kjell1979's Full Review: Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Gold Edition for Wind...
For years I avoided the Civilization games for the same reason I avoided World of Warcraft. I just was afraid that I might get sucked into the game too much that I would end up losing sleep. Lawns would go unmowed. Electricity bills would rise. Yeah I was right.
Gameplay
Civilization IV is the fourth installment in Sid Meier's Civilization series; the flagship franchise of an already impressive library of games. The premise of Civilization is simple: to beat your opponents to one of a handful of "victory conditions" before they have a chance to do the same. What is a victory condition? It can be to wipe all the other civilizations off the map, launch a space shuttle, be unanimously elected as the UN Secretary General, or to simply have the highest score when the year reaches 2100 AD.
You start by founding your first city. Your city allows you to build different units and buildings within the city. Units can be used for military purposes, diplomatic purposes, or to improve the tiles surrounding your city. The placement of your city is critical as the surrounding tiles determine how successful your city is. Each tile has a value in terms of food, production, and commerce. In addition, certain tiles can produce goods that can improve your city's health, happiness, or provide you a resource to build buildings faster or produce more powerful military units. Allowing your city to grow as you found more cities and expand your borders is critical is a careful balancing act, which is one of the most central gameplay mechanics behind Civilization IV.
Civilization IV is a turn based game and the idea is to improve your civilization the best you can in the least amount of turns possible. Improving tiles around your city allows it to work more efficiently. For instance, the more hammers that appear near your city means you can produce buildings and units. More food production allows your city to grow more, while more coins allows you to generate more money and research new technologies faster. Technology also plays a huge role in Civilization IV. It allows you to advance your society via a tech tree. Learning the wheel allows you to build roads. Animal husbandry allows you to find horses on the map, and also allows you to research horseback riding. Technologies allow you to build more powerful units, open up the ability to contruct different buildings and wonders.
Wonders are a special kind of building in that they provide a great benefit. There are two different kinds of wonders in Civilization IV: National and World Wonders. National wonders can be build in any city, however you're only allowed two different National Wonders per city. World wonders are unique to each game. Only one person can build the pyramids or the great wall. World wonders tend to have an even greater benefit like opening up different styles of government to allow you to access a specific victory condition.
In Civilization you play as a specific leader who has two traits which give him or her an advantage over the other players. For instance, some earn additional commerce from certain tiles, while others can generate military units with experience or even certain upgrades already in place. Selecting a leader can in some ways determine what kind of victory you hope to accomplish and what playing style you're going use. For example one can expect to go to war a lot if Genghis Khan is your neighbor.
There any many ways to approach a specific game. You can play a militaristic style whereby you construct a lot of military units and declare war on many of the other players on the map. Military units receive experience the more it defeats other units. Experience leads to leveling up which allows your unit to do special things like attack twice or increase their power. Using this style isn't all that easy as Civilization IV is very defensive oriented. It is very hard to capture a city, but you can destroy your opponents' tile improvements in order to send their economy into turmoil.
Playing in a peaceful manner can also be just as rewarding. Helping out your neighbors results in stronger alliances. While you still must maintain a military in some capacity, your diplomatic ties help to discourage war either through friendship with your neighbors or because you have a defensive alliance with a couple other leaders.
There are a few other gameplay mechanics which factor into Civilization IV. You can found a religion whereby you can then construct missionaries to spread your religion and thus form stronger ties with your neighbor. You can construct spies that can perform espionage missions to either peacefully temper an ally's contempt for you or to forcefully sabotage their cities and tile improvements. You can also enact civics that formulates the makeup of your society. For instance, the more technology you discover the more civics become available to you. Civics can determine your government, law system, commerce and even your religious direction. Different civics can put a drain on your city's commerce based on their upkeep cost, but can provide benefits depending on your style of play. Finally, Civilization IV has what are called great people. There are a few different kinds of great people. You can have a great merchant, great profit, great engineer, or great artist. With the expansion packs, different types of great people open up as well. Great people can do one of a few different things. They can discover technology, create unique buildings, or join your city to improve research, commerce, or culture. Certain type of great people can do unique things as well. For instance a great engineer can complete a building in one turn. This can allow you to complete a World Wonder well before your adversaries. A great merchant can travel to another city and generate a large lump sum of gold for you. These great people are very powerful and can turn the tide of a game very quickly.
The funny thing about Civilization IV is that multiplayer takes more away from the gameplay than it does to play with the computer. For instance, against the computer you can play a peaceful game without getting involved with any wars. The Space Race, Diplomatic, or Cultural victories are all within your grasp because the computer will allow you to legitimately achieve them. However, against human players the only true victories are domination, annihilation, or time victory. The reason is because whenever a player is about to launch the space shuttle or is working on their 3rd epic cultural city, the other players will declare war on them and they will inevitably lose. Similarly, if you build the UN or Apostolic Palace, no one will vote for you because that will essentially concede defeat. So it forces you to build an army and duke it out with your neighbors.
