Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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543 of 604 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!, October 25, 2005
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
If you’ve never played Sid Meier’s Civilization and are thinking about buying for the first time, I recommend you read some of the reviews from the previous version Civilization III to get a glimpse of how exciting and breath-taking this game, its concept, and artificial intelligence truly are. If you’re a veteran at Civ, THEN LISTEN UP!!!
I ripped open this package as soon as I got it, told my friends & family not to talk to me until Thanksgiving, and basically put my life on hold.
Right from the opening, you are blown away by the higher-grade graphics, details, sounds, and more lively persona of the game. Although many game elements have changed, you will not need to read the manual (who does?) to play. Right away you’ll figure out the new console and controls. Starting off, you choose map style, map size, climate, sea level, and the civ – just like Civ III. These are the civs you can play for now (I’m sure there’ll be expansion packs later):
Americans
Arabians
Aztecs
Chinese
Egyptians
English
French
Germans
Greeks
Incans
Indians
Japanese
Malinese
Mongolians
Persians
Romans
Russians
Spanish
Unlike Civ III, most of these civs have two leaders that you can choose, which allow another dimension of play. The movements and landscape are incredibly better with 3-D effects that are more colorful. Even down to the borders of the countries, the lines are more creatively contoured.
It’s harder to over-expand or quickly expand your cities. In Civ III if you were Chinese, you could beat everyone virtually by getting your population to the point of overwhelming others in production capacity, units, and wealth. Therefore, you have to be more judicious with each city’s focus, research, and commitments.
There no longer is a government angle like democracy, fascism, or monarchy. You achieve the governments as part of your research toward civic choices. Similarly, you research pacifism to get towards one of the religions. The religions seem to play a much more incorporated component to the game, but a subtle. The religions are: Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Taoism. So, for example (and I apologize that this isn’t politically correct), if Christian Napoleon fights the Persians with Islam, there seems to be a slight difference than Christian Napoleon fights the Taoist Persians, to the extent that religion plays a role. I've tried that combo a few times and continue to get similar statistically significant results. However, certainly for those civs that are keen on religion, you’d better go for it asap!
New military units are all over the place. I played Americans my last time and I noticed the Navy SEAL. That was pretty cool. Also units can now be promoted so their attack rate or defense can be incrementally improved over time. Figure a swordsman beating a Navy SEAL? Also, there are less worries about micromanaging the Workers.
Overall, the game speed is about 2X faster. In other words, what took me 6hrs to achieve in Civ III takes around 3hrs. That makes it more intense playing. You’d better keep you eye on everything.
In short, Fireaxis has done an incredible job. Hands down, the best game ever (ever). Sid Meier, if you’re reading this, you are absolutely a master game developer and please NEVER retire!
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339 of 376 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best turn-based strategy game ever, October 27, 2005
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
If you have never played a "Civ" type game:
Civilization 4 is a turn-based strategy game - the action freezes while you decide what to do (compared to Real-Time-Strategy (RTS) games where things keep happening). Turn-based games typically offer much more depth than most RTS games, whose complexity is limited by the frantic pace of the game, and the 1-2 hour target duration of the RTS game.
People who love the Civ type games typically share two qualities. First, they are good at seeing the "big picture" - this game is more sophisticated than a game of chess, as the cause and effect of game decisions are often subtle, and not clear cut until much later. Second, the best players make a lot of good decisions, similar to an air traffic controller. You have a limited number of resources to do more things than is possible (do I build combat units to fight a war, economic structures to support me, or pursue a religious strategy at the risk of weakening my military?). The program allows you to automate a lot of decisions, but you can usually coordinate things better to your grand strategy if you do them manually (especially production decisions).
While the graphics and sound are excellent, these are not the focus of the game - instead, the entire gameplay experience is. Civ4 is extremely addictive due to the many decisions you make, and the way your decisions affect you nation (hopefully in positive ways). Civ4 is a game that is fun to start and restart over and over looking for an "optimal strategy", although this strategy will change based on who you are (different nations have different strengths; i.e. the Mongols are better at combat, while the Egyptians are better at religious development).
If you buy one game this year, get Civ4.
For FOLLOWERS of the CIV series:
Civ4 is the best. There are a lot of changes to the game that enhance play, but don't make it more difficult to play. First, many of the things that used to waste your time are gone or reduced. For instance a city with too many unhappy people no longer goes into revolt, but just slows down. Allowing any unit to automatically explore makes life easier as well. Your tax rate is slightly automated, defaulting at 100% science. If you are spending money on other things, the science rate automatically goes down as needed, rather than dismantling improvements.
