Sid Meier's Civilization IV
by 2K Games
|
List Price: Our Price: $16.40 You Save: $3.59 (18%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Buy Used: from $5.95 (click here) Category: Video Games See more product details |
|---|
Video Game Reviews of Sid Meier's Civilization IV
Customer Review: Seemed boring to me but apparently its epic.
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this game off of Steampowered and was expecting it to be epic, which I can see it is with all the different elements in the game. The only problem is that it's almost too complicated, once you get to the 1900's the turns take way too long and everything just slows down giving you nothing to do but move military forces around.
To be fair I was expecting something like Black & White and thats not what this is at all, its about thinking and strategy, basically an electronic board game.
Customer Review: Civ IV: Nothing is more addictive!
Summary: 5 Stars
Civilization IV:
A game of excelent graphics, and realistic scenery shows how magnificent this game actually is. I believe several hours could be spent on it, so overdoing game-time in CivIV is the greatest concern. This game is truly an amazing, and addictive computer game.
Customer Review: So unplayable, I didn't even finish the tutorial
Summary: 1 Stars
I've been a fan of Civ since the first one, and spent
countless hours playing Civ I, II, and III. So I was
really looking forward to IV.
In Civ IV, the units have changed to little groups of
people that run around. The map has changed from 2
dimensional to a 3D perspective view. All these little
people running around the 3D perspective view means I
couldn't tell where the grid was, couldn't tell where
one unit ended and another began, and couldn't tell
what type of unit was what. It was also ridiculously
slow to scroll around the map, hard to figure out what
direction a unit could or couldn't move, and quite
disorienting to just try to find a place: as in
"now where was that settler I sent to the west that
I was just looking at a minute ago?"
Then the program crashed before I even finished the
tutorial. I realized that the play had been so
cumbersome (and the plastic robot Sid Meier so annoying)
that I was almost glad it crashed. I uninstalled the
game without ever finishing the tutorial.
I'll go back to a previous edition of Civilization
until they publish something better than THIS. The
hyped up graphics and movement make Civ IV a lot of
fancy window dressing on a big turkey.
Customer Review: An improvement in most ways
Summary: 5 Stars
Civ IV is still recognizably Civilization, but with enough tweaks to make it fun and plenty of new stuff to master during repeated play.
The game has movies about each wonder that play when you finish it. It animates battle scenes with great detail and sound effects. It has great music - Gregorian chants, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikowsky and even modern opera to match the era.
The internal math has been updated. Food, production, and culture still work more or less as they did in Civilization III - land gets farmed or mined, its food or industrial production goes up accordingly, and when it accumulates enough culture points, it expands. But there are new ways to tweak them. There are lots of new resources, seem to be more on the map, and you don't seem to stress out as much over getting them.
And there are some whole new dimensions.
Instead of offensive and defensive numbers, military units have a single power number. They get different bonuses against different opponents - archers get an edge, say, against mounted units - creating the offensive or defensive edges Civ III featured. You can see odds calculated before you opt to fight, and see every unit in a city before attacking it. You avoid unfavorable battles. The ones you pick, go faster.
Also, there are a slew of promotions you give units as they become eligible, customizing them with different strengths. A swordsman can get a bonus against archers, handy particularly if you know he's about to face one. Or a bonus good for attacking across rivers. Or one good for faster recovery.
The infamous "spearman effect" has been quelled. A primitive unit with the right promotions can still be effective defending a city against a stronger, more modern foe but when the odds get beyond a certain point, they collapse to 100 percent. So your tank won't get destroyed by a spearman who's having a lucky day.
The game introduces collateral damage to discourage stacking units into numerically unbeatable armies. If you shell or bomb a stack of units, you can damage the whole stack. On offense, you can bomb a city to weaken its overall defenses, but you can also bomb the defenders themselves, with one bomb damaging them all, making conquest immeasurably easier.
Religion is a major element. If you discover a religion, you work to spread it. Other rulers are friendlier if of the same religion, more hostile if from a different one. You can convert to curry favor. Religion helps keep your people happy, as it did in Civ III, but it also allows you to spy on foreign cities where you've sent a missionary. (The "Jesuit effect.")
Every time you build a synagogue, a cantor chants something in Hebrew. (And every time you finish a new technology, Leonard Nimoy recites some pithy saying about it. Gunpowder: "You can get more with a kind word and a gun, than you can with just a kind word." - Al Capone.
