Sid Meier's Civilization IV Special Edition
by 2K Games
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Video Game Reviews of Sid Meier's Civilization IV Special Edition
Customer Review: Absolutely the best TBS ever
Summary: 5 Stars
People who gave the game a low review are not voting on the merits of the game's design, but rather on the shoddy QA that got rushed before final production. It is true that premature optimization is the root of all evil, but no optimization at all is Evil Incarnate. I admit that this game can be slow on even decent hardware. I'm running a 2 GHz Athlon, 1.5 GB RAM, and a 128 MB GeForce 5, and I keep anti-aliasing turned off and a few other graphical goodies to keep the game speed tolerable. And yes, the game does have bugs that cause it to crash rather ungracefully. That being said, here is my best advice for this game:
Step 1: BUY THE GAME. The worst QA issues (except possibly things like getting the wrong disk) have been fixed. What is left justifies every dollar you spend.
Step 2: GET THE PATCH. The official 1.52 patch is the version that should have been released as 1.0. It wasn't; Firaxis made a mistake; boo-hoo. Quit your whining, get the patch, shut up, and play.
Step 3: CASH OUT YOUR STOCK OPTIONS. Odds are, you will lose your job, your family, and everything dear to you for the next several weeks. Better get your finances tidied up so your electricity doesn't get shut off right before you are about to launch for Alpha Centauri.
Now, let's talk about the game. If you want the details, read any one of the other fine reviews here or elsewhere. The best sites are probably Apolyton and CivFanatics. If you are a connoiseur of Civ, and want to know why I declare Civ IV "Absolutely the best TBS ever", then read on.
1. No more time sinks. Yes, there are still things to micro-manage. If you are masochistic, you can create time sinks for yourself out of various game elements. But none of them are *compulsory*, like in past Civs. The game just flows much more smoothly. It's a true pleasure to play. Whereas Civ 1 was like driving a go-kart, Civ 2 was like driving a dune buggy, Civ 3 was like driving a military-grade Hummer, Civ 4 is like driving a Lexus.
2. The game actually looks nice. The interface is natural, intuitive, and gives you a tremendous amount of information. Of course, there's hotkeys for all the useful commands (and unfortunately, some commands are *only* available through hotkey). The 3D aspect of the world seemed gratuitous to me at first. Then I zoomed from the max, where you can see only a few tiles and full unit/tile detail, all the way out to the globe view, where the map is wrapped around a sphere, and the cities are annotated tags on the globe, and I just sat and stared for a minute. Watching that 3D globe spin with your entire Civ world on it is breathtaking the first time you see it. Somehow, it puts the entire planet in the right perspective. Unit animations bring not only units, but also the map alive. Tile improvements indicate usage through animation, and even unimproved tiles show a little hut on squares that are being worked. Attention to detail is leagues better than prior versions.
3. Combat is now as interesting as economy. Combat evolved very slowly in the Civ series. While the life-or-death battles of Civ 1 led way to more interesting combat systems, the current system is best described as "continuous". Instead of having 1-5 hit points, units now have 100 HP (though that number is represented as a percentage of their Strength factor). Why does that make combat interesting? Simply put, it gives more possible outcomes for each battle, and thus a larger combination of tactical and strategic decisions. It's possible for that archer to dent a tank without destroying it...unless the tank is actually so damaged that an archer could conceivably ambush it somehow. By doing something as simple as making the HP a quasi-continuous variable, Firaxis has opened up the combat system to a whole new level.
But that's not all. Experience also makes battle more tactical. Before, you would just build up your Stack-o-Doom and always pick the freshest units to fight. Now, you focus on units that are near promotions, and sometimes you might be willing to fight a more even battle either to get that promotion, or to get more experience points. The number of interesting decisions to make during combat has multiplied exponentially. Also, the promotion system allows for customization of each unit and each encounter. You can tune units for besieging cities, attacking unit stacks, defending, moving quickly, or even healing. The combinatorial nature of the promotion system allows you to build a highly intricate military with structure even within a single unit type. For instance, I can get three free promotions with my current civics. So when I build a tank, I can make it a pure City Raider, which leads to +75% attack vs. city (which gives me a devastating 28+21+2.8=52 strength vs. riflemen@14), a pure defender with Drill III, which gives 2-5 First Strikes (an attack on a tank with Drill III by a stack of anything less than tanks is a suicide mission sure to end in tears), a pure stack raider, with Barrage III (+100% collateral damage)...very nasty against stacks of units in the field, or an "artillery tank", with perhaps City Raider II + Barrage (big bonus vs. cities with collateral damage on each attack...after a few tank strikes, the rest of the units in the city are so softened up you can pretty much roll over 'em). So you can build a diverse army out of nothing but tanks, or artillery, or any number of different unit types.
