Sid Meier's Civilization IV

The Good
Review: 3nd Update.
Game version: v1.0.0.
Tech Specs Used: Intel Dual Core 2 1.86 Ghz Processor, 1GB Memory, 256MB NVIDIA 7300 LE Video Card.
Level Difficulty Played: Immortal
World Map used: Pangaea
Map Size used: Huge, Large and finally Standard.
Game Speed used: Epic.
Race used: India, Asoka (don't need to upgrade fast workers)
Time Played: You don’t want to know…

So now comes the long awaited Civilization 4. Considering all three series were a success in my personal opinion, I had no doubt to what Civilization 4 had to offer. I was wrong. But again, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Graphics
No doubt, its graphically superior. Very much similar to Pirates!, so you may have an idea about the graphics displayed here: detailed and yet somewhat cartoon feel. Nothing going wrong in the graphics/art department as far as I'm concerned. Well, almost nothing...

Music
From all of the Civ series, this game definitely the best music soundtrack, if not one of the best game music soundtracks I've heard in a very long time. The trivia section in MG mentions that the opening theme (the obviously best music in the game) is in Swahili...and man, those Swahili can sing! The composition of that particular soundtrack alone deserves an award! And I thought the Lion King sound track was good.

The game like its predecessors is still pretty much addictive as hell. Exploration and finding that perfect spot for your next city will occupy the first very several hours (or days) of game play. Depending on your level difficulty played, you will probably have to fight of those irritating raging barbarians that seem to show up out of nowhere on the map. But to my professional opinion, although the bad doesn’t really out-weigh the good in the end, it does tend to shatter the hopes of fans of the series. Which I will explain in the bad section.

The Bad
Time for the bad...

Graphics
It’s not the graphics/art department's fault in this case. The problem is, the level of graphics in the game is a little too good for a strategy game. Usually veteran gamers may notice that if the graphics are good in one area of the game, it means something is lacking somewhere else…and boy you really notice where its lacking, if that is you’ve played Civilization 1, 2 and 3.

Hey Sid Meier? You did a hell of a good job with Pirates! (despite the lack of a storyline), why the hell didn't you do the same with Civilization 4?

You really notice the good graphics (despite the lack of an intro movie…though Nimoy's not-so-pleasant voice while loading is very much noticeable, at least to me – and me being a Star Trek fan). Note: Thanks Ben Shadwick for pointing this out, thought it was Sid, not Nimoy. The main map, you have all those detailed animations, smooth graphics, while wondering how this will effect overall game, since something this graphical is bound to take up a lot of memory. But we’ll talk about that later.

Now I’m all for graphics like in previous Civilization games, but the thing is, if your familiar with the series as well as Alpha Centauri, you notice a lot of things missing:

• No Eye-Candy for Personal Achievements
  Remember in Civilization 1 (and 2? Dunno about 3) you can upgrade your palace and stuff? They took that away. There is nothing graphical about your personal achievements. The only animation movies going on is when you create World Wonders. And not much audio historical background about that either. In fact, the only animations (cut-scenes) are only about World Wonders…as if everything in Civilization revolved around that and only that.
• No Eye-Candy for Cities
  One unique feature in all Civilization games (excluding this one) was you could see the not-so-little buildings of your city from your city screen. In another of Sid Meier’s games for example, Colonization, new buildings would be shown being built (its just shows appears slowly in the city screen), giving you a sense of accomplishment in city development. Some genius brilliantly removed that feature of “city accomplishment”, replaced by minor information that X building has been built in Y city. Now looking at your city screen is very much boring since there isn’t much eye candy to see. No close-ups, no nothing. If you don’t feel you love the city, you really can’t feel to love the whole game either.
• No Eye-Candy for Technology Advancements
  I remember in Alpha Centauri each technology advance provides a minor movie, thus giving you some form of entertainment while you watch and listen to words of wisdom. This is now replaced by (still) very good quotations from famous people/sources but narrated by Leonard Nimoy’s (to my personal subjective opinion) not so charming voice.

Overall, they focused the graphics too much on the primary game play and not enough features anywhere else. I said it once, I’ll say it again. Please do not take away little things that fans have learned to love.

