Civilization IV: Sid Meier Hates You

So over Christmas, I picked up Sid Meier's Civilization V on Steam's Christmas sale. (75% off, woot!), I have been working on playing through the game and getting the feel for it and learning how to properly take over the world in a hex grid as opposed to a squared one

Civ IV (top) vs Civ V (bottom):

Now with slightly different polygons than before!

Now the Civilization franchise has been around for ages; or more precisely, since 1991 with the release of the original Civilization computer game. While by modern standards, the graphics were laughably bad, for the time the game was rather innovative and made good use of that generation's engine and gameplay abilities. Not to mention founding a gaming dynasty that remains quite healthy over 20 years after the initial game was released.

Now while I am working on learning the ropes of Civilization V, I would like to take some time to pause and review the game that was my introduction to the franchise: Civilization IV. Like with Civ V, I picked up Civ IV during the Steam Christmas sale about two years ago as something to do while staying at my parents' house over Christmas break. I had seen a friend fiddling around with Civilization III a number of years prior and it looked pretty fun so I decided to drop the $10 and buy the whole Civ IV generation of games, which included the original Civ IV and a number of expansions as well.

In case you felt like this review needed even more Roman numerals

The Civilization series has a rather simple premise: pick a nation and guide it through the entire course of human history, from cavemen banging rocks together and fighting off lions and wolves, to the space age where you have the opportunity to launch a spaceship to colonize Alpha Centauri. A player chooses between one of a few dozen different leaders/nations each with their own traits, strengths and weaknesses and seeks to build an empire that dominates the world in some way or another.

The gameplay style is turn based strategy where one player acts on his/her own turn and then their opponents get their chance to act (given that your opponents are usually AI's, the wait time between turns isn't too bad). The game largely follows a "4X" style of gameplay: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. Essentially, one grows one's empire in order to gain access to land and resources and ultimately vanquish whatever enemies one encounters along the way. Turns consist of a variety of actions from city maintenance and construction orders, to improving the land the city uses to produce things, to diplomatic negotiations with rival civilizations, to moving troops around and capturing enemy lands.

Domination through a cunning use of flags

If this sounds a bit dry or a little too in-depth, I fully sympathize. Civ is definitely a game with a serious learning curve on it. The game does come with a tutorial which is helpful in giving a basic understanding of what buttons do what, and giving the player a basic introduction to turn-based strategy gaming. If you are new to the series or to the genre of turn-based strategy entire, then playing through the tutorial is a must. However, learning the game properly, like many things, is something you can only pick up through actual practice and several failed attempts. My hard drive soon became loaded with a number of half-finished games of me just trying to figure out what the hell I was doing and not trying to get murdered by guys with sticks. It is horribly depressing watching London get sacked by barbarians because you didn't know units could occupy the same square at the same time. True story.

However, I feel that the time investment to learn to play the game is quite rewarding once you get the hang of it and can stumble through a game without sabotaging yourself too badly, or even manage to win through some manner of competent strategy. I do wish to forewarn you that each game is a bit of a time sink depending on what kind of strategy you use to play through it (my early games ate up upwards of 8+ hours of play, though now I can usually clear though a run in about 5 or less). Yet, when all is said and done, there is a great deal of satisfaction in raising a nation from its infancy to it's overweight, greedy and bloated old age and knowing that it was your wisdom that ensured the Greeks were reduced to nothing but a fallout ridden wasteland because Alexander the Great had the gall to offer you Fish in exchange for one of of your Oil resources.

Psht. I get my fish and oil from the same tile. Don't need what you're selling Alex

Incidentally, if you like history then the Civilization series also offers something rather interesting: laughably amusing inaccuracies that are entirely your fault. Civ IV manages this in a number of ways, but to keep things brief I will only prattle on about one which amuses me particularly. In Civilization, you have a number of opportunities to construct various "World Wonder" buildings. These are buildings which you probably learned about in school at some stage, things like Stonehenge, the Parthenon, the Pyramids, etc. In terms of gameplay, they are terribly costly to construct, but they provide some rather substantial benefits to your civilization in return. The benefit one gains from it's construction is (very) loosely tied to the historical use of the wonder when it was originally constructed. For example the Colossus of Rhodes provides an increase in how much gold you get from your coastline; historically the Colossus was a beacon of trade in the Eastern Mediterranean. Hopefully you see the connection.

However, the humour comes about through the absurdity of some of the gameplay choices you might make. For example: You begin your game and choose to play as Queen Victoria of the English Empire. You begin playing and ultimately decide to build the Pyramids in... London. Now as a stroke of luck you have received one of the game's "Great People" who grace your civilization every so often and have a variety of uses. The one you happen to get is the Great Engineer Benjamin Franklin... Born in the year 2500 BC... in Newcastle, England... And you use him to quickly (rush) build the Pyramids in one turn of gameplay... Ow, My history hurts... However, I am willing to accept this is a quirk of the game that only amuses me and a select number of people (Kalpar included) who find historical inaccuracies to be causes of rollicking amusement, but I wanted to point it out all the same.

Hilarious

Now while I do have a lot of good to say about Civ IV, and it is truly a good game and has provided me with a lot of entertainment, there are aspects of the game that are quite frustrating as well. For one the game cycles through all your units on a given turn ensuring that you give orders to every unit that can do something that turn; while this is largely a helpful feature, and you would have to be insane to disable it, it often results in the game yanking control away from you when you are attempting to do something you wish to prioritize. It becomes frustrating to try and click on a particular unit, only to have the game wrest control away from you to tell a worker to continue building his farm.

Secondly, to oversimplify the game's combat mechanics, each unit has a base amount of strength and the game uses that value as well as random number generator to determine the outcome of battles (there are other factors as well, but we won't worry about those). While I understand that it is essentially an impossibility to translate battle tactics into a cloud of 1's and 0's, the random number generator seems to have an anti-player bias which allows for rather perplexing outcomes to battles. To put it another way, it is infuriating to have your helicopter shot out of the air by a guy with a 16th century musket. To put it another another way, Sid Meier hates you.

Accomplished with something that belongs in a museum

On a whole though, Civ IV is a game which I would heartily recommend to anyone who has an penchant for strategy gaming, and the time to invest in it. Hopefully, if there are any gamers in the readership, you might consider picking it up and giving it a try. Definitely not everyone's cup of tea, and there are some definite flaws in the game, but not the worst thing you could spend your money on either.

See? Much worse things you could spend your money on.

God save the Queen

- Carvan