Civilization IV
October 31,2005 - The Civilization franchise is widely considered to be one of the best in the gaming industry.  Throughout its entire history as a series each core offering as been completely revolutionary and made the strategy genre better as a whole.  Civilization II is the one that truly set the tone for the series to be considered a classic rather than just another good strategy franchise like X-COM.  Sid Meier, the creator of the series, was out to do much, much more with his brainchild.  Meier is responsible for many of the PC’s best strategy based titles and what many consider to be the most addictive games out there.  Games like Civilization, of course, and others like Pirates!, Gettysburg!, and Alpha Centauri.  All of these games are considered classics by this point, but Civilization II was the one most people considered to be his best.  Now that Sid Meier has finally released Civilization IV, the second game in the series has new competition and can step down as the fourth installment is the best one and renders all past iterations obsolete.

If you don’t know exactly what kind of strategy game Civilization IV is, it’s turn-based strategy, which is very different from your typical Warcraft, and Age of Empires styled real-time strategy games, so don’t get them confused.  The way it plays out is almost like a board game.  You take turns either against your human competition or computer AI doing what you need to do to raise the best Civilization possible.  Each turn will take you up in time as you progress through the game.  You will start the game at 4000 BC and after you finish each turn you’ll continue up until 2050 AD or until you win the game sometime before that.  Civilization is a series that is highly addictive, but that being said, there’s a pretty steep learning curve for those of you who have either never played a Civilization or a turn-based strategy game before.  Even veteran fans of the series should definitely stick it out through the tutorial mode hosted by Sid Meier himself.  Not only is it highly informative on all the new additions in Civ IV, but it’s also one of the most fun tutorials in any game that’s come out in a long while, mostly due to the fact that it eventually sends you off to finish the map on your own and conquer the world.

Civ IV incorporates charm and style directly into its gameplay.  All of the avatars you’ll be dealing with as other Civilizations you’ll encounter, such as the Romans, Indians, Chinese, Americans, whatever, are all cartoon-styled pictures of famous leaders or figureheads such as Julius Caesar, Franklin Roosevelt, Ghandi, and many others.  The way you advance your Civilization is by building other cities beyond your capitol, researching technology and military, and making treaties, pacts, and alliances with other major Civilizations on the map.  There are six different ways to win a game in Civ IV.  The easiest of those ways is the Time Victory.  The way you win a Time Victory is by ending at 2050 AD with the highest score.  If you want a little bit more of a challenge and a little more of an interesting approach to victory, the Space Race victory in which you construct a space ship and launch it to Alpha Centauri (cool tie-in, isn’t it?) before anyone else does will result in that win.  The Domination Victory is another standard win in which you control two-thirds of the land and a quarter more of a population lead over any other rival.  The Cultural Victory is where you have three of your cities reach “legendary” status, the Conquest Victory is where one civilization wipes out or captures all of the rival land areas, and the last one is the Diplomatic Victory where you have the United Nations Secretary-General calls for a vote of a diplomatic resolution, if you’re the winner of that vote, you obviously win the game.

As you can see, the single-player mode doesn’t really offer a campaign or a story to follow, just a bunch of randomized maps and locations for you to build the best civilization you possibly can.  As said before, the style of Civ IV is directly put right into the gameplay.  It’s really fun when you research something new in a time frame that is either completely absurd or you add a wonder or building in a place it clearly never was.  For example, having somewhere like Rome be the founder of rock and roll or Hollywood, or maybe having New York be the housing city for Stonehenge.  It’s just funny when stuff like that works out that way, it’s awesome though.  Another funny thing is some of the design avatars for the things you can research and discover.  Probably the funniest one is when you get to the later time periods after you’ve already discovered computers and such when you can invent or discover the internet.  We all know who discovered the internet, right?  Al Gore, and he just happens to be the avatar picture!  Everything about Civ IV’s style and charm come right into its gameplay and depending on how you play you can make it more interesting for yourself every time.  If you want to play a game where you’re America fighting for your freedom from the British, you can do that.  Or if you want to play a game where Rome and America go at it, why not, it’s all right there for you to do!

The combat system in Civ IV has been tweaked a lot over the past games in the series.  All of your units have a strength rating and the ability to level up in some sort of way.  This will allow you to use your combat units in a wise way that will make you think twice before sending them against certain foes.  Tanks, battleships, planes, etc. are all the strongest attackers, while you start off with just being able to unlock a warrior, which has a very low strength rating.  As you advance your society you’ll research new abilities and thus unlock the ability to not only level up existing units to make them stronger, but advance them into completely different units all together.  Like changing a warrior with a club into a grenadier.  A new addition to the world map is the open boarders option.  If you agree to open boarders other civilizations will be able to freely roam your terrain.  Otherwise, the only other way they can enter your area is if you’re at war with them.  Religion in the game is one of the bigger pushes they were adding to the game as well, even though when all is said and done it isn’t that important.  You can run a civilization that has several different religions going through it or even one that has a no-state religion so they can just choose themselves.  You can build missionaries to go to other cities that aren’t yours to spread their influence and information of your religion or you can just sit back and ignore it all together if you want.

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