Civilization IV As Addictive As Its Predecessors

Civilization IV lives up to its family heritage. The very night I installed the game, I stayed up til 2.45 in the morning--and it was a work night. Its addictive qualities are very much in evidence as you scheme, build, war, plunder, spy, and convert your way to the top. The latest addition to the Civ series features a few minor changes to the gameplay, mostly in streamlining the amount of micromanaging you have to do in each city. When your city becomes unhappy, instead of production grinding to a halt altogether, you merely drop a few levels of efficiency. The revolutions are handled in a more streamlined fashion--and there's more aspects of your society to revolutionise. For example, you can change the economic basis for your society without changing from one type of government to another. One of the more notable additions to the game is the concept of religion. Religions are parcelled out as benefits of various technological or intellectual discoveries. Your first religion becomes your state religion--unless you decide to convert to a more powerful religion or revolutionise your society by declaring free religion. This religion spreads through nearby cities and you can make missionaries to hasten the process. Neighbouring countries may adopt your religion or try to spread their own, which affects culture, city resistance, and your diplomatic relations. Once you meet up with countries who have their own state religion, you might find that they get a little zealous. I was threatened by Hatshepsut several times for maintaining my pagan Buddhist beliefs. There is also no greater feeling of malicious joy than sending a missionary to the country of some ruler who has just pissed you off and converting his burgeoning populace to your state religion. That said, there is no technological or ideological advantage to the religions--the only difference between them is which technologies are associated with them, AND that DOES affect when in the game they will be discovered. Islam, for example, is discovered with Nationalism, I believe, and is likely to be founded well after Buddhism or Taoism or Confuscianism, which are discovered with second tier technologies in the ancient era of the tech tree. There were some things I didn't like about the new Civ which prevent me from giving it a perfect score. There's no palace appreciation from your loyal subjects--not so far as I've seen. Maybe I'm missing out on something, but I got into the Middle Ages and noticed, "Hey, where's my palace?" One of my carrots-on-a-stick from the prior Civs was developing my palace as my loyal subjects brown-nosed. I had Greco-Roman colonnaded wings branching off from a Japanese terrace and Middle Eastern minarets. My palaces were architectural soup, but I'm sorry to see that they aren't in Civ IV. The Go-To function could be quite annoying--you're supposed to be able to send troops to any tile on the board, a function of the older Civs, but bound by default to the right-click key in Civ IV. I accidently sent troops to various odd locales as I right-clicked on terrain, hoping to bring up the terrain stats. I quickly eased out of that habit, but occasionally I'd forget, and that would be a turn wasted for that particular unit. Also, if you have a dual monitor setup, it's a bit annoying to try and get your mouse back on your primary screen should it wander off. A minor annoyance though. All in all, Civ IV has lived up to its predecessor's legends as a soul-sucking, time sink of a game that will cause you to accidently stand up your boyfriend for a dinner date because you totally forgot because those b******d French snuck in a city when you weren't looking and of course you just had to get it back. Or so I've heard. I mean, I'm not that type of girl. At least in another universe, where they don't have Civilization IV, I'm not that type of girl.