Be honest, how many hours have you put into this charming game?

207. ^_^ A bit over half of that's on my first, solo, farm, where I'm going for all the achievements I can reasonably get (still need a few recipes and artifacts and to get the last Stardrop, and beat Journey of the Prairie King), the rest is playing with a friend.

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Looks interesting, might have to check it out.

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Quoting: PangaeaAdmittedly Civ 4's combat isn't where the game shines - though it still managed to utterly trounce the idiocy of Civ 5. But like touched upon in the above post, there are a great deal of features in the game that make it interesting, and offers the player many different ways to achieve their objectives, and different ways to win the game…

I think they got almost everything right with Civ 4, and very few things wrong. I can't say that about Civ 5 and 6. I'll take stack warfare over parking lot logistics any day of the week.

I guess it comes down to a difference of opinion—a Civ game without meaningful ranged combat options was always going to stack up poorly in my opinion, no matter how well it executed the other parts. But that's also a factor of what I was into at that age, and it's possible I'd enjoy it more now; my tastes have definitely changed over time. In fact, after Civ 5 I graduated to Europa Universalis IV, where the combat model is (ironically) much more like 4's than 5's (in that it's strategic rather than tactical): stack any number of armies on provinces, smash 'em into each other, no ranged combat, etc..

I personally feel that Civ 5 got the majority of things right (once you include both major expansions), but I can certainly sympathize with the feeling that a series you love is going in a direction you no longer enjoy. :|

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Quoting: NanobangAhhh ... gotcha. Bit of tunnel vision on my part, I'm afraid. Though I don't watch "let's Play" or live streams of gamers on something like Twitch, I'm a bit chagrined at not having thought of that myself.:whistle:

Btw, thanks for your well considered, well written answer. Your thoughtfulness is appreciated! :)

No worries! You're welcome. :) Different personal experiences, that's all. I've watched a few Let's Plays of Undertale, and while I'm not particularly interested in playing the game I've considered getting the soundtrack. (Though that's available on Bandcamp rather than Steam so it's not a perfect example, but you get the idea. :D)

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Quoting: bingusI'm on the south east coast of NSW, and its been like armageddon down here. Any help is gladly appreciated.

Stay safe over there!

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Quoting: PangaeaCivilization 4 is the best version in the series, with depth and so, so many ways to achieve your goals (and a damn hard AI/difficulty level). This game is available DRM free on GOG, so I see little reason to try out the inferior, dumbed down versions that came after it.

Hopefully they bring the series back to its roots at some point in the future, but I won't hold my breath.

I've never liked the absolutely atrocious combat in 4, worse than 5 or even 3; I mean, the nigh-complete removal of ranged units*‽ Who greenlighted that? Combat is no longer an interesting puzzle of positioning, picking apart enemy units at range while minimizing damage taken in return, just mash your doomstacks together until the stronger one wins. Even in 3 you could bombard enemy doomstacks at range to weaken them up first.

Granted, that put me off the game so hard that I never tried any of the expansions and don't really remember it much, so it's possible that the non-combat portions of the game were indeed interesting (I've heard a lot of good about the Beyond the Sword expansion in particular).

*Airplanes come far too late in the game, and are far too limited, to be interesting.

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Quoting: NanobangI haven't ever bought a game soundtrack, so I'm probably missing something. I can see the logic behind making a game's soundtrack available to those who owned the game. They would've heard it when they played the game and know if they wanted to hear more of it outside the game. Myself, I can't imagine wanting to buy a soundtrack I hadn't heard before. Is this something people do a lot? Just curious.

I've personally bought…*counts*…uh, "many" soundtracks for various games, both on Steam and Bandcamp when there's no Steam version. (My personal music library is 99% classical music from before 1900 and game soundtracks. :D) I don't buy soundtracks "sound-unheard", but there are plenty of ways to get exposure to game soundtracks besides simply playing the game these days. Maybe you watch a Let's Play or a streamer playing a particular game which you aren't interested in playing yourself, but which you really like the music to. Many game soundtracks can already be found on YouTube if you want to preview them before buying (you can of course also just rip them from the videos if they're up, but I prefer to show my appreciation for music I like by paying, since I can afford it).

Quoting: einherjarI think it is also silly to buy a game, that includes the music (as it is played in the game) and then pay for the music as a DLC, to get "the game music". You already payed for it...

While I can definitely see your point, I can think of three four five reasons someone might want to pay for it:

• Different arrangement. Sometimes the music as it's played in game will be arranged slightly differently (for gameplay purposes) than the music released in the soundtrack. For example, something that might be an infinite loop in gameplay could have a proper intro and outro bit added in the soundtrack. Or, in Portal 2, the soundtrack has a complete rendition of the Cara Mia Bella song which you can't hear in-game (though that soundtrack was released for free). Or, take Thomas Was Alone: the music there is made up of many very short little bits which are randomly played after and over each other throughout the game, so the only way to get that music outside of the game is through the soundtrack which has a representative arrangement of it. The Stellaris soundtrack also includes versions of a few songs that have a vocal part added, which are pretty cool, but which I can see wouldn't really work as default background game music.


• Convenience. In Paradox's grand strategy games, the music files are all lying around to be listened to outside of the game. However, if you want to get them into a playlist you'll need to go through and add track numbers, update it every time new music is released, etc. Buying the soundtrack for Stellaris allows you to have an auto-updated, pre-made playlist of tracks which reduces the amount of work needed.


• Quality. While I'm personally not an audiophile and can't tell the difference between an MP3 and a FLAC version of the same song, some people swear by it. Some soundtracks (again, Stellaris springs to mind) give you both MP3 and FLAC versions of the music, whereas the files for the game only have the MP3 versions.
  


• Appreciation. Sometimes you really just like a developer and want to show your appreciation by throwing a little more money their way.


• Practicality. While some games have the files just out and about if you want to copy them and listen to them elsewhere, sometimes the game files are all locked up in various archives. While I could probably figure out how to open them given enough time, I value my time higher than the (typically) couple of bucks the soundtrack would cost.

I'm not saying you (or anyone) should be buying soundtracks, and I'd be cool with more people releasing them for free, but in a world where developers need to make money to be able to continue making games those are a few reasons people might be interested in spending some. :)

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Good on 'em. Even here in Melbourne, far, far away from the worst of the action, there's a smell of smoke in the air and the Moon was tinted an ominous orange as it rose last night.

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Nice, I like it! It's always felt silly that I can't buy the soundtrack from a non-Linux game separate from the game itself.

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Quoting: hammahUnrelated to the conversation at hand, but I stumbled over the word “titbit” in the first sentence. Personally I hadn’t seen it written like this before, but only as “tidbit” i.e. with a “d” instead of a “t”. Believe it or not this was the reason for creating an account with GOL.

In any case if anyone is interested, apparently both forms exist, but according to Merriam-Webster, the notation with a “t” is less common:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/titbit [External Link]
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tidbit [External Link]

Thus ends my first contribution to this fabulous site...:D

From what I remember reading, the original version was actually titbit, nothing salacious about it, that's just how it came down from older English. But then someone created the tidbit form because they thought it was salacious, and now we have two forms. :)

Uhh, on topic, that's actually rather interesting to hear that Steam for Linux got started by ex-Microsoft employees, and that even they can think that Windows is going the wrong direction.

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