The second expansion to Civilization IV, Beyond the Sword, has been released. In this article, Solver, a long-time Apolyton staff member, reviews the game.
You can buy Beyond the Sword from Amazon US or Amazon UK.

Beyond Civ4

Civ4: Beyond the Sword is finally about to be released worldwide, to the excitement of the Civ community. I have had the pleasure of contributing to this expansion and will now give my thoughts on the finished project.

Before saying anything else, it’s important to say that Beyond the Sword is easily the most ambitious expansion the Civ series has ever seen. It does not limit itself to the addition of new civilizations and some big feature. There are numerous new features with a significant gameplay impact, and then there’s a really high amount of minor tweaks and additions. BtS is very much unlike the Warlords expansion. Playing Warlords felt just like Civ4 with a bunch of new civilizations and some smaller stuff thrown in. Playing BtS is really different from playing Civ4 or Warlords, and player strategies will also reflect that.

Still, no matter how many features there are, new civilizations are the most visible addition to many players. This time, we’re given ten whole new civilizations to enjoy playing with, and they’re really a mixed bag. Personally, I’m very glad to see the Mayans and Ethiopians make it, as well as the first ever Southeast Asian representatives, the Khmer. The lineup is not perfect, and on the more disappointing side there is the generic Native American civilization and the Holy Roman Empire, for which it’s fairly doubtful whether they were a civilization. Don’t forget that you can easily rename the latter into Franks, for example.

BtS does not include any new civilization traits, and is probably the better for it. Including even one new trait would create a large number of unused trait combinations – now, on the contrary, almost all trait combinations are filled. With Boudica having Aggressive/Charismatic, bright red hair and a mean look, who would want to cross her?

My own favorite new civ is probably the Khmer Empire. They strike me as the best civ for expansion and growth. Suryavarman is Expansive for cheaper Workers and Granaries, and also Creative. It means that you can probably get your second city up quicker (assuming you build a Worker before your Settler, so the Worker completes quicker) and you can immediately build a cheap Granary in the new city, without needing to spend time on a Monument for cultural expansion. The Baray, replacing Aqueduct, adds +1 food to the city. It may not seem like much, but while your cities are still small, that will be a useful boost to their growth.

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Civilization IV: Warlords Review by Solver

Warlords, the first expansion pack for the highly-successful Civilization IV has just been released. I am going to take a look at how the gameplay has changed with the expansion's release, and at how the new major features blend in.

Civer, Meet Warlords!

Most of you probably already know what's new in Warlords at a glance. Other than six new scenarios, the expansion pack offers six new civs and a total of ten new leaders. These would be the Ottomans (led by Mehmed II), the Koreans (Wang Kon), the Celts (Brennus), the Vikings (Ragnar), the Carthaginians (Hannibal) and the Zulus (Shaka). Additionally, some of the old civs received new leaders – Ramesses II, Stalin, Winston Churchill and Augustus Caesar.

More interesting than the leaders themselves are the new traits. There's whole three of them, not two, as had been originally said. They are:

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CivIV According to Yin

Finally we come to the most subjective part of the review wherein I share with you bits of some games that I found interesting. The first is a large Pangaea map, and I'm playing a Kublai Khan, who is aggressive and creative. I chose him because for this game, I was trying to focus on FEWER cities to see if I could still win, and his creative rating helps push out my borders (though really there are much better options for the “fewer cities strategy” than Kublai Khan, but I like the guy). I also turned off space race and timed victories.

GAME 1: "No Real Focus"

As you can see, I started off with the most vital resource in life: wine (which I also include to mean beer or any other intoxicating drink). No matter what, my people's outlook on my rule will be helped by having them too sloshed to care.

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CivIV According to Soren

Another rarely used method of reviewing a game is to judge it against the developer's stated goals. Perhaps this is hard in many cases because developer's goals aren't always there in anything more than marketing hype. Soren, however, wrote one of the best Afterwords I have read in a gaming manual, and I think his view of CivIV deserves some discussion. First, he acknowledges that “there are a thousand ways to make a great game about all of civilization – we only get to make one of them.” What does he think he made with CivIV, and what do I, Mr. Random Reviewer, think of the results?

NOTE: The “dialogue” here is made up. I'm sure the real Soren would say things far more brilliantly.

1. SOREN: Sticking with turn-based allows for “a series of overlapping mini-goals".

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Author Profile

Yin26 A long-time "on" and "off" poster on Apolyton Civilization Site's forums and strategy gamer, he has been notably vocal and critical in the past of Alpha Centauri, Civilization: Call to Power and more recently Civilization III. The 34-year-old lives in New Haven, Connecticut with his wife and two young daughters. He is working on funding for university students to study East Asian languages in China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan.

