Why I buy this one ?
- Match wits against world leaders in a quest to build the ultimate empire
- Detailed, living 3D world with animated units and customizable armies
- Flexible tech tree provides more strategic choices for developing civilizations
- Easy-to-use interface; team play offers new way of setting locked alliances
- Single player or multiplayer gameplay options

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What our customer's say!

"The Addiction Is Back", I missed the original Civilization from way, way back but did catch Civ 2 when it first came out in the mid 90's. While the graphics weren't pretty, even for it's day, the gameplay definitely made up for the experience. A deep game, easy to play and yet difficult to master, and indescribably addictive. When Civ III came around the bend I was really excited to see the new improvements but was let down by what appeared to be a hopelessley buggy game with some serious corruption and unit imbalance issues. I finally threw my hands up in frustration after a month or two of trying to beat that game and swore off all future Civilization releases based upon my experiences with it.

My brother purchased Civilization IV when it came out and told me how great it was. I was immediately skeptical and this was further compounded when I saw all of the glowing reviews it was receiving in the various PC games magazines, all of which had said similar things for Civ III (I suspect a lot of times when magazine folks review games they may give it extra points for the popularity of the developer, and Sid Meier is almost a deity in the industry) and opted not to get it. Due to my brother's hectic college schedule he approached me one day and said something to the effect of "I know the last one sucked, but try this, I swear you'll like it". So I loaded it up over a year ago, and I am here to tell you that this is one of the greatest games I have ever played.

The basics remain the same. You choose a civilization (Aztecs, Romans, Spanish, etc.) and build your capitol city, striving against the CPU opponents to spread your civilization across the globe while trying to maintain a lead, or at least a competitive level in military might and scientific progress. One of the carryovers from Civ III (and one of the few plusses I found in that game) was the addition of borders, basically explained as the 'culture' of your civilization. A colony of the English, for instance, that is surrounded by larger Spanish cities is going to have a much harder time keeping a hold of it's British roots as it may quickly get inundated with that of it's surrounding neighbors.

Another carryover from Civ III was the idea of resources appearing on the minimap. These range from useful metals like copper or gold to luxury items like sugar cane or silk. In Civ III these resources were not permanent and could (and all too quickly did) run out. This has also been corrected in Civ IV, and it definitely gives one incentive to go out there and spread your civlization as getting your mitts on iron, copper, and coal are going to be nothing short of a necessity to your continued existence in the game as time goes on. If all else fails though the Diplomacy model has been reworked thoroughly (I can't tell you how many times I wanted to physically maul Hiawatha in Civ III for his lopsided "business" deals) so you can trade for much needed items if need be. The individual match setup is very intuitive and I find that anything past the "Noble" difficulty setting is basically an exercise in how long one can survive.

In previous games one could build temples and other religious edifices but it largely had the effect of appeasing the masses when they got ornery (Good grief...New York is in rebellion again. Ok, here's your Temple). There was no named religion, per se, more or less just the accoutrements of a generic one. In Civ IV they've added the major world religions, and while one is not really better than any other, if you found one you'll find that it can seriously help your civilization in the long run as a source of extra income, diplomatic heft, and research. The CPU players tend to make a beeline for Hinduism and Bhuddism at the very beginning of the game, so acquiring those requires one to move pretty quick.

Occasionally you'll get a random "quest" that your civilization can partake in. These range from building 5 libraries (one in each city) to the intriguing and difficult "Holy Mountain" quest, which requires you to plop a city down next to a mountain sacred to your civilization. That's not an easy feat as all of the other civs are champing at the bit to expand and may settle next to your mountain before you do. Succeeding in a quest typically nets you a reward along the lines of making a permanent free experience level for your military units, or boosting the research value of your libraries. It's a nifty gimmick in the game and I find I rather like it.

