Civilization IV

[screwtype]

Okay I've played the game enough now to draw a conclusion and I'm afraid it's not a nice one.

I saw in the designers' notes to the game that they are congratulating themselves for thinking up clever ways to reduce the micromanagement burden from the previous games. In fact what they've done is turn the game into an even greater micromanagement nightmare.

In the previous game, all you had to manage was citizen happiness. But now they've added health to the equation, so you not only have to keep your citizens happy but healthy as well.

In addition I find that most of the bonuses you get from buildings etc are too complicated to be able to assess easily, and it's the same problem with the Civics. Again, I see in their notes that the designers think strategy games are all about creating tension-filled choices. So they give you a bunch of Civics that have both advantages and drawbacks. The end result is that it's very difficult to be able to figure out what advantages there are if any of one Civic over another. So there's little sense of achievement in getting some new Civic. And this kind of problem persists throughout the game.

Also I find there's no real sense of character or personality about the things you build. In a game like Age of Wonders, for instance, your city improvements really have a meaningful impact on gameplay. But it's all so incremental in Civ that buildings tend to lose any sense of identity, it's just an extra health point here and a culture point there, or some esoteric this-building-gives-me-an-extra-smiley-if-I-also-have-silk-in-my-resources formula. So you just end up slogging your way through one building after another after another to try and get a bit of functionality into your city. I mean, all computer games are ultimately about counting. But the idea of a game is that the counting is hidden from view in an entertaining package. In Civ, the underlying arithmetic is only too glaringly obvious.

I also have a problem with a lot of the basic design decisions. For example the designers note that they gave builders two moves so they could move and build something in the same turn. Okay, that's fair enough as far as it goes. But then, why do builders need a movement rating at all? With game turns measured in years, what's the point? You should be able to just pick up a builder and drop him anywhere in your territory when you want to build something. You should not have to run him from A to B, or worse still, have to transport him overseas on those Galleys with their piddling two tile movement rate so it takes you 50 or 100 years to get them where you want them! This is just more micromanagement hell.

I'd also like to know why after all this time there aren't separate build queues for units and buildings - especially given the long build times for buildings in this game. And why does it have to take so long to build military units anyhow? There's already an effective limit on the amount of military units you can build because of the gold it takes to support them.

It seems to me this game would be a LOT more interesting if you were able to churn out military units at a much faster clip. You might then actually be able to have some fun fighting wars without your entire tech development and economy falling catastrophically behind the other powers. As it is you can rarely afford to build a military unit because of the time it takes away from city improvements. It totally sucks.

There are some modest improvements in the game here and there, particularly in the glitz department. They did get rid of corruption thank goodness, and what they replaced it with seems to work quite well. But overall I still find the whole thing largely an exercise in frustration and tedium. This is a game that is desperately in search of a good dose of elegant simplicity.

PS Thanks for the info on turn modding ChaosLord.