you stole them from.
Meanwhile you're climbing the tech tree from stuff like "animal husbandry" all the way up to "quantum physics" and beyond. Each tech advance allows you to build new types of buildings and units, and makes others obsolete.
It's an insanely in-depth game, and will steal your life. I haven't even started to scratch the surface of the game mechanics here.
It reminds me (the turn based part) of a game that everyone used to play when i was young, had a hero and a castle and you had certain amount of steps per gameday etc...can't remember a name though.
Yeah, Rise of Nations was a pretty blatant Civ knockoff with more of an action focus. Civ involves a lot of diplomacy and micromanagement that Rise of Nations disposes with. Rise of Nations also incorporates RTS elements that Civ lacks (for the better, IMO).
Civ has always been a great game, but I don't think I ever enjoyed the sequels as much as the 1st one. It was such an original concept at the time, with tons of depth and replayability. I will never forget when my friend and I reached the 'Space Race' ending. We were so proud of our little civilization.
1991 was a great year for PC games actually. Civ, Lemmings, Eye of the Beholder II... all fantastic.
Civ 1 also had the best intro of all the Civilization games I've played imo...
I'm avoiding buying it at the moment because I have some tight work deadlines for the next couple of months and a new Civ game would totally **** me up, but I watched the developer interview/walkthrough thing on Gamespot the other day and it looked very slick.
It's about time they shifted to a hex grid, and it looks like some of the combat changes will make strategy much more interesting too. I'd like to hear how well balanced it all is from a Civ veteran though.
So far there are a lot of positive reviews but also a lot of complaints, mostly about:
1. You need Steam to install it. There are like 90 negative reviews on Amazon because of this, which is retarded, but whatever.
2. The AI is stupid/doesn't know how to play the game Firaxis created (i.e., archers going face to face with melee units, etc).
3. Occasional crashes/very resource-intensive.
There's a pretty good review here that goes into both the positives and the negatives in a pretty balanced way.
For the record, I downloaded and played the demo and didn't really have any issues (aside from having to run it in DirectX 9 because of my video card). It played like Civ with some tweaks, which is what I expected.
I must admit I find digital distribution really frustrating. The file size of games is increasing much faster than broadband speeds are. I could go to the game shop and back in 15 minutes, or I could get it off Steam in an indeterminate period of at least several hours. That's not progress, at least not for the consumer, no doubt it's cheaper for the studios...
The AI has always been pretty lousy, I don't ever remember seeing the AI make a decent go of a war. I'm glad people are complaining about it, people usually don't complain about shit AI. Probably because they're too busy enjoying the feeling of superiority.
Sounds like every other release since the advent of the web - sell it now and patch it later. It's a shame but I suppose this is why people get discounts for pre-release ordering, given that the game won't be finished when they play it.
i probably have the slowest internet connection out of anyone in the entire world right now and im a huge fan of digital distribution (albeit not of steam)
its usually faster (especially when youre having to deal with all the bs involved in obtaining a physical copy of a game that isnt dubbed into german (and being an import copy also unrated and only possible to purchase if youre 18 (which of course i am but online retailers need to see a scan or fax of your id or you have to go to some small specialty game shop)))
and most importantly installing the game is a lot faster and much less annyoing... theres nothing i hate more than the sound of a cd drive
actually it is
you have to consider that the majority of (pc) gamers is pretty much used to being able to easily grab pirated copies of the internet with just a few hours (minutes if your connection is decent) of downloading
if you want to compete you have to change your distribution channels to be at least as conveinient as that
Will try it as soon as possible, cant wait to nuke the hell out of everyone surrounding me, even if that means building temples and lowering taxes to keep the populace happy, then switch governments and then just one more turn to...holy crap its 3AM already!?