Civilization 4 Review by 'yin26'

CivIV tries to do more with less (fewer units, fewer cities, etc.) -– and often succeeds, at least through an engaging early game. New twists, such as Great People and battlefield promotions, also allow for some wonderfully fresh strategic possibilities, even if these take some time to learn and appreciate. This approach solves many old Civ problems while introducing some novel gameplay, and any serious Civer should try CivIV just to see these elements in action.

But an overly rapid progression up the tech tree and what seems to be a shallow menu of available units (again, in part, because the tech progression is too fast?) quickly pushes aside the wonderful early game and the subtle nuance, giving way to a late game bogged down in the repetitive tedium that many Civ fans have long hoped would be put to bed. Not helping the situation is an interface that hinders more than inspires and a host of performance issues that threaten to push some players to relegate CivIV to the shelf until help arrives. In short, CivIV is best approached as a promising work in progress.

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PART 2: After Several Days of Non-Stop Playing... (Page 1/3) The only way to write a review worth reading is to play the hell out of the game in question, so that's what I've been doing for the last several days. I've played quick, standard, epic, and accelerated start games, some through to completion and a whole bunch of "mini-games" to test certain theories out, attempt to stress or break the game, and experiment in general. Let me break it down for you. CivIV is divided into six basic areas that require player input and management at the city level. These areas are: Population Growth (food production) Productivity (hammer production, formerly shields) Money (to be used to either line your pockets or pay for research) Nothing new there....that's standard fare 4X [(eXploration, eXpansion, eXploitation, and eXtermination)] stuff. Now add the following: Health (unhealthy cities are less productive cities) Happiness (unhappy cities are less productive cities) G-Man Rate (The rate at which your city generates "Great People" of different types) NOTE: None of these three are early game concerns....they are introduced gradually, as cities grow, and as technological research continues to develop. With the inclusion of these three areas, now we're starting to get somewhere! Now we're starting to get some interesting choices and tradeoffs! Ahhh, but there's more. In addition to these six basic areas, which are entirely "city centric," there are six additional areas that overlay the basic city-oriented structure of Civ IV, and tie it all together into a cohesive (Imperial) whole, and these are: Civ Traits/Starting Techs (each civ in the game comes with two traits and two starting techs, giving each a different set of opening abilities out the gate, and leading to a staggering variety of possible playing styles and strategies). Diplomacy/Espionage (flip sides of the same basic coin, and all about your relations/dealings with rival civs) Religion Overlay (seven different religions in all, with the option to found one or more of them, and a variety of compelling in-game benefits for doing so. Religion stands on its own, and also modifies Diplomacy (above) and Culture (below). Cultural Overlay (a measure of the overall strength, vitality, and enduring value that your civilization is creating, most prominently expressed in terms of how far your borders extend from your cities, and quite powerful in this regard, as it can allow cultural absorption of nearby rival cities, and/or bring in wholly new resources into your sphere of influence). Civics Overlay (governmental choices in the same vein as SMAC's Social Engineering Table, with effects that modify existing in-game conditions, and at time, open up wholly new possibilities (ie, slavery allowing population to be sacrificed to the completion of a building you're working on)). Empire Overlay (increasing maintenance costs for founding additional cities, based on the number you have, and their distance from your capitol. This tends to put the brakes on rampant expansion (at least on higher difficulty levels), as you will reach a point where the maintenance costs for a newly founded city are not worth what it generates each turn in gold. At that point, your treasury goes negative, and must be offset by slowing down research, which is the kiss of death...thus, measured growth is the new key to success). By now, we're getting verging on genuine complexity, and that's a good thing, but there's even more! Added to all of that is the fact that we've got a good (largish), robust tech tree with and/or branches (multi-linear...multiple possible paths to the same end-point, new territory for Civ, and very dynamic and exciting!). Even better, gone is the notion of "speedbump" techs...techs you HAVE TO research, but that don't do anything for you in the way of providing some kind of in-game benefit. The tech tree, how to attack it, and what your strategic goals are is really a mini-game all by itself, with the rewards for playing that particular game well being manifold, and range from being the father of one or more religions, to being the first to be in a position to afford another round of expansion, or being an early era production titan by reaching Forges first, making choices about what wonders to build, and what you may have to give up in the attempt... In short, the tech tree alone opens up enormous avenues of experimentation, and it is but a single element of the whole! Combat in Civ is somewhat weak (which keeps with tradition, in this regard, because combat in Civ has always been somewhat weak), but as I have argued many times in the past, at its core, Civ is NOT a war game, but an empire building game, and its aim is to allow the player to experience the whole width and bredth of human history. As such, combat has its place and ...