So the last time I posted was 2 weeks ago – what happened? Well on November 4th Civilization IV came out – somehow (come on we both know how..) my free time has been spent trying to lead my chosen civilization to victory 🙂 It’s the most different Civilization I have seen since Call to Power came out – and even better it all works just great.

The major change is religions – all are treated equally in the game though they do have to be "discovered" at different times so making Islam a major religion is more difficult – but achievable 🙂 It works well and adds an entirely new way to play the game 🙂 Another major change is the introduction of civics – no more one type of government and thats it – you can pick from 5 (?) different areas to define how your civ works – for example you can define the financial side, the religious side etc etc – both of these also have an effect on diplomacy which is now much more realistic in that you the ai players really do act as either friends or enemies – its all more predictable 🙂 There are lots of other things as well that just make everything more coherent. For example you used to spend a huge number of turns building wonder X only for a competing civ to build it first. You could then convert it to another wonder and immediately take advantage of the turns spent already building the previous wonder. Not very realistic. It also led to a domino effect where when one wonder was completed,  there would be a flurry of other wonders built by civs that had just missed out on the previous built wonder. Now you just get money 🙂

OK so I could go on but there are plenty of reviews elsewhere on the web and you can guess where I am going with it 🙂 you should just buy it 🙂 Just be prepared for the amount of free time you will lose!