wagedomain's Full Review: Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Gold Edition for Wind...
The first thing to be said about this game is that it will be very, very difficult for newcomers to jump into this game. It will be mildly difficult for even the most hardened of game veterans to jump into this game without reading the manual or online strategy guides.
I have divided this review up to address universal concerns, newcomer concerns, and fans of the series concerns.
Newcomers to the series
Sid Meier's Civilization IV is the fourth in a popular series of turn-based strategy games. You do not need to play the previous three games, as each is an entirely new game, essentially they are just remakes with new rules, technology, graphics, etc. The fourth is by far the best of the series, though purists may enjoy some of the older ones for nostalgic value. This game takes everything good about the series and improves it, and removes all the tedium to provide a wonderful gaming experience.
The best way to think about this game is to think of it as a board game. Many people fall into the trap of thinking of it as a real-time game, where everything happens at once instead of turn-by-turn, player-by-player. This also means that sometimes yes, a helicopter may get killed by a knight, which makes no sense in real life, but makes perfect sense in terms of the gameplay.
The game takes you from one single unit to a sprawling civilization, which can take anywhere from 2 hours to 8 hours depending on the type of game you choose to play. The game is made up of from 2 civilizations to 31 civilizations inhabiting one world map, each of which is made up of units and cities. Cities are the meat and potatoes of the game, because they generate money, technology research, more units, and ultimately other cities.
Each turn, units can move so many tiles on the map, a city produces a certain amount of gold and research points, and each unit can fight an enemy unit once (some twice with special abilities). As a turn is complete, time moves forward so many years, up to 100 at the beginning of the game, 1 at the end. As time goes on, research points pour into a technology of your choosing, and when you discover it you gain new abilities, units, and buildings to build in your cities. You can also upgrade older units. You will probably find while playing that an average game has units appropriate with the approximate time period the year represents, for example in 1400 you will probably get knights.
The game has multiple victory scenarios. You can play until 2050 and see who has the highest score, or be the first to build a spaceship and launch it towards Alpha Centuari. You build spaceships by researching specific technologies and then using cities to build the available spaceship parts. There are many required to win. Another way to win is the more traditional "destroy everyone else", of course. You can also win by building 3 cities with maxed out "culture", or by having a certain amount of land under your control using cities and your nation's border. Another victory condition is diplomatic, by building the United Nations and then having a certain percentage of the world elect you leader.
To clarify, culture is generated by a city with specific improvements and each city generates culture each turn. The culture slowly fills a bar, and when the bar is full, the borders of the city expand. Borders show a physical boundary of your territory, and helps limit where the computer-controlled civilizations can walk without declaring war on you.
As I said, this game is not for beginners. That sets up the basic game, there are a lot more advanced ideas as well, such as religion, diplomacy, tech trading, strategic resources, bonus resources, economic management, embargos, alliances, famous people, and more. If you read all that and think "dang, I want to know more!" then read on! If not, this game may not be for you.
Universal concerns
The graphics are a 3-dimensional isometric view, that is zoomable. In fact, you can zoom out to see the entire globe, or all the way in to a single tile. Screenshots of the game do not do it justice, as the world is a lively, animated place.
The ambience in general is really refreshing. Each diplomatic action with another nation plays music from the other person's background. For example, if you talk to Louis XIV, French-style music will play. Worldmap music is not really notable, which is a positive thing for background music during such a thought-heavy game. There is also music for each civilizations cities. When you zoom close to a city, music related to their nationality plays softly. The closer you get, the louder the music gets.
Walking around on the world map, instantly it can be said that units are animated. They walk, they shuffle, they attack. Walking into and out of forests sometimes yields a neat animation of scattering birds, as well. Resources such as elephants and deer are animated as well, walking around on their tile. They do not wander the map, but stay on the same tile.
Gameplay is satisfying in single-player, as mentioned earlier ranging from short, quick 2-hour matches to long extended 8-hour+ "epic" setting games. Some turns are very quick, merely waiting for things to get done. Other turns are long, micromanaging your empire and moving your army around the map.
