Civilization 4 – Gandhi Made Me Do It

[Dracos]

As many around the site, Civilization has devoured me for the last few weeks since I dared crack the case on it and made it one of the first games installed on my fancy new laptop.  I would spend entire days, nay weeks, entirely devoted to building the mighty Indian empire.  I would plot out for days at a time the growth of its unstoppable army, micromanaging obsessively in a way that simply devoured time.  I finished a grand total of four rounds with an average round time of thirty hours running on epic as the preferred game length.

   Thus, I am obligated to give two warnings: A)The game is for the patient micromanager at heart.  B)If you have any problem getting absorbed in micromanaging things, this game will destroy you.  Especially if you use any mods to give accelerated starts.

   I'm going to admit right off, I'm not the kind this game was meant for.  I played it for the awesomely cool building stuff having no patience for the actual game as designed.  I can still go over it largely because I'm well aware of what I saw, but if you're looking for a straight shooting review, this isn't exactly it.  If you're looking for a multiplayer side review, I can't write that either as I was solely here for the single player experience, both original flavor and scenarios.

   The game in its entirety is a take over the 'world' scenario, which basically just involves, regardless of the settings, a number of turns to play, a random terrain of varying size with a few choices on what it tries to aim for, and a certain number of nations and/or barbarians to contend with.  There is no story.  The scenarios and even the mods I've seen do not change this structure.  You play the illustrious leader/dictator of your entire civilization, elected at the dawn of time (or wherever you start) to lead your society to greatness.  You have certain traits individual to each leader and each society has a special unit.  As may be guessed, I preferred Gandhi and the Indians for their fast workers and pacifist leader, despite the lack of the civ 1 charisma and nuclear weapons lines.  From there you get to move each unit a set number of times per move and assign work to cities and such, slowly building your empire towards one of several victory conditions.  The game is flexible enough that pretty much any form of civilization supremacy you can think of is represented in the victory conditions and a final score based one for the game lasting too long.  Notably, you get one palace alongside your leader, a city that will never betray you.

   The in game setups are pretty flexible, allowing for dozens of scenario options to be set, and if this isn't enough there's both a world builder for manual setting up of a special game scenario and the mod tools which can edit every aspect of the game pretty much.  Despite the mod tools being out for a while, there were zero mods out when I checked that changed anything of meaning.  Lots of extra scenarios (I'm a british lord now!) but really, nothing to extend gameplay if you grow tired of the basics.  The mods and scenarios that are there are largely of the reenactment type, so if you're into that, there's a lot there for you.

   The worst part of the game, I think, is the first 400 years of each game.  It's supposed to go quick and technically it does, but the whole 'start with a settler and a warrior' was pretty meh in my eyes.  The game doesn't shine when your only decision of merit is 'wait for 12 turns for a basic building to build.  It's a carry over from earlier designs, but I don't think it was ever a great decision.  Random placement aside, there's a pretty significant advantage that is just getting generated at the right spot.  I've seen comp characters get spawned on ice parts and they never really catch up.  Losing the first fifty turns or so before getting a new place is brutal and having your main city be unproductive is equally so.  Sure, it's technically balanced since you can move, but having you moving to find a good location while the ai spends 3-4 turns harvesting at their excellent start location can be a fair handicap in and of itself, even with how weak the starting rounds end up being.  This I was pretty not keen on.  I just didn't find the start of the game fun.  Moreso, I'd actually say settlers were generally too expensive with most people I discussed strategy with relying most heavily on sending out cheaper explorers to hopefully trigger a settler unit from a village.  This is reasonable in one sense as cities are very valuable and each settler is effectively a city, but really, they eat turns pretty mightily and make setting up a bunch of cities impossible until mid to late game without relying on random finds.

