With the likely appearance of Bioshock 1 + 2 here imminently - maybe a 3rd 2K game is also on its way...? :)

Didnt IV rather complicate/extend the "choose your government" by using the civics system? (Though I only played FFH2 so I am not sure this is part of normal Civ IV.)

Yes, it has five civics categories, each one with different options to choose from. It's one of the best systems I have ever seen: https://guides.gamepressure.com/sidmeierscivilization4/gfx/word/262535406.jpg

Have you also seen the civics categories of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri?

Yes, and I really like them, but after playing Civ4 as much as I have, I am much more familiar with the sinergies and subtleties of the system. All the civics are well designed and useful in one situation or another (except perhaps serfdom), and they force you to evolve and adapt your strategy throughout the game.

So those patch notes were from Oct 28th.Anyone have rough guess when the actual game will hit GOG? (wonder if all DLC will be included in a complete edition of sorts)/

It would be great if they threw that in the patch notes just to screw with people. But it that's what it was they should've went bigger and said the fix was for an overlay in Half Life 3.

Looked at the wikia for Civ IV and you are correct. Been a while since I had played IV.

It would be funny/sad if this was just a typo of someone missing the "I" before the "V". ;)

I would definitely be interested in this one. While I've enjoyed the Civ franchise over the years, I was never a big fan of the inevitable stacks of doom. Better strategic thinking with a more limited supply of units is definitely a plus in my book.

Also added Espionage and Religion as separate sub-elements, from what I recall, and had a bunch of smaller changes that polished IIIs system further.

Stacks were counterable by "artillery" units that damaged every single unit in stack with their attack.

Can't say I'm overly fond of the "one unit per tile" rule. It severely reduces power projection of high-manufacturing strategy, especially if geography forces you to fight through some kind of a chokepoint.

It's also perfectly viable to defend a chokepoint against overwhelming AI with simple unit rotation, as there is limited number of attacks your units have to contend with. It's much easier to cheese AI than back in "stack" days.

I agree about the game play, but not about the graphics. I like the cute pixel graphics of games like AoE 1/2, HoMM 4 or Civ 3. Civ 4 has the better game play, but Civ 3 for me looks better than Civ 4. And with a simple ini file setting you can run Civ 3 with the full resolution of your monitor (see comment at the end of "Install Notes").

I tried to counter a large stack by artillery in Civ IV once, but the problem was that I would have needed as many artillery units as the enemy had stack units because I could attack only once. Needless to say I could not produce enough artillery for that, it was too expensive.

The "one unit per tile" is in principle also quite old and stood the test of time, see the SSI General series. The clou is always the density of tiles vs. the number of units you have, You want them to spread out and take terrain into account but you don't want them to block each other and produce nothing but traffic jams.

With the right tile density, you could not simply rotate units in and out because you would not have enough of them.

Civ V with a fixed tile size but spanning a huge time range with small amount of units at the beginning and a large amount of units at the end shows the limits. They could have adapted (1 unit per tile in the ancient times, 2 units per tile in the renaissance, 3 units per tile in the modern time) and it would probably have been quite difficult to win against the AI.

That's not true.

Artillery did collateral damage to other units in the stack. I think it was 50% of base damage or so.

Meaning a single artillery unit would do 100% its attack value to the target unit, AND 50% to others in the stack. Combined arty strikes were easy way to wipe out stacks.

"General" did not include production. Not to mention that it took place on a vastly different scale.

A closer comparison would be Europa Universalis (or Crusader Kings), and both allow "stacking" without any balance issues.

That assumes the terrain allows the same access to enemy for all units. Or that the defender is not using forts.

I've defended cities in 3v12 situations (or similar enemy advantage) enough times to know it's perfectly possible in Civ V. Of course not so much if you put road (or even worse, rail) network all around your city, but that can be pillaged as needed.

People who had problems with "doom stacks" not only failed to appreciate just how hard artillery countered them, but also the fact that enemy's possession of "undefeatable" one was their own failure in not maintaining similar military production.

And yet it was perfectly possible to win against large stacks in Civ iV. Go figure.

Good tip on artillery.
I hated the (seemingly) *unlimited* stack count. It's not fun when three or four units are securing a local area and suddenly a stack of 36 barbarian cavalry appears from behind a shrub to take out the phalanxes; it's just rage-quit-reboot annoying. :)