World of Warcraft servers are down for maintenance from 3 AM to 11 AM PST today. Oh my god, this is the worst - oh wait, WoW sucks. I'm gonna go play Civilization 4 or something.
Remember they statistically drop the Star Craft 2 servers much less on the same day. One could play SC2, baring that, if really desparate, consider just watching replays of games you saved in the past.
Yes, though I find corporations, espionage, and random events to be obnoxious and the non-Nimoy voice-overs for the two new technologies (Aesthetics and military science) definitely feel jarring and "shoehorned in".
Not gonna happen. They're just adding a new continent, like they did with the first two expansions. I've heard, however, that there are some illegal private servers that don't run Cat. I'd very much like to learn more about those and start playing on one. I confess that espionage would be much less irritating if I could permanently lock the number of spies in each of my cities at zero. I hate seeing my specialists auto-assigned as spies when they could be something useful instead, like scientists or merchants. As for corporations... meh, I've already exterminated 1/3 of the players in the game and vassalized at least another 1/3 before the first corp becomes available, so it's not that big a deal. They're just hard to utilize effectively when you do finally get them, especially considering that you're advised to build a courthouse in every city that has a corp due to the increased maintenance, but courthouses increase the number of your specialists that can be wasted on generating espionage points instead of production/science/gold/culture
I like not having to get Scotland yard first, alphabet is a lot easier to get. You're fast. I ussually wait for Rifiling in order to start conquering people.
tried them long ago, sure you can play for free, try a few hundred people across all that area, if you see one person or 2 in a major city its a real event.