Picking nits

For all its advancements, there are several areas where the game doesn’t live up to the overall standard it sets. For the most part, the drawbacks are merely areas where the Civilization IV has done well but could be better. Notable for this is diplomacy, which doesn’t quite reach the high standards set by Alpha Centauri or, especially, Galactic Civilizations. The AI is notoriously unwilling to engage in many kinds of deals, automatically excluding certain possibilities just because it doesn’t like you. This can lead to some really silly scenarios, such as if you need an alliance with another power and have, for example, some valuable cities of a third party you recently conquered that you’d give them – but they refuse to consider the idea no matter how many cities you throw in. These hard limits feel stale and artificial.

Religion is a major factor in Civilization IV, at least early on. Your relationship with other nationalities is dependent in great part on whether or not you share the same religion – co-religionists tend to be very friendly, while those of other beliefs become increasingly hostile the longer you know each other to be of different faith. Your state religion lets you see what goes on in any other cities that have the same faith. This can get somewhat silly, since there’s nothing to prevent a city from having all religions and there’s no way to remove a religion once it’s established in a town. Eventually, once the AI discovers the appropriate techs, it will adopt the religious tolerance civic, and lose bonuses and penalties associated with a single religion but enjoy extra happiness per religion in each city while at the same time removing religion as a factor in diplomatic relations. Furthermore, all religious bonuses are generic, meaning that a lot of the diversity and potential edginess of religion has been downplayed in order to make the game politically correct. There’s nothing unique about Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam as far as Civ is concerned. All in all, it seems like state religion dominates relationships between nations too much early on, while later it becomes almost meaningless. It’s not done badly, but we feel that Firaxis handled the topic with kid gloves and was too cautious about offending.

Dirty panthers killed my settler

I'm poor

Race to Monotheism to have my own religion

There are only a few spots where we felt anything resembling disappointment with Civ4. The performance seems sub-standard – the game becomes very CPU and memory-intensive, especially on the larger maps, once it reaches the 18th century or so. By then there are enough cities and units to noticeably slow down a P4 3.0 with 1GB of RAM. A more acute disappointment is in how similarly all games play out; there’s far less surprise as to what might happen in a game, unless you ramp up the difficulty level. Firaxis played it safe with the strategic resource generation, to the point where the player would have to be either very lazy or under pressure from an aggressive AI at high difficulty to not find horses, iron, oil or uranium. Speaking of which, the AI seems to reserve most of its aggressiveness for the player – it doesn’t prosecute wars against fellow AI civilizations very vigorously or competently in our experience.

Finally, the random map generator appears to be somewhat less random than we’ve been led to believe. One map has shown itself three times and two maps have appeared twice, with identical starting locations and resources, in the games I’ve played. The maps are better – much better – than in Civ III, at least as far as resource generation goes – but after almost fifteen years of Civilization it’s very odd to suddenly find oneself playing the same maps a few times.

Revenge on the panthers

Die cats

Lions killing my scout

Of course, all these criticisms are relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. There’s no doubt that these are good or at least adequate implementations that fall short of the excellence the game displays otherwise.