Firaxis/2K Games Sid Meier's Civilization IV Review

Civilization IV represents a HUGE leap forward in the series.  With Civilization III, there were some new features, but anyone who had played previous Civ games could pretty much just jump right in and feel comfortable.  That's still true with Civilization IV, but there are so many new features that the game is very different from its predecessors.

 Civilization IV adds tons of new features and content such as the social engineering found in Alpha Centauri and completely new concepts such as state religion.  The game also takes the complex diplomacy that Civ III borrowed from Alpha Centauri and ups it yet another notch, with options to negotiate proposals such as "Stop trading with X" or "Please adopt Y religion or civic."  Opposing leaders are influenced in their opinions of you by many factors, including peace, trade relationships, your social engineering choices and state religion, and even other leaders' opinions of you."

 There are, of course, also many new technologies, units and wonders, and with all the new content and features, the game is more complex than ever.  Luckily, though, the difficulty and the level of micromanaging are very easy to change to suit your own preferences, with plenty of help and advice available if you want it, and the game never lets you get overwhelmed unless you want to.

 The only issue I can think of with this game is that it can be a resource hog.  The graphics are rendered in full 3d, and with all of the variables and things that the game needs to keep track of, it can run quite slowly on systems with low memory.  When I first installed the game, I had only 256 MB of memory and integrated nForce 6150 graphics, and the game was very, very slow.  However, at even 512 MB of RAM, the game runs much more quickly and is quite playable, even with the onboard graphics chipset taking a lot of the system memory.  In my opinion, though, this is a fairly minor issue since most gamers these days have at least that much memory in addition to a separate graphics card.

 There is simply so much content and so many great new things about Civilization IV that it is quite hard to put them in an easily-readable review.  I have owned this game for more than a full year now, and I still feel like I'm barely scratching the surface.  Even without the expansion packs, Civilization IV is an amazing game with infinite replay value.  Add in the expansions as well, and you have a game that is good for literally years of play.  Civilization IV was a great value even at the release price, and it's value has only increased as the price has come down.  If you are at all interested in turn-based strategy games or have played any of the past Civilization games, I would recommend Civilization IV with only a slight warning about its resource consumption.