Civ4's developmnent of religion revolutionizes the game as much as culture did to Civ3. Religion allows cities to use specialists, which are the main way to generate leaders. These leaders can still accelerate research or wonder production, but they can also improve a city's production (production, culture and commerce). There are 7 religions, and the founder of a religion (the first to research the tech for that) gains advantages: spies in all cities with the same religion, and income from all cities with the same religion.
You no longer have settlers running through your territory towards open spaces unless you agree to "open borders". Opening your borders increases your trade, and allows you to spread religion (and vice versa). Religion provides a lot of ways to make your people happy, but it is better to use your own religion, than join someone else's.
The government changes are much more discreet - instead of 6 or 7 types of government, you have 5 areas of civics, with up to 5 selections each (which become available as you research different techs). Changing one attribute of your government requires only one turn of anarchy. If you have the techs, you can fine-tune your government: do you want to maintain more military units, or produce more culture? Would you rather trade openly with all, or refuse trade (mercantilism) and develop more specialists? The possibilities along with their development curve allow a multitude of different grand-strategies.
Combat... attacking cities can be dangerous. As a unit wins combats, it gains experience, and can gain "levels". With each level, a unit gains abilities; from +10% combat strength, to bonuses in different situations (i.e. +25% defense in a city). The effect of this makes it difficult to take more than 2-3 cities in a flurry, unless your empire is huge.
Technology advancements are more flexible. To advance, you need any one prerequisite, instead of all prerequisites. This means it is easier to focus a research strategy to an endpoint, and also easier to find an unnused tech to trade.
The diplomatic trade interface is more flexible and useful. Things the other side won't ever trade are in red, so you know not to bother. Additionally, the game tells you why your relations are at a certain point (it lists modifiers based on religion, open/closed borders, current trade agreements, any many other events). If a nation is hostile towards you, you'll know exactly why.
The one drawback of the game is the new interface. Civ3 took me about 15 minutes to feel comfortable and forget the old. Civ4 took about 2 hours (after I used the zoom-out 4 times, turned units onto solo figure, and turned on the health-bar). The payback is worth it though - the strategic component and the addiction factor are much higher than Civ3 once you get used to it.
If you enjoyed civ3, Civ4 is a mandatory purchase.
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29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Review for Existing Civ Players, November 21, 2005
Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars
Civilization 3 was devastating for me personally, professionally and academically. Every game was a 24 hour commitment and it was borderline impossible to save and stop mid-game. I would go days without sleep, skip classes, nod off at work. I missed a midterm. I was a zombie, and all I could think about was getting home to finish off the French.
Apparently Sid et al. recognized that their game was ruining lives and worked hard to make the game more time managable. Unfortunately, this is by far the biggest change in gameplay between Civs 3 and 4.
Whereas a game of Civ 3 rarely clocked in at under 20 hours, I completed a NORMAL length timed victory of Civ 4 in just under 6 hours! I couldn't believe it. The gameplay has been severely shortened - and with disastrous consequences. For starters, to accomplish this, the maps have been greatly reduced in size. A massive part of the strategy is now "choking" enemy civs by putting up cities with impassable borders in narrow stetches of territory to stop your enemies from expanding. As such, border-negotiations are now an insanely crucial aspect of the game.
Furthermore, it now often takes hundreds of years to wage a war (or to capture one city even) making military conflict ridiculous. I often found that, between attacks, my entire army had become outdated and required replacement. The unit building to tech development ratio is incredibly off (by the time my army of Aztec Jaguars were mobilized and en route to France, I had already developed the tech for cavalry). As such, the fundamental military aspects of the game have been utterly marginalized. Culture and religion are now much more reliable ways of colonizing other civs - which, though cool-sounding, is in fact... well, boring. Twice now Ive just stopped playing because I was bored of grinding it out by building wonders and buildings for culture without any conflict for millenia. I had to wipe my hard drive to stop playing Civ 3...
There is simply too little time during each era of the game. They've essentially taken the entire structure of Civ 3, added civics and religions and crammed it all into 1/3 to 1/4 of the play time. There's no spare time to empire-build, wage war or conduct diplomacy anymore.
This may seem like a petty detail to some, but it has honestly made the game much less fun (atleast for me). The added features (which are basically: better graphics, civics and religion) are in fact all fairly insignificant, superficial tweaks that do not offset the duller, faster gameplay.
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