   When the game became fun is when you started getting several cities, working your way to enhancing them, or at least, that's where I spent almost all my time.  Each city can have lots of enhancements, allows for micromanaging of resources with a significantly better interface than I've seen in previous iterations (Finally, I understand where all these problems are coming from).  Cities can also have wonders, which are both great special bonuses, cultural things, appear on the map beside your city, and give a beautiful building up 3d animated scene when you get them.  There's several of them and as only one nation can get each of them, it was always a collect them all race in my eyes.  Your city grows as a function off both your population and your city enhancements, of which there are many.  I loved fiddling with this.  You also have up to 20 plots where people can work, harvesting resources for the city.  This is largely where the importance of placement comes in, as a city with few of these plots harvestable is doomed from the start to be a tiny miniscule city.  Even with all the plots available, having some being mediocre plots can really decline a city, since there's no in game way to improve the terrain and having a plot that gives 5-7 resources unimproved really is a heavy advantage over one that gives 1 resource and cannot be improved.  Generally, ice, rock, and desert are your enemies as they are pretty much unusable.  I did not play an ice game through, largely as I was convinced pre-emptively that such would be very little fun for me. At the least though, you can generally rely that 80 percent of the map will not be covered in ice and rock and desert.

   I mentioned enhancements, and that was the second half of my obsession when playing.  Each plot can have a number of different buildings on it that improve or weaken the resources on it, helping the city improve faster.  These plots are only utilized when people are on it, so even if you can fill the entire twenty plots with neat buildings, they won't do anything until there are at least twenty people.  The plot your city itself is on is never improved unfortunately.  That said, you can transform your one plot city into a rather huge one surrounding it with towns and farms.  Those two are the primary improvements in general.  A farm providing the necessary food to hasten population growth and a town requiring a huge number of turns to reach full producitivity, though then offering the highest wealth rate available (I've seen up to 8 gold per turn from one plot).  The others are important to production and using odd terrains, but those two are the real heart of it and on almost every plot, they'll be highlighted as suggested features to put there.

   What about the rest of the game though?  There are a few other really important aspects and unfortunately they aren't really as interesting.

   You have your finances to deal with, splitting your income between income, science, and art and thus determining the rate of growth of research, wealth, and culture.  Unfortunately, these things are all on a national level, so you can't really set a single city to be producing lots of art and wealth and another to be a scientific powerhouse.  This would've been a real nice bit of flexibility, but unfortunately they just give a global setup for your nation.  You have to deal with inflation, unit support (both home and away), city maintenance fees, and paying for civics.  Notably, both of the last two are based on number of cities, which is kind of annoying as it makes it far less clear as to the actual cost of placing a new city and provides a sort of upper limit as each new city can potentially give a 'number of cities' increase in cost.  It'd probably be better if the civic cost was more clearly defined so that a player could figure out what a new city would add to their bottom line rather than finding out post building.  Of course, I could be wrong and it could be population based, didn't test that quite thoroughly enough.  Anyhow, you get a neat finance area to check all of your costs per turn and adjust accordingly to keep your nation in the green.

   That's actually one of a bunch of advisors.  There's also the foreign advisor and whole diplomacy area which, I admit, they gave a good try to.  You can see a lot of information about relationships there, trade routes, etc.  Talking to folks allows asking about their opinions on people, etc.  The problem is, nations act randomly instead of sensibly.  It's not true randomly, but it's effectively so.  And the diplomacy is rather low level in general.  You can't do much strategy in it and a lot of the decisions are fairly arbitrary.  I've often seen half the nations get angry because I traded with someone they hadn't even met yet, but was somehow their worst enemies.  That sort of stuff ticked me off during the single diplomatic run I did.  There was no way to form a sort of global alliance.  You can't even act as peacemaker between nations and all.  It's just a really superficial diplomacy scheme.  The best you can do is get everyone 'pleased' with you and semi-block them from heading to other nations so that you can dominate the UN vote and earn a diplomatic victory.  It was rather disappointing on the whole and one hopes that this area gets the most attention if there's a civ 5, because it didn't ever really feel like interacting with other nations, but instead a sort of weak bargaining for favor thing.  The numbers don't seem to mean too much as regards actual behavior and two folks having excellent relations with you never leads to them bettering their relations with each other.  In a word, the diplomatic model as written feels very childish, like playing baby sitter to a bunch of kids.