Health and sickness have been quantified and elaborated. The numbers tell you when you need to build Aqueduct, Grocer or Hospital, and how much you need to solve your problem.
Diplomacy has been updated. A running list of praises and gripes from rivals, whose attitudes you could only infer in Civ III, let you know who's a strong ally or enemy, who's on the fence, and why, which helps you figure out what to do about it.
The rulers have more personality. It's priceless when Julius Caeser or Queen Victoria, annoyed because you've refused trades or alliances, says, "I studied on killin' you."
Trade has been altered, in my opinion, for the worse. Resources can only be traded for other resources, or gold per turn, which other rulers never seem to have much of, meaning even a resource-rich empire must return to the market repeatedly to sell Silk for 2 Gold, then Corn for 1 Gold, then Wine for 3 Gold, etc. Or you trade Silk straight up for Corn, which the game thinks is an even trade. This is an improvement? It's a lot less like real history, when Silk or Spices were precious and rare, as they were in Civ III.
You have to trade techs for flat sums or other techs, not for gold per turn. Other rulers won't haggle much, which is no fun. In Civ III, I liked counteroffering 15 times until I'd shaped absolutely the best deal possible, or trading a resource for a tech with some gold and gold per turn thrown in on either side. I liked being able to sell techs repeatedly for hefty golds per turn and have them keep me rich for the next 20 turns. All that's gone. Feh. Also, there are options involving conversion or adoption of another country's civic values, but they're usually grayed out, and the game doesn't let you offer to convert in exchange for something. It should.
The graphics are fabulous. You can zoom in and see every building in your city, or zoom out to a globe view, handy when viewing a whole continent, estimating sea distances or scanning the entire world's resources.
There's a lot of automation. The game can suggest where to send workers or build cities - the latter usually near water - speeding up a lot of busy work. The new system for right and left-clicking units to move them, goes a lot faster.
Many minor flaws have been ironed out. You needn't colonize bits of land to keep opponents out, because the game won't let new cities form within two squares of another. Cities expand faster so more of those land slivers end up safely inside your borders anyway. Not only does corruption, now called "maintenance costs", discourage huge empires, but it also punishes fast growth, even early in the game. Besides farms and mines and a variety of mills, workers can build outlying cottages growing, with time, into money-generating villages and towns putting the city into the black. But before their surrounding settlements grow, new cities drag down your economy, so you don't want too many new cities all at once. At war, you can plunder those towns and villages for gold, which makes plundering a lot more lucrative, and gives your cavalry something to do while you're slowly moving footsoldiers and catapults into place.
Civ IV moves a lot faster. You can turn off some animation, once you've seen it all - seeing the Taj Mahal get built a dozen times was enough - to make it go faster still. I could spend 50 or 100 hours playing Civ III games if they had large maps and big wars. 12 to 24 hours is more typical for Civ IV. The game is also sped up by this: the characteristics of every unit, technology, resource, improvement or what have you is right there when you click on something. You don't have to remember that Optics lets you build Caravel, or that Caravel requires Optics; it says so right there in both places. You don't have to get out the instruction book or go to Civilopedia very often.
The down side is that a Civ III game became part of your life, a given map part of your mental geography that you'd pondered over every city. When a game was over, I was sorry to say goodbye. I still remember Civ III games I played two years ago. Civ IV games aren't as involving. Players don't really get into the city screen and get their hands dirty, and so may not really learn the game's guts.
But because each game is shorter, you feel freer to take chances and make mistakes. You have less vested in each game. I'd play safe in Civ III, not wanting to blow three weeks of work with a dicey attack or strategic error. A couple of days ago, by comparison, I had to decide between the UN victory in Civ IV and the space race, and opted for the latter. No matter: today I did the UN victory in the next game and learned how it worked. Finishing two games in three days never would have happened in Civ III.
Customer Review: Everything as expected, and a bit more
Summary: 5 Stars
I hadn't played Civilization since it was on 3 1/2 inch floppies. It was good then... but it's great now!
Everything was there as I remembered it- but the obvious evloution of the game was outstanding. the graphics were excellent, from eye in the sky to practically first person view point - it was a seamless transition.
It was easy to (re)learn, and many an hour since then has been spent playing. My son and I have played both over each other's shoulder, and using hte "multi-player" option.
I heartly recommend this to everyone.