Civ First Look

Welcome to my first look/impressions of Civ4. As you can see, I began the game with a settle and a warrior. The first things you will notice are that they have changed the icons so that a unit is represented by three units instead of one. Although, considering how many units are used in a war, defend a city, etc, it’s obvious that a unit still represents many more units than three. However, it’s pretty neat to watch battles now. Also, there are cows and horses on the map! You can make pastures for these and they will provide you with health/food/etc. If you irrigate or anything else, you lose the animals.

Here you see that the city menu has radically changed. A lot more information is at your fingertips and it’s more pleasant to look at. Your percentage of population from your civ is shown here and that plays a larger role in whether you lose a city to culture than in previous civs.

Here my national boundaries have begun to expand. You can also see that for the worker options, they went for a look that matches games like Age of Empires with large graphical buttons representing their actions. At least in settler mode, they highlight actions you might like to use.

More of how the game looks early on.

Above you can now see a farm, which has replaced the irrigation of land tiles. Now I am making roads up to where I would like my next city.

Here you can see my horse pastures. Additionally, you can see how it looks when a city is protected by a unit of warriors. You can also see a cottage behind the horses. A cottage is what provides commerce in Civ4, unlike in Civ3 where it was just accomplished by roads.

Now you can see my second city after a false start where I made the newbie error of sending settlers out on their own without protection. They were killed by barbarians and I lost the production time.

I zoomed all the way out to show you my four cities.

The galleys look MUCH cooler than they did in earlier civs - actually seaworthy.

See how my cities have grown after a few dozen terms.

By using great artists I was able to win this city from the Egyptians via culture! Mwahaha!

I have Knights!

A closer look at the beautiful city graphics.

Ah yes! I loved this part. My culture increased so much at one point that it caused a discontinuity in everyone else’s culture! That’s how much I’ve focused on it.

Thanks! I’ll be posting more as I play some more.

• Civ4