Anyone playing it? It's quite nice to have out-of-the-box multiplayer without having to get unofficial fixes (à la Rockstar's GTA series) or an expansion pack, but frankly, the game hasn't really caught onto me as much as the earlier Civ games did.

I had kind of hoped my expansionist strategy would come to and end with the new installment, but the promised "improved research and economy" from solely maintaining very few cities doesn't work so well. Don't get me wrong, it's a really nice game with a quite a bit of new innovativeness, but sometimes I can't ask myself whether or not it's just like a patch for Civilization 3 with new graphics, faster turns and gamer-requested balance tweaks.

Does it make you "lose lots of sleep" as promised by many magazine reviews? Sure, if you don't already know the Civilopedias from the previous games by heart. What happened to Alpha Centauri II?

"Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica and is widely regarded as the most important innovator in scientific and technical computing today." - Stephen Wolfram