Free Candy For Everyone

I finally completed a game of Civilization IV today, so felt I was now qualified to share my thoughts on it. Let me start by saying that as soon as I won, I opened up World of Warcraft and started playing that. Which should be a big indicator that there’s something wrong in the world of Civ4.

I’ll start with what I like. They went with a full 3D engine using Gamebryo, and it was a good move. The units look good, the cities look more alive and are now actually integrated into the world. Here is one of my cities, at three levels of detail.

The really nice part about the near view is that those buildings in the city are the buildings I built. All the skyscrapers are just generic city, but the temples, cathedrals, etc are there because I built them. In cities with aqueducts, they’re actually outside the city and span several tiles. It’s nice to have that on the map representation of what is in your city. And the silliness of the unit scale is just something you accept.

I still don’t really think much of the globe. You cannot play at that level of zoom. Everything you need to do can be done zoomed in more. It’s not even all that useful for getting the big picture. And one turn, I zoomed out, then hit end turn and was unable to see anything that was happening, as the globe turned around, centering on units that were way too small for me to see.

The basic gameplay is very Civilization. You do all the things you expect from a Civ game, such as building new cities, exploring, picking research, interacting with other nations and combat. All of these systems have undergone fine tuning and streamlining from previous versions. But I’m not sure I like where they streamlined.

For example, the military units you can build have undergone a change. Instead of having two attributes, one for attack and one for defense, all units now have a strength. And they also have bonuses versus units of particular types. So one unit might have +50% vs Mounted units. Very RTS inspired. What this ends up meaning is that you have less units with more decisions about what to build. All previous Civs ended up having one unit that was ideal for defending your city. When you got the next unit with a better defense value, that was the best unit to defend with. Now, there are a few units you could defend with, depending on what the enemy is building. So if you choose to build a ton of defensive infantry, and the enemy has anti-infantry units, you are in trouble. You need to spread out your defense and build more. But overall, I believe there are less units.

This system will take some getting used to. It’s just not quite the way I’m used to playing a Civ game. Of course I’m familiar with the concepts as I’m a hardcore RTS gamer. But in this setting, it’s a change. One I’m not sure I like yet.

After some misconceptions, I’m starting to understand the role of Religion in the game. First, a quote from the manual:

We know that people have extremely strong opinions about religions - in fact, many a war has arisen when these beliefs collide. We here at Firaxis have no desire to offend anyone. However, given the importance that religions have had in human development, we didn’t want to just leave them out of the game altogether … All religions in the game have the same effect, the only difference being their technological requirements.

Which begs the question, why have them at all, if they are all the same? There are some elements in the user interface that lead me to believe that they were not always the same. My guess is that fear of political fallout lead to them all being sanitized and homogenized. So then what are they good for? Basically, if you found a religion and you build a special building for it, you get line of sight to every city that shares your faith. That’s pretty cool. Also, every Civ game has let you build Temples. In Civ4, you can build one for every religion in your city. So if you have five religions, you can have five temples along with the happiness and cultural benefits they bring. It’s really in your best interests to found every religion possible and spread them wide and far. A neat idea, but I really wish that the religions had different benefits. That’s be much more interesting. Oh. You can adopt one of the religions as your State Religion, in which case the cities that share that religion gain benefits. But those benefits are always the same, no matter the religion.

I won my first game at the Chieftain level by a World Domination victory, which as far as I can tell, just means that I rock. I didn’t wipe everyone out, I didn’t have the best culture, but really, no one stood a chance of beating me. It was just at the boring phase where I was mustering my troops to steamroll the next AI in the line. I think I’m ready for the next difficulty setting.

I think the game is fun. I enjoyed playing it. I was completely unchallenged for the entire time at this difficulty setting, and that has a lot to do with my lack of enthusiasm in the endgame. I’m definitely going to start up another match at a higher setting and see what happens when I need to make decisions about what to build in a city instead of building everything. There looks to be a lot of room to specialize a city. Instead of the basic Entertainers, Scientists and Merchants you could have in previous Civs, there are Engineers and Priests. And there are building requirements for how many of each you can have. I think it’ll be interesting to see how much city management comes out of all this.

One more thing - the world is much smaller in Civ4. I was playing on a standard sized world, which is actually one of the largest sizes, and the number of cities we ended up with was much smaller than on a comparable Civ 3 game. I read that they were trying to eliminate the “Infinite City Sprawl”, wherein the most successful strategy was an infinite number of huge cities. I sort of liked that, though in the late game managing all of them was a bit of a hassle. But the initial landgrab phase where you just build city after city and build up the road network was always super fun. And that seems to be a much shorter phase now.

Oh, really, one more thing. I really was disappointed about the tech tree time span. It basically ends at the current state of technology. There are no near future techs to research for things we don’t have in the world today. It seems like there is some real room there to bring things into the near future. I’m not talking about going hundreds of years ahead, but the techs end at Fiber Optics. Come on, we’ve had that for years! Where’s the nanotech, the advanced weaponry, the bionic citizenry?

I’m feeling a bit disaffected right now. Ultimately, I think my fondness will grow as I see the nuances of gameplay. But the things I’m seeing right now result in me rating this at 80%. I know that the big guys are in love with the game (hello Gamespy, perfect score?!?), but I’m apparently a harsher critic.