gimpieman
20-02-2006, 03:59 PM
The question being asked after any really good game is when do we get the sequel? In the case of Sid Meier’s Civilization, this has been going on for quite some time. I myself have played every version of the series worth mentioning (II and III mostly. Had a go at CivNet before the system choked) and Civ 4 continues a long pedigree of genre defining games.
The trouble with sequels is that there is a fine balance to strike between keeping the old fans happy and bringing in new players. Civ 4 manages to be similar enough to its predecessors whilst introducing enough new content to keep the game going until the next one comes along. New gamers will undoubtedly succumb to Civ 4’s inherent sexiness.
The basic premise behind the game (for those of you who just got back from not giving a shit) is simple. Your job is to start your own civilization to stand the test of time. From humble beginnings where you only know about your immediate surroundings, you must build, explore and expand your empire across the tile based world by building settlers to make new cities to make settlers to build more cities and other stuff.
http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/files/6/5/7/0/civilization4_thumb.jpg (http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=15733)
No nation is complete without a Lion farm
If you’ve never played any [Civ] games before, don’t worry. Civ 4 has Sid Meier himself in the tutorial (well, almost. It’s an animated head version of Sid. Some say this is cleaner and generally easier than a real head. I tend to agree). In less time that you’d notice you’ll be up and running, spreading your Civilization across the continents.
There are a few big changes in Civ 4. Gameplay has had an overhaul. In previous versions, players would spend a considerable amount of time micromanaging their cities to ensure everything ran smoothly. In Civ 4, anarchy, corruption and pollution are all very subtle. Cities no longer stage civil uprisings if the unhappy faces mount up. Instead, the unhappy plonkers go off in a huff and stop working. If there are enough plonkers, the city will descend into anarchy, but if you’re paying attention, that probably won’t happen.
Civics is another one of the ‘big new shiny things’. It used to be that you’d research republic and switch to republic as your form of government. Simple and obvious as it was, it wasn’t very flexible. Civ 4 allows you to choose from a selection of civics in five categories: Religion, Economy, Labour, Legal and Government. Each has a maintenance cost and a different effect on your civilization e.g. Organised Religion allows cities with your state religion to build improvements 25% faster but the drain on your treasury is high. Balancing these civics is an important aspect of the game. If you get the right mix, your Civ will flourish.
http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/files/6/5/7/0/civilization4_5_thumb.jpg (http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=15735)
Fear and numbers are great motivators
Courthouses work in Civ 4; they reduce the burden on your treasury by halving maintenance costs. The forbidden palace of wonder is still there and there’s also Versailles if you need a third center of government. In Civ 2 and 3, the only real way to bolster the treasury was to build the Adam Smith wonder. Civ 4 doesn’t include it, instead it has a selection of seven religions, namely Buddhism, Judaism, Taoism, Christianity, Confucianism, Islam and Hinduism. Each religion has its own wonder, buildings and missionary unit, used to spread the faith to neighbouring cities and other civilisations. The manual makes a stated point about the religions to keep everything PC, which explains why they didn’t include Jedi. Go look it up, it’s a minority religion. You can put it down on your census if you like.
Terrain manipulation in Civ 2 allowed you to turn mountains into hills to improve output. In Civ 3, you could build a mine and a railroad on a mountain tile to at least get some output from them. In Civ 4, they are impassable. This means cities based next to large mountain ranges will have very few workable tiles. Spot the trend yet?
For their part, workers have more possible actions in Civ 4 than ever before. This follows on from lessons learned by Firaxis from Alpha Centauri where terraformers (as they were known there) could build a wide range of tile improvements. In Civ 2 and 3, workers usually ended up covering the entire continent with roads, then railroads. Where tiles were used by cities, farms and mines sprang up on any grassland or hill tiles in the area. This still happens in Civ 4, but the AI behind the automation is a lot smarter – it won’t tear up a farm on a grassland tile and build a mine, but it seems to be fond of windmills. Maybe it likes swishy noises.