   There's a military advisor which I never found of much use.  It simply wasn't detailed enough and all.  I'd say more about it but really it was just this mass list and indecipherable blob of influences that generally had little to do with military might.  The military system is precisely the same kind of system that's been in Civ as long as I can remember.  You have units of varying types.  They have different abilities and bonuses and such.  They also have levels for experienced units who've won lots of combats.  There's fortification for building defenses or midway points and such.  Oddly, the best strategy I've heard for forts outside your city plot is right next to the enemy city to provide a solid attacking base, which feels weird since the effect of building forts near your own cities effectively makes a weakness there due to this use.  Battle is resolved by moving a unit onto another unit's square and fighting it out.  Loser vanishes, winner lives, with few exceptions.  If the loser was the only defending unit, the winner takes that square (and possibly a city with it), if not, the winner's turn is over and you have to wait another round to attack the city again.  In effect, this means that attacking cities can take a fair number of turns and again accents the high cost of settlers, as the city is always razed back to a start city, even if you don't burn it down entirely.  The effect, in practice, is a city taking is something that requires attention for sometimes as many as a hundred turns or so, making it difficult to do military while doing anything else very effectively.

   The game has this neat culture feature which allows you to expand your influence and even convert other cities.  This is based on artistic output of the city, buildings, religions, etc.  One of the victory conditions requires high culture but it's something rather hard to achieve.  Anyhow though, this is also how you claim the world map, having enough culture on each plot for a 50 percent or higher culture lead on the spot versus any other cultures that may share ownership of it.  This can allow for neat things like outculturing nearby cities, but oddly, it's rather hard to do while being diplomatic, as losing a culture war prompts hostilities pretty quick.

   In the end, Civilization 4 is a nice game that has the bonuses of nice art and nice music on top of it.  It's not without its flaws and it's fairly addicting, but as far as a tactical board game goes, it's pretty nice.  It is not for those without patience though, as the game is meant to take a while.

Dracos

[kpjam]

The worst part of the game, I think, is the first 400 years of each game.  It's supposed to go quick and technically it does, but the whole 'start with a settler and a warrior' was pretty meh in my eyes.  The game doesn't shine when your only decision of merit is 'wait for 12 turns for a basic building to build.  It's a carry over from earlier designs, but I don't think it was ever a great decision.  Random placement aside, there's a pretty significant advantage that is just getting generated at the right spot.  I've seen comp characters get spawned on ice parts and they never really catch up.  Losing the first fifty turns or so before getting a new place is brutal and having your main city be unproductive is equally so.  Sure, it's technically balanced since you can move, but having you moving to find a good location while the ai spends 3-4 turns harvesting at their excellent start location can be a fair handicap in and of itself, even with how weak the starting rounds end up being.  This I was pretty not keen on.  I just didn't find the start of the game fun.  Moreso, I'd actually say settlers were generally too expensive with most people I discussed strategy with relying most heavily on sending out cheaper explorers to hopefully trigger a settler unit from a village.  This is reasonable in one sense as cities are very valuable and each settler is effectively a city, but really, they eat turns pretty mightily and make setting up a bunch of cities impossible until mid to late game without relying on random finds.

I actually like this part.  Much more then end-game.  Different strokes.  I didn't care for the insta-set-up, though sometimes I got something agreeable.

   You have your finances to deal with, splitting your income between income, science, and art and thus determining the rate of growth of research, wealth, and culture.  Unfortunately, these things are all on a national level, so you can't really set a single city to be producing lots of art and wealth and another to be a scientific powerhouse.  This would've been a real nice bit of flexibility, but unfortunately they just give a global setup for your nation.  

Actually, you do have some idividual flexibility.  It's a bit crude, but after certain civs are developed you can assign specialists.  Priest, workers, etc, who modify the output of cities.  more grain, more sceince, etc...  It's not complete, because that would to a degree invalidate the use of plots.  

There was also, in each city, the ability to shift gold output between taxes, science, wealth, and culture.  

Not sure which of these two concepts you're talking about, but I think the latter.

   In the end, Civilization 4 is a nice game that has the bonuses of nice art and nice music on top of it.  It's not without its flaws and it's fairly addicting, but as far as a tactical board game goes, it's pretty nice.  It is not for those without patience though, as the game is meant to take a while.

Dracos

nice overall review which I concur with.  CIV 4 was nice in it's upgrade, but if you're expecting a rewritten Civilization, this isn't it.  

And I conpletely agree with diplomacy, it's baleful.

