I would be curious to hear what you think of CIV, theta 
Yeah! Disclaimer: I'm quite the noob at Civ.
So it was a bit of a pain to get it working, the game kept on freezing when trying to skip the intro and eventually crashed my whole PC at least twice. Also, Fullscreen mode was glitchy when minimizing to do other things. Fortunately, I figured out that you just needed to wait 5 seconds and not click anything and it would pop back up easily. And I disabled the intro movie so in the end, I got it running really smoothly.
The first game I played as Greece (IIRC) on Cheiftan difficulty. As I expected, it was a pretty breezy game and by 1950 or so I had a pretty hardcore military. I could have won by domination or just have played the game out, but I ended up winning by Space Race.
Next, I tried a game on Warlord as I-forget-who. I expected it to be about as easy, but I ended up getting smashed around 1400 because I hadn't invested in the military. I guess the other civs will automatically try to attack you if you're weak enough? I tried again as England but only held off slightly better before caving to attacks by multiple civs on multiple fronts.
By this point, I was getting a little frustrated and tuned the difficulty back to Cheiftan. It was a little wimpy, but I don't particularly enjoy getting my butt kicked, and I wanted to spend some more time just familiarizing myself with the game. I couldn't finish my playthrough, but again it was pretty breezy.
As for the game itself, it's much better than Civ III and definitely less "clunky" as you said. A couple things stood out as obvious improvements; the government types were better explained, movement and combat were nicer, and recommended buildings and techs made the first game easier. I'm still getting used to the new things though, Religion and Espionage were kinda ignored the first game and I still don't fully understand how they work. And the new Diplomacy/Government/Military/X advisors are a little harder to use in some cases. Navigating diplomacy actually feels like a downgrade. When you exit it takes you back to the map instead of the diplomacy chart, making me need to f4 spam if I want to see if any of the civs will declare war on somebody. In addition, there's no way to view diplomacy when presented with a deal, so I don't have the choice of figuring out what my relations to Alexander are before I join Isabella in combat against him.
The game's super fun, and I hope once I grasp the intricacies I can start getting into the strategy and playing at higher difficulties.
aren't words?
cost makes no difference, seeing as you need to pay it off before you can buy anything.
, but it was manageable.
