I have a totally different opinion about Civ 4. It's an "ok" game in my book, but that is all. It's way too simplistic and primitive in many aspects. Actually the combat system is what I hate the most in Civ4. It's just pathetic.

Its the sum of the parts in CIV IV that make it so great. It doesnt have the best battle system, the best AI, the best diplomacy and so on. BUT the sum of the parts make for great minigames within the game, replayability, different avenues to explore and much more.

It's not so much Fanboi-ism as it is my general dislike for Civ game-play. I used to like the Civ game back in the day but every time a new one came out there was something screwy about it. Like a Woolly Mammoth beating a M1A1 Tank or something like that. I like my strategy games to involve warfare of some kind and the war's in the Civ games never cut it for me.

I absolutely love everything touched by Firaxis; to claim that there is something wrong with the strategic combat is heresy, and should be punishable by forty whippings at dawn!

Although to be honest, I've played far, far more FFH2 than Civ4 vanilla. ;p

Hear! Hear!  I know I am in the EXTREME minority, but I thought in terms of gameplay, Civ 2 was a VERY sligh upgrade from Civ 1 and then it was all downhill after that. Yeah, they added lots of "oh! Neat!" features, but in many cases these features got in the way of playing the game, they did not add much if anything to the fun factor.

I do not believe you are an extreme minority.  I personally skipped Civ 2 (and 3 somehow) but its been expressed to me that Civ 2 was just Civ 1 with a bit more shine, nothing really missed.  

Even the Civ people have realized it's been far too long in a single idea. Which is good. But I suspect Civ 5 will get a large pass from me unless Elemental gets delayed.

I'm a pretty huge Civilization fan and look forward to Civ V.  It depresses me that people see them as competitors because a decade ago, no one would have believed that because the PC TBS market was so big that we didn't just have Civilization but there was Civilization Call to Power -- that's competitive.  

Strategy games taking place on land doesn't seem to be common enough to be competitive to me.  Unless Civ V is planning on adding quests, tactical battles, unit design, on map city building, NPCs, recruitable units, etc. they're pretty different.

Froggy, it seems like you are only looking at AAA games. I dont claim to have the numbers, but from my prespective, there are quite a few stragety games that fill those requirements minus the quests/tactical battles/unit design/ect.

Thank ya for the update frogboy. 

Thank's! It works in windows mode. I should have had this idea myslef. 

The game crashes after several turns, but it is OK form me at the moment. Important thing is I may play with it around.

Heh, which is why even the vanilla version of Elemental will be much better & diverse compared to those games.

How do you play in windowed mode?  (It might be something to try for me as well, in addition to fiddling with the video settings.)

If you can bring the game up, go to the options and in video options uncheck fullscreen.  If you can't bring the game up at all, find the prefs.ini file and edit it to specify Fullscreen=0.

Pre Ordered earlier this week. Looks like I just missed the cut off to be in the beta

Any Idea when the beta will be open again? Im dieing to test!