Having now canceled my last remaining MMO (LOTRO), I have been looking around for other games to play. Even before canceling it, having gotten to that pre-cancelation stage where I am not able to stay logged in for hours on end, but still want to do some gaming, I started searching for, and found, a good one: Civilization IV. Now, I had not played Civ III, but I had played Civs I and II and really enjoyed them years ago, so I expected good things from the game, and also had a basic intuitive understanding of the game’s main elements. I’ve leaned toward real-time strategy (RTS) rather than turn-based strategy (TBS) games of late, but I thought it might be fun to have a change of pace. This review may seem a little untimely, as it has been a couple of years since Civ IV was initially released, and I am only reviewing the vanilla version of it (I’ve not yet gotten around to buying expansions). However, I can only review a game when I actually play it, and I thought it would be worth posting a more positive review here, since many of my more recent ones have been largely negative. This isn’t to say that I don’t think those negative reviews are justified — they absolutely are, and if anything I feel more strongly about games like Spore now than I did when reviewing them. But it’s also as important to help steer people toward quality offerings as it is to warn them of the caveats of the poorer titles.
Civilization has been around for years in computer games. I think the first Civilization game came out in the mid-90s, followed by Civ II a little later. I played the first one on my 486-33 MHz computer (and it ran well), and the second, I believe, on either that one or possibly my Pentium I-75. I never played Civilization III, beause not long after getting tired of II, I started to develop more of an interest in the RTS (as I said above). For the last decade or so, almost all my strategy gaming has been of the RTS variety. The main reason for this was that RTSes provided faster games (1-2 hours rather than 10+), and also had more interesting animations to watch in most cases. However, the TBS games have caught up in the graphics area (though they will never be RTSes), and the fact remains that most RTS games are shallow and uninteresting once you remove all the fancy visuals.
I was surprised at how well the Civilization I mechanics have worn over the years. Certainly there have been many tweaks and changes since Civilization first came onto the market, but the basic, fundamental game is still very similar. You start with a tribe of settlers (whose only function is to found a city when you find a good site) and either a scout or a warrior to help you explore. You slowly push back the “unexplored” blackness and the “fog of war” as your civilization expands, and you meet and interact with other civilization leaders (run by the game’s Artificial Intelligence, hereafter “AI”). You can either trade and be nice to them or you can try to take them over culturally (by spreading your religion and culture) or by force. As your civilization grows you will have to manage your economy, make sure you are producing improvements and military units at the necessary rate, and invest in research to gain new technologies. In the end you can win by either being the first to build an interstellar rocket, by conquering your foes, by being elected “Pesident of the World” through the U.N., or by getting three cities to become “legendary” in cultural status. Which one of these you decide to do impacts the strategy you will have as the game unfolds. If you are the first to reach one of these victory conditions, you are declared the winner, and then given a score and a rating on the scale of historical leaders.
Visuals – 8/10
The graphics and visual effects of the game are good, but not outstanding. The terrain features look reasonably smooth, and the units look good at whatever zoom you care to use. The animations look fine, but are not mind-blowing. Basically the units have one or two “attack move” animations that they will use, and a “dying” move if they get wiped out. There is nothing spectacular here in the visual area but nothing to complain about. Special effects are minimal, but appropriate. You won’t see laser beams blasting across the battle field, but as this is a realistic setting on our Earth, you really shouldn’t see those either.
Sound – 9/10
The sound effects and music of the game are good. I very much appreciate some of the classical music scores that you hear after you obtain certain techs and get into the appropriate age (Rennaisance), including some wonderful sections of Beethoven’s symphonies. Gaining technologies gets you a quote from a famous person such as Churchill or Aristotle, and the voice-overs for these are done by none other than Leonard Nimoy, who does a great job on them. Individual units “speak” much the way they do in a typical RTS game, usually in what at least sounds like their own real world language (German for the German units; Latin for the Roman units; etc) — though I don’t know whether they’re speaking anything coherent in the non-English languages. Battle sounds are good, if nothing to write home about, and sounds for things like gaining wonders, changing ages, etc, are all good. This is not a game that makes me want to turn the sound off and substitute my own soundtrack (as many do), so I’m happy with the audio part of the game.
