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 ...
July 28, 2012, 17:41
Tweet
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.