Sound in Civ 4 is really, really good. The only thing better than a professional composer with a full orchestra behind them is two. Civ 4’s music was made by a pair of composers, some of it old reworked classics, most of it brand spanking new stuff. Veterans will recognise the old reprisals from Civ 2 and 3 as they squeal with delight at Leonard Nimoy as the narrator (OMG:8: ) doing an impression of Sputnik 1. The railroad one is really weird too. “I fooled you! I fooled you! I got pig iron! I got pig iron!” Yes indeed, Civ 4 is pleasing to the ear, and some of the things Nimoy says will leave you paralysed with glee.
Being the first Civ game with a 3D engine is a significant step for the series. In every previous version, the camera was fixed and set at an angle. You may have had limited zoom, but it wasn’t something you’d use. Civ 4 offers an almost black and white-esque view of the world to the player. You can zoom in and count the number of tassels on your flag or zoom all the way out and spin the world you inhabit. This is downright nifty. Shame you can’t spin the camera though.
http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/files/6/5/7/0/191434_full_thumb.jpg (http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=15731)
Atomic sausage is one of the civic upgrades for Germany
The whole game is still tile based, but you could easily forget this unless you turn on the grid. A lot of the terrain features are combinations of two or three individual types. In the older Civ games, a hill in the middle of a forest was a hill. In Civ 4, the trees cover the hill so it comes up as a hills/forest tile. If the tile is near the extreme north or south of the map, chances are it’ll be a hills/forest/tundra tile. Finding tiles with special resources used to be a bit of a chore, but Civ 4 has a button that points them out to you. The new system irons the terrain together with fewer creases and it keeps your whites white too.
Gameplay in Civ 4 is as fast or as slow as you like. The power a player has over the game they want to play during the setup phase is impressive. Various options governing barbarians, victory types, technology, starting era and game length are all available. The tech system has changed a lot since Civ 3. Civ 4 allows you to prerequisite a technology with a choice of one or more other technologies. This means you can learn Priesthood through Meditation or Polytheism. Some technologies like horseback riding can be done away with completely (but you might regret it if there are cavalry attacking you).
As for multiplayer, I can say I have mixed feelings. You see, those of us who have ATI cards were in for a bumpy ride when Civ 4 hit the hard drives. Many of us cursed, swore and incanted until the game finally worked for us. I myself spent two days working on a crash-to-desktop issue that occurred whenever I tried to launch the game. Nice work to the official website with their solution (that didn’t work) and I’ll let the fact that they linked to a player support forum slide for now, but blind rage isn’t as sympathetic.
The patch couldn’t have come sooner. Some disagree. Actually, a lot of people disagree. Problems with the multiplayer were wide and varied before the patch and the loss of all those pre-patch saved games didn’t impress people, but a lot of the more glaring issues were fixed. Talk of memory leaks hasn’t gone away, but it isn’t as loud as it was. Gamespy have taken a lot of flack over the multiplayer (so they should have). I would question its ability to support 12 player games (basically because it can’t unless you’re playing on a LAN). Fuck, I’d just question the whole thing. As if the shakiness wasn’t bad enough, finding a game only to be kicked is worse. Kicked because you stumbled on a ladder match and the snooty hosts won’t let non-ladder people play. Racist tools. On the off chance that you do get playing, make sure you’re sitting comfortably. You’ll not be going anywhere for at least six hours. A lot of the time, multiplayer in Civ 4 boils down to an endurance test, or means test if you’re the type who can afford copious amounts of caffeine tablets and guarana to stave off sleep for just one more turn. Multiplayer is often slower than single player because of lag, players who don’t automate their workers, players joining in mid-game (20-30 seconds it takes. Not good) and the fact that Gamespy is trying to do more than it can. “Gamespy is great” you may say, but it doesn’t seem up to the task at hand in Civ 4.
http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/files/6/5/7/0/civilization4_2_thumb.jpg (http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=15734)
Unfortunately, nothing is to scale
If you’ve no staying power then there are two other multiplayer modes worth mentioning. Play by email lets you pit your wits against those hobbled 56kers (hang in there guys, I’m running as much fibre optic cable as I can) and hot seat allows the whole family to play on the same computer (snicker).
It’s the whole “Just one more turn” idea that makes Civilization great. The simple fact that it gives you millions of tiny simple jobs keeps you playing long after you intended to escape. Sure the in-game alarm went off but let’s do one more turn. It’s very addictive stuff.
