Quote Originally Posted by The Spartan
sounds pretty interesting...
One of the best things about Civ-type games is the AI - it tends to be pretty competitive. There's often a frisson of excitement when you first encounter Shaka or Ghengis. The AI is often very aggressive and what's more, often aggressive "in character" - meeting Ghandhi does not lead to the same fear. The AI threat is often backed up by lots of AI resource bonuses, tech cheats etc but the cheating is not that obvious. TW could learn quite a lot from civ in terms of creating a single player challenge and modelling AI personalities.

The combat is heavily stylised, but that in Civ4 is pretty neat and involved (units get special powers, can be upgraded to higher tech, there's a rock-paper-scissors thing going on, there's a tension between stacking and being dispersed, terrain plays a role, inner lines of communication - especially railways - are a major advantage etc etc).

The main weakness, IMO, is the end game can really drag on and on. You can have long periods where nothing happens but you tweak your build orders etc. and war, far from livening things up, often slows it down even more.