Educational Value and In-game Documentation
It's still there, but less than it used to be. The in-game help menu somewhat sucks, since half of it is more clicking on pictures. There isn't any info on military units, just its statistics, no background. You get the feeling at one point, this game was for pre-school children (considering all the yummy graphics and click-able pictures), but not for that hardcore Civ-Gamer that wastes months of his or her life playing this game.

The help menu sucks, I still have no idea what "First Strike" means in combat, I still don’t understand how my Longbowmen can get beaten by a Warrior, I still don’t get why I don’t get resource bonuses (not the special resource, but the terrain bonuses) when I build a city on a resource, I didn’t find info whether I should build cities on the coast or by the river or should it just be within development reach? Info on cities is too minimal, too many holes in the documentation to actually use it seriously. If you’re a veteran and hardcore strategy gamer, you know that you eat every information you can get just for an edge.

Memory Leaks and Heavy Specs
Another long awaited title down the drain. The next Civilization will probably be after they've discovered a graphic card for 4 Dimensions (whatever that is). Yikes, the tech specs of this game is downright irritating.

Before I played this game with my once upon a time before my new super computer, I played it with really low specs (really minimum requirements), here’s what happened…

The game loading is slow, the start new world is slow, the load game feature is slow (and slow is like more than 10-15 minutes here) Dang it, since when was "game loading" part of gameplay to a game? Don't quite understand why it takes so long to load? Black and White 2 is very stable in its graphics and much faster than Civ 4 (but then again, Lionhead Studios never once blundered in programming…Yay!), and it runs on 256 MB. I gave up Civ 4 (then) because of the loading time. After loading a save game around 5 times or more, the game gets REALLY slow. Sometimes the enemy leaders you talk to don't even have a face, it's like a blurry no graphics disorder. Even quitting the game is takes time. Well, probably because I prefer playing Large and Huge worlds, but I couldn't bother myself with Standard worlds...

The problem is solved after I totally upgraded my PC with the new specs now mentioned in the beginning of my review. But it still has problems. I checked the recommended specs, which I have totally fulfilled. The thing is, the only way I can get to play this game (almost) smoothly is if I play the Standard Map. When I played Huge, the game started to get slow (suspicious of memory leaks) near the World War I era. Same deal with Large. Play it too long, it sorta hangs on you. More than often the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) shows up or other crashes mentioning an error having to do with my memory card or something. This process tend to occur in Medieval to WWI times, and later. What’s going on? Do I really have to have the utmost expensive memory card and 2 GB of RAM just to enjoy this game to the fullest?

Combat
This is why Civilization 4 died. Remember in its previous games, you couldn't access an "area on control" or something like that, meaning you couldn't enter tile adjacent to the enemy. This means you can't sneak by the enemy. Thus, fortress built on tiles have a use. Another genius erased that feature, so you can just walk anywhere you like in enemy territory, don't mind the fact that the enemy has 20 tanks in that tile, you can just walk right pass them. This action ultimately killed any form of strategy in combat, since you can't really "guard" certain key geographical positions. It also rendered fortresses useless, unless of course you fortify an entire geographical line, which is of course inefficient.

Stupid. Real stupid.

I also noticed that you can move units in the same tile as neutral troops. I reckon this is due to problems in multiplayer (greedy players like me guarding passes and resources, hehe). But that was really fun, you could plan and guard areas. The only way to override that was to declare war. Which is perfectly logical. But they had to take that out to, since newbie gamers tend to whine a lot (then again, veterans still do too…hehe).

Resources, Lousy and Unbalanced Gameplay and Everything else
[Gold] This game focuses on one thing and one thing only. Gold. When you play the computer opponents, that’s all they do. Build hamlets and villages, paying little or no attention to other improvements. It’s just about gold. Hell, I once butchered a civilization to only one city and that civilization for some stupid reason still is more technologically advanced than mine? Why? Gold and certain civ choices. I mean seriously, I have 20 cities, that bloke has only 1 city. How in statistical probability theories can he still be more technologically advanced than me???

[Politically Biased] The game is a little biased on too more “western” type values. I mean, hell, the bloody communists and the fascists once upon a time where the most advanced nations in technology, now you tell me I have to be a “democracy” with emancipation to get the most bonuses in technology advancement? Come on…

[Time Errors] Thus, it is pretty obvious that something is amiss when you notice that the opponent starts the Apollo Project in 1870. What? And this is me playing the Epic game speed. The game is totally unbalanced. It’s the 21st century and I still have my War Elephants with me…only because I don’t have access to horses to upgrade them.

