Civilization IV

By Cyrris

Take a look around. Almost all the reviews of Civ4 have given it 9/10 or more. GameSpy gave it 5 stars, and there are also several 10/10 scores. I can’t help but not look at the game quite the same way. I’m going to be subjective, opinionated, and at times angry. I’m also not going to review the game as it was shipped - I intentionally waited for the first patch to be released before installing it.

I played each previous Civ game for years, and have been a huge fan of the series. Civ3 was widely criticised - not for deviating so far from the formula (which it did), but for doing it in a way that made the game irritating. Resources were too scarce, AI opponents were more frustrating than challenging, and on bigger maps, even on machines far more advanced than anything available at the time of development, it could run so hopelessly slow that sometimes games weren’t worth trying to finish. Especially not by way of war.

My hopes for Civ4 were that it would take those new features introduced in Civ3, such as culture and resources, and actually do them right. To a large extent, this has indeed been accomplished. However there are some major issues I have with the game which have spoiled it for me, but let’s start with the good, shall we?

City time wasters are gone

All the Civs, 3 in particular, were annoying as hell when it came to civil disorders and pollution. A civil disorder would need your direct attention and require immediate intervention - just so you can build a cathedral or something. It was a restriction imposed on the game to make it more challenging, but it did so by wasting the players time and in doing so, sucking out the fun. Pollution, too, was outrageous. I would actually dread going through the industrial era in Civ3 because until your entire country was covered in railroads, getting your workers to clear pollution was a waste of time, and extremely annoying to deal with.

Civ4 has thankfully replaced both of these with simple balancing mechanisms. Improvements and resources can help create health or happiness (or potentially decrease both). If your city has less happy to unhappy faces, it won’t strike a disorder, but will become less and less productive as the situation gets worse. Likewise with pollution, more sick faces will be detrimental to your city. Fixing these problems is neither very time consuming or annoying, and trade with other civs can in fact be something to think about here, as some resources can increase the health of your cities. Your people will love bananas.

It’s the simple things…

Some of the improvements are so basic and simple that I have to wonder why they weren’t thought of before. Your units can now sit on the same tile as another civ’s units as long as you aren’t at war. You can even build a city while another civ’s settler is standing on that square, ready to do the same thing when it’s his turn (bad luck Bismark!). There is also an “Explore” command you can give to your units, to send them wandering aimlessly into the darkness, automatically uncovering as much of the map as they can for you.

The game is also the first Civ in which I have found it much easier to use the mouse for absolutely everything. In Civ1 I just used the keyboard. In Civ3 I would still use it for regular unit movement, but kept the mouse for organising my cities and such. Now in Civ4 I use the mouse almost exclusively, and I like it. That said, I don’t think the keyboard would have gone down too well in a 3D environment such as this.

Religion and Civics

Here are two completely new things in Civ4. Religion is a concept which can dictate many things - such as the cultural influence you have and your diplomatic relationships. It’s an important part of the game, and using it correctly can really help your Civ along. Founding religions (by learning a certain technology first) allows for special buildings, easier spread of the religion, and together with the right civics can bring more production or happiness.

In general though, I have found civics to be a bit of a let down in the game, as some are just so much more helpful than others, almost regardless of how you play the game. The choices of which civics to use are rarely difficult to make - just use the same ones each time. More bonuses for the earlier, cruder civics would be something I would support.

It all feels so right

The developers really put a lot of effort into getting the atmosphere right. The menu graphic, of the sun rising over the Earth is fitting without being over the top. The music is fantastic (and the mp3s aren’t locked away like in most games - just look in the folders and they’re there if you want them). Some of the in-game tracks will be familiar to those who’ve listened to some of Bach or Mozart’s work. Of course, these tracks only play in the relevant time period, a nice touch.

The 3D engine also allows for some nice graphical effects. Wonders and Great People come with some fun lighting effects, and units moving on road/rail are motion blurred to show how they’re moving faster. Having the cities themselves with visible improvements sprawled onto the map generally looks good - though seeing roads and such scaling adjacent mountains does stretch the textures to the point of looking stupid. Don’t let the rather simple graphics fool you though - the game does require a decent video card, as there’s just so much on screen, especially in the later ages. My Radeon 9600XT struggles to keep up at times.

The interface in the game is generally an improvement, though I do have some issues. Available units and city improvements are all listed as icons, without text, and even after playing the game for some time it can be hard to find what you want to build. The icons were actually hand drawn, but I don’t think they’re very fitting, and personally I preferred the actual unit images present in Civ3. Some of the advisor screens are also harder to interpret, and there is no one easy spot to quickly see your overall exports, imports, and available resources at once. Available ones are shown in the city screen, and deals can be viewed in the foreign advisor screen, but it’s just not as easy as in Civ3.

