To wrap things up for our 25th and last day, this page is full of miscellaneous and humorous screenshots that I saved from various points in time during Civ4 testing. Unfinished games tend to contain a lot of bugs and, well, some of them ended up being pretty funny to see in action. Without further ado, these are some of my favorite random images that I collected over the course of these months.
Flying sheep! 
I don't remember how this bug was triggered but yes, the sheep in the pastures were floating in mid-air for at least one test build.
This was a screenshot highlighting how the AI was cramming in cities at some of the most preposterous locations imaginable. The filename that I have for this picture is simply "Bad City".
These next two pictures deserve a bit more explanation. During the earlier portions of the pre-release testing, Civ4 used a generic flag design with the silhouette of an eagle against a colored backround, with every civ sharing this same flag concept. Then roughly six months before release, right around when I was joining the test group, Firaxis shifted over to individual national flags each sporting their own unique designs. These were a great addition to the gameplay and there were a number of suggestions from the testing group on how the initial flags created by the development team might be improved upon. One of the testers (unfortunately I can't remember who) went so far as to mock up a bunch of flag designs for potential use by the developers. Some of these colors were a bit too wacky for inclusion in the real game, like the peach sword for Persia and the turquoise Incans and the neon green Aztecs, but I did rather like the Three Lions for England and Rome getting dark red instead of purple for its color.
This was a flag comparison screenshot created by the same tester, with the flags as implemented in Civ4 at that time on the top row and the suggested alternatives on the bottom row. What's noteworthy about these flags is that some of them actually did get incorporated into the official version of the game! The developers didn't really know what to do for Mongolia and simply gave them a generic horse logo, which was improved upon by this creator by making use of the soyombo that appears on the real Mongolian flag. The final version of the soyombo was simplified from what was presented here but the original idea came from the testing community. It's also subtle but the final version of Civ4 uses the laurel wreath with crossed branches for Rome's flag as suggested here, not the original design (though Rome did keep the purple color). Germany also swapped over to gray coloring at the suggestion of this community member instead of the bizarre orange that they had been using earlier. All in all, it's another little fascinating snapshot of the development process in action.
Those of you who have played Civ4 will probably recall that a unit which has an available promotion glows with a blue light. That concept went buggy in this particular build, causing the blue glow to remain fixed in place as the unit moved. Therefore any new units built in a city with a barracks would keep their blue glow stuck on top of that city's location, and after training a dozen units out of that city, well, you would get the INTENSE azure shine captued in this screenshot. Those poor archers on guard duty couldn't even sleep at night!
There's a character limit for how long city names can be in Civ4, which is unfortunately on the short side at only 15 characters. Did you know that originally there was no character limit at all for those city names? I discovered this accidentally while testing when I dubbed this spot "The City with the Incredibly Long and Unnecessary Name lololol!!!!!" which prompted a fix to this issue shortly thereafter. Errr, I'm sorry if I ruined this for everyone else by forcing the developers to add a character limit. 
There were lots of other visual bugs in testing; I infamously had my first-ever game of Civ4 played on a map where all of the terrain went completely dark. This was a screenshot from one of the other testers who had the opposite effect occur: every unit going completely black while the landscape remained unaffected. The effect was downright eerie, looking like some kind of weird Halloween mod where the units were replaced by undead wraiths. I named this screenshot "Army of Darkness" on my computer and I think the name fits.
Speaking of spooky stuff, TheDohr had this visual bug where his units disappeared from the map... everything except their weapons which remained mysteriously floating in midair. I kind of wish that I'd been able to play a whole game where my units were all ghosts, that looked like it would be fun.
Other visual bugs were more explosive in nature. This picture captures a bug where artillery pieces stacked together created a bigger and bigger explosion on screen if they were fired together with the grouped command. I think this player had about a dozen artillery units grouped together and when they all fired at once the resulting blast leveled half of the continent, heh. Maybe we should have kept this one in the game for amusement's sake?
Then there were the naval bugs. This test build inexplicably scaled the galley unit up to enormous sizes, and I remember that it was an easily reproduceable bug so this was happening to everyone at the same time in hilarious fashion. There were jokes about the huge galleys for weeks afterwards, I think one of the test reports I preserved here even mentions them.
Then a little later the opposite bug popped up: various buildings associated with the cities moved away from the central city tile itself and onto other tiles. This was a minor issue for landlocked cities, only to look ridiculous when it happened in port cities and those buildings moved off into the water. This gave the appearance of cities that had descended beneath the ocean waters, Civ4 versions of Atlantis sunk into the blue deep. This had to be one of the weirder bugs that took place during the test group.