Gameplay/Strategy – 8/10
The game-play in Civ IV is engaging and about as deep as you find in most TBS, and much deeper than you will find in an RTS (for obvious reasons). There are many ways to play, from ruthless warmonger to peaceful diplomat. Many elements from turn to turn conspire to force you to think on your feet and react properly — to other civs, to changes in your own society such as disgruntled citizens, to the layout of the terrain. Even accomplishing a simple “rush” such as the “Axe Rush” (where one builds a bunch of axe-men and sends them after a neighboring civilization very early on in the hope of gaining an early lead) requires thought and planning. As the difficulty level increases, opposing civilizations become increasingly more difficult to please, and increasingly likely to launch a war that will, if not damage your empire, at least slow it down sufficiently that other non-warring civilizations may gain an insurmountable lead. This is something I enjoy about the TBS game: the complexity can be ramped up because you have an unlimited amount of time to think and plan and execute your strategies (as opposed to only minutes or sometimes seconds in an RTS).
However, the linchpin of any strategy game, as I have said in other reviews on this site, is the artificial intelligence (AI) — the programming that allows the computer to use what looks like strategic skill to a human player (no computer can use true strategy, as that requires thought; but computers can be programmed to mimic it rather closely if this is done well). Unfortunately, there are no real advances in this area. Indeed players on the third-party forums devoted to the game frequently discuss how easy it is to defeat the AI militarily, or to trick it into giving them blindingly stupid deals in trades. Increasing the difficulty, as is traditionally the case with these games, does not improve the game’s strategic skill. Instead, raising the difficulty level just gives the game more and more license to cheat. For example, an enemy civilization might be given a free technology (that it has not researched) every so many turns. I have always viewed this sort of “difficulty increase” as a rather poor cheat, and I’m not impressed that Civ IV still does this. It’s equivalent to the hard levels of a chess game forcing you to start off with less and less pieces than the computer does. This undoubtedly would make the game harder, but is it really making the game harder in the proper way? I argue that it is not.
As a result of the relatively weak AI, I docked a couple of points and gave them an 8/10 for this rating. The strength of the game is its depth and variability.
Controls/UI – 9/10
The controls and user interface features are relatively straight-forward and obvious. Scrolling around the screen and selecting units are accomplished in an intuitive way, and the icons and text are readable and easy to understand. There are ways to automate units and city management, which can certainly help the “casual” gamer playing on the lower difficulties. However, if you intend to win the game at the medium and higher difficulty levels, leaving control of whole cities, or even of a few units, up to automation is asking for trouble. Most of the more successful strategies — ones that allow you to win on levels like “Deity” and “Immortal” by the year 1800, for example — require intense turn-by-turn micro-management of what can eventually become upwards of 20 cities. The interface does allow you to do this in a relatively easy way, but no interface can help you do this level of micro-management without you investing a lot of time yourself.
There are a few mild annoyances with the interface, but nothing major. I did dock them a point for the interface of the tutorial. The main issue with it is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to save your progress in the 30-minute (or so) tutorial, so if you get 15 minutes into it and need to stop for some reason (as I did), you have to go re-play the whole thing to finish it. They really should’ve given it a “save” feature. Also, a lot of things are never really explained well in the manual or in the tutorial, and this should not be the case — they need better tutorials for such a complex game. I miss the days when games like Age of Empires II would give you a whole tutorial campaign, and that game is nowhere near as complex as Civ IV. We need something like that here.
Replayability – 9/10
Civ IV has a very high replay factor, because the game is truly different each time. Where you start on the map can dictate what strategies make sense to use, for example, and how the world is arranged will determine who your friends and enemies are. There are also various scenarios that come with the game, and others that can be downloaded from various fan sites. I have played the game through on random maps at least 15 times now, and I still find myself wanting to try it again. As you change the difficulty level or the starting conditions, you change how the game plays, meaning that there are many hours of fun to be had with this game.
Fun 10/10
And speaking of fun, I would say this is the most fun I’ve had with a game in a long, long time. It’s been quite a while since a strategy game had me so engrossed that I was up until way past my normal bed time. I often found myself saying, “OK, just one more turn…” and then saying, “Well… one more can’t hurt,” and then again, and again, until an hour more went by than I was planning to play. The game is addictive, not the least because I keep finding out about new strategies on fan sites and then wanting to try them out and see if I can make them work. If you like strategy games, whether RTS or TBS, I can recommend this one for hours of fun, strategy, and interesting game-play.
Overall – 8.8/10
Overall, Civ IV is an excellent game — probably the best overall game I have reviewed on this site, as the high 8.8 score reflects. It does have its flaws, most notably the weak (and predictable) AI, but in general it is a very fun game with lots of replay potential. Given that it’s now a couple of years old, you should be able to get it for a fairly good price (I think I got my copy for $24.99), and it would be well worth it if you are a fan of strategy games.