The interface comes with very handy mouseover tooltips, which is great when you hover your cursor over an enemy city - it’ll tell you what units are stationed there. Tooltips also show up when engaging in diplomacy - they’ll tell you why a Civ does or doesn’t like you, and what trade deals you currently have. In fact, there is rarely a time in the game when a tooltip isn’t present somewhat on the screen. Even a regular map tile has information displayed about it, such as terrain and resource details. It never gets in the way and is quite helpful indeed.

The OK bits

One thing I’m not huge on is Specialists and Great People. These two things go hand in hand - the more culture and improvements you have, the more specialist citizens you can get in your city. Priests, engineers, entertainers and what not. The more of these you have the more likely you are to get a great person - A Great Prophet, Great Merchant, Great Scientist, Great Engineer or Great Artist. I think these are just OK - Great People are useful at acquiring knowledge, finishing wonders, or sparking Golden Ages. But fiddling with specialists inside cities isn’t something I have really gotten into yet. It seems a bit tedious for me, and I think I would prefer some more automation, depending on what buildings and wonders you already have in the city.

Combat, overall, seems less coherent than in Civ3. Amassing units for an attack seems to take longer. Unit improvements are a nice touch, as are other concepts like collateral damage. It just seems to me that the game has shifted it’s focus more on choosing whether or not to win by war or other means, rather than on combat itself. I guess this may be good for many (even me, depending on my mood), but if I’m feeling aggressive it just takes forever to get a big army going, ready for action. Naval combat and air units are generally done better now, with ships being much more important, as they are needed to defend resources at sea - something which wasn’t an issue in any previous Civ. The air units also benefit a lot from the new graphics engine. They look superb.

I thought you said you were going to get angry

Oh, I am. You see, all of the above is genuninely good. The improvements made to the Civ formula by Firaxis have been heavily concentrated on the Fun Factor, rather than just the old “One… more… turn…” addiction which is really the only thing which kept me going at Civ3. But there is one area of Civ3 which Civ4 did not improve on. Infact, I believe it’s been made even worse, and that is the code sitting behind it all.

Now, I wrote a bit on Civ4’s bug issues last month, but that was actually before I experienced any of them first hand. I did indeed wait for the first patch because I knew there were so many issues, but another one is sorely needed already. Even on standard sized maps, once you get into the more modern eras, this game runs like an obese cat with one leg. I have experienced freezes which I thought were permanent, only to realise one time later, that the freeze wasn’t permanent - it just lasted about 10 minutes at an odd part of the game. Some helpful people on the CivFanatics forums have released several tweaks and such - one being an INI change I had to use myself to stop a crash bug. This did however ruin the smoothness of all the in-game movies, but it was a price I was willing to pay. My PC is no slouch (though the video card could be better), but these issues aren’t from a lack of power.

Now, in comparison to a lot of the people there, I have experienced very few problems with the game, but I have never seen, in all my time gaming, as many technical issues with a game as this (maybe I just haven’t seen enough). Every Civ site I go to is inundated with bug issues, and the complaints of the ever present slowness of the whole engine. The fact that some more technically-inclined gamers have released their own patches (which have apparently sped the game up enormously), means I must conclude that Firaxis’s code monkeys are in fact monkeys. Either that, or someone very stupid, higher up, decided not to let these guys finish the game properly before releasing it.

I can’t help but draw out a comparison here, though you may think I am stretching it a little. When Nvidia and ATI released video cards, they usually did so with paper launches. Releasing review samples and benchmarks well before the cards were actually available. This started to really piss people off, so when Nvidia launched it’s GeForce7 series, it made the cards available at launch. Nowadays, even if cards are available just a few weeks after launch like in ATI’s most recent case, everyone has a go at them. So, when is this going to start happening with games? We need games that come out and work properly at launch. No more “Let’s release now to get everyone excited and fix it later“. I’m sick of that attitude, and just like it changed in the graphics card industry, so too does it need to change here in gaming.

Reviewing a game after the first patch has been released is being forgiving enough, in my opinion. But when the game can’t even run in a stable or smooth manner after that, then it deserves to have points deducted. I won’t be giving the game a rating, but there is no way I can say a game deserves 9/10 when so many people have issues that appear to be so easily fixable. When all is said and done, Civilization IV is the best game I have played all year, but the experience has been sullied by a slew of errors, which I dare say wouldn’t have happened if the game had spent another month in quality assurance.