 Review By: Nick Arvites |
Developer: | Firaxis Games |
| Publisher: | 2K Games | |
| Genre: | Turn-Based Strategy | |
| ESRB: | Everyone 10+ | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | Yes | |
| Accessories: | N/A | |
| Buy Now: |   |
Micromanaging your empire has been improved and almost simplified. Many features from prior games are gone and replaced through other features. For example, you don’t need a legion of workers to clean up pollution in the modern age. Using workers to construct improvements on resource tiles add bigger bonuses. You get larger bonuses for constructing a mine on an iron depot, or a farm on a wheat tile than in previous games. Corruption and waste has been completely overhauled from the previous games, and Civilization 4 provides a good balance between limiting over-expansion while promoting it just the same. Cities no longer waste overproduction and instead apply it to the next project, and citizens can be specialized to provide greater overall boosts for that city. The tech tree has been improved to allow advancements through multiple paths. In previous games, you would likely have to research tech x AND y in order to get z. In Civilization 4, you have situations where you can get tech z by building x OR y. Many of the micromanagement features are easy to miss until someone points them out, but they all feel right when you play the game. Civilization 4, at least in my experience, was much easier to micromanage than the prior installments in the series and I didn’t have nearly as many problems with keeping control of my empire.
The military and combat systems are still very similar to the systems in the previous games, but present a few changes. You still have a system in place that gives an almost rock-paper-scissors bonus to certain units when they attack others (ex: spearmen hold an advantage against cavalry). This system still provides for some strange results at times. For example, I’ve occasionally lost modern units to units carrying swords or spears. While I’m not saying it’s impossible for pre-modern units to take down a modern or future unit in reality, it is extremely unlikely that a tank would fall to a defending spearman. One improvement towards combat is that artillery pieces can be used to counter the stacking approach of combat. In the prior games, players would often stack up a variety of units because the game would automatically select the best defender for a particular situation. Units like Catapults can now damage multiple units, which can negate the stacking strategy.
One of the persistent problems with combat in the Civilization series centers on naval units. Like every other installment of the series, Civilization 4 fails to reproduce the historical importance of a naval power. The ships do not move quickly enough to be a real threat. If you play on a map with continents separated by a vast ocean, it takes far too many turns to send out the navy. In fact, the naval units are horrifically underpowered and underperform in Civilization 4, especially when you think about it in a historical perspective where naval supremacy dictated who was on top of the pecking order. Air and ground units work perfectly, at least in the modern age. Due to the unit movement speed, it can be difficult to mount extensive wars early in the game.
Posted: 2007-06-21 18:01:02 PST