I also saved this screenshot which technically didn't come from the testing group at all but instead was produced by a random poster at CivFanatics. It was a month or two before release and Firaxis had been dropping screenshots of the nearly-finished gameplay, which happened to include a zoomed-in picture of this city taken with flying camera mode. The original image contained a full-sized Rifleman unit defending the city, which of course looked gigantic next to the buildings when seen at this zoom level. This CivFanatics poster thought that the rifleman unit being larger than the city was too "unrealistic" and therefore created this picture with the rifles scaled down in size to match the building heights. Of course, having a unit that absurdly small would be impossible to see while playing the game normally, but that didn't deter this CivFanatics guy who was convinced that he had the game scale done correctly and the developers were all wrong. I hope he actually tried to mod the gameplay to create microscopic units like this after release, that would have been amusing to see.
Ummm... these pictures also deserve some more context, let me explain. When the placeholder leader art began to be replaced with the actual leaderhead animations, there was a big controversy in the testing group over Catherine. The developers were clearly going for a "flirty" personality for the Russian leader, animating her with winks and glares and the slapping animation that she produces when the player rejects her demands. Now originally this was dialed up even further: Catherine had an animation where she would lick her lips in sultry fashion which was intended to titilate the mostly male audience for Civ4. A number of the people in the testing group thought that this went too far and lobbied the developers to remove Cathy's licking animation, which they ultimately decided was the right thing to do and took it out. I didn't have strong feelings either way at the time though in retrospect I agree that this was probably the correct decision.
So, circling back to those two pictures above. One of my on-site testing colleagues at Firaxis was Kevan, who I mentioned in my introductory post had kind of a wild personality. Kevan thought that this whole controversy was ridiculous and that anyone upset over Cathy was essentially an uptight loser; Kevan wasn't exactly the most sensitive person and would have been an HR nightmare if he hadn't been working in a heavily young and male environment. Thus Kevan used his modest Photoshop skills to create this image of Catherine with an extended tongue and sharp teeth, then edited an image of Isabella as well to give her dirty blonde hair, an increased bust size, and a Playboy bunny tattoo. He posted these images on the internal Frankenstein forums specifically to mock some of the members of the testing group, which did not go over well and resulted in Kevan getting told to stay off the forums for a while. It was a bizarre incident but something that's stuck in my memory for the last two decades.
And if for some reason you wanted to dive deeper into Kevan's unique way of thinking, he also edited this screenshot of what he said he wanted Civ4 to look like. It was a running joke with Kevan that what Civ4 really needed was more undead skeleton riders and giant mechs to spice up the gameplay. He even used one of our internal Multiplayer games as the basis for this image, although that's not too surprising since I played probably 50 or more games with Kevan and Scott and Pat and James during those summer months working on-site at Firaxis. To bring this all full circle, Civ5 actually did implement Giant Death Robots in one of its expansions as an end of the tech tree unit, so I guess Kevan's vision of Civilization eventually came true after all.
While I was working on-site at Firaxis and browsing through some of the files on the internal testing server, I stumbled across a true gem: a series of promotional recordings done by Leonard Nimoy which never made it into the finished version of Civ4:
I edited them together into one audio file and uploaded it to YouTube at the link above. Nimoy reads out a series of amusing short promotions for Civ4 in his signature voice, such as "the best stealth learning game ever" and "you won't stop playing until you want to stop playing". Then the final audio clip is a longer recording where Nimoy reads the full introduction text from the original Civilization game; I can never listen to that one without getting chills. I can't remember ever seeing these recordings posted anywhere so I may have the only copies that still exist, what a fascinating tidbit of Civ4's history.
Finally, this image was posted on the Frankenstein forums at one point and I snapped it up out of amusement. That's our fearless leader Soren Johnson, lead designer for Civ4, while he was waterskiing on vacation at the time. I don't know why one of the Firaxians posted this but it was too good of an opportunity not to keep the screenshot. A decade and a half later, I was able to get another picture of myself with Soren in the background when he invited me to drop by the Mohawk Games headquarters, when they moved to their new location in 2019 shortly before launching Old World:
Soren is the individual with the beard in the background; I should have asked him for a proper photograph of the two of us which I'm sure he would have been happy to provide. None of this would have been possible without Soren who was the driving force behind putting together the testing group for Civ4 in the first place, and then being the incredibly rare developer who was genuinely interested in community feedback and willing to make major gameplay changes based upon them. One of the testing group members did a mockup of the Civ4 logo where they replaced "Sid Meier's Civilization 4" with "Soren Johnson's Civilization 4" and that would have been a much more accurate title if marketing had allowed it.
Thus we come to the end of the road, the 25th and final report in 25 days to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Civ4's launch on 25 October 2005. It was a lot of fun for me to go back and read through all of these old reports and I hope that I was able to share a little bit of what the experience was like to take part in this amazing testing group. Here's to another two decades of fun times and fond memories with Civ4. Happy Civving! 
- Sullla
