Shadowtounge,

I've played Heroes II, III, IV and V. Not the first one though but some day, maybe

I've played plenty of Heroes III. Defeated all the campaigns in the original and played a few scenarios.

The equalness of all the castles and overpowered expert lvl of enhancement magic made it boring though. Every castle got 7 lvls of creatures (though some are vastly different in power) and expert lvl in enhancement magic (Bless, Shield, Stoneskin etc.) made it too equal and bland.

It got some good things like wait and half damage for ranged weapons though but that's not enough for me.

Heroes II got this high fantasy charm and different powerlvls of the factions. Knight and Barbarian must expand quickly while Wizard and Warlocks can take it easier. Sorceress and Necromancer must also wait a bit before they strike out but they're stronger then the Knights and Barbarians but weaker then the Wizards and Warlocks.

Yeah I've read that Civ V will differ quite a bit from the previous ones so who knows. Got a feeling I won't though but I'll try the demo!  (which is something I've never done for any Civ version.)

I had some debates with myself (not talking, but thinking. Not sure how to word it in english) about if Heroes II or Heroes III were better.

I went back and forth but ultimately I decided on Heroes II. The soundtrack, different power of factions and above all, the spell system gave the victory to Heroes II.

Heroes III got much better graphics and a much better Knight faction lineup but other then that....I don't know what's better about it vs Heroes II.

I always come to think about the broken magic types when I think of Heroes III. Expert lvl enhancement magic was just too good. A nobrainer. In Heroes II, highlvl magic was much more valuable since you had to have Wisdom to learn lvl 3 and above spells which the Knight and Barbarian had a hard time to get. That gave the spellcasting classes a nice, unique advantage against the powered up creatures of the Knight and Barbarian. Also consider that in Heroes II, Attack and Defense gave 10% and 5% bonuses to the creatures which is a hell of a lot.

Mass Slow, Mass Haste, Mass Bless and Mass Curse were lvl 3 spells. Had to have Wisdom to cast those which gave the spellcasting classes a magic advantage just as it should be. Also costed a FORTUNE to upgrade the mageguild!   Resources you didn't use on creature dwellings but instead invested in magic to MAYBE get some good spells.

Seems to be an unbreakable rule that threads always go offtopic

Apparently, you will be able to load Civ 4 maps in the Civ 5 map editor, and convert them to Civ 5. Looks like it's just maps, not mods or things like that. Still nice though!

Get the Rise of Mankind mod - they have map sizes that cause my 3.6 Ghz quad core processor with 8GB ram to stutter a bit. If you set it to like 7 continents and the slowest game speed you can spend weeks playing and just be in the late ancient era. Start the game with just 5 other civs or so and make sure the option to dynamically create civs is on. Barbarians will rise into new civs, and factions will break away in civil wars (so the British for example could spawn the Americans, and the Romans could spawn the British). It's not perfect, but it's really the only way to play civ4 once you've played a few games. That was the hardest thing about playing some of the better Civ4 mods--- The games were too quick even on the slowest speeds. When I play a game like this I want to really build an empire. And I want to build it MY way. This mod doesn't give you the ability to do quite that but it's the closest thing I've seen for Civ4. One of my hopes for the "Strawberry" version of [The Elemental Mod] E:EE (which we are talking about splitting into it's own mod) is that it will allow you to do that- play an epic game that takes months to play on the slowest settings, allows you huge customization options, massive size worlds (if your computer can handle them), with an ever expanding list of technologies, quests, and other challenges. Not quite sim-fantasy, but certainly taking many elements from the concept.

Anyway got off track there for a sec....

But yeah I'm really hoping Civ 5 has MUCH larger maps than civ4.

http://kotaku.com/5583378/civilization-v-develops-snazzy-100-edition

Retail collector's edition detailed. Was hoping for a nice collector's edition, but I'm not a fan of miniatures, so I'll probably just preorder online. The book is nice, but not $50 more nice.

Yeah, this is too expensive for me too considering the soundtrack is in the deluxe Steam edition for dramatically less money. Artbooks and figurines arne't worth this premium.

Some new details courtesy of CivFanatics.

Thing that I find most interesting is that building upgrades in cities have a maintenance cost now. I think I like that. It was often a no brainer in Civ 4 to build upgrades whenever you didn't need troops, because there's really no downside to it.

I never thought civ was that heavy in the micro department myself. Then again, I play a lot, a lot of strategy games, some of which are so heavy in micro management it's unreal (Guild 2 for example).

I can't believe the system requirements/recommended hardware

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/65031

That's crazy high end.

The recommended specs surprised me, those ARE pretty high with how PC games have been the last couple years.

The minimums are more reasonable, dual core has been pretty standard for years and those aren't high end video cards at all. Question will be how well does it run at minimum?

It's the quad core requirement (for rec not min) that makes it stand out a bit I think. The rest doesn't look too extraordinary to me except I still haven't seen to many require dual cores until just recently.

Really? Vista/Win7, 4GB of RAM, Quad Core, and a video card that wasn't released until 2008 are "2007 specs"?