Civilization IV

I had spent many hours developing civilizations back in the dark days of computing of the early 90s. The game "Civilization" came out after the other hit; "Sim City" had started to lose its shine. The games are similar, but different enough to warrant buying and playing both. If I cast my mind back even further, there was a textmode war game that I spent many hours on called Empire which had a slightly similar feel to Civilization's battle system. A big thanks to Bryan at Textmode for continuing to host programs such as that.

I was in the Philippines and had some time to kill because a coup had me flee the country a little earlier than I had planned. I spotted the latest incarnation of Civilization in the airport and made the purchase (after checking the net to ensure that I wasn't getting ripped off).

Civilization IV has some nasty minimum specs which exceeded that of my 2 year old laptop (Toshiba A10, 2.2GHz Celeron, 768Meg RAM). I was faced with a dialogue telling me "Your machine is below minimum specifications. Civ4 will not run on this hardware setup." So I spent some time downloading the latest drivers (of which I had already it turns out), just to make sure it wasn't something simple. No. The problem is that the game needs some nifty little hardware based rendering features on your graphics card or you will get this error. LIES! It ran OK on my machine despite this. Sure it was a little jerky and slow, but that just completed the nostalgic trip for me.

Civilization IV is the same game as the 1991 version but with a lot slicker interface and some very sweet music. I did not try the online play, mainly because I do not think that I would be as ruthless with other real life players. Plus you can't trust people. At least with the computer AI you know that the friendly nations will generally tend to do friendly things. So until I play the multiplayer version I cannot give a complete review, but I don't think that will happen anytime soon.

Civilization is a turn based game, so you do things in turn, wait for the other civilizations to have their turn and then start all over again. So you play it at your leisure, considering each move as you develop your world. You build towns, who can build a unit (eg: soldier, missionary, worker) or upgrade (city walls, banks, hospitals). You have a directive of sorts which heads your civilization to create new developments (eg: iron, electricity, theology, communism etc). You trade with other civilizations through a very easy to use interface. All rather complex, and difficult to fully explain without becoming a manual. The game actually prompts you when it thinks you have been neglecting something, and many of the units have an auto-mode so they can go about happily developing or protecting your civilization without you having to micro-manage them.

This game is full of joy. Building towns that flourish, satisfying your people so they spontaneously celebrate your leadership, building relationships with other civilizations that you like, and the cold shoulder to other civilizations that you know you are going to have to "take care of" later; oh they may beg for mercy, offer tribute, but they never seem to want to hand over half their cities for peace, they would prefer the inevitable complete destruction that I only too willingly hand to them.

I had forgotten that you spend ages developing this civilization, the towns, the diplomacy with other governments. Then the damn game ends and it is all gone. Oh the hollow feeling, the loss, the futility of it all! OK, maybe not that bad, but very similar to reading an excellent book, getting to the end and wishing there was more.

This game rocks. But like last time, I may only play it one more time. Not too bad value if you consider the cost of the game and the number of hours you spend on it. If you want to get your own copy I would suggest you check out eBay but make sure that you get an unused serial number or you won't be able to play online. Make sure you download and install the latest update, done from within the game.