After many, many bouts of severe frustration playing Civilization III I swore off the franchise. I was through, I told myself, with suffering through blantantly cheating AI and non-existent or simply horrendous multiplayer functionality. Though I dearly love turn-based 4X games, of which precious few exist, I turned my back on Civilization, though it pained me no end.

Until, of course, the siren song of Civilization IV was sung. But not too long after purchasing both Civ IV and its expansion pack Warlords I found that both were well-designed, highly entertaining games, but sadly lacking in the development department. Civ IV suffers from constant video memory-related crashes (with an error dialog advising me to “allocate more video memory”. Hello? this is the year two-thousand-fucking-seven; users should never even be suggested to manually juggle memory for any reason. Warlords will occasionally just freeze my system and cut to a black screen during leader trade dialogs.

Both the base game and Warlords are patched up (to 1.61 and 2.08, respectively, the highest patch versions available). It’s both interesting and exasperating to note that the last Civ IV patch was released in April 2006, and Warlords’ last patch was published in October the same year. Searching in vain for an answer to my problems, I thought I’d found the solution in the Mehmet II patch (written by a Firaxis developer to solve a problem with a particular leader dialog, but never released through official support channels), but, alas, no love. And the Firaxis’ (the developer) and 2K Games’ (the publisher) sites offer only the lame suggestions of updating Windows (no problem) my video drivers (done) or playing the game in 800×600 resolution with 16-bit color.

I’m sorry, but fuck that. 800×600? 16-bit color? Are you fucking kidding me? Those are crap answers from people either unwilling or unable to fix bad code. The QA team and the engineers behind them should hang their heads in shame.

And meanwhile, I’m out $70. And heartbroken. Again.