With the success of 2005's
Sid Meier's Civilization IV, and with the usual need for a game publisher to both fix glitches and tweak its products to improve game play and make the original game a bit more challenging, it's not surprising that Take Two Games and Firaxis would release not one, but
two expansion packs to the fourth major title in the popular god-game franchise that has addicted millions of Civ-fans since 1991.
Although I passed on the first expansion pack,
Civilization IV: Warlords (which was released eight months after the original
Civilization IV), I decided a few months ago to go ahead and try 2007's
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword. I figured that the time was right for a new challenge - even though I haven't yet played all the scenarios of the original version - after a year of "building empires that will stand the test of time."
Another reason that influenced my decision to purchase
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword was that I had read in an online article that Take Two Games was including all the patches to the original version along with the new features first introduced in
Warlords. That was an important factor; the last time that I'd tried to download a patch for
Civilization IV had been a frustating experience, and I was playing the game with only the second upgrade rather than being up-to-date.
Like most, but not all, expansion packs,
Beyond the Sword (BtS) isn't a stand-alone upgrade or sequel; if you want to play it, you absolutely need to install
Civilization IV (Civ IV) and keep it in your hard drive. Don't worry; if you find yourself too overwhelmed by BtS at first, you can always boot up the original Civ IV because BtS won't "take over" or overwrite the older game. Think of it as using Civ IV as a training ground for BtS.
For an in-depth look at the original game to which BtS is an expansion, including a discussion on the basics of the game, please see
Sid Meier's Civilization IV.
The Expansion:
Although producer Jesse Smith and his team of programmers and game designers keep much of Soren Johnson's Civ IV "as is" - the basic rules, Graphic User Interface, Civilopedia, and the voice talents of Leonard Nimoy as the narrator/new Techs announcer - BtS now focuses a great deal on the post-Renaissance stages of the game. There are now several new civilization advancing-Techs (which are announced by the voice of Civilization's creator Sid Meier), including Aesthetics and Stealth.
This means that there are new units, buildings, game concepts, and Wonders of the World, as well as a more detailed set of Space Race victory conditions, including the step-by-step building of your civilization's spaceship, a feature present in older versions of the game but left out of Civ IV.
New Features:
More Worlds: Although Civ IV has an interesting mix of world maps to choose from, there are not too many of them and although there is a built-in World Builder tool which players can use to create their own world maps, I have no patience - nor the time - to play Cyber-God and create my own Earth-like planets.
Thus I was happy to see that BtS now includes several more World Generator options, including ones that have more landmass variations, including Two Hemisphere and Continent-Island combinations.
Corporations: In Civ IV, Missionaries helped spread the various religions both within your empire's borders and your neighbors. Now, in
Beyond the Sword, Corporation Executives help you increase the coffers of your civilization by expanding the reach of their respective Corporations (Sid's Sushi Co., CreativeCon) throughout the globe.
Espionage: In the early 1990s' versions of the original game, Diplomats not only handled the overt business of diplomacy by setting up embassies and establishing foreign relations, but also the cloak-and-dagger covert stuff, such as bribing other civilization's units to switch sides, poison water supplies, or incite riots...the kind of nasty stuff John Le Carre and Ian Fleming loved to write about. In Beyond the Sword, Espionage is "discovered" earlier in the game, is more detailed than in Civ IV, and has a bigger role in gameplay than ever.
Random Events: In the first version of
Civilization, not only did players have to deal with rival AI-controlled civilizations and the hated Barbarians that roamed the world, but also with random events - fires, volcanoes, and floods - that hampered their empire-building progress to some degree or other. In
Beyond the Sword, they're back, only this time they're more complex and often require you to choose from various options to solve the problem at hand.
Advanced Starts: Don't want to start in 4000 BC from scratch but, say, maybe in 1700 AD? No problem, because this option lets you begin with more of the world visible to you, with a variable amount of gold in your treasury to allow you to buy city improvements, ships, army units, and the like to set into motion your empire-building activities.
Expanded Space Victory: Still the ultimate non-World Conquest goal, the race for Alpha Centauri is now much more difficult to achieve, and in yet another tip of the hat to Civilization's first two incarnations, you now get to build your Spaceship and see it being assembled.
Expanded Diplomatic Victory: In the original 2005 version of Civ IV, if you wanted to win diplomatically you had to wait till late in the game and either build the United Nations Wonder of the World or, if a rival empire built it first, run for Secretary General and hope you got elected.
Beyond the Sword still has this, but it also added an early era equivalent, the Apostolic Palace. This Wonder of the World sort of works like the UN, but with a religious undertone; it allows the main leader to propose certain diplomatic resolutions that the other civilizations can either adopt, defy, or abstain from voting.
The expansion touts its addition of several new civilizations and their respective leaders, but having owned three earlier editions of Civilization, I noticed that Babylon and Native America have appeared in at least two of the ones I played previously, though the latter was known in
Civilization II as the Sioux.
The new civilizations and their leaders are:
Babylonian Empire/Hammurabi*
Byzantine Empire/Justinan I
Ethiopian Empire/Zara Yaqob
Holy Roman Empire/Charlemagne
Khmer Empire/Suryavarman II
Mayan Empire/Pacal II
Native American Empire/Sitting Bull*
Netherlands Empire/Willem Van Oranje
Portugal/Joao II
Sumerian Empire/Gilgamesh
*
Denotes leaders or civilizations introduced in earlier editions of Civilization but not included in either Civ IV or Warlords
In addition, the Vikings and several other empires introduced or reintroduced in
Warlords are also included.