Civ 4’s predecessors had a lot of screens that broke the flow of play. If you wanted to change what a city was building, you had to open it up, drag your mouse around and get back to playing, only to discover that you’d forgotten what you were doing before you intercepted the zany governor who was trying to build a wonder in a city with two shield production. To counter this, many units have been given an extra movement point e.g. scouts, settlers and most importantly, workers. Many’s a time I’ve moved a worker onto an empty tile to build a road on one turn, only to find something better for him to do on the next turn. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen much anymore. Civ 4 allows you to edit cities without actually bringing up the city screen. The emphasis throughout is to keep you in the game as much as possible. Changing build queues and unit orders can usually be done with 2-3 clicks. This might not seem significant, but the new RTS style interface doesn’t break your train of thought. This is significant because although you might not know it, your subconscious is figuring out what to research next and where to build what. The game reminds you to build extra settlers in case you forget to expand, harbours if you need money and other things as you need them. It’s helpful that way, especially on the lower difficulty levels when you’re unsure of the interface. It even makes suggestions for good city locations and improvements for settlers and workers respectively.
http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/files/6/5/7/0/191435_full_thumb.jpg (http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=15732)
C'mooooon...gimme nuclear secrets.
Last thing I need to mention is the ‘moddability’ of Civ 4. Firaxis were clever enough to use lots of XML. This means you can tweak the mechanics of the game simply by editing a few HTML flavoured text files (they both have tags, so stop screaming please). For those of us with a few programming skills, there’s python scripting available. The further promise of an all singing all dancing SDK for the game only adds to the motivation given to budding modders of the game. I myself have not dreamed of making any maps, and with the World Builder, I might just start.
This game was destined to do well before it was even envisaged. It had a few teething problems, but the dedicated teams of forum gnome's sussed out most of the major bugs. Whether a third patch will be necessary (the first one was a stillborn misfire) is yet to be seen, but as it stands, Civ 4 is mostly stable. As a game, it is a definite necessity for every collection. The new interface may throw a few of the more institutionalised players off the scent, but it won’t be long before they settle down for another few years.
The trouble with sequels is that there is a fine balance to strike between keeping the old fans happy and bringing in new players. Civ 4 manages to be similar enough to its predecessors whilst introducing enough new content to keep the game going until the next one comes along. New gamers will undoubtedly succumb to Civ 4’s inherent sexiness.
The basic premise behind the game (for those of you who just got back from not giving a shit) is simple. Your job is to start your own civilization to stand the test of time. From humble beginnings where you only know about your immediate surroundings, you must build, explore and expand your empire across the tile based world by building settlers to make new cities to make settlers to build more cities and other stuff.
http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/files/6/5/7/0/civilization4_thumb.jpg (http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=15733)
No nation is complete without a Lion farm
If you’ve never played any [Civ] games before, don’t worry. Civ 4 has Sid Meier himself in the tutorial (well, almost. It’s an animated head version of Sid. Some say this is cleaner and generally easier than a real head. I tend to agree). In less time that you’d notice you’ll be up and running, spreading your Civilization across the continents.
There are a few big changes in Civ 4. Gameplay has had an overhaul. In previous versions, players would spend a considerable amount of time micromanaging their cities to ensure everything ran smoothly. In Civ 4, anarchy, corruption and pollution are all very subtle. Cities no longer stage civil uprisings if the unhappy faces mount up. Instead, the unhappy plonkers go off in a huff and stop working. If there are enough plonkers, the city will descend into anarchy, but if you’re paying attention, that probably won’t happen.
