Why no Save game Feature

[Gandalf Parker]

alexti said:

Civ4 took rather interesting approach to save games. Reloading the game was so insanely slow that nobody would want to reload unless one absolutely must had to turn the computer off I don't know whether it was an intentional decision or just a result of overall poor coding that plagued otherwise very good game

Actually that is one of the options that gets mentioned in programmer forums. A way to give it to them but not really give it to them. As if "well this was the best I was able to do".

Things like:
slow save

slow reload

save only when quitting the game

save only at special places in the game that are far apart

randomly generating as much as possible and including it in the save so reload cant cheat

not allowing naming of saves so that you only get one save at a time (keeps you from long-term backtracking)

Of course the people doing it those ways are given a hard time about giving in to players over the quality of the game. But no one gives them too hard a time for avoiding the flak by giving crappy saves. And before anyone says anything, no I dont think that happened here. What we have is standard Linux saves for a pbem game. Nothing else would have made much sense in Dom1 and only seems reasonable now because of the improved menus in Dom3.