taczillabr: 'these'?for the newer games, you mean?
That's damn long for master of magic. I'm looking for a good Civilization IV guide...but I've never bought any guide, they're a bit overpriced for a pdf file i think.
Mentalepsy: Yes, most strategy guides are pretty much worthless - for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the internet exists. Why pay $25 for a glorified instruction manual? That's more than I usually pay for my GAMES. :p
My Master of Magic book is fantastic, though. It was released well after the game came out, so the authors had plenty of time to analyze everything to death and catalogue huge amounts of information on numbers and formulas. I learned a lot from reading it, and the authors' insight really helped me out. If there's such an exhaustive guide to Civilization IV, it might well be worth a look, even though we're living in the GameFAQs era. Complex, replayable strategy games can really benefit from in-depth analysis.
According to Amazon, though, Brady's Civ IV guide is a mere 192 pages - I'd be surprised if the
manual for the game is less than a hundred pages - and I'm willing to bet that it suffers from the same failings as pretty much any strategy guide. The only other Civ IV book I see has 80 pages and stands proud with a one-star customer rating. It's probably best not to bother.
That's why i had never bought any, and would never bother to buy a pdf file.
Of course for modern games there are FAQs aplenty, but for complex RTS games like you said, or a flight simulator etc., it's nice to have a paper guide, manual sitting in your desk if you really want to dominate the game, like Civ IV.
And in GOG case, for some people it's the pdfs and mp3s that make desirable to buy the game here, then it's cool for me.