[Sunhawk]

Heh.  I would note that "settler rush" is an extremely potent tactic in Civ IV, especially if you're willing to save/load on villages (until you get workers or settlers) and picking the right points to build settlers.  I found that you REALLY get stung in regards to city costs and get forced to drop science to about 10-20%, but once your cities start blooming, you're nigh-unstoppable.

I haven't experimented a lot with military tactics for victory -- all of my takeovers have been culture-based (cities revolt to join me), so I don't know a lot about that.  My tentative attempts at crushing other cities almost always failed, with the exception of a couple barb cities.

The spies are... well, crap.  Only one city in a nation can build them, and you don't get them until the last part of the game anyway.  You can halt current production in a city with them, destroy terrain improvements, and they're invisible.  Oh, and you can have a max of five or six of 'em.  I've used them mostly to destroy resources and remove farms from a particular target civilization to drop the city populations as a prelim to cultural domination.  That's it though -- you can't incite revolts (a MAJOR hurt for the spy's effectiveness).

[Dracos]

   You have your finances to deal with, splitting your income between income, science, and art and thus determining the rate of growth of research, wealth, and culture.  Unfortunately, these things are all on a national level, so you can't really set a single city to be producing lots of art and wealth and another to be a scientific powerhouse.  This would've been a real nice bit of flexibility, but unfortunately they just give a global setup for your nation.  

Actually, you do have some idividual flexibility.  It's a bit crude, but after certain civs are developed you can assign specialists.  Priest, workers, etc, who modify the output of cities.  more grain, more sceince, etc...  It's not complete, because that would to a degree invalidate the use of plots.  

There was also, in each city, the ability to shift gold output between taxes, science, wealth, and culture.  

Not sure which of these two concepts you're talking about, but I think the latter.

May have changed, but the shifting of the gold output between taxes/science/wealth/and culture was all done globally, even if editted in city mode.  There was as far as I could tell, no way to tell the city "Yeah, beyond the fact that you have a few artists, you are also spending most your resource gains funding your culture." without telling the rest of the empire to match that.

   In the end, Civilization 4 is a nice game that has the bonuses of nice art and nice music on top of it.  It's not without its flaws and it's fairly addicting, but as far as a tactical board game goes, it's pretty nice.  It is not for those without patience though, as the game is meant to take a while.

Dracos

nice overall review which I concur with.  CIV 4 was nice in it's upgrade, but if you're expecting a rewritten Civilization, this isn't it.  

And I conpletely agree with diplomacy, it's baleful.[/quote]

Which really annoyed me, because outside of harnessing OCD with building stuff, it was the only thing that could've kept me playing it.

Dracos

[Dracos]

Heh.  I would note that "settler rush" is an extremely potent tactic in Civ IV, especially if you're willing to save/load on villages (until you get workers or settlers) and picking the right points to build settlers.  I found that you REALLY get stung in regards to city costs and get forced to drop science to about 10-20%, but once your cities start blooming, you're nigh-unstoppable.

I haven't experimented a lot with military tactics for victory -- all of my takeovers have been culture-based (cities revolt to join me), so I don't know a lot about that.  My tentative attempts at crushing other cities almost always failed, with the exception of a couple barb cities.

The spies are... well, crap.  Only one city in a nation can build them, and you don't get them until the last part of the game anyway.  You can halt current production in a city with them, destroy terrain improvements, and they're invisible.  Oh, and you can have a max of five or six of 'em.  I've used them mostly to destroy resources and remove farms from a particular target civilization to drop the city populations as a prelim to cultural domination.  That's it though -- you can't incite revolts (a MAJOR hurt for the spy's effectiveness).

Yeah, the spies were a joke.

The thing is, I ignore that as a tactic because it depends on save/load.  It's not really a tactic represented  in the game as it involves rerolling the die until it says you get an advantage, which in a multiplayer version of it, you wouldn't be allowed to do, and even in a fairly extensive 'you can do what you are allowed to in game', it involves shutting the game down to do it...which I don't think is a very good ground to review the game on as most folks aren't going to play it like that.

Really, the potentness of the tactic accents what I said.  Settlers are  too expensive, but they end up having to be because getting extra cities just exponentially powers you up.  Heck, my last cheating game doing that had a perfect exponetial curve on culture from beginning to end.

Dracos
SLepy