Multiplayer can also be very satisfying, but is unfortunately unbalanced. Only one type of victory condition is really viable, and that is to kill everyone else. Most multiplayer matches use the team game option, so you have permanent allies throughout the game. There are many multiplayer options, such as play by email, and hotseat (same computer, everyone just switches places when it's their turn), and traditional online play.
Veterans of the series
Changes to the game from CivIII greatly improve the game. Gone are the days of plopping cities all over the place and setting research to 0% right away to generate income and buy techs. Corruption(production) is gone, and replaced by a new type of maintenance. Instead of losing production the farther the city is from the capital, it simply increases in cost but produces the same number of hammers. This means it's better to plop down fewer cities farther apart and make them specialized, rather than building tons of cities with no buildings to reduce cost.
Religion has been introduced, and adds a whole new angle. Religions are founded by the first person to discover certain technologies, and offer bonuses. The bonuses are neutral across all religions, so as not to offend anyone, a tactful touch by the game developers. Instead they offer extra happiness in each city in your empire as long as they match your national religion. You can change the national religion whenever you want, but only to discovered religions. They also offer cash bonuses, since they open up new wonders of the world that give +1 gold per turn for each city that has the religion.
Religions spread to other cities on their own, through trade routes, and also by placing missionaries (a new unit type) in other cities. The benefit of this, besides the cash bonus already mentioned, is that a civilization that has a majority of a religion in their empire will switch to your religion. Besides spreading even further, this also increases your relations between them. This also leads to some really really fun "holy war" scenarios, especially when all 10 or so civs in a game are split 50/50 between two different religions, and then all go to war.
The map sizes were rumored to be smaller than in civ 3, but this is definitely not true. The sizes are much higher in terra maps, a new map type. In fact, instead of 3 random-map generating scripts, the new game has 21. This means a huge huge huge variety of maps can be generated, from terra (earth-like with two major landmasses, all civilizations start on one and colonize the other) to archipelaego and more.
The other major change that will probably be most interesting to veterans is the combat change. Gone are the days of spearmen killing tanks, for sure. Sometimes unexpected battles are lost, but it is rare and almost never as extreme. Instead of an attack and defense score, each unit has one single "power" number. Warriors are 1, Archers 2, etc. This means warriors have strength 1 for both attack AND defense. Tanks have a ridiculously high number, like 40 or so, and so a Spearman with strength 4 could almost never, IF ever, kill a tank.
Battles are much more chess-like than before. Let me explain what I mean by that, bear with me here. Units DO have an advantage attacking or defending, but not based on power score. Instead, each unit can be "promoted" in a similar fashion to RPG games. Experience points gather and at 2 exp points, a unit reaches level 2. They can pick one single promotion each level they gain, and it can significantly change the outcome of a battle. At level two, units can pick Combat 1, City Raider 1, or Woodsman 1, granting respectfully a +10% combat bonus, +25% combat bonus when attacking a city, and +25% defense in woods or jungle. So if a warrior of power 1 had Combat 1, he would fight with a power of 1.1 and have greater odds both attacking and defending. Getting back to the chess analogy, some units come with custom promotions, such as "+25% against melee units". This means there is paper-rock-scissor aspect to the game, only with tons of units. It is kind of like chess in that respect. One unit type is strong against another but weak against a different one.
Another REALLY helpful touch is that if you right-click to move a unit, and then mouse over an enemy, it will display "combat odds", or odds of you winning that battle. This is a really helpful tool for planning battles, and an amazing addition to civ games.
Wonder movies are back in this game, as well as religion movies and an intro and victory movie. Another excellent touch is that the flavor text on the technology screen when you discover a new tech is read by Leonard Nimoy himself.
The scenarios included in the game are somewhat enjoyable as well, but better scenarios are found in the expansion.
Bugs and issues
The game had many bugs at launch, most of which are memory leak issues. They do cripple gameplay, causing lockups and in some cases restarts. However, with a completely patched game, most, if not all, of these issues are fixed, including many performance issues that were originally reported.
The game has somewhat high system-requirements, so if you have a "weak" computer, make sure you can run it before purchasing it.
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