Performance and System Requirements
Unlike the world of console gaming, not every computer is the same. With a fully patched Civilization IV, it runs decently on Pentium IV 1.4 GHz computers and faster with at least 1GB of RAM which is what I would consider the recommended system requirements. The stated minimum system requirements state that you only need a half gig of RAM and a 64 bit video card and a processor speed of roughly 1.3 GHz. I've also found that on these computers that push the minimum system requirements, the larger the map, the longer it takes for the computer to evaluate the changes between turns on larger map sizes. However, this is also an issue on machines twice as fast.
In addition to that, I had to turn off movies because they caused me to get booted from the game back to the desktop. Reinstalling the patch fixes this temporarily in case the opening movie boots you as well. However, it's something to consider.
Finally, if you're using a computer that has heating issues, make sure to have a backup solution when you play. For instance, I have a small fan that I have running when I play on my laptop because when it gets too hot, everything gets really choppy.
Controls
The tried and true mouse and keyboard reign supreme here. Most movement actions are handled via right click operations, while double clicking on cities or units bring up secondary displays. The keyboard more or less allows you to perform common actions quickly than you would normally. There are also other control schemes that can be changed in the settings such as allowing the right click to open up a action menu instead of automatically moving units. Overall the controls are solid. I would have preferred to see more customization from the control scheme, but the lack of it doesn't hurt my impression of the game overall.
Graphics
The graphics in Civilization IV aren't anything spectacular. While they are much more refined and fluid compared to previous Civilization installments, Civilization IV doesn't push the boundaries of graphical maturity in PC games. Most leaders take on a cartoon-like visual nature. Units and tiles all seem to possess the graphics of a game produced 8 years ago. The cutscenes themselves look good, but they also look very similiar, if not a little sharper, than the Civilization games from years past. My only real complaint about the graphics as it relates to the gameplay is that sometimes it's hard to recognize a resource on a specific tile if there's an improvement built over it, and even less so if a unit is placed on it. Overall the graphics aren't terribly important in Civilization IV.
Sound
I liked the audio in Civilization IV. While it's not anything to rival that of the great musical compositions from the console world, the audio really flows together in a practical aspect. The music has more of a classical feel and changes depending on your character and what era you're playing in. The sound effects are also practical as well. Units seem to utter in their native dialect or at least something close to it. Certain tiles produce sounds depending on their characteristics. Events also have distinct sounds that really tune you into the game. Since there's so much going on in Civilization IV, you really come to rely on the sounds as a guide to what's going on in the game, especially if you're having trouble keeping up with the game log messages. The only thing that's really missing is extensive voice acting. It would be fantastic to be dressed down by Napoleon or Lincoln if you decided to foolishly wage war on them. But overall the audio is nothing spectacular, but it's really solid from a strictly practical point of view.
Replay
The replay value of Civilization is vast. A single game might take between 8 and 20 hours to complete depending on the game speed setting. I ended up playing a dozen games in the couple months I've been playing this. Part of the reason you're driven back to the game over and over is because of the learning curve involved with learning the basics and the more advanced features of the game. Even after 8 games and almost 100 hours spent with the game, I was still learning about certain features like espionage and corporations.
Another huge factor that plays into the replay value is that Firaxis encourages modding to the game. Modding can include changing the value of certain tiles, adding a resource or unit, or changing a trait of a leader. But it can also include more involved tasks like adding leaders, cutscenes, or victory conditions. Modding is made accessible because it's all made up of easily edited or added XML and Python code. Even if XML and Python isn’t your thing, you can benefit from the expertise and creativity of others by loading their mods.
In order to get the most out of your Civilization IV experience, you're best off getting the Beyond the Sword expansion pack. It adds in many different units and concepts that have since become mainstream when playing Civilization IV.
Overall Civilization IV might be the best computer game I have ever played. While I am not as well versed with the entire history of the Civilization franchise, Civilization IV certainly turned me into a hardcore fan.
ESRB Rating: E10+ - Everyone 10+Genre: StrategyFeatures: Classic Game Design: The strategy classic is rebuilt with improved visuals while retaining t...More at Newegg.com
Welcome to Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization®. Colonization is a game of discovery, conquest and revolution. It chronicles the European col...More at NVIDIA
Sid Meier's Civilization is back in its latest incarnation in Civilization 4. Lead your civilization through history from 4000BC to 2050 AD. Civilizat...More at Meijer
Civilization IV Brand New DVD With over 6 million units sold and unprecedented critical acclaim from fans and press around the world, Sid Meiers Civil...More at eBay
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.