Mindless Ramblings

CIV IV

My wife and I each bought a copy of CIV IV last Friday. While the the learning curve due to new technologies, wonders, civilization features, and interface the game is every bit as addictive as its predecessors.

Instead of militaristic, scientific, industrius, expansionist, and religious cultures allowing you to build or buy an entire class of buildings at half price, the new culture types only allow certain buildings within the class to be built at half price. However, each new culture type also gives another benefit such as free troop promotion (a new feature), great people (a new feature) being born quicker, or lower upkeep costs.

Great people allow you to research faster, generate more culture, spread your religion (another new feature), and perform other highly beneficial tasks. As well as upgrading troops to more advanced kinds, you can now promote troops to make them stronger, harder to kill, more resistant to certain types of attacks, or better at attacking cities. There are 7 religions in the game; the 3 Abrahamic religions as well as Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Whoever controls the holy city for  a religion gets cultural and/or monetary benefits.

Terrain is slightly different also. Mountains are now called peaks and are utterly impassable and unusable for resources. Also, a square can have multiple terrain types. In the game that I am playing right now, I have Forest/Tundra, Hills/Grassland, and Hills/Ice.

Government is handled differently too. Now there are 5 aspects of government including the role of religion, the classes, and economic policies.

One of the best improvements though is the timing. Instead of the 8 hours that it took me to play a game of CIV III, I can now play a game in 3½ hours.

The main disadvantage though is that CIV IV drastically increased the recommended system specifications. You should now have at least 512 MB of memory and 128 MB of video memory. I cannot see many of the animations as my video card only
has 64 MB. I know there are animations because we recently upgraded my wife's video card and she has jumping fish, playful sheep, and happy piggies!

All-in-all I would rate CIV IV 4 out of 5. It lost ½ point for the learning curve and ½ point for the recommended specs going way up. It only lost ½ for the learning curve because I figured out what I was doing after playing one full game (which I won with a space race victory).

posted by carsonb @ 9:54:00 PM