Apples and oranges my friend.  Apples and oranges.  How narcisistic do you have to be to fault a game by not transforming itself into what you want it to be?  Civilization wasn't supposed to have tactical combat.  You were supposed to use a chain of probability to your strategic advantage.  What you might consider "game ruining" is game making for others. 

Reloading? So you lost a combat you thought to win, became angry and reloaded?

No problem for me, it worked both ways.

HOMM5 levelling could be annoying depending upon what you wanted and what you got. How about visiting witches huts in HOMM3? That was a pain, hiring a dupe to go see if the witch had a winner or a dud.

Whatever you don't like you could mod to be different. Why don't you say what you want  instead of saying what you don't want? You want a chess style combat where everything follows rules and there is no randomness? In that regard you don't like the Total War series either?

How is combat in Kings Bounty perfect? I've never played it.

Look who's back.  I thought you weren't returning until May Hortz?

OOOH this forum LOVES to eat posts!!      So annoying....Island Dog needs to connect an extra server instead of posting all day long (and playing PC games in their serverhall where Brad can't see him....)

Randomness is the spice that make something good exceptional. The random chance of which primary and secondary stat you get in Heroes V can put a pole in your spokes but that just means that you can't hope for things to go a certain path but have to be prepared to adjust. The A.I is useless at choosing secondary skills so you got an advantage either way.

I've heard that before (I don't play Civ) and I wonder why they didn't just give tanks and planes an armor which make them nigh impervious to such primitive weapons. Kinda like the armorsystem in Dawn of War. Low damage Guardsmen against a Vehicle_Armor_Medium  was absolutely pathetic. Maybe 5% of the damage went through the armor. Against tougher armors the % goes down even more.

Huh?

TBRWITS stands for The Big Roulette Wheel In The Sky, a fairly derisive term for overpowered RNGs. Some randomness is fun, but the player also needs a certain amount of control in order to play with it: otherwise it just becomes a matter of "roll two dice and hope they both match".

I remember stuff like this more from Civ I than from Civ IV.  I have a fond memory from Civ I where my Battleship was cruising along a coast and I spotted a Phalanx on a hill.  I attacked the Phalanx and my Battleship sunk.  You can still have some improbable victories in Civ IV, but nothing like earlier versions of Civ.  Civ IV is all about controlling when and where combat happens so the odds are in your favor.

Some random is good. Totaly random is bad. If everything is absolutley determintstic then i might as well go play fire eblem(good game, but not what i want from elemental). Don't want peasent miltia rolling dragons either. Having to take chances and risk your forces gives some good suspense though and really adds to the game.

elite swordman killing modern armor? How is that a joke? Happens all the time in real life. Iraq invasion, quite a few tanks got killed with moltov cocktails. Set thier air intake on fire, engine gets no oxygen, it dies and rips itself up. Dead tank. For all that we talk about how high tech and powerful our army, all the gps and coordination gear and predator drone uplink won't save you from getting your face smashed in by a rock.

Gotta have some randomness involed or you might as well be playing your game on a spreadsheet. I think the idea that randomness killed Civ IV is just silly. That's a wildly popular game for a strategy title. I've been playing Civ games since I knew what PC games were and they've done an excellent job with the series. No reason to hate on a game just because you don't care for a part of its system.

Thats a real problem with games that use something from real life, we demand that they behave as they do in real life.

To the point that a good set of rules can't be included because people will complain when their battleship gets defeated by the phalanx.

Yes its annoying, but geez if you have a battleship and they the phalanx think what the AI must be thinking....

"Bloody human, always plays me on Chiefton level. Here we go again, battleship vs phalanx..... Hooray! my phalanx finally won! Oh no, you wouldn't, but you are.....  reloading....."

A toast to the AI! May it never have the ego of a human lest it realise what bad sports we truely can be!

I've played hundreds of games of Civ IV since it came out. What you are talking about is a very rare occurence. Like a fraction of 1%, so yeah rewriting the entire game for that miniscule issue... right. I am starting to question if some of you actually play Civ IV if you read that complaint some forum a couple of years ago and just repeat it.

Oh I should have mentioned the complaint that's been floating around since forever and is now on Wikipedia.

I love to see an underdog victory, it's what makes things interesting imo. But I don't want it to be by chance, I want it to be because I planned a way to overcome the difficulty. Longbowmen, with ample knowledge of their surrounding terrain could easily survive long enough to take out the drivers when they get out to make camp. Effectively "destroying" the tank unit.