OLD STUFF 

The premise remains from the original. Guide your chosen race from 4000 BC through to the middle of the 21^st Century. Protect your civilization from hostile barbarians and rival nations. Research new technologies to improve your cities and your armies and aim to win the space race to Alpha Centauri. Or else claim victory based on territorial dominance, outright military conquest or via popular acclaim. 

NEW STUFF 

There is really just one big new concept in Civ 4, religion. Other differences (not necessarily improvements) include new buildings for your cities, lots of new units and unit promotions and some very important changes to the Great and Minor Wonders. In the second add-on pack, Beyond the Sword, there is another major addition, with the appearance of Corporations.

 

BOTHERING GOD 

It took a while to work out how religion was working in the game and even today it throws up some new situations every now and then. There are six religions to choose from and each is founded along with the discovery of some technology or other. Once founded it can spread spontaneously along trade routes (rivers now count as roads) or via missionaries, a new unit. Where you have more than one religion present in your empire you can choose to convert between them should you wish to do so. This might be to take advantage of one being more widespread than another, or to ally yourself with a neighbour. Being of different faiths is a major source of tension in the Civ 4 world, while co-religionists are more likely to come to your aid should you be attacked by an infidel and are less likely to attack you. 

There is also now an additional Religion branch in your civics choices. Here you can adopt options that, variously, mean that cities with the official religion present can either build building faster or produce more skilled military units. Either that or you can eschew a State religion altogether. 

IT’S CULTURE, INNIT 

Culture was introduced in Civ 3 (though the egg was laid with SMAC) and it’s been developed in Civ 4. There are now more ways of increasing your cultural output and thus your civilization’s influence. Now a Monument, as opposed to a Temple, is a must in any new city, unless you’ve built the Stonehenge Wonder. Adopting the appropriate religion will help as well.  

GREAT PEOPLE

This concept develops upon the Great Leader idea from Civ 3. Instead of appearing either spontaneously or as a result of great battles, each city can generate points each turn towards to the birth of a GP. This person may turn out to be a scientist, a merchant, a general, a religious leader or an entertainer. The probabilities being determined by the buildings a city has and/or the specialists it has living within it. These now come in the same five flavours as your GPs. Each type requires a certain building and means a square being taken out of production. In addition to GP points each will also give you extra resources, science, trade or culture. It looks fiendishly complicated at first, but it all makes sense in the end. In fact it’s an improvement on the old version which stems from Civ 2. Each Specialist now adds two factors, instead of just one and so you have more control over what your cities produce. 

CORPORATIONS 

In the Modern Age, you will get access to Corporations (with the BtS add-on), which can be founded, once you have the appropriate technologies, by Great People. Each will bring benefits of culture, food, science or production to the cities within which they operate, though at a significant tax penalty. Corporations are spread actively via Executive units, but you have to be careful not to do so indiscriminately. For instance, Sid’s Sushi Co. gives a city extra food, allowing previously maxed out cities to continue growing for a while, or bolstering the granary of somewhere that is starving. You need therefore to target those places that are in need and accept the tax hit. However, there’s nothing to stop you spreading your corporations into rival territory, provided they have access to the appropriate resources. You get a gold bonus for every city with a corporation that you were the first to found and they get the tax hike. 

IMPROVEMENTS, OR NOT 

Within the city, some improvements have been split. For instance, the Marketplace is now the Market and the Grocer. Both add to your trade revenue, but one increases happiness, while the other improves health. There are no longer limits on population growth until certain improvements have been built. Instead it’s all about health. The more people you have, the heavier the pollution the city generates. Some improvements don’t help (e.g. forge, factory), while others do (e.g. aqueduct, grocer).  

One of the bugbears of Civ 3 was the pollution phase. During this you had to automate (and re-automate) dozens of engineers to clean up the mess made by your modern society. Now the effects are seen directly in the city. As well as the familiar happy/unhappy citizen tote, you have a healthy/unhealthy ratio as well. If the unhealthy outnumber the healthy, production begins to fall off and a visible green miasma engulfs the place. You can mitigate with various improvements as well as gaining access to special resources which provide health. There is even a civic (Environmentalism) which takes the pressure off in the end game. 