I always wondered why it takes 30-100 years or so just to create a Warrior unit the start of the game (BC). What do they do, have 1 working day and 6 holidays? Why can’t we enjoy those prehistoric times slowly? And why is it, all those civilizations in the world and you get to meet ALL of them during the stone age?

Why is this a problem? Simply because you have to work fast because a couple hundred years later (which is only several turns away), the roaming barbarians have archers and axemen knocking on your door (but never spearman).

[Resources] Speaking of resources, not every civilization has access to the resources they need. This is pretty useless for Egyptians, Russians, Mongols, Arabs, etc., whose unique units are horses…but no horses. This game focuses too much on the monopoly of resources…and its not really abundant. And correct me if I’m wrong, doesn’t it just make you MAD when you can’t access a certain resource, but the city is strategically perfect where you want it?

Thus, a find a location for a new city is always irritating. Which is always a problem for Civilization games (but not for Colonization and Alpha Centauri). Since some resources (like Iron and Copper) cannot be seen until you have the technology, it’s a bummer when you create a city that doesn’t reach that resource or if you accidentally built it right on top of one…which you don’t get bonuses either. Mountains don’t give you resources and one thing they still haven’t fixed, building cities by the ocean without resources is still not advisable. Funny that this game still hasn’t figured out that creating a city by the ocean SHOULD be faster than creating a city in the middle of a forest. Apparently not.

I don't know. Civilization just doesn't have that "edge" it use to have. Every time a game relies the graphics of be the "edge" it goes down in the pits. Well, there goes Civilization 4, Master of Orion 3 all down the drain. I hope they don't ruin the remake of Alpha Centauri...if they decide to make it again.

The Bottom Line
Make sure you have 1 GB of memory, despite what the minimum and recommended requirements of the game suggest. You may need 2 GB of memory to fully experience the Large and Huge maps, and darn expensive video card.

Still addictive, but this series is no longer for the mature audience and veteran fans of Civ.

The Good
There is a nice introductory cinematic, although that’s probably not why you bought this game.

More importantly, there is a thick spiral-bound paper manual that should come standard with every PC game of this type. There is also a solid tutorial, narrated by Sid Meier himself, to help you get started.

Personally, I had no performance issues in running the game. I also have a newer computer, so that really just means the game is running as it should be. Multiplayer is included from the start this time, which is nice I guess, although I don’t really think multiplayer is what turn-based strategy gamers are most concerned with anyway.

Finally, I appreciate the inclusion of built-in updater. If we are going to be forced to download numerous patches to make our PC games playable, the least these companies can do is make it easier for us!

The Bad
I find it hard to express in mere words how much I feel let down by Civ 4, but I will try anyway.

In his design notes to Civ 2, Brian Reynolds talked about the trepidation he felt in tackling the sequel to the best game ever. He knew that it was already a fantastic game, and that it mainly needed tweaking at the margins. You know: more stuff, more user configurability, and so forth—but for godsakes, no major changes should be made that would break the game. Soren Johnson and the other Firaxians who worked on Civ 4 must not have read Brian’s notes, because they obviously shared none of that reverence for the classic Civ. Not a single opportunity to make changes to the design, big or small, has been missed. You’d hope that they would have at least made sure that most changes were for the better, but alas, that isn’t the case.

Previous Civ installments have had nice musical soundtracks. This game repeats a lot of the old ones, although it adds an incredibly annoying “world music” theme to the title screen. The first of many changes that is not an improvement...

The manual seems disorganized, as if the author kept getting ahead of himself and then returning to where he left off. As the game originally shipped, the Civilopedia was poorly laid out (they may have fixed this some in the updates, I’m not really sure). Since the manual and official strategy guide both leave a lot to be desired, the lack of user-friendliness in the Civilopedia was definitely NOT a good thing.

The game interface is frankly a mess. In order to make the graphics stand out, they have reduced the buttons to tiniest icons possible. The result is that they are all both hard to see and click on. You can mouse over them to get a description in words, but more text would have been helpful.