Six existing civilizations also get additional leaders, and one of Rome's Emperors (Augustus Caesar) gets his attributes tweaked to improve his administrative and leadership skills.
Also, BtS introduces new ways of adding wealth into your treasury, such as improved trade routes by sea and using the new Corporation Executive unit to spread the influence of several Corporations to other civilzations and increase revenues that way.
Espionage, which was de-emphasized in Civ IV, is back, but in BtS there's a greater focus on it. Funding for it is now added to the tax distribution options, there's an Espionage window available, and several major buildings (Security Bureau and Intelligence Agency) must be built to reduce the effects of rival civilizations' spies and covert operations.
From
Warlords, BtS borrows a new wrinkle to the Great Persons feature from Civ IV: The Great General. Great Generals don't get "born" when a civilization's cities earn Great Person Points as in Civ IV, but rather when certain parameters regarding total military experience accrued by an empire's units are reached. Like Great Prophets, Great Artists, or Great Engineers, players can use the Great Generals to start a Golden Age, build a special building (Military Academy), or perform a one-time only task (in this case, becoming a Military Instructor).
Additionally, as in
Warlords, Great Generals can be attached to a "stack" of units and "lead" them, but if they do this, they can be killed in battle.
Other Warlords-based features: In addition to the Great Generals, BtS borrows quite a few features from the previous expansion, including Vassal state status in the Diplomacy options. In short, a rival empire (usually weaker than the player's) may ask to be a player's vassal, which takes away the supplicant's ability to declare war or make peace on its own but assumes that the Overlord empire will then protect the vassal state in return.
There are also culture-specific buildings that replace generic ones such as Markets or Lighthouses. For instance, in the American Empire, the Mall replaces the Supermarket, while in the Egyptian Empire the Obelisk takes the place of the usual Monument in the early stages of the game.
Although most of the changes to BtS are derived from
Warlords, also returning from the 1991 version of
Civilization are random events - natural disasters, airplane crashes, weather events, weddings, and political instability - that affect individual cities or international relations, giving players a more "real-world" feel to BtS.
This expansion also brings 11 new scenarios and modifications (mods), many of them written by very talented Civ fans
not affiliated with Firaxis or Take Two Games:
Afterworld
Broken Star
Charlemagne's Wars
Crossroads of the World!
Fall from Heaven: Age of Ice
Final Frontier
Gods of Old
Next War
Rhye's and Fall of Civilization
World War II: Road to War
Some of the scenarios are based on real world history, while others, such as Afterworld, Final Frontier, and Gods of Old, are pure sci-fi or fantasy games with little resemblance to classic Civ games.
Comments and Impressions: As I said in my review of
Sid Meier's Civilization IV, Take Two Games/Firaxis did a great job when it updated the popular god-game/turn-based strategy game for the 21st Century. The three-dimensional renderings of the various worlds, the amazing richness of the sounds and music, and the incredible versatility and mental challenges in the gameplay are what make Civ IV and BtS both interesting and, above all,
fun and addictive.
Of course, since the designers did tweak things to make the artificial intelligence (AI) players a bit harder to beat and also changed a few rules to make the tasks of running an empire a bit more realistic, this expansion does make a player have to work to win any of the various Victory Conditions. The new emphasis on Espionage, for instance, means that if you want to make sure none of your opponents (either AI ones in Single Player or live humans in Multi-Player mode) outsmart or out-spy you by shelling out part of your treasury on Espionage points.
The new features which seem to be new to BtS and not introduced in either Civ IV or
Warlords also made it hard for me during my first few games with the expansion. In my haste to play the new and improved game, I neglected to read the manual, which has a chapter on new features such as Colonies and Independence, which affect an empire's treasury in no small way. The first time that I spread my civilization's reach beyond its original continent and onto another, I was caught off guard when my treasury started dropping like a rock even though my Science, Culture, and Espionage rates were rather low.
At first I thought it was a "bug" in the program, then I read the manual and saw that I was making a typical "World Ruler" mistake by forgetting that setting up colonies and maintaining them require money. It's good to be ranked No. 1 in everything, yes, but
Civilization IV has a new matrix which doesn't necessarily reward players for just being the biggest or the brawniest, as older versions of the game did.
There are, of course, various ways to deal with such a "British Empire" scenario. Players can emphasize trade and revenue-generating strategies, or they can go the bloody-and-expensive World Conquest route, or they can grant the Colonies independence. This option automatically creates a new and friendly-to-the-player civilization, and there are various other side effects as well.
Because BtS is an expansion, the graphics and sounds are not much different from those in
Civ IV. Depending on the computer, operating system, and other variables, players might want to tweak the settings accordingly, since both Civ IV and BtS require lots of memory
and, quite a bit of hard drive space, and good sound and video cards.
System Requirements: Copy of Civilization IV, 1.2GHz Processor, 256 MB RAM, 64MB Video Card (DirectX 9 support needed), sound card, 1.7GB HDD
Like the game it expands,
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword runs best on a PC with at least 512 MB RAM, a fast Pentium 4 or Dual Core CPU, a nice graphics card, decent sound card/speakers, and Windows XP. I run mine on a new Compaq Presario with twice the minimum amount of RAM and on Vista; it ran okay on my previous PC but it sometimes froze up in mid-game, which isn't exactly a fun experience, especially if things are going well and your civilization is making good progress. It runs very nicely on this computer, but because it was not written for Vista, it has the habit of always starting up with a "voice capture failed" error message. (I obviously don't have a microphone attached to my PC, so that's why I keep on getting that message.)
