Good to know; I’ll check it out too when our contract expires.

Since then, any game designed by Sid Meier is a “must play” for me; the guy’s a genius. Can’t wait to play this one in the fall!

I was willing to give this game a chance as I tried to learn the intricacies of it. Unfortunately, the game plays like one is rolling the dice rather than relying on strategic skill. I was willing to overlook the fact that the class of units really doesn’t mean much. Particularly when a 17th century musketeer unit handily took out one my 20th century tank unit, and that a rematch with a decorated cavalry unit of mine could neither best them. (They really wanted to destroy my best city… and they eventually did it)

After about twenty restarts, when I felt confident that I’d learned enough of the game’s nuances, I made a concerted effort to use as much of the management options that I’d come to learn and give this game a good go. And I was doing quite well. So well, in fact, that I spent innumerable turns fending off barbarian attacks. Finally my fledgling cities could not produce enough warriors. Many of my warriors were highly decorated from so much fighting. But the barbarians finally won out and destroyed two of my cities. On one round, all five of my cities were under attack by barbarians. It was pretty ridiculous and laughable. I can’t remember a round where there weren’t barbarians either attacking or interrupting my workers, or destroying my infrastructure.

It seems that the more successful one is in this game, the more ridiculous aggressive the AI gets. Oddly, I was only playing at the third level of difficulty… there are actually ten levels. I’d hate to see how vindictive the game logic is at level ten.

The diplomacy gets very annoying too, so much so that it becomes irritating and pointless. There are a lot of good foundational features in this game, but this game will give you so many “WTF” moments and pointless diplomatic dialogue that you’ll stop enjoying it completely. The game has very good tech tree logic, good city management features, and a straight forward and easy to use interface. And the graphics are decent for a 2006 release. But all of this is seriously spoiled by the rock-paper-scissors and roll-the-dice logic of the AI.

I never thought the AI was very strong feature in past iterations of Civ. This is why I’ve never really thought of it as really worthy of awards. But the AI in Civ IV is a little too unsophisticated. Here the AI is a dichotomy of what the rest of the game offers. But I do think that this speaks to the trend in newer games. Weak AI’s are developed in favor of online and multi-player gaming. I think building a strong off-line, single player gaming experience has become a forgotten art.