Civics is another one of the ‘big new shiny things’. It used to be that you’d research republic and switch to republic as your form of government. Simple and obvious as it was, it wasn’t very flexible. Civ 4 allows you to choose from a selection of civics in five categories: Religion, Economy, Labour, Legal and Government. Each has a maintenance cost and a different effect on your civilization e.g. Organised Religion allows cities with your state religion to build improvements 25% faster but the drain on your treasury is high. Balancing these civics is an important aspect of the game. If you get the right mix, your Civ will flourish.
http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/files/6/5/7/0/civilization4_5_thumb.jpg (http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=15735)
Fear and numbers are great motivators
Courthouses work in Civ 4; they reduce the burden on your treasury by halving maintenance costs. The forbidden palace of wonder is still there and there’s also Versailles if you need a third center of government. In Civ 2 and 3, the only real way to bolster the treasury was to build the Adam Smith wonder. Civ 4 doesn’t include it, instead it has a selection of seven religions, namely Buddhism, Judaism, Taoism, Christianity, Confucianism, Islam and Hinduism. Each religion has its own wonder, buildings and missionary unit, used to spread the faith to neighbouring cities and other civilisations. The manual makes a stated point about the religions to keep everything PC, which explains why they didn’t include Jedi. Go look it up, it’s a minority religion. You can put it down on your census if you like.
Terrain manipulation in Civ 2 allowed you to turn mountains into hills to improve output. In Civ 3, you could build a mine and a railroad on a mountain tile to at least get some output from them. In Civ 4, they are impassable. This means cities based next to large mountain ranges will have very few workable tiles. Spot the trend yet?
For their part, workers have more possible actions in Civ 4 than ever before. This follows on from lessons learned by Firaxis from Alpha Centauri where terraformers (as they were known there) could build a wide range of tile improvements. In Civ 2 and 3, workers usually ended up covering the entire continent with roads, then railroads. Where tiles were used by cities, farms and mines sprang up on any grassland or hill tiles in the area. This still happens in Civ 4, but the AI behind the automation is a lot smarter – it won’t tear up a farm on a grassland tile and build a mine, but it seems to be fond of windmills. Maybe it likes swishy noises.
Sound in Civ 4 is really, really good. The only thing better than a professional composer with a full orchestra behind them is two. Civ 4’s music was made by a pair of composers, some of it old reworked classics, most of it brand spanking new stuff. Veterans will recognise the old reprisals from Civ 2 and 3 as they squeal with delight at Leonard Nimoy as the narrator (OMG:8: ) doing an impression of Sputnik 1. The railroad one is really weird too. “I fooled you! I fooled you! I got pig iron! I got pig iron!” Yes indeed, Civ 4 is pleasing to the ear, and some of the things Nimoy says will leave you paralysed with glee.
Being the first Civ game with a 3D engine is a significant step for the series. In every previous version, the camera was fixed and set at an angle. You may have had limited zoom, but it wasn’t something you’d use. Civ 4 offers an almost black and white-esque view of the world to the player. You can zoom in and count the number of tassels on your flag or zoom all the way out and spin the world you inhabit. This is downright nifty. Shame you can’t spin the camera though.
http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/files/6/5/7/0/191434_full_thumb.jpg (http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=15731)
Atomic sausage is one of the civic upgrades for Germany
The whole game is still tile based, but you could easily forget this unless you turn on the grid. A lot of the terrain features are combinations of two or three individual types. In the older Civ games, a hill in the middle of a forest was a hill. In Civ 4, the trees cover the hill so it comes up as a hills/forest tile. If the tile is near the extreme north or south of the map, chances are it’ll be a hills/forest/tundra tile. Finding tiles with special resources used to be a bit of a chore, but Civ 4 has a button that points them out to you. The new system irons the terrain together with fewer creases and it keeps your whites white too.
Gameplay in Civ 4 is as fast or as slow as you like. The power a player has over the game they want to play during the setup phase is impressive. Various options governing barbarians, victory types, technology, starting era and game length are all available. The tech system has changed a lot since Civ 3. Civ 4 allows you to prerequisite a technology with a choice of one or more other technologies. This means you can learn Priesthood through Meditation or Polytheism. Some technologies like horseback riding can be done away with completely (but you might regret it if there are cavalry attacking you).
As for multiplayer, I can say I have mixed feelings. You see, those of us who have ATI cards were in for a bumpy ride when Civ 4 hit the hard drives. Many of us cursed, swore and incanted until the game finally worked for us. I myself spent two days working on a crash-to-desktop issue that occurred whenever I tried to launch the game. Nice work to the official website with their solution (that didn’t work) and I’ll let the fact that they linked to a player support forum slide for now, but blind rage isn’t as sympathetic.
