Civilization IV

I played half of a game of Civilization at the lowest difficulty level, found it was to easy, and started another one at a medium difficulty. Something like 12 hours later I won that game, with a diplomatic victory. So here are my thoughts on the new version of this classic game:

Civilization IV is a very good game, mainly because it didn't stray too far from the successful predecessors. It is still a turn-based game, where you start in 4000 B.C. with a settler, found your first city, and build an empire of many cities over the ages. In a standard game there are 6 other civilizations competing against you, all played by the computer. At the core of the game are your cities. These grow, produce buildings, produce units with which you can explore or conquer the map, and they produce gold and research. With research you move along a tech tree from inventing the wheel to inventing space flight, thus moving your civilization through history.

What is interesting in Civilization IV is that you have a wide range of options how you want to run your empire. If you want, and don't mind very long games, you can micro-manage every tiny bit. But if you dislike micro-management, you can set most things on automatic, and concentrate on whatever your favorite occupation is, e.g. waging war against your neighbors. The AI of the automated tasks isn't bad, but not perfect, so for the highest difficulty levels you would probably need to micro-manage to succeed. I really like the fact that with 9 different difficulty levels, and numerous other options at the game creation screens you can tailor the game to your liking.

There are 6 different victory conditions, which again shows you how you can approach the game in many different ways. You can win by having the highest score in 2050, by eliminating all other civilizations, by controlling most of the map and population, by having three cities with legendary cultural status, by building a space ship to alpha centauri, or by winning a diplomatic victory through an election by the United Nations.

The major resources of each city, food and production, are not tradeable. There is no way to feed a starving city from another city in abundance next to it, which feels a bit strange sometimes. But Civ4 has come a long way in making your empire feel more like a connected whole, and not just the sum of the cities. This is done with resources, which are distributed all over the map, some of them hidden until you discover the appropriate technology. If you want to build for example a spearman in a city, you need access to iron or copper. For that the city must either have the iron or copper in its own city radius, or be connected to it with roads. And there must be a mine on the resource. So connecting your cities with a road network is very important.

What is new in Civ4 is the concept of culture. Previously the number of inhabitants of your cities determined its zone of control. Now each city is pushing the borders of your empire forward (and against those of other civilizations) with a value called culture. You can increase the culture of your city with buildings like theatre, the city culture then slowly accumulates, and at certain values your cultural influence radius grows. You can even drop "culture bombs", by using a "great artist" in a city to give it a sizeable culture boost, which is nice for controlling borders.

Likewise new is a choice of different religions. There are 7 religions in the game, which to be totally politically correct are all totally identical. The first civilization to discover certain technologies founds the religion related to it, and from there it can spread automatically or with you building missionaries. It is generally a good idea to have the same religion in all of your cities, declare that religion as "state religion", and receive certain bonuses. Neighboring civilizations with the same religion are more friendly to each other, but converting them is rather difficult.

The last major improvement is that instead of having simple state forms like monarchy or democracy, you now can mix and match your own state form from 25 civics, sorted in 5 trees of 5 choices. These civics give different advantages, but also cost different amounts of upkeep.

Beyond simply playing Civilization IV, you can also spend a lot of time developing maps and "mods" for it. There is a world builder editor, you can modify data files in XML, and there is a simple script language named Python. The official website still doesn't offer much in the way of mods and maps, but sites like Apolyton or Civfanatics do.

I really do like Civilization IV. The only worry I have is about replayability. While the huge number of options is nice, the tech tree and general development of each civilization is always the same. And the game flow is very similar to how the previous games played, which makes it more likely that you tire from it earlier. But this is definitely a game I want to have in my game library to play occasionally.
- posted by Tobold @ 5:20 PM Permanent Link