Gameplay

Wars are generally not quite as common as in Civ II, but more vicious to compensate. This is especially true if the player is unprepared for the war and doesn’t have units pre-positioned for attacks on the enemy. In a typical game at Noble difficulty, I’d end up fighting about 3-8 major wars, depending on the map, how the religions play out and of course my own actions. In a prepared war, the fight can be as short as 10 turns or so if your objective is only a few cities. Unprepared, you may end up in an epic 50 or even 100 turn struggle as you beat back the invaders and then build up the forces to take the war into their territory. Due to the difficulty of capturing cities, pillaging improvements is a major activity and leads to frequent battles in the open between smaller forces.

Units have new combat values as well – there’s no longer an attack and defense value, just combat power. However, there are modifiers for each unit type. Units generally fall into several categories – melee, ranged, gunpowder, siege, armored and so on. All these have generic traits – for example, armored and horseback units never enjoy defense bonuses from terrain, while ranged and gunpowder units have a first strike ability to help in defense. Units can also have specific traits – pikemen and phalanxes are excellent at countering cavalry, while gunships enjoy a 100% bonus against armor. Everything has a counter. Defending stacks automatically put up their best available unit against the foe, so even though in a hypothetical stack the Marines may be the most powerful unit overall, if attacked by armor, the gunships will defend since they’re the best at dealing with armored vehicles. So what do you do when a superstack, one of each unit type, appears on your doorsteps? You fire artillery or your siege weapons. Artillery has the ability to do splash damage, affecting all or most of the stack. They do a great deal more damage to a large stack than is worth risking, but as often as not siege weapons die in the attempt. This is a rather ugly solution, in our experience, and it doesn’t get better until bombers and stealth bombers appear.

Rank up baby

Barbarian lions

A sky-high view

To top that off, your units gain experience in combat. As they gain experience, they can buy new abilities, like a bonus in attacking cities, or defending hills, or they can upgrade existing powers. The abilities they can gain are limited, however, by the unit type that they are – gunpowder units cannot gain a city attack bonus for example, just like armor cannot gain bonuses to defense.

The idea of a static government type is gone in Civilization IV. Rather, the player chooses from a list of half a dozen “civics” in a half dozen categories. Civics are the rules by which your civilization lives – so you may have adopted slavery or a caste system. Your economy can be mercantilistic or a free market. These have a considerable effect on the game and new civics are discovered as your civilization makes research advancements.

Research is handled differently from past civilizations as well. Formerly, the research “tree” was quite linear – meaning that the player needed X and Y to get Z – always. Now, there are many techs whose pre-requisites are not X and Y, but X or Y. Take for example Rocketry – it can be achieved either from Flight or from Artillery. It’s possible to have a fairly skewed research tree consequently, one that reflects your state’s needs. A player going for a cultural victory will likely rush to develop all the religions first (to enjoy the bonuses that come from founding the religion), while a militant player can focus more easily on the military techs and ignore the social ones. The differences are not extreme but can be significant.

The Mongol capital

The vile English

Civic selection

Civilization IV is built from the ground-up for multiplayer. Even when setting up a custom singleplayer scenario, this becomes readily apparent in the civilization selection list. The player can also determine the victory conditions that are applicable for the game. Civ IV works very well online, a far cry from the empty promises of multiplayer in Civ3 and its first expansion.