A Review of Civ 4 for Fans of Civ 3

Author's Rating:

Pros: Gorgeous graphics, more complex and interesting yet more straightforward than Civ 3

Cons: Still pretty buggy. Gameplay needs to be faster.

The Bottom Line: 
I never play Civ 3 anymore. This new revision has some problems but is much more interesting, beautiful, and fun than the last version. Worth upgrading!

Author's Review
Civ 4 is a beautiful game with complex dynamics that will tempt your strategic mind and keep you entertained for many many hours of gameplay. It's a revolutionary improvement on Civ 3, but the step up in features has some quality bumps along the way.

Civ 3 was the first of the series that I ever played so I cannot compare Civ 4 to every version of the game since the beginning of time. However, I did spend a LOT of time with Civ 3 and can comment extensively on the differences between v3 and v4. That's the focus of this review, and, I hope, the question on many minds amongst the fans of the game series.

Let's start with the good stuff:

Gorgeous graphics & SOUND - a pleasure to experience

Civ 4 is a gorgeous game. The 3D graphics implementation is lovely and a pleasure to look at while playing. It is truly a 3D experience, although the game retains its overhead-map aspect. How is this possible? Well, a couple of things. First, your perspective on the landscape of the game can zoom in and out, showing you up close details of the landscape or a very high level "god like" view of things. Second, battles offer the option of "zooming in," on the action. If you go with this option, you'll see each melee between two units blown up to about half the size of your monitor, whereupon the animations become pretty vivid and fun to watch. The animated artwork in Civ 3 had a lot of character and fun, and this continues in Civ 4.

Many other things about the graphics make the game a pleasure. A map square which represents a river delta is no longer just a static graphic, the water actually flows and foams through the delta as you play. Exploring the territory early in the game with a warrior? You may be pleased to see that when you move into forests, sometimes crows fly out, disturbed by your presence. There are many little touches like this that make you salivate by comparison to Civ 3.

Sound is also used extensively. If you spend the entire game zoomed way up to a bird's-eye-eye view, you will miss a lot. At least once or twice, zoom way in and scroll around your landscape. When you come to a square that has the cattle resource, you'll hear mooing. Coastal map squares have the sound of the sea. Lumbermills echo the sound of sawing logs in time with a tiny saw moving back and forth inside a tiny lumbermill. Each military unit also has sounds. Remember the sneezing riflemen in Civ 3? You'll be pleased to find that each military unit has some personality in their animation and sounds in Civ4.

Military unit upgrades more interesting

Military upgrades are a lot more interesting in Civ 4. When a unit gains experience, you have some choices as to the speciality where that unit will gain skill. What does that mean? In Civ 3 all units have a flat system of experience: conscript/regular/veteran/elite. In Civ 4, when a unit wins a battle and has experience points to gain, you can choose from things like:

1) plus 10% city attack
2) plus 50% against gunpowder units
3) increased chance of withdrawing from battle

...the options depend entirely on what kind of unit it is. This allows you to grow your army with quite a bit of specialization built in. Some units are good at attacking cities. Others develop their defense skills. Others are good at opposing certain classes of enemies. It sounds complicated, but it's not. If you so desire, the game will "auto-promote" units, choosing their class of promotion for you. It still comes in handy when you go to attack a city and find, for example, that it's guarded by a longbowman. Now where did I put that swordsman with the 10% city attack upgrade and the 25% vs. archery units? He'd come in handy right now!

Corruption much, much better handled

In Civ 3, some of your cities will experience corruption, which drains their production toward your civilization's whole. The amount of corruption is relative to how far the city is from your capital. Sadly, the way Civ 3 is calibrated, this means that a lot of your cities produce absolutely nothing once you expand past a certain point. It's pretty lame that if you expand your civilization past about 20 cities, then all new cities are so far from the capital as to be useless. There was some attempt to address this with government types in Civ 3, but there really was no way to get around this "corruption creep" past a certain point in the game. All cities built or acquired in the second half of the game were virtually useless. That's just the way it was. But Civ 4 is different. Corruption as a game concept is gone, replaced by "upkeep" costs. These do increase with distance from the capitol or "Forbidden City" but they're just more REASONABLE and things work out better. You can conquer or build a city far from your capital late in the game and it will still have some reasonable capability. This was a huge annoyance with Civ 3 for me and I'm glad it's fixed.

There are actually several things which didn't work very transparently in version 3 which are much improved in Civ 4. City illness is no longer a vague behind-the-scenes calculation which you never know how to predict. Now, each city has a "red cross" number and a "sickly face" number. The sickly face number goes up when you do unhealthy things, like build factories. The "red cross" number goes up when you do healthy things, like supply new and more diverse food resources. It's very transparent that acquiring the fish food resource, for example, will make your "good" health number go up by +1. If a city has a Harbor built, that will be +2. Everything's clearly laid out. And when the "bad" number gets higher than the "good" number, you see effects start to happen. If your "sickly face" number is 2 points higher than your "red cross" number, then you will begin to lose food-per-turn (aka: bread). This sounds incredibly complex but you get used to it, and at least Civ 4 makes it all transparent and clear, as opposed to the Civ 3, wherein you never knew why your cities suffered disease, or if you'd done enough to counteract it.