The patch couldn’t have come sooner. Some disagree. Actually, a lot of people disagree. Problems with the multiplayer were wide and varied before the patch and the loss of all those pre-patch saved games didn’t impress people, but a lot of the more glaring issues were fixed. Talk of memory leaks hasn’t gone away, but it isn’t as loud as it was. Gamespy have taken a lot of flack over the multiplayer (so they should have). I would question its ability to support 12 player games (basically because it can’t unless you’re playing on a LAN). Fuck, I’d just question the whole thing. As if the shakiness wasn’t bad enough, finding a game only to be kicked is worse. Kicked because you stumbled on a ladder match and the snooty hosts won’t let non-ladder people play. Racist tools. On the off chance that you do get playing, make sure you’re sitting comfortably. You’ll not be going anywhere for at least six hours. A lot of the time, multiplayer in Civ 4 boils down to an endurance test, or means test if you’re the type who can afford copious amounts of caffeine tablets and guarana to stave off sleep for just one more turn. Multiplayer is often slower than single player because of lag, players who don’t automate their workers, players joining in mid-game (20-30 seconds it takes. Not good) and the fact that Gamespy is trying to do more than it can. “Gamespy is great” you may say, but it doesn’t seem up to the task at hand in Civ 4.
http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/files/6/5/7/0/civilization4_2_thumb.jpg (http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=15734)
Unfortunately, nothing is to scale
If you’ve no staying power then there are two other multiplayer modes worth mentioning. Play by email lets you pit your wits against those hobbled 56kers (hang in there guys, I’m running as much fibre optic cable as I can) and hot seat allows the whole family to play on the same computer (snicker).
It’s the whole “Just one more turn” idea that makes Civilization great. The simple fact that it gives you millions of tiny simple jobs keeps you playing long after you intended to escape. Sure the in-game alarm went off but let’s do one more turn. It’s very addictive stuff.
Civ 4’s predecessors had a lot of screens that broke the flow of play. If you wanted to change what a city was building, you had to open it up, drag your mouse around and get back to playing, only to discover that you’d forgotten what you were doing before you intercepted the zany governor who was trying to build a wonder in a city with two shield production. To counter this, many units have been given an extra movement point e.g. scouts, settlers and most importantly, workers. Many’s a time I’ve moved a worker onto an empty tile to build a road on one turn, only to find something better for him to do on the next turn. Thankfully, that doesn’t happen much anymore. Civ 4 allows you to edit cities without actually bringing up the city screen. The emphasis throughout is to keep you in the game as much as possible. Changing build queues and unit orders can usually be done with 2-3 clicks. This might not seem significant, but the new RTS style interface doesn’t break your train of thought. This is significant because although you might not know it, your subconscious is figuring out what to research next and where to build what. The game reminds you to build extra settlers in case you forget to expand, harbours if you need money and other things as you need them. It’s helpful that way, especially on the lower difficulty levels when you’re unsure of the interface. It even makes suggestions for good city locations and improvements for settlers and workers respectively.
http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/files/6/5/7/0/191435_full_thumb.jpg (http://forums.zgeek.com/gallery/showimage.php?i=15732)
C'mooooon...gimme nuclear secrets.
Last thing I need to mention is the ‘moddability’ of Civ 4. Firaxis were clever enough to use lots of XML. This means you can tweak the mechanics of the game simply by editing a few HTML flavoured text files (they both have tags, so stop screaming please). For those of us with a few programming skills, there’s python scripting available. The further promise of an all singing all dancing SDK for the game only adds to the motivation given to budding modders of the game. I myself have not dreamed of making any maps, and with the World Builder, I might just start.
This game was destined to do well before it was even envisaged. It had a few teething problems, but the dedicated teams of forum gnome's sussed out most of the major bugs. Whether a third patch will be necessary (the first one was a stillborn misfire) is yet to be seen, but as it stands, Civ 4 is mostly stable. As a game, it is a definite necessity for every collection. The new interface may throw a few of the more institutionalised players off the scent, but it won’t be long before they settle down for another few years.