So I just finished my first game of Civ IV. It took a little over 8 hours and I ended up loosing closely to the Germans in a space race. The game is simply amazing. I’ll need to have a few more games before I can make a detailed description of exactly why it’s so good, but I thought I’d give a few details on what I think makes it such a good game.

The first thing is the fact it feels like Civ. I was a little worried when I first started reading info about it, and especially when I started seeing the screenshots. The game has changed quite a lot, however it still holds true to the civ flavor that I’ve come to love. It all fits together in a cohesive game which stays interesting and exciting the whole way through. The ‘end-game’ has been fixed up and I like the way the first few ages take quite a bit longer to get through. The changes to combat are excellent and while it will take a while to get some solid strategies down, it handles the paper-scissors-rock style of so many RTS games extremely well. I might put up a full review of the game once I’ve had a few more tries if anyone is interested.

In other news, I did some AI coding this morning before I began my day long civ-fest. I’ve now got the enemy ship firing counter missiles in response to missiles you fire at it. I also sat down with a math’s friend and went through the missile interception problem. It seems that it IS in fact extremely hard to calculate, and so far the best I can get to is a 4th order polynomial, which is no walk in the park to solve. For that reason I’m going to fall back to my ‘plan b’ for now. I will basically break the path up into small parts and find the best point to aim at. This will be substantially slower than a simple mathematical formula, and not truly accurate, however for now I believe it will do that job.