Who knew nation builing could be so fun? With this game, Sid Meier has now given us 4 installments of his award winning Civilization series, and this time they decided to try something new.
There is not much that is different from the other games. The story is the same, you play as a ruler of a race or nationality of people, starting from scratch, attempting to become the best in the world. To do this, you must either control the largest amount of land, destroy all of your rivals, attain the best culture, or be the first to leave for space.
There are a few improvements in this version of the game. For one, the game had a huge graphics upgrade. While the other games have been known to use sprites, 2-D or 3-D, this game uses compleatly 3-D rendering for everything, from units to the map it's self. Second, the game has introduced the ability to have religion. This is way to keep your people happy, depending on your government style or buildings you have in a paticular city. This is also a way to gain allies and make enemies. Other nations will put up with you more if you share their religion, and will be more apt to attack if yours differs from theirs. The game also introduced a style of government editing taken from Alpha Centauri, allowing you to not just choose your rule type like in the other Civilization games, but also your economic, political, social, and religious style. The game also introduced a new level system for units, allowing your units to gain abilities like increased attack points, better mobility, defense bonuses, and so forth. Also, there is a new style of unit atributes. Defensive units dont have the ability to attack, ranged units have a 'first strike' ability that can be used to add damage before they take damage, cavalry units cannot defend or recive defensive atributes from land, and several other new rules. There is also a new ability to create special people that can do things like create special labs, jack up your culture rating in a city, speed up advancements, force golden ages to occor, and other special abilities.
The game shares some problems from the last installment and has fixied a few as well. For one, the problem with the enemy nations being able to produce WAY more units then you is still a huge problem. It seems no matter how fast you can make units, your enemies can make them 5 times faster then you even if they dont have any material rich areas around their cities. The new religion system makes it hard to gain allies, since unless you have the same religion as an opposing nation, you can just forget about doing things like getting a allience or fair trades. The game did increase the number of rulers, adding different rulers for single nations, allowing for a different style of play since the rulers usualy have a different style of ruling. The game also adressed multiplayer problems by including multiplayer right off the bat with no need for expansions, also adding a new feature which lets you incease and decrese the speed of the game, crunching down a 5 hour game to 40 minutes, perfect for playing online with others. While matinence for troops has been lowered to let you have a chance of defending yourself, the number of gold required to support your buildings is not shown, so matinence is a pain to deal with since your gold matinence can jack up very high with no warning and no explination. The biggest problem is that there is no real reason to improve the graphics so much. If anything, all it does is make the game harder to run on lower powered computers, straining even the most recent computers with the high amount of detail for something as simple as trees and buildings. The game would have been better keeping its low graphics so it would run on more computers, and run faster so players would not have to watch their screens get choppy when their units move.
Still, like all the other civilization games, this one is fun and addictive. It will almost surely please anyone who is a fan of any of the other Civ games. If your system can handle the graphics upgrade, then it is worth a try.
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