But the single greatest part of this game has to be the music. From the intro screen you're greeted with the best original game music I've ever heard ("Baba Yetu" by Christopher Tin, with a melody that gets in your head and stays there) in my gamer's life, and that's no easy feat. Much of the music you hear in the game is timeline specific, from tribal types in the beginning to Baroque music in the Renaissance period, down to the wonderful Classical selection they have in the Industrial period, featuring lots of Dvorak, Beethoven, and a little Rimsky-Korsakov. I could spend much of the review on the music alone, suffice it to say that I find myself listening to the tracks in my offtime and plan on shopping around for the complete works as the game music tends to be certain movements from each classical piece, not the whole thing.

I did not play this game when it first came out so I cannot speak about the bugs and imbalances that seemed to plague it when it was first released. What I can say is that one of the most infuriating aspects of the game is when I see an enemy unit armed with a sword taking down one of my Cobra gunships. Thankfully this is pretty rare now and like as not will happen when you have an already severely damaged unit that's doing the attacking. This was a huge issue for me in Civ III and the single biggest sticking point in that game. (And yes, I know there are multiple cases of folks with inferior arms taking down superior forces, but I can point to many more than that where it was the use of superior arms that won the battle, see Rorke's Drift, among others).

Overall this is wonderful and addictive game, and one can usually find me plodding away trying to conquer the world on an almost daily basis. It's like I've run across a secret stash of heroin I'd forgotten about.



"Seemed boring to me but apparently its epic.", I bought this game off of Steampowered and was expecting it to be epic, which I can see it is with all the different elements in the game. The only problem is that it's almost too complicated, once you get to the 1900's the turns take way too long and everything just slows down giving you nothing to do but move military forces around.

To be fair I was expecting something like Black & White and thats not what this is at all, its about thinking and strategy, basically an electronic board game.

"Civ IV: Nothing is more addictive!", Civilization IV:
A game of excelent graphics, and realistic scenery shows how magnificent this game actually is. I believe several hours could be spent on it, so overdoing game-time in CivIV is the greatest concern. This game is truly an amazing, and addictive computer game.

"So unplayable, I didn't even finish the tutorial", I've been a fan of Civ since the first one, and spent
countless hours playing Civ I, II, and III. So I was
really looking forward to IV.

In Civ IV, the units have changed to little groups of
people that run around. The map has changed from 2
dimensional to a 3D perspective view. All these little
people running around the 3D perspective view means I
couldn't tell where the grid was, couldn't tell where
one unit ended and another began, and couldn't tell
what type of unit was what. It was also ridiculously
slow to scroll around the map, hard to figure out what
direction a unit could or couldn't move, and quite
disorienting to just try to find a place: as in
"now where was that settler I sent to the west that
I was just looking at a minute ago?"

Then the program crashed before I even finished the
tutorial. I realized that the play had been so
cumbersome (and the plastic robot Sid Meier so annoying)
that I was almost glad it crashed. I uninstalled the
game without ever finishing the tutorial.

I'll go back to a previous edition of Civilization
until they publish something better than THIS. The
hyped up graphics and movement make Civ IV a lot of
fancy window dressing on a big turkey.


"An improvement in most ways", Civ IV is still recognizably Civilization, but with enough tweaks to make it fun and plenty of new stuff to master during repeated play.

The game has movies about each wonder that play when you finish it. It animates battle scenes with great detail and sound effects. It has great music - Gregorian chants, Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikowsky and even modern opera to match the era.

The internal math has been updated. Food, production, and culture still work more or less as they did in Civilization III - land gets farmed or mined, its food or industrial production goes up accordingly, and when it accumulates enough culture points, it expands. But there are new ways to tweak them. There are lots of new resources, seem to be more on the map, and you don't seem to stress out as much over getting them.

And there are some whole new dimensions.

Instead of offensive and defensive numbers, military units have a single power number. They get different bonuses against different opponents - archers get an edge, say, against mounted units - creating the offensive or defensive edges Civ III featured. You can see odds calculated before you opt to fight, and see every unit in a city before attacking it. You avoid unfavorable battles. The ones you pick, go faster.

