Product Description

With over 6 million units sold and unprecedented critical acclaim from fans and press around the world, Sid Meier’s Civilization is recognized as one of the greatest PC game franchises of all-time. Now, Sid Meier and Firaxis Games will take this incredibly fun and addictive game to new heights by adding new ways to play and win, new tools to manage and expand your civilization, all-new easy to use mod capabilities and intense multiplayer modes and options. Civilization IV will come to life like never before in a beautifully detailed, living 3D world that will elevate the gameplay experience to a whole new level. Civilization IV has already been heralded as one of the top ten games of 2005, and a must-have for gamers around the globe!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #368 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: 2K Games
• Model: 710425217128
• Released on: 2005-10-24
• ESRB Rating: Everyone 10+
• Platforms: Windows XP, Windows 2000
• Dimensions: 2.10 pounds

Features

• 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

From the Manufacturer
With over 6 million units sold and unprecedented critical acclaim from fans and press around the world, Sid Meier's Civilization is recognized as one of the greatest PC game franchises of all-time. Now, Sid Meier and Firaxis Games take this incredibly fun and addictive game to new heights by adding new ways to play and win, new tools to manage and expand your civilization, all-new easy-to-use mod capabilities and intense multiplayer modes and options. Civilization IV comes to life like never before in a beautifully detailed, living 3D world that elevates the gameplay experience to a whole new level. Sid Meier's Civilization IV has already been heralded as one of the top games of 2005, and a must-have for gamers around the globe!

Features

Civ 4 features beautiful 3-D worlds with fully animated units

• Civ IV comes to life! - Beautiful 3D world with dozens of fully animated units (including culturally unique units) and totally customizable armies. Detailed cities and wonders will appear on the map. Wonder movies are back!
• Greater Accessibility and Ease of Play - An easy-to-use interface will be immediately familiar to RTS and action game players, and newcomers to the series will be able to jump in and play. Multiplayer -LAN, Internet, PBEM and Persistent Turn-Based Server (PTBS or Pitboss) offer players all-new strategies and ways to play when competing or cooperating with live opponents.
• Team Play - Whether playing multiplayer or single player, team play offers a new way of setting locked alliances that result in shared wonder effects, visibility, unit trading and shared territory that delivers a plethora of new strategic and tactical options.
• Mods and Community Tools - Designed from the ground up for modability, the game contains a powerful map editor with XML and Python support.
• Choose Your Leader - Many Civs now have 2 leaders from which to choose, with each Leader having traits that provide various bonuses to the player and lots of replayability.
• Civics - With the discovery of new techs, civic options can become available. Freedom of speech or slavery? Hereditary rule or open elections? This creates endless government choices and possibilities!
• Religion - Now there are 7 religions in the game that are unlocked through researching. When unlocked, the religion spreads through a player's empire allowing them to use the religion to help manage happiness, gain gold and create Great Prophets.Great People - As the player uses specialists they gain Great People points in the city that is utilizing the specialists. Great People include the Artist, Tycoon, Prophet, Engineer, and Scientist. They can be used to get free techs, start Golden Ages, or join a city to increase its output.
• Promotions - Each unit has a promotion path that emphasizes specific unit traits. Promotions include bonuses to Attack/Defend on specific terrains/features, movement bonuses, sight/visibility bonuses and increased withdrawal chances.
• Tech Tree - Flexible Tech tree allows players more strategic choices for developing their civilizations along unique paths.
• More Civs and all new Units and Improvements to enhance and grow your empire.
• Faster-Paced Fun - Gameplay has been streamlined for a tighter, faster and more compelling experience.
• In-Game Movies - Civ IV will have over 70 in-game movies and animated sequences.

Customer Reviews

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.