Here it is, the report from the first game of Civ4 that I ever played, dated to 17 May 2005.
Sullla AGA1: Out of the Darkness
v.55
Medium Fractal, Standard climate, speed
Noble Difficulty (Julius Caesar)
Note: At the time Julius Caesar had the "forbidden" Industrious / Philosophical trait pairing, which would later switch to the Expansive / Organized trait pairing that he used for release version Civ4, only to be changed again when the Warlords expansion shuffled all the leader traits around.
Since this was my first game of Civ4 - and it was played under very unusual circumstances! - I'll try mostly to limit myself to initial impressions rather than making suggestions. I need some more data before coming to any conclusions. But the short story is that I had a blast with this game even though I had the hardest time seeing what was going on. Not because I didn't understand the game's controls - because of this:
My computer uses a NVidia graphics card, and for some reason it didn't agree with the surface textures in v.55. But I waited a whole month to finally get my CD, so I wasn't about to let a little graphics bug stop me from playing. 
I had no clue what terrain my starting settler was on, but I moved onto the river (Civ3 habits die hard) and founded Roma on the second turn. I picked the location blindly, but the city turned out to have a great balance of high shields/food tiles, and resources galore - iron, gold, marble, horses, and corn (!) all within the immediate 21 tiles. Umm, yes... I definitely planned that. I decided to go for an early religion, so I began researching Mysticism first. My warriors in the picture above head out into the blackness.
OK, so I ended up getting to Hinduism first and founded that religion. Then, since no one had founded Judaism, I researched and founded that too. I would go on to found all of the religions other than Buddhism, which Spain grabbed very early; I had no chance to get it. Still, six religions gave me a lot to play around with. I had an immense amount of trouble seeing the map, but finally I realized that I could turn on the food/shields/commerce grid and identify stuff that way. I tried to move a warrior into the ocean for about 5 minutes before I moused-over the blackness and realized it was water. 
The only giveaway that I was near the coast was rivers emptying into... nothingness:
Those poor fish! What are they swimming in? 
OK, seriously, I soon realized I was alone on an island, which was probably just as well because I couldn't see cultural borders either. The barbs started showing up, which was interesting, but my scouting warriors prevented them from popping up in great numbers. I lost a warrior and almost had a city captured at one point, but managed to produce a chariot and kill the barb before it could wander into the unguarded city. The barbs formed one city that I captured from them (and it turned out to be a powerhouse city too). After that, I was at peace for centuries, isolated from the rest of the world. Since the oceans were a sea of blackness, I didn't have much incentive to go out exploring. I did get to use my unique unit to take the barb city; those Praetorians kick some major behind, but are they supposed to be so... pink?
I got a better and better sense of how the game works as I went along (not surprisingly). This included very simple things, like "Oh, you need a TEMPLE to create Priest specialists!" and the like. As far as specialists go, I definitely like them. They seem to add a great deal of depth to the game, open up a lot of different strategies. What we are going to need to do, however, is EXPLAIN how they work to casual players who are not obsessive strategy fans like me. I'm sure a tutorial is planned for the future; I'd be happy to work on something like this down the road. One of my big impressions from Civ4 is that this is a GREAT game in progress here, we just need to make sure that casual fans can pick it up and play while having fun. (Ditto for the tech tree - the system is light-years improved from Civ3, but it can be extremely confusing for a new player. The current F6 chart is simply not correct, but I'm sure you already know that.)
Anyway, back to the story... There was no stone resource on my island, so I skipped most of the early wonders. I also had the least clue what I was doing when first starting. By 500BC though I finally had a couple of cities and got into the wonder act. I built Ankor Wat, and used that wonder to make HEAVY use of priest specialists (and with all my temples, I could run a lot of priests). A 2 shield/1 commerce specialist is very powerful in the early game, and as a side effect, I ended up with a ton of Great Prophets. Like, my first 6 or 7 Great Persons were all prophets. I used the first 5 on shrines, then used the sixth to cut most of the research off of Divine Right, then used the seventh for the Islamic Shrine. After that, I mostly merged the Great Persons into Roma, which became my super city (but more on that later), aside from no-brainers like creating an Academy with my first Scientist, etc.
In terms of Civics, I started out using Organized Religion, then swapped to Theocracy. That was helpful for getting my cities started out, but the really strong move for me was swapping to Free Religion about midway through the game. For a civ with six religions, that gave each city as many as six (SIX!) happy faces, and then considering I could build six different temples in those cities as well... Happiness stopped being a problem for my people. The +25% boost to research didn't hurt either. Of course I could no longer see foreign cities with my state religion in them - but I couldn't SEE anything anyway, so it didn't matter! As far as the other categories, I never had enough money to justify going with Federal Reserve over Free Market's extra trade routes (and wow, in the late game some of those trade routes really brought in a ton of dough). I stuck with Serfdom throughout the game for lack of anything better; it seems weird that this is such a strong civic, dunno about that one. I ended up going with Free Speech for Legal, simply because I had few cottages and lots of specialists running in this game. Finally, I went to Hereditary Rule early on and stayed there the whole game. Roma was a behemoth, easily as strong as all my other cities combined. Why not pump it up even further? Some tweaking is definitely needed on individual civics, but the system itself is a real winner.