Also, there are a slew of promotions you give units as they become eligible, customizing them with different strengths. A swordsman can get a bonus against archers, handy particularly if you know he's about to face one. Or a bonus good for attacking across rivers. Or one good for faster recovery.

The infamous "spearman effect" has been quelled. A primitive unit with the right promotions can still be effective defending a city against a stronger, more modern foe but when the odds get beyond a certain point, they collapse to 100 percent. So your tank won't get destroyed by a spearman who's having a lucky day.

The game introduces collateral damage to discourage stacking units into numerically unbeatable armies. If you shell or bomb a stack of units, you can damage the whole stack. On offense, you can bomb a city to weaken its overall defenses, but you can also bomb the defenders themselves, with one bomb damaging them all, making conquest immeasurably easier.

Religion is a major element. If you discover a religion, you work to spread it. Other rulers are friendlier if of the same religion, more hostile if from a different one. You can convert to curry favor. Religion helps keep your people happy, as it did in Civ III, but it also allows you to spy on foreign cities where you've sent a missionary. (The "Jesuit effect.")

Every time you build a synagogue, a cantor chants something in Hebrew. (And every time you finish a new technology, Leonard Nimoy recites some pithy saying about it. Gunpowder: "You can get more with a kind word and a gun, than you can with just a kind word." - Al Capone.

Health and sickness have been quantified and elaborated. The numbers tell you when you need to build Aqueduct, Grocer or Hospital, and how much you need to solve your problem.

Diplomacy has been updated. A running list of praises and gripes from rivals, whose attitudes you could only infer in Civ III, let you know who's a strong ally or enemy, who's on the fence, and why, which helps you figure out what to do about it.

The rulers have more personality. It's priceless when Julius Caeser or Queen Victoria, annoyed because you've refused trades or alliances, says, "I studied on killin' you."

Trade has been altered, in my opinion, for the worse. Resources can only be traded for other resources, or gold per turn, which other rulers never seem to have much of, meaning even a resource-rich empire must return to the market repeatedly to sell Silk for 2 Gold, then Corn for 1 Gold, then Wine for 3 Gold, etc. Or you trade Silk straight up for Corn, which the game thinks is an even trade. This is an improvement? It's a lot less like real history, when Silk or Spices were precious and rare, as they were in Civ III.

You have to trade techs for flat sums or other techs, not for gold per turn. Other rulers won't haggle much, which is no fun. In Civ III, I liked counteroffering 15 times until I'd shaped absolutely the best deal possible, or trading a resource for a tech with some gold and gold per turn thrown in on either side. I liked being able to sell techs repeatedly for hefty golds per turn and have them keep me rich for the next 20 turns. All that's gone. Feh. Also, there are options involving conversion or adoption of another country's civic values, but they're usually grayed out, and the game doesn't let you offer to convert in exchange for something. It should.

The graphics are fabulous. You can zoom in and see every building in your city, or zoom out to a globe view, handy when viewing a whole continent, estimating sea distances or scanning the entire world's resources.

There's a lot of automation. The game can suggest where to send workers or build cities - the latter usually near water - speeding up a lot of busy work. The new system for right and left-clicking units to move them, goes a lot faster.

Many minor flaws have been ironed out. You needn't colonize bits of land to keep opponents out, because the game won't let new cities form within two squares of another. Cities expand faster so more of those land slivers end up safely inside your borders anyway. Not only does corruption, now called "maintenance costs", discourage huge empires, but it also punishes fast growth, even early in the game. Besides farms and mines and a variety of mills, workers can build outlying cottages growing, with time, into money-generating villages and towns putting the city into the black. But before their surrounding settlements grow, new cities drag down your economy, so you don't want too many new cities all at once. At war, you can plunder those towns and villages for gold, which makes plundering a lot more lucrative, and gives your cavalry something to do while you're slowly moving footsoldiers and catapults into place.