4. Geography is key. The introduction of strategic resources in Civ 3 really brought home the point of why nations often go to war in the first place. While it is often possible to trade for what you want, it is often not possible to make everyone happy, because someone doesn't like one of your trading partners and wants you to stop. When that happens, and the belligerent happens to have a monopoly on a key resource you want, you don't have much choice than to live without or take it by force. By making city health an explicit gameplay aspect, and tying it to food resources, even something as seemingly trivial as good pastureland or arable farmland seems like a target worthy of military conquest. Civ 2 allowed you to make the world look homogeneous, which was nice for growth, but not very realistic. Civ 3 limited the terraforming abilities, but still left geography a bit lacking. The large number of tile improvements not only makes the game much more interesting from a geographical point of view, it also opens up economic and political aspects of the game. There are much greater customization possibilities without turning everything into super-irrigated plains. You can turn grassland into production-worthy tiles with the addition of a workshop. You can get a whopping 7 resource units from a hill with the addition of a windmill. You can tune the balance from commerce to food to production, not by chaning the Earth, but by changing how you use it. That is both more realistic, and more fun. I admit that it would still be nice to use desert squares, or at least make them remotely useful. But there must be pain somewhere, and there's a reason you don't see a metropolis in the middle of the Sahara (or don't you...isn't it called "Las Vegas"?).
5. Better balance in the gameplay. This is the last point I'll address. While some players complain that Wonders have been nerfed, this really leads to more intelligent games. A military player that builds Da Vinci's workshop could easily get thousands of gold worth of free upgrades, which is unreasonable given the amount of production required to build the wonder. Wonders do indeed have more subtle effects. But this is to make the game more realistic, and also more fun. Missing out on a key wonder could cripple an otherwise good game in earlier versions. Strategies that depended on getting certain wonders sacrificed much of the other aspects of gameplay to get those wonders. Now you have to play the entire game to do well. Sure, there are strategies for playing a narrow-minded cultural victory game, but the overall balance still requires you to manage your entire empire in a more even-handed way. Ignoring any aspect too much will cost you in the long run. By toning down the wonders, there is less chaos when a player gains a huge strategic advantage. The advantage is still there, but it is in closer proportion to the effort expended.
Overall, the game is brilliantly designed. It's not perfect, and it's by far not the last Civ that will ever be made. But it is head and shoulders and torso and hips above the rest, due to the high-quality improvements in almost every area of the game. One of the main reasons Civ IV is such a great game is because it was partly designed by the players...the people who know Civ inside and out and know its flaws and strengths perhaps better than even some of the game designers. I'm sure it took plenty of humility for Firaxis to accept help from the gaming community, but it was the smartest move they ever made. By listening to the players, they produced not just a good game, but an outstanding one...one that I am sure will "stand the test of time."
LM
Customer Review: Good game - with some conditions
Summary: 4 Stars
Why can't these games be debugged before shipment? After the latest patch, the game performance and stability is much improved. But the first impressions remain.
As another reviewer said, this game also stresses your hardware. If you don't have good equipment, go for something else.
Beyond that, its definitely a positive refinement on the genre of turn based strategy. Oh, and it works OK over a network; unlike many predecessors.
Customer Review: Two Disk 1's???
Summary: 1 Stars
Purchased the game for xmas -- opened it up to find two copies of disk 1, no copies of disk 2. Analyzed them both and they are the same disk! 2kGames is of little help, their support doesn't account for this -- amidst several problems with installation -- and their 800 number is inoperable. Customer Review: Good game - but be warned
Summary: 3 Stars
I have always loved the Civ games, right from its very earliest incarnation. This is a fitting follow-up and does almost everything right. I like a really swift game so I found I had to wind down a few of the bells and whistles on the larger maps so I am not waiting too long for all the AI players to take their turns.
But here's the caveat emptor: Do not even THINK about buying this game if your PC is on the bare minimum specs. Even with 1GB of Ram, (and absolutely no other apps running), a spiffy quality 256Mb video card, and the latest monster patch from the company, I repeatedly was maxing out my video memory when playing the "Huge" map, towards the end of the game when everyone had heaps of cities and units. The game would just shut down with an insufficient video memory error message, mid turn, no chance to save, nothing. Splat.
So I have learned from this: either go get more than 1Gb of RAM or don't even bother playing a large map during gameplay (which is a pity, as it can be a load of fun). For this reason alone I am lopping off another star from my mark.
I am not saying don't buy the game -- do -- but be warned, you may be disappointed if you don't have a high-end machine to experience it in all its glory. You have been warned.
Since writing the above I have found out the game has a "memory leak" according to Civ forums, explaining why you can start out with a hefty chunk of RAM free and end up with so little by the end of a long, bloated game -- ultimately crashing due to lack of video memory. Some enterprising technically minded gamers are even posting patches for it. Doubtlessly Firaxis et al will follow too. So it's not your machine that's lacking the specs -- it's them, sucking them all up!
Customer Review: Great Look to a Tried and True Model
Summary: 5 Stars
I had to buy a new video card to play this (or old, depending on how you look at it), and was impressed - they really added a makeover to the series. All the fanfare was well deserved, this game doesn't disappoint. I believe I'm coming out of the stupor that is MoO3, and will return to this franchise shortly.
I don't really have anything to add, except that I've heard that Masters of Magic 2 might come out -- for anyone that's played MoM, can you imagine Tranquility over your capital, Armageddon, or any of those global spells, on a Civ-4 type world? That would look awesome...I hope a developer reads this. :)