A few quick notes on the civics which went through many, many iterations during the testing process and differed substantially from the final set at this point in time. Organized Religion was unchanged but Free Religion provided 25% bonus to science instead of its eventual 10%; the holder of a religion's shrine also had visibility on all cities running that religion in non-expansion Civ4. Federal Reserve was a civic that granted gold income equal to a percentage of the gold sitting in the treasury, it was eventually scrapped because we could never balance it properly. And Hereditary Rule had the Bureaucracy bonus at the time, +50% production and commerce at the capital, which ended up getting moved backwards on the tech tree because it was too strong unlocking at Monarchy tech or with the Pyramids. Finally, if all that wasn't confusing enough, Free Speech had the +3 beakers on specialists benefit which would later be moved to Representation. This should put some of my past self's comments into better context.
There's my civ around 1000AD. (I kept getting these sound file errors nonstop ever since entering the Classical Age. They came in a constant stream up the left side of the screen; I just ignored them and played on. Never had any sound.) I've settled most of the island at this point; I would eventually put another city up in the north, and I would have done it at this time, but I couldn't see the terrain and didn't realize there were some grasslands up there. I've just researched Currency and now my economy is about to pick up for the first time and start to research at a better rate. I soon had the research rate up to 80%, and once I started meeting other civs and got some trade going, I was able to get it to 90%, where it stayed for much of the game. I was actually contacted by the other civs first; Isabella and then Saladin sailed by and said hello. Isabella was a sourpuss and refused to trade, but Saladin and I swapped several resources and mutually benefitted. This allowed my civ to take off in growth and leave the other AI civs in the dust; they do indeed appear to fall apart halfway through the game (at least here on Noble). I built all of the world wonders from the mid-game on, and was never challenged again.
So after getting Saladin's world map, I saw that France was also nearby and sailed over to say hi. (Wow, Louis looks like a ghost in this version! Get out in the sun, Monsieur Sun King!) After doing that, I sent my ship out exploring the waters of the world. Here was what the poor little guy saw:
This is why I didn't go out exploring sooner - he's fallen off the edge of the world! Total blackness out in the middle of the ocean, it was a little freaky. I eventually found the rest of the civs and traded with everyone, except for Tokugawa, who refused to trade with anyone. He was conquered and killed by Peter (coincidence? not likely; the civs who refuse to trade only hurt themselves).
The late game was pretty much a coast job. I played it out to see all the techs and figure out how stuff like railroads worked, but the AI civs were at least a dozen techs behind me and so I couldn't really exploring some things like diplomacy. Too far out in front (not bad for my first game! ) I did have one little fight to take care of; there was no coal on my island, and the closest source was under a barb city across the ocean. I built some cavalry and a cannon and went over and took the city; one thing I'll say is that the new bombardment units seem very strong. I like the change from Civ3, but I'll reserve more judgement until if I can see how the AI uses them. One thing is for sure, if the cannons show up those walls are coming down! Oh, and having the City Raider promotion for my cannon really seemed to make a huge difference compared to my cavalry who lacked it. I had virtually no combat in this game, but the experience system seems like it will be a big plus. Still need more personal data on it though.
Finally, there's my civ on the last turn of the game. I researched all the techs except for a couple of optional ones like Communism, and will launch the spaceship next turn. I held off on launching for a couple turns to let Roma pass 100,000 culture to see if that would get me a win. It didn't, and I understand the cultural victory is still being reworked at the moment. In any case, here's my super-city at the end of the game:
Now that's a city! Not too shabby for someone who didn't really know what he was doing, if I do say so. I wanted to see if I could get to 1000 culture/turn, then when I got to that, I tried for 1500. If I used the culture slider, I could have gotten to 2500 culture/turn easily. And with over 100 turns left before 2050AD (if that's the end date), I could probably have hit 250,000 culture in Roma. Now, what that would have DONE in concrete terms is beyond me, but I was having fun in any case. I was also entertaining myself by seeing how many shields/turn I could get Roma up to, and as you can see, I did get over 225/turn. As far as Great people, I ended up with about 20 total for the game, about 12 or so who ended up getting merged into Roma. I tried to use a Great Merchant for a trade mission, and took him all the way to Spain's capital, only to get a game crash every time I used the mission. So I carted him all the way back to Roma and merged him into the city.
Final Thoughts
Well I really enjoyed this game (I can only imagine what it would be like on a non-black background). As messed up as this version was for my graphics card, I could... not... stop... playing. I kept playing long into the night, usually going to bed between 2-3am. It was just that addictive. We've really got a great product on our hands here; the visuals are looking better and better, the Pyramids wonder movie (which I saw about 20 times ) is terrific and hopefully a sign of more good stuff to come, and the strategy is pretty deep. I'm already convinced this will be a huge hit, we just need to make it that much better before release so that players will stick with it for a long time after purchase. My only concern is that it may be difficult for new players to pick up and play, but so long as documentation is added as the project gets closer to completion, this shouldn't be too bad. (I'm not worried at all about the "CivFanatics" out there; strategy fans are going to eat this up and play it for years.)
So for those of you who have been slaving on this for months now, great job so far! I'll do my best to help out in the time we have remaining.
More than twenty years later, I think it's fair to say that I called this one correctly. One last note: I saw the Pyramids wonder movie 20 times because it was the only one finished at the time, and it played whenever any wonder completed. On to the next report!
