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Be my valentine. |
Strictly speaking, this isn't a review for Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword. There will never be a review, by me, for Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword. This is because it is quite simply one of the best games I have ever played in my life, and certainly the best game that I've actually spent real money on. I mean, I could just rave about how much I love it, but that'd be pretty much as redundant as telling a girl that she's special to me. Bitch just plain knows it.
Ultimately it wins by being one of those infinitely replayable games that never stops being amazing fun, but what puts the icing on the cake is that Civ4 is quite easily the most widely customisable games I've ever even heard of. I mean sure, you may think that being able to change a few graphics might make your game "customisable", but you'd probably be wrong. Call me when you can gut the entire combat mechanics and turn it into a fantasy RPG and then I'll look to see if your game even comes close.
This is pretty lucky then, because five years after Civ4's initial release, I'm finally starting to get really fed up with the tech tree and civic systems.
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For some reason, this does not happen to Paradox games. |
This is a real danger for any 4X (empire management) game: that given time the failings of the entire game's technological progression, military model, economy, or what-have-you will turn out to be unrealistic or insufficient. Players will always want a deeper experience after long enough.
Civilization IV, at least, equips you with the tools to fix this, and there are literally hundreds of mods out there which address issues I have with the game. Civ4 has the largest modding community I know of -- and possibly the largest modding community there is (if you assume games like Spore don't count, that is). The problem is the tendency for modders to bundle their changes with larger mods. There's no picking-and-mixing here: it's all or nothing with these mods. So while someone might indeed have extended the tech tree to the distant future, this comes at the cost of lots of new retarded religions, for example. Yes, you can have a huge map of the earth with tree new terrain types and new resources, but only if you give up random starting locations, accept a series of history-enforcing events, and put up with ten new widgets cluttering your entire screen.
So here are my current problems: the tech tree is limited as hell and predictable. I hate having religions founded as a result of someone researching a tech first (and of older religions having an unfair advantage). I want future tech to actually mean something. And above all, the civic system is crap.
Firaxis realised that just switching your entire government over to "Fascism" for a few years didn't make a lot of sense. Governments have nuance, and policies. When I first read a review for Civ4, which entirely sold the game to me, one of the things that excited me the most was the civic system. In essence, each civ would be able to choose its stance on religion, economy, and so on, and get bonuses based on their choices. It sounded great.
But like so many things that sound great drunk, it turned out to be pretty awful in practice. I'm not entirely sure what's the worst part of it: the fact that they're so poorly balanced, the obvious progression of quality as civs become more advanced, the fact that the legal and economy trees only have the vaguest thematic separation, or the clear pro-Democratic vibe. Actually, I think it's the latter -- slavery is bad to modern America, so it only has one benefit which causes crippling population loss and massive unhappiness. Don't ask me why the ancients routinely slaughtered thousands of people every time their slaves built anything.
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Fact: Chichen Itza is made entirely out of slave hearts. |
This is made a lot worse when you consider that during the same point in the game you can build the Pyramids wonder, which gives you access to Universal Suffrage, which gives you the same benefit in exchange for gold and makes your towns more productive, thereby potentially limiting how often you need to use it. Get it? Because democracy is good, and slavery is bad! Don't even get me started on Emancipation, which gives a cumulative unhappiness penalty to every civ that doesn't have it, even if they've never heard of any civ that has, or aren't advanced enough to enact it.
This doesn't just upset me because Firaxis appears to have the same views on cultural expectations of personal liberty that my dad has. What upsets me is that Civ4 is meant to be a game of fun escapism where we create worlds that could never be. There's nothing more fun than when you realise that you're playing a Jewish Greece near the southern hemisphere involved in wars with a Hindu Sino-Incan alliance over islands in a huge interior sea. I love that utter disconnect from reality. What I want is for my society to actually have an identity of its own that's distinct from those of my enemies. I would like to try out an oppressive police state and see how that actually works, instead of being penalised for it.
So I guess I'm back in the modding community again, attempting to figure out balanced civics that are an inseparable part of a civ's identity. And for this I'm looking to Paradox games. Sadly, the best example of this done well is Victoria, a game so unbelievably complicated that it actually gave me two new mental disorders overnight. Wrestling with Victoria's micromanagement is a lot like wrestling with a terminal illness, complete with family looking on, consumed with despair, wondering if it would be more merciful for everyone just to euthanise you now. But it at least has ambition, and depth. If the game wasn't real-time involving global empires of hundreds of provinces each all of which have their own micromanagement (yeah, I know) then the political system in the game would actually be really good. I'm certainly going to take a lot of ideas from this game.