Civ IV moves a lot faster. You can turn off some animation, once you've seen it all - seeing the Taj Mahal get built a dozen times was enough - to make it go faster still. I could spend 50 or 100 hours playing Civ III games if they had large maps and big wars. 12 to 24 hours is more typical for Civ IV. The game is also sped up by this: the characteristics of every unit, technology, resource, improvement or what have you is right there when you click on something. You don't have to remember that Optics lets you build Caravel, or that Caravel requires Optics; it says so right there in both places. You don't have to get out the instruction book or go to Civilopedia very often.

The down side is that a Civ III game became part of your life, a given map part of your mental geography that you'd pondered over every city. When a game was over, I was sorry to say goodbye. I still remember Civ III games I played two years ago. Civ IV games aren't as involving. Players don't really get into the city screen and get their hands dirty, and so may not really learn the game's guts.

But because each game is shorter, you feel freer to take chances and make mistakes. You have less vested in each game. I'd play safe in Civ III, not wanting to blow three weeks of work with a dicey attack or strategic error. A couple of days ago, by comparison, I had to decide between the UN victory in Civ IV and the space race, and opted for the latter. No matter: today I did the UN victory in the next game and learned how it worked. Finishing two games in three days never would have happened in Civ III.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Didn't work with Vista but expansion pack fixed that. ", I have a computer with Windows Vista Ultimate 64. This game wouldn't play at all on my computer even after the patches for both the game and the Nvidia driver. I saw that the Beyond the Sword Expansion Pack says its Vista compatible, installed that plus the patches and now I can finally play this game. And its alot of fun.

"Civ 4 is very fun", I have been playing Civ since 2004 when I got Civ3, play the world and conquests. Last year i got Civ 3 complete, which it thought was very fun. I got very bored of Civ 3, so I got Civ 4 last year. I couldn't play Civ 4 because i didn't have a graphics card(which every computer game needs now. This year i finally got a graphics card and started playing. I think Civ 4 is very fun because the many new features and graphics. I recommend this to any person who played civ-civ3 or just likes conquering the world.

have fun gaming!

"Hard transition from Civ III", I have been a huge fan of Civ through Civ 2, Civ III and the Civ III Expansion pack. I recently got Civ IV for Christmas and I'm still adjusting to it. The only way I can really enjoy it is to erase what I knew from Civ III and just pretend that it's an unrelated game. There are some fundamental changes in this game, many of which have already been addressed in other reviews. I am going to add a few things that I'm bumping into as I learn how to play Civ IV.

1. Map size is much smaller
In Civ III on a std map, you might build 15 cities. In a Civ IV std map, you're going to get 5 and the game will tell you that you have the largest civ! The map appears to be much smaller, but I think the focus is to do *more* with less cities.
PRO:
Since you have less cities to focus on, you can really put your attention to fully developing them. You have a lot more ways of working your terrain, like building farms, pastures, watermills, forges, etc. If you enjoy terrain development and urban planning, you have less to focus on so you can give it your full attention. Cottages in your city will actually develop into hamlets and then into towns. Your cities will be much more complex.
CON:
My old strategies from CIV III, namely building as many cities as possible as soon as possible, seem to be less relevant here. In Civ III, on a huge map on a higher difficulty level, you would want to hastily throw up as many cities as you can. It's hard to change the focus, if you that's what you're used to.

2. Tech tree is diversified and seems to lack many pre-reqs
PRO:
A lot of new techs have been added to give you more diversified civic planning. Animal husbandry is a new one, for example, as is "Guilds". You'll need Bronze Working if you want your workers to be able to chop down forests (and forests will grow if you're not tending to them). I enjoy the new techs that give civic development more depth and seem more realistic.
CON:
-The tech tree seems to be a bit too loose. I discovered Nuclear Fission and built the Manhattan Project the other day before I had even discovered Medicine! The game will announce you've moved into the Classical or Renaissance Era or something and you might not have even discovered Alphabet yet. You can move ahead with technology where it's just not a logical development. In easier game levels, you'll discover new tech so frequently that it becomes annoying to keep clicking on the tech menu. I discovered so many new techs in the earlier part of an easier game that I didn't even have time to use them! It's too much to do with instant gratification and game action, I think, that it's distracting.
-This is probably my own learning curve but I cannot figure out the clear victory path yet. In Civ III, you'd want to throw yourself into discovering Lit so you could build the Great Library and get many free techs. Then, you'd want to concentrate on moving to Democracy at one point, because your workers would be so much more efficient and your income would dramatically go up. Then, you'd need Steam Power so you could have all your military units able to move across your entire map in one turn for attack or defense. With new religions, and civics and being able to develop tech in illogical orders, I cannot yet figure out the clear victory path in Civ IV.