Resources have been adjusted somewhat. The Strategic Resources problem in Civ 3, in which you didn’t have something vital within reasonable range (or even on an entire continent, as happened to me twice), has been mostly solved, in that there will always be something close, if not actually within your boundaries. All well and good, but it does remove the strategic (and very realistic) reason for going to war with a neighbour. Minor resources (wine, dye, bananas etc) now add luxuries via gold or health and just as in Civ 3, flogging off surplus to your rivals can bring major benefits.

 OFF TO WAR

Two things have been improved in Civ 4. Firstly the graphics have moved on a generation. The units are more finely detailed and the battle animations quite superb. However, where you had just a single soldier, now you have up to three. As your units battle it out damage is indicated by one or more of the figures going down. Up close that’s just fine, but the triple units are a bit of a blot on the landscape when you are zoomed out to the most comfortable distance.

There are also many more units than of old and the Special units, unique to each culture, are better tuned. Some appear a lot earlier than others, such as the Romans' legionnaire, so if you are wont to get punchy in the opening stages, you know what sort of race to choose.

Artillery has been given a thorough overhaul. Whereas in Civ 3 it could only bombard, now it can also enter combat directly. You can thus use it to reduce a city’s defences prior to attack, then have a go at the defending units, inflicting collateral damage even if you lose. This has a striking effect on your ability to take out cities, which are otherwise a lot easier to defend than of yore.

Units now have clearly indicated experience points and each time a new level is reached (5, 10, 15 etc) you get the opportunity to bestow a promotion. This can be something simple like power, but you can also give it a better chance against a designated type of unit (mêlée, mounted etc), or in certain types of combat, such as city attack or hills defence. Particularly useful is the capacity to increase the healing rate of units on the same square.

I haven’t had much of a chance to engage in maritime warfare yet, but the range of units looks good. Carriers can now only carry fighters, which is right and proper, though they can now bomb almost as well as dedicated bombers. Missile cruisers and submarines can carry both cruise and tactical nuclear missiles, while ICBMs are limited to the city in which they are built. The nuke attack graphic is very neat, though the sound effect from Civ 2 is still way the best.

 SPY IN THE CAMP

In BtS, espionage has been given a new lease of life. Back comes the spy unit and in comes the espionage slider. This appears along with the science/tax and, later, luxury sliders and allows you to allocate a slice of your income to spying. You can then divide up your espionage points between your rivals as you see fit. As you pass certain numerical values you will be able to mount counter-espionage missions, which make it more likely that you will detect enemy spies before they can cause mischief, or gain intelligence on what that rival is researching, what cities he has or even look inside them to see precisely what he’s up to. You can also use your spies actively, once they are inside an enemy city, to blow things up, foment dissent and other naughtiness. There’s a nice wrinkle here, which means that the longer a spy is in a city, the cheaper in terms of espionage points the actions are, all the while risking the spy being compromised. I have yet to really get into this part of the game, though in my current effort I am being given a very hard time by one or other of my rivals.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

A huge, but largely invisible improvement has come in the hard wiring of the different leaders. Stuff like producing Settlers at twice the rate of rivals, or getting an extra gold from certain squares now mean, especially in the BC era, that how you play is very strongly influenced by whom you play as. Most tribes have two or even three leaders to choose from and they all have a different combination of attributes. It’s much more akin to the differences between the factions in SMAC than earlier versions of Civ and it forces you to experiment with different races, rather than sticking to a couple of favourites, as has been my habit.

 THE END

Although you get more points for an early triumph, the best win is still the space race. Until the advent of the BtS add-on pack, Civ 2 still had the best implementation of the race proper, though Civ 3 had the cleverest building system. If you remember back to the good old days, you could adjust the size and configuration of your ship so that even if you launched after a rival, you could still win. That has been brought back in BtS, though to be honest it’s a bit of a swizz as the options are pretty limited. However, it does add a bit more interest to a close run game and the launch graphic is rather good.

 SUMMARY