Civilization IV

Great People, great game?

Sid Meier's Civilization series continues its historical and addictive reign with the highly anticipated release of Civilization IV. New features include religion, Great People, and promotions, on top of new ways to play multiplayer games and team games.

There are seven religions included in the game: Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Taoism. If you somehow are the first to discover the technology associated with a particular religion, then that religion is founded in one of your cities. It can then spread passively throughout the cities and into your opponents' cities too--and with the use of trade routes, your religion can spread farther and more quickly. The game also incorporates missionaries who go from city to city attempting to directly convert everyone to your religion. By converting other states and cities to your state's religion, you can gain happiness and monetary bonuses.

Keeping true to the instances of ancient history, Firaxis also introduces a new feature called "Great People." The five types of Great People are: Artists, Engineers, Merchants, Prophets, and Scientists. They're created at the city level with "Great People Points" that are generated in many ways: creating a great wonder, or turning regular land workers into specialists. A great wonder can affect the kind of Great People you will create; for example, building the Pyramids will generate a Great Engineer, or building Stonehenge will generate a Great Prophet. All Great People will be able to research new technology that is related to their field of expertise, i.e. Great Prophets can give religion technology such as Priesthood, Great Artists may give you Literature, etc. Additionally, these Great People will be named after an actual Great Person from history, such as Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, or Marie Curie, just to name a few.

Firaxis is tweaking the unit promotions ability in Civilization IV. You may now choose from over 20 different bonus types. Many of these bonus types contain multiple levels, for a total of over 40 available promotions. The numbers and types of available bonuses differ per unit type and only land and sea military units can acquire them (air units are different). You gain these promotions in a few ways, including successful combat, from Barracks, Drydock or goody hut, and from wonders.

The graphics have taken a turn for the 3D, a distinguishable difference from its predecessors. Is it necessarily progress, however? The overview might look too crowded or inefficient. The units are larger than your buildings during gameplay; this might take some getting used to when playing the game. The transition from 2D to 3D may not be comforting for a lot of fans; it could easily be an annoyance. However, Firaxis might surprise us and prove that a 3D environment will indeed work out beautifully with this game.

Civilization IV will be released this coming November.

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