GAME DESCRIPTION: With over 6 million units sold and unprecedented critical acclaim from fans and press around the world, Sid Meier’s Civilization is recognized as one of the greatest PC game franchises of all-time. Now, Sid Meier and Firaxis Games take this incredibly fun and addictive game to new heights by adding new ways to play and win, new tools to manage and expand your civilization, all-new easy-to-use mod capabilities and intense multiplayer modes and options. Civilization IV comes to life like never before in a beautifully detailed, living 3D world that elevates the gameplay experience to a whole new level. Sid Meier’s Civilization IV has already been heralded as one of the top games of 2005, and a must-have for gamers around the globe!
* Civ IV comes to life! – Beautiful 3D world with dozens of fully animated units (including culturally unique units) and totally customizable armies. Detailed cities and wonders will appear on the map. Wonder movies are back!
* Greater Accessibility and Ease of Play – An easy-to-use interface will be immediately familiar to RTS and action game players, and newcomers to the series will be able to jump in and play. Multiplayer -LAN, Internet, PBEM and Persistent Turn-Based Server (PTBS or Pitboss) offer players all-new strategies and ways to play when competing or cooperating with live opponents.
* Team Play – Whether playing multiplayer or single player, team play offers a new way of setting locked alliances that result in shared wonder effects, visibility, unit trading and shared territory that delivers a plethora of new strategic and tactical options.
* Mods and Community Tools – Designed from the ground up for modability, the game contains a powerful map editor with XML and Python support. Choose Your Leader – Many Civs now have 2 leaders from which to choose, with each Leader having traits that provide various bonuses to the player and lots of replayability.
* Civics – With the discovery of new techs, civic options can become available. Freedom of speech or slavery? Hereditary rule or open elections? This creates endless government choices and possibilities!
* Religion – Now there are 7 religions in the game that are unlocked through researching. When unlocked, the religion spreads through a player’s empire allowing them to use the religion to help manage happiness, gain gold and create Great Prophets.Great People – As the player uses specialists they gain Great People points in the city that is utilizing the specialists. Great People include the Artist, Tycoon, Prophet, Engineer, and Scientist. They can be used to get free techs, start Golden Ages, or join a city to increase its output.
* Promotions – Each unit has a promotion path that emphasizes specific unit traits. Promotions include bonuses to Attack/Defend on specific terrains/features, movement bonuses, sight/visibility bonuses and increased withdrawal chances.
* Tech Tree – Flexible Tech tree allows players more strategic choices for developing their civilizations along unique paths.
* More Civs and all new Units and Improvements to enhance and grow your empire.
* Faster-Paced Fun – Gameplay has been streamlined for a tighter, faster and more compelling experience.
* In-Game Movies – Civ IV will have over 70 in-game movies and animated sequences.
PLAY: Instantly you realize how deep and involved game play is for Civ IV. Certainly there are a lot recognizable in Civ IV. It’s been seriously upgraded and tweaked—so much so that it makes playing the game instantly replayable.
The maps are much more detailed. You can highlight tiles and see what is on that tile and all of its resources and details on workers and troops. There is also an emphasis on correctly handling your resources. You can’t just be a war monger and building nothing but troops–your cities won’t grow. You also can’t allow for nonstop pollution in hopes that problems will go away. Everyone wants to build factories, forges but hospitals and groceries are important. Keeping your people happy has become a very important part of the game. Happy people are productive—unhappy ones do nothing.
National Wonders have always been a love-hate part of Civ. Everyone wants National Wonders but they often take up a great deal of time. What is wonderful about Civ IV is the ability to create specialists. Some specialists help with wonders, research, and there are even religious ones. Previous the only specialists were great leaders set to make for war.
Now with troops you can make them work together—whereas in the past you had to build a great leader to do this. This is perhaps our favorite addition to the war aspect. Also, archers, musketmen, infantry all have different abilities and are better at fighting certainly groups. They can be upgraded with first strike power, more strength, and better at digging in to an area to protect your cities or areas of land. You can also have them stay tight until they are at full health when injured.
One major issue, an issue in previous editions, is the fact that you can attack a city with archery guards with your infantry and artillery and still have a rough time. Machine-gun bullets verses arrows are no competition. You should be able to mow them down and yet we often lost one or two men for every three archers. With our cavalry there were occasions when we’d lose all three cavalry men to one of their archers. There is the idea that they are behind walls and have some advantage—but even when you take them on outside of the city they seem to have a distinct advantage.
Culture has been tweaked in the fourth release—but the most welcome addition is religion. Whether you like the idea or not adding depth and realism is always welcome. You can build missionaries to spread religion and now religious wonders add a lot of culture to your entire civilization.
We took a similar strategy to the past—trading our advances with other countries in exchange for cash, maps, and resources. We have no idea whether this is the best way to go but we were able to stay well ahead of our friends and enemies–enough so that we were building tanks while they were still building musketmen. One thing that can’t be overlooked is going straight for building military based advances while ignoring advances that help with hospitals, paper, etc. These help keep your culture happy while you are building your war machine—should you choose to be a warmonger.
And if you want to be a warmonger you might want to get some of your friends to declare war rather than going it alone. We declared war on Greece because it seemed everyone hated them—but when we did Japan declared war on us for no reason other than we were weakened by war. We had to negotiate with Egypt and Persia to help us out as Japan put a hurting on our minimally defended cities. Civ IV isn’t a walk in the park and the AI has been tweaked to make smarter cultures that will react if they feel that you are weak or have moved too many troops to one area leaving yourself vulnerable.
GRAPHICS: If there ever was a failing of the older Civ releases it was the elementary graphics—all of which have been upgraded with Civ IV—certainly you won’t confuse the game for Doom. Regardless, CIV IV doesn’t disappoint as you watch battles up-close and get to watch the building of the Wonders and actually see things like aqueducts that until know you just assumed where there. The addition of 3D graphics weren’t necessary but welcome.
SOUND: Leonard Nimoy does a great job of narrating. For every new technology we are given a quote from an individual that connects to the technology—such as Ben Franklin or Sun Tzu. More voiceover would have been welcome for things such as wonders and information about troops, civs, etc.
The soundtrack is brilliant. It’s no longer simple wav files that sound like a cellphone ringer. These are glorious orchestral pieces from Beethoven, Bach, and more all in lush stereo.
FRANKLY: We took a long time to review because of an issue that many gamers where having with ATI graphics cards. We were unable to play—but now that a patch has been released we have dug so far into Civ that it’s hurting our real life relationships. Thankfully we can blame work for playing on the computer.
Civilization IV is easily the best version of Civ yet! There is no comparison from the graphics to gameplay. There are so many ways to win—going to space, diplomatic victory, and and crushing your enemies from war—that Civ IV never gets old. As soon as you finish one game you know what you’d do differently the next time. There is a reason we were still playing Civ III until recently. Now we look forward to another few years of Civ IV.
+ Richie Wright
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