3. Wonders, new and old
Forget what you know about Wonders from Civ III, b/c they are just fundamentally different now. It would have been even better if they just changed the names to avoid confusion.

4. Foreign Leaders are more complex
PRO:
If you mouse over a leader, it will tell you exactly why he's annoyed with you (your borders are too close, you traded with his enemy). You no longer have to guess why a leader is annoyed vs cautious. I love getting the detail on what the foreign leader's bias is.

CON:
-The leaders will bug the crap out of you constantly. While you're trying to build your cities, you will get numerous 'status' reports from them like, 'Stop trading with my enemy.' To be completely honest, it's annoying to me. I may no longer have to click 'ok' to happy city declarations like in Civ 2 and I may no longer have to constantly clean pollution like in Civ III, but I have to constantly listen to foreign leaders babble on; it's distracting. I miss the long periods of 'quiet' in Civ III, when I could focus on my development tasks and mull over military strategies.
-This is a very minor complaint but the leaders went from looking realistic in Civ III to looking like strange little cartoons in Civ IV. Oh well.

Anyway, those are some things that you might bump into if you were a serious user of Civ III. I think IV is a good game, don't get me wrong, but it's just very very different to III that I have to almost forget that they are related at all.



"No Problems Here", A lot of people have been complaining about this not working right so if you think you're going to buy this game then get a demo or borrow it from a friend to see if it works first. Let me tell you though it works on my computer completely fine and I have a 256 ATI Radeon Graphics card, 512 MB of RAM, and a 2.4GHz Intel P4 Processor. I have also installed it on my laptop (which blows my desktop away... Except for the cruddy Intel Graphics Accelerator card), my friends laptop, and my friends desktop. Anyway let me get on to the game. The gameplay seemed much better to me in one aspect because you did not need 40 towns to beat the other Civ's. The only other one I've played is Civ 3 and at the end of a game I always had around 30 or 40 towns, not after taking the others towns. The unit upgrading adds a nice touch so you can customize your units to a play style. There are also a lot more civilizations to choose from, some with 2 different leaders, to which you also gain specific bonuses from the things they start off with (like building a barracks 50% faster). The graphics are great and you can customize the game settings in many different ways, although I do wish the maps were a bit larger and you could choose how many people you wanted to fight at once. Unit selection and moving is great. Being able to move more than one guy at a time is amazing (I don't remember if you could do this in 3 as my brother played it more than I did so I never found a way to). The different Wonders are interesting. Having "Great People" be able to help with research or culture is nice and you are always wondering "I wonder who will pop up next". Overall I think this game is great fun and I personally have not had any problems with it so I am not responsible if you read my review, buy the game, and then your computer explodes for whatever stupid reason.

"3d graphics adds nothing to this epic game series.", The differences between CIV 3 and CIV 4 are small except for the 3d graphics. My PC has 2gHz processor, 512 DDR memory, and a 128 meg NVIDA graphics card. CIV 4 runs terribly slow and often freezes my PC. One of the attractions of CIV 3 was the ability to customize the game by producing your own units, building, technologies, ect.. That is impossible for all but the most advanced users in 3d. So don't expect many mods.
The other new game features are great. The expanded importance of culture and religion are welcomed additions to the CIV franchise. One disappointing factor is that the battles are just as lame as before, one unit battles one unit at a time making for unnecessarily long game play and unrealistic results.