Graphically, I find the game to be thoroughly unappealing. The charming 2D graphics of past installments have been replaced by some very ugly, blocky 3D character models. Units are now represented as groups rather than single individuals, which adds absolutely nothing to gameplay—except maybe for some confusion as to how many units you’ve really got. Seeing stuff is generally hard in this game. You need to zoom in on units and cities to make your moves, but you also need to zoom out to get the bigger picture of your empire. I’ve spent a lot of my time with Civ 4 zooming in and out instead of actually playing. Yuck.

As for the substance, all of the elegance and simplicity of the original design has been jettisoned in favor of new stuff that may or may not add anything to the game. We used to have Improvements and Wonders; now we have Great Wonders, Small Wonders, Projects, Buildings, and Tile Improvements (phew!). Now this is a lot to absorb and keep track of, but it could still be worth it is the stuff was really compelling or added a lot to the old gameplay. In my humble opinion, nothing that’s new here adds to the depth of the game enough to justify its inclusion.

This thought keeps popping up in my head regardless of the game element. Civics? Yes, it sounds cool to be able to build your own government types, and it’s actually one of the better changes they made to the game. Still, I don’t think it really adds much. The same goes for religion. It’s a neat idea on paper, but it seems mainly to add “stuff” to the game without changing the underlying dynamic much at all. It’s really not too different from Culture. At least they didn’t break the game with these changes.

The military dimension, on the other hand, has been reduced to total crap. The old system of offensive and defensive unit values worked fine, but they scrapped it in favor of what appears to be a simpler system of just one unit value. However, you discover that there is not just one unit value, but a unit value modified by a plethora of other values! I’ve spent a long time studying the new system, and I honestly still don’t get it. It’s a complicated mess of counters, rule exceptions, and special abilities. A simple rock-paper-scissors dynamic (a la the archers-knights-barbarians of Ancient Art of War) might have been ok, but this system is just over the top.

And don’t get me started on the unit promotions system that adds even more confusion to the mix. Units that earn experience are now eligible for promotions, which work sort of like another tech tree, except that it only applies to individual units. (Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to collect military experience and distribute upgrades on a global basis?). So now you have to micromanage the development of your individual units in addition to your cities. Deeper? Maybe. Realistic? Hell no. Fun? I think not! It also stinks that they removed some of the better civ-specific units like the Man-O-War and F-15 Strike Eagle and replaced them with less interesting units.

At bottom, the whole game lacks a sense of artistic quality or historical seriousness. Everything has been made “cooler” at the expense of smarts, beauty, and authenticity. The wretched influence of real-time strategy gaming is very apparent here. It’s in 3D, you zoom the camera, the little men run around and do things, ahistorical units are included simply because they are supposedly fun to play around with (axemen, macemen, grenadiers, etc.). The content value is also significantly lower here than in Civ 2 and Civ 3. A lot of the legitimately good stuff from those games is simply missing here. I’m assuming this is so they can dribble out two or three commercial expansions over the next few years filled with content that could easily have been included in the original game. As it stands, I don’t see why you’d want to buy or play an incomplete Civ 4 when Civ’s 1-3 are finished products that are already widely available—at a much lower price.

The Bottom Line
I bought Civ 2 and Civ 3 on pure faith in Sid Meier, and I was not disappointed. Civ 4, however, is the biggest letdown I’ve ever had as a gamer. It seems to be unbalanced, underdeveloped, and just plain uninspired. Clearly the franchise needs to be given a rest. I doubt that even the inevitable two or three expansion packs can save it.

The Good
Civilization 4 adds in many new gameplay concepts and almost all of them work well.

Civics are my favorite improvement to the game. This is an idea that first appeared in the great Alpha Centauri. In earlier versions of Civ, you could only change your government to change the way your civilization functioned. In Civ 4, you can pick your civilization's values and organization from up to 5 different categories, depending on your technological development. This is the first Civ where you can choose a socialist democratic government (Universal Suffrage + Free Speech + Free Religion + State Property), a Republic at war (Representation + Nationalism + Free Markets + Free Religion) or a Monarchical throwback (Hereditary Rule + Serfdom + Vassalage + Theocracy).

Another great innovation is the idea of Great People. Great People are created by the specialists in your cities. Each specialist adds a specialized production bonus plus a small amount of great people points to your pool. Once you get a certain number of points, the great person is born. The number of points you need to create each successive great person increases by a lot over the course of the game, but you can add to your pool for that city with wonders and certain other buildings.

