By: Chris Stavros

About 15,000 years ago, the race of man first began to give up the life of the nomadic hunter and gatherer for the life of the farmer and planter. His early efforts are lost in antiquity, with only a handful of ruins to mark the passing of those early farmers. After some 7,000 years, the early farmers began to band together in settlements and formed the world's first cities, and more importantly, the birth of what we call civilization. On the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the first civilization we know of was born - the Sumerians. The best game ever to simulate the struggle from the founding of that first civilization to the modern era was Sid Meier's Civilization. Now Firaxis has debuted the fourth installment of this great series in Sid Meier's Civilization IV.

For those unfamiliar with this series, Civilization is a turn based simulation of all recorded history, where players start with only some nomads and found a city and a civilization, and then study technologies and build great cities and empires. Players select from a choice of different ethnic groups with appropriately named cities, and then set out to be the greatest civilization in recorded history. From the second installment, multiplayer options were added, allowing players to pit themselves against each other in the race for world dominance through the ages. Players improved the land, found new cities, built roads and military forces, and constructed improvements to their cities to make them more productive and better protected from the elements and other races. As the series progressed, innovations were added to each version, changing and expanding some things and eliminating others.

So after four editions, what is new in this product? Quite a bit as I will discuss as we go along. The game begins the same as each game in the series, with the player having a settler and a unit to explore the hidden map, and a few technologies. The first thing that you will notice is different is that the game is now three-dimensional and has full zoom in and out. You must choose where to found your first city, and where you start there are usually good choices. The game will indicate what it believes is the optimum location by placing a blue circle in the best square for the city when you highlight the settler unit.

Once you select the spot and choose to build your city, you will now be given a series of choices. Civilization IV is all about choices, in that the path you choose will dictate how your civilization will advance through the ages. The game will offer you several suggestions as to what it considers the best builds and the reasons why. Other choices can be highlighted through the scroll down menu, and each includes an explanation of what it does and what benefit it provides, as well as how long it will take to construct. More complex items and units will take longer and better choices may be available. The best choice at first is to build a defensive unit to protect the city, or if you are daring, you can construct a worker first to improve the land or even a barracks to make veteran units, since experience plays a huge roll in this game.

One of the next new things you will see in this game, is that there are more then just the other players and roving barbarians in the world. There are also wild animals such as lions that can and will kill unprotected units. As you explore the map and time advances, wild animals cease to appear and only barbarians are seen. As in every version of the game, there are villages, which veteran players often referred to as 'goodie huts,' sprinkled about the map; moving a unit on one of them may give cash, a technology or bad events like barbarians.

Now that you have built your city and selected what to build, the next choice is what technology to study. Techs are the heart of this game, as learning will provide better units, world wonders and city improvements. It is imperative that players never fall behind in the technology race lest they be overwhelmed by more advanced races and lose the game to them. The best choice of what to study is again highlighted as well as anything else you can study.

Discovering technologies will open paths to new technologies and alter the map by providing new resources for players to use and fight over. The technology tree provided with the game, and viewable through the minister screen, will show the paths of the techs. A new feature is that the paths are no longer rigid as in past versions.

Players can arrive at a tech from several different technologies, greatly increasing the variables of play. The techs also include a greatly increased amount of governments to research as compared to the limited types in previous versions. As you discover each tech, actor Leonard Nimoy of Star Trek fame reads a famous quote of an historical figure.

Players can now mix and match the kind of government their civilization will have. It could be a monarchy, but with full religious freedom and yet have slavery. There are five civics categories to choose from and each has a number of levels providing great diversity in the type of government you have. The type of government affects the happiness of the citizens as well as city production and relationships with computer controlled civilizations.

The best new feature is the religion choices. The world's great religions are tied to technologies, and being the first to research a given technology, will reveal the particular religion for it. Players will discover Hinduism, Buddhism, the Jewish Faith, Christianity, Islam and Taoism. The religions will spread along trade routes, and players can build missionaries to help spread a favored religion. Among the civic options is naming a state religion, which can help with happiness as well as again effecting foreign relations.

Another innovation added to the game is the appearance of great historical figures. People such as Homer and Henry Ford appear in cities throughout the ages, and they can increase a city's effectiveness, speed production of world wonders, discover techs and even start golden ages; to see men such as Thomas Aquinas and St. Paul pop up from time to time is a fun edition.

The last of the major new additions is the new military experience options; the power bars are now gone from units and replaced with a numerical ranking and special symbols indicating the experience traits a unit has. If a unit is constructed in a barracks, it gets a free choice at start, and several wonders allow for bonus traits. As the units survive combat, the trait level can increase and new types can be added. One of the best features of the game is that all units can be upgraded, so nothing is ever useless or outdated. For example, I built a swordsman in 2000 BC that survived the game and numerous upgrades, to finish as a mech infantry unit that was nearly invincible. When you upgrade, previous traits are retained so veteran units are hugely valuable.

The graphic engine in the game is the best ever put into this series. The units are wonderfully rendered and animated, and the cities are nicely detailed, even displaying on the map buildings and wonders constructed in a given city. The controls are smooth and easy to use, and the interface is well laid out and includes full text when highlighted. The music and sound are excellent throughout, with wonderful theme music for each race, as well as wonderfully done tribal music for the game theme songs. The units will speak in their native languages when you zoom in and move them about.

The only real problem I had with the game was the excessive lag as the number of selected civilizations increased and the ages advance. For my system, nine or more civs caused this lag, but other people have told me they had trouble at five civs and others only with 12 or more. I hope Firaxis addresses this problem quickly, as it appears to be the only flaw in the game.

Overall, this is the finest example of this great franchise, and finally surpasses Civ 2 as the best in the series. With so many races to choose from, as well as wonderful eye candy in the units and terrain screens, the game is fun as well as being educational. Historical units, great leaders and cities, and a world to win with variable victory conditions give this game endless replayablity.

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