1)No Multiplayer
It'll ship in the expansion pack. Not a big deal, but then I'm a SP player.
2)No scenarios
They'll be here... If the game is being rushed, I'd rather have them working on other things.
3)No tech poster. And to add insult to injury they added the crappiest poster imaginable in the LE.
The whole LE business worries me a bit.
4)No wonder movies.
This is crap. They promised something nice to replace them, but it lookes like a rush job because the game is going gold in 10 minutes and they need SOMETHING. Also, at the end of each movie, you would get info on what the wonder does, not here.
5)Incomplete scenario editor
Another sign of the rush job, but one that can be easily patched.
6)Can't fix starting positions in scenarios.
This is a flaw. Most of my Civ2 games were played on a real (Earth, Europe) map. I will now be forced to play on a random one, as the Earth maps are not historical.
7) No cheat mode. This was useful for strong players to give the AI some advantage and for weak players to gain an advantage. While you can make adjustments before the game with the editor you apparently can make adjustment in the middle of the game any longer
Never used it. Don't care.
8)Can't change warning preferenes. The only preferences that you can change seem to be audio-visual ones. You could customize preferences a lot better in SMAC.
This is bad. At the start of a turn, I get messages over a city that it has built something, that it's in disorder, that they love me, that production is complete, but they go by so fast that they become useless. It's OK when you have 3-4 cities, but with 10-15, it's a nightmare. I had Rome build Legions!!! in 1997 because it escaped my attention. Other cities were building bombers, tanks and jet fighters. Rome built a legion... I dread to think what happens if I don't notiice an unhappy city under Democracy.
9)Basic info left out of manual: I may be wrong here but there doesn't seem to be any table with information about city improvments; their costs and benefits etc.. The SMAC tables were organized much better.
Been busy playing. Will comment as I read
10) Really crappy world maps
See above.
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It's a great game, but boy, does it feel rushed!
... It playes like Civ, feels like Civ and I will love it like I love Civ. My biggest problems are the -non- starting locationd, the messages at the start of the turn, and (expecting rotten tomatoes) I preferred the CTP graphics. The tiles looked more beautiful then...
If they fix the locations and the messages, I'm happy