and that is take a risk and inovate they created this wonderfull distribution platform. It's DRM but very mild compared to the BS we have endured over the course of the last 10 years. Here are some facts. Other then the whole price argument which I tend to agree even though i'm not affected by it. One way to look at it is steam is providing a service of convenience so if it's the same price as retail I would say who gives a shit cause i'm a lazy ass and I dont want to drive to the store so what I would save in gas goes to the developer/publisher which I dont care. If the game isn't made by Valve and isn't locked down by the developer you can mod it. There is no way that steam stops you from using mods unless it's their own game which as far as I can recall has full mod support. All this don't support mod BS is from the developers who want to milk us via DLC releases. Why have the community create the mod when they can do it and charge. Steam works offline. You just need to ensure that you dont log out of steam when you exit so that when you log in the next time what happens is it times out and then prompts you to try again or go in offline mode which at that point you have full access to your library. Just need to ensure you have the game you want to play installed first. Re-sell. The fact is they no longer want games to be a product they want it to be a service and this is why it's harder and harder to sell off your copies as it's usualy attached to some account. If you blame steam for not owning your copy and not complaining about every other platform/developer/publisher then your nothign but a hypoctrit. Retail Copies of PC Games - We have all noticed the decline in availability of PC games in store way before steam or other distribution platforms have come out. The retailers are hypocrits. They are crying because all of a sudden there is a surge of quality games coming to the PC and they see $$$$ but they wont get shit cause they can't resell like they do for console but even with console you can see this is going away with consoles being connected to the internet and catching up to the PC in the distribution departed. The way I see it Consoles are 5 years behind in inovation at all times behind the PC. And for those complaining about the DRM and steam disapearing well good news on that front because like all DRM come and gone they have all been hacked/cracked and you can easly find those executables out in the wild. I mean if this is stopping you from accepting change then so be it but personaly no loss to me or the 20 million other steam users out there. Funny considering that blizzard is one of the bigges pc companies out there with steam and they dont complaing yet everyone else does.

Question for you. What difficulty setting where you playing on ? If you want a challenge you need to play above noble. Anything below that is easy to medium difficulty.

The justification that DRM is stopping you from playing this game is ridiculous. I've used steam since day one and trust me I hated the idea I raged like most and said I ain't taking this crap. It's been long enough that the platform is very robust and stable compared to the beginning days. Unfortunatly finding games without DRM is rare in this age and it wont go away. Personaly I think you are all missing out on a great gaming experience for something so trivial as Steam DRM. Steam is immense and in no way would it disapear. It would be like saying all the game stores all of a sudden deciced they were going out of business and no longer selling the games. How does steam decide if you can use the game or not. You bought the game Steam is a service and there is no reason for them to decide when and how you can play the game unless you are doing something inapproriate which in that case it's your own fault. It would be no worse then buying a physical copy and then all of a sudden it stops working. Chances of that happening are higher then Steam telling you you can't use your product anymore. Re-sell value who cares the company's are doing everything they can to stop the re-sell as it does cut in their profit and the stores that re-sell games are marking them up for just a few bucks less then a brand new copy (at least for newer games). In the end re-sell will go away or will come in the format of allowing you to transfer your game copy to someone else who has an account on the Platform. I can see the alternative happening at some point and there already has been mention of this. Besides Steam all they are really using is steamworks for achievements and so forth to add some more value to an already great game. On top of the fact they even implemented LAN support for the game which alot of the new games dont include as a deterent for Piracy or there excuse at least so they can control every aspect of your experience. DRM comes in different forms and if you are ignorant to not inform yourself on what the DRM is involved in this game. All this to say that most of you're excuses to not buy this game because of DRM is just plain ignorant. Anyway there is a demo out for it and I recommend at the least that you try it for yourself and decide if the DRM is really as intrusive as you suspect. Now the game itself of course has it's quirks and if you read my early post I would ask most of you to re-install Civ IV without patching it and tell me how the experience goes. So I aggree it has it's bugs and none are a deal breaker...even if the game crashe it has an auto save feature so chances are you havn't lost much of your game and so forth. Long live CIV.

WTF are you talking about. It uses Steam. You can play online or offline and doesn't hinder you playing in anyway. Get off your high horse.

This game is still Civ at it's core. AI issues and so forth is normal. If you go back to vanilla Civ IV without any patches and then come back and tell me it is better. I've only played about 2 to 3 hours just to avoid missing any work but it is still as addictive as the previous versions of the series. With patching and future modding from the community this game will be as popular as the rest. Now just waiting for a free weekend to lose myself in trying to conquer the world with a friend or two since I only seem to play huge maps lol

I saw this a few months ago on TV. Can't recall what program it was but they basicaly tested generic cables with the monster ones to see if there was a difference in the quality of the signal. From there testing there was absolutly no difference. That it be gold plated or not absolutly no difference.