Great People can give you all sorts of interesting options. You can use two or more great persons to start a Golden Age. All Great People can help you research new technologies. Each Great Person also has a unique ability of its own, such as the Great Engineer's ability to hurry buildings and the Great Merchant's ability to generate large amounts of cash from trade. Finally, if you have no better use for the Great Person, you can just add him to the city to add very nice bonuses to your production.

Controlling your units is also easier than in previous Civ games. Stacking units is no longer awkward like in previous Civs, and the automatic worker options also are easier to deal with. The addition of helpful icons showing you everything that a unit can do is helpful, and makes it possible to play the game entirely with the mouse. The game even will make good suggestions on where to settle your next city when you are moving settlers around.

Military units are a lot more interesting with the addition of customizable upgrades. Each time a unit wins a battle, it gains experience. Once you get enough experience, you can pick from a wide variety of useful upgrades such as: improved unit strength, improving your unit's strength vs a particular type of unit, improving your unit's defense and movement in a particular set of terrain types, improving the healing rate of the unit, and so on. These improvements allow you to really customize your army to fight your enemies. You will have to do this, too, because many units have built-in bonuses that are particularly nasty vs. common units. (For example, the Axeman is only strength 5 to the Swordman's 6, but it gets a 50% advantage vs melee units)

Another nice change in Civ 4 from Civ 3 is that siege units actually matter. Cities are assigned a defensive bonus based on both improvements (such as city walls) and their culture rating. Unless you have much better military technology than your enemy, you will lose many city fights unless you bring in the artillery to bombard the city's defenses. Siege weapons are also great because they do collateral damage to all units in a stack. So after you bombard the defenses away from a city, you can then send in your artillery to weaken the stack of units defending the city.

The game rewards you for building mixed and flexible forces rather than hordes of one good unit. This tends to make combats a lot more strategic and interesting, and it enables the underdog to sometimes fight off a much stronger unit if they are smart about what they build.

Diplomacy is much improved. The computer now tells you why it is mad or happy with you, which lets you take steps to improving your relations rather than just guessing.

Finally, even though I prefer the single-player game, multiplayer support is not only included in the initial release, but it is much improved from the mediocrity that was Civ 3: Play the World. There are a wide variety of custom settings that are fun to try in multiplayer (such as the duel-sized maps that have the same resources on each side).

The Bad
Sadly, all of the improvements in Civ 4 come at a huge cost in resource consumption. My computer is not new, but Civ 4 is the first game in the series which will crash on me regularly on the default settings, especially while playing Wonder movies. Even after deleting all of the Wonder movies so the game would be stable, I still cannot play on the largest map size, even with 512MB RAM.

It is a good thing that Firaxis made the Update tool so easy to use, because the game is nearly unplayable out of the box until you patch it to version 1.52. This version fixes most of the most egregious errors, from poor memory management to the badly organized Civilopedia index. (In the shipping version, the index has graphic icons but no text! Arrgh!)

The addition of Religion to the game is a mixed bag. Overall, I like what it adds to the game, but I hate the fact that I always seem to end up with Buddhism or Hinduism as my main religion, which just seems wrong when you are Saladin, King of the Arab Empire. Also, religion in the late game is almost never worth it. You don't want the Persians nuking you just because your religion conflicts with theirs, even though you have been at peace for 2000 years. Free Religion is almost a requirement late in the game, since it removes religious hatred. Too bad you can't just decide to piss everyone off and be Atheist!

The gameplay speeds are also a mixed bag. I like the ability to finish a game in 3 hours on the Quick setting, but the game just feels way too rushed. Early wars take hundreds or thousands of years on the Quick setting, and you usually don't discover even up to Computers until the 21st century. The Normal setting is more reasonable for single-player mode.

A lot of little things annoy me. The list of default civs does not include a civ for every combination of special powers. Where are the Philosophical Industrialists? The computer opponents still tend to gang up on the human player, even though they have much better targets closer to home. The AI can be very obtuse during trading even though your relations are good with them and the trade would be mutually beneficial.

The Bottom Line
Civ 4 is a greatly improved and expanded version of Civ 3. The gameplay is much more varied, subtle, and less random than in previous Civ games, and multiplayer is finally included in the first release. Civ 4 is buggy and a resource hog, but if you patch the game you will most likely have a better gaming experience (although much higher in difficulty) than in previous versions of Civilization and its imitators.