"Custom Game" options

One of the things that has been bugging me up until recently is the inability to adjust certain game parameters like "victory conditions." The standard game setup wizard does not include some options I recall from Civ 3, like the ability to turn off Space Race victory. The race to complete the space shuttle is fun, but it is without a doubt the easiest way to win and sometimes makes for shorter, less interesting games. It's always fun to turn that possibility off so you have to play a land-war contest to the bitter end, or win a diplomatic victory instead.

These and other options would seem to be missing from Civ 4 at first, and I thought they'd simply omitted them from the first release. I was wrong. Click "custom game" after "single player" when creating a new game, and you'll be presented with victory conditions options, and many others as well.

Some of the interesting options include starting the game in whatever historical era you want. Currently I am playing a "future" game. This began with all technologies discovered already (to me and the other players) and 3 settlers, 3 mech infantry, and 3 explorers (scouts) each. This is a new an interesting way to play. Often, you spend the whole game in the stone ages, trying to build up the fancier units and more advanced abilities. It's cool to start the game with that stuff, and see where it goes from there. No delays to be able to tap certain resources, no futzing around to get railroads and other strategic necessities. Just a full-on contest of land-grabbing and combat from the very beginning. If you want to play a cutthroat game with all the modern units and find out what "Future Tech Level 15" can do for your Civ, try this option sometime. Very interesting!

And now for some cons. There are many things that didn't get fixed from Civ 3 to Civ 4.

First and foremost among my complaints is software quality. This game crashes or screws up in a major way more often than it should. In particular, iTunes new "album art flipper" conflicted with it in a big way on my machine.

It now has an autosave feature which can help you get back to where you left off, but the game is almost as buggy as it was in version 3. And that is saying a lot, since it was incredibly buggy to begin with. It seems that they have little concept of quality assurance or perhaps they don't leave themselves enough time to do QA. The game is unstable.

Secondary complaints

Game control

GRRRR! I still can't do what I want to do WHEN I want to do it. The game informs me that a new Knight has been built in a certain city, and it scrolls over to that city. But I can't click on the Knight at that time, to tell him what to do. Why? Because another city has built a Bank and it's time for me to get scrolled over there and learn about that. I'm in "new notifications" mode for this turn and I can't do a damn thing until I'm out of it. I find this restrictive. It's helpful to have the game notify you upon certain key events (like the production of a new military unit) but it's hard to keep all the notifications in your head, and then remember to go back afterward and handle each one. It would be much better if you could make decisions about each one as you went along. The same goes for buildings, wonders, etc.

3D battles are pretty lame

The "zoom in" battle animations are interesting, but they don't work very well. Here's what happens, when, for example, an archer and a swordsman zoom into battle:

1) The archer has "first strike" ability, so he fires an arrow at the swordsman, who stands apart at some distance
2) The swordsman rushes in and a hand-to-hand melee begins - the archer puts away his bow and starts slashing with knives
3) The two units take a few jabs at each other
4) The two units pause for a few seconds
5) Then, out of nowhere, one of them screams, flies backward, and dies

The timing is often just ridiculously off. And worst of all, the FINAL health bars for each unit are visible throughout the entire battle! So as soon as you begin a battle, you know how it's going to end, and all the animated melee in the world is just a waste of time.

One of the truly comedic aspects of Civ 3 is watching an archer go up against a tank. The comedy continues in Civ 4, and I'd say it's even better. The arrows fly, the tank fires its big gun... The archer gets dirt on his face... and suddenly the tank explodes! Good shot my lad! Incredibly good shot!

Turn Button color change: When you've made all the decisions you need to make in a given turn, the "turn" button turns from green to red to let you know that you can now pass if you want and not miss any outstanding decision making. This is a very useful feature and helps you move the game along without missing anything really important. However, the button itself lags behind the game for several seconds. You constantly find yourself saying "I think that's it... is the button going to change?" and waiting... and waiting... and thinking "Hm... I must have forgotten something." And just when you start to go back and look for what you're forgetting, BAM! The button finally changes color! Annoying! Especially in the early game when turns are short and you want them to move along quickly.

Overly Similar Colors for Various Teams: Ugh. Civ 3 had this problem to a lesser extent, but now there are more Civs than ever, and not all of them have easily discernible team colors. Good luck managing your map when it has light blue and teal units all over it.

Last Saved Game: In Civ3, when you loaded a saved game, to continue where you last left off, it automatically selected the most recent save, and all you had to do was click "OK" to load it and go. That little feature was lost. Now you get a list of all the saves you've ever made, and you have to select the one you want. If you sort by date, you can still bring the last game you played to the top of the list, but it's still a minor oversight and an inconvenience - gives you the feeling the game was rushed out the door. And developers NEVER go back and fix this kind of thing in updates... grrr...

Overall

I'd highly recommend this fun and delightful game if you enjoyed Civ 3. It took some time to learn a few of the new elements, like religions, but they add new dimensions to the game that keep it interesting. The game is more complex than ever, and more beautiful than ever. It's rich with all kinds of details, and retains lots of customization options. There are still a few bugs, but no more than in Civ 3, probably fewer actually. And some of the clunky aspects of Civ 3 that weren't exactly "bugs" have gotten attention. I'd definitely recommend it. I loved Civ 3, but I never play it anymore. I'm all about Civ 4 now! I just hope that you find a way to get it to run reliably on your computer. And don't forget to save your game early and often!!