Civilization IV Review

Religion now plays one of the key roles in the game. The beautiful thing about it is that religion as a social and philosophical phenomenon is quite diverse and volatile even within the borders of your own empire. Each factor in this game is governed by an addition number of factors and that seems to be the case with religion as well. The game has seven real world religions: Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, and Hinduism. Judaism may be strong in the southern parts of your empire, while the fringe towns on its northern borders may be Christian. Depending on the predominant religion of your enemy in the adjacent regions, certain cities may even fall into your adversary's hands, if you are not careful about which temples you choose to build. The game's recommendations won't always be correct, so if your town borders with Saladin's territory, my advice to you is not to build mosques for the citizens, as you may end up losing your city to the enemy.

Sacks of money... mmm...

Roman Empire at the height of its power.

Speaking of city conquering and conflicts in general, another major Civilization IV feature are the RPG style unit promotions. In previous Civ games, units have only a few levels: conscript, regular, veteran, and elite. Now in Civ IV, there are more than 40 promotions you can give to your units as they gain experience, enabling you to customize your units to make them more unique and more powerful. If you want to avoid having a "Stalingrad" situation on your hands, you will be sure to pay attention to how you promote the units, as well as which units you put up against particular enemy troops. I nearly lost the war to Saladin. You see, he had oil on his land, and I didn't have any oil resources. Consequently, some of my cavalry units that I have left around to linger from the 19th century weren't really best equipped to deal with assault choppers. Having no oil, I couldn't really build an Air Force.

Speaking of the military, about the only real drawback of Civilization IV seems to be the handling of the units themselves. Grouping of the units should've been made more effective and more intuitive, and the fact that you cannot attack with groups (say by putting knights in the front and archers in the back), is a tad frustrating and cumbersome at times. There is definitely room for improvement in that department.

Back to the list of innovations, other awesome additions to the game include the Great People (persons that can create great works of art, expedite research and so on), as well as the possibility to choose between two leaders of a particular nation. This is not available for all of the nations, but some will let you choose between two very different leaders, each accenting a different aspect of governing.

It's also worth noting that, like in the previous Civ games, Civilization IV has awesome replay value. It's extremely customizable and features a multiplayer mode, which will allow you to test your governing and military skills against other players over the Internet.

In a nutshell, Civilization IV is one of the best games I've played this year - a true labor of love; perfectly scalable difficulty levels, great AI, in addition to all of the abovementioned improvements. A definite must buy.