Yeah, I'm behind the times. I just recently got a computer that could handle this game.

I don't play a lot of computer games, but like everyone else who ever owned a 386 I was addicted to Civilization back in 1991. Why? The consensus seems to be that it's about the "one more turn" phenomenon: that there's always a reason to keep on playing, because on the next turn you're going to capture a city, or build a Wonder of the World, or discover a new technology. This emphasis on structure always struck me as a bit odd. It's like praising a museum for having a great floor plan. Yes, establishing a good flow from gallery to gallery is important, but more important is making those galleries worth seeing.

To me, computer games are about seeing what all there is to see. They're not about victory — my first IF piece could be won by typing >WIN, a hint that reaching the putative goal was not actually important. And they're not about the pleasures of solving puzzles for their own sake, of coming up with the correct series of thrown levers and pushed buttons — or the perfect combination of tactics to sack Karakorum with three chariots and a catapult — and getting nothing but a puny "You have gained a fabulous treasure!" message in return. The reason I played Civilization back in the day was watch to the close-up views of my cities evolve, to watch dirt paths turn to paved streets and to see what the Wonder I'd just completed would look like; to meet the leaders, each with a different font, theme music, and jabbering head, and see what the combination of era and government would make the advisors in the background look like; to discover new lands and alter them in new ways as my tech improved; to build up my palace with marble columns and onion domes. Therefore, I differ from a lot of Civ I enthusiasts. When I'd seen everything in the game, I stopped playing.

Since then I've bought each iteration of the Civilization series, played it a few times, seen what there was to see, and then packed it away. I imagine the same will be true for Civilization IV. I loved most everything I encountered in the game, and then quickly ran out of new things to encounter.

As usual, you start with a couple of units plunked down somewhere on the globe. As you explore, you reveal more of the map — and what you uncover is absolutely beautiful. The original Civilization was pretty ugly even for its time. But while I have long considered 3D computer graphics a giant step backward from the often gorgeous pixel art of the 1990s, the 3D works very well here, partly because of technological improvements over the past decade and partly because in Civ IV you're usually zoomed out far enough that you can't see the jaggies and weird texture maps that can make 3D graphics such an eyesore. Big ups to the art team on this game. Even if it were nothing but a screen saver it'd be worth the purchase price.

One of the first things you do is build a city or two. In Civ IV there is no "city view," because the cities on the main map are no longer iconic representations; the main map is the city view, just zoomed out a really long way. You can zoom in closer to approximate the old city view, but it's not the same. Ah well.

You also build units right from the get-go. In Civilization units were colored squares with crude pictures on them; in II and III, each unit was represented by a single figure, an archer or a rifleman or a dude with an axe or something. In IV, the units are small squadrons, and when they fight, instead of one of the squares blowing up or the power bars shrinking, you actually see a miniature battle. Much as I dislike scenes of violence, each time I built a new unit it was hard not to be curious about what its animation would be like. Due to my battle-averse playing style, this is actually one aspect of the game that I still haven't thoroughly explored. I think the most advanced unit I've seen in action extensively is the cavalry, which is a shame because one of the later units, the spy, is represented by a slinky lady in a black vinyl catsuit. One very nice addition is that when you click on units, they respond with a number of messages in the language of the civilization you're playing. (My favorite is probably when you click on an American unit and it pleads, "Tell me what to do!") This is the sort of thing that makes games replayable. If each civilization's units looked different in addition to sounding different, I probably would have played them all. But with the exception of a single individualized unit, each empire's units look the same.

In theory, Civilization IV was designed so that civilizations could distinguish themselves by pursuing different branches of the technology tree, rather than making roughly the same advances in roughly the same order. This aspect of the game is an improvement over its predecessors, but still, it's hard for civilizations to distinguish themselves from one another. Some are a little ahead of the others, some a little behind, but there are no great divergences of direction. I think the main issue here is that, despite some lip service to the contrary, Civilization IV is fundamentally a war game, whereas I'd be more interested in something like Sim Civ: I want to see what effect emphasizing different branches of the tech tree would have on everyday life in my country. Are you using metallurgy to make iron weapons like the Europeans or to make intricate art of gold and silver like the Incas? Alpha Centauri did a pretty good job of making its factions qualitatively different, but in its case the differences were hardwired. I'd like to see this kind of diversity made by choice.

One way to do this might be through Wonders of the World. The best Wonders have always been the ones with wild effects: in Civ I, the Great Wall forced enemy nations to offer you peace, so you could basically shut off military development; the Great Library gave you any technology two other civs had already discovered, so you didn't have to pursue your own science... the ones with effects like "extra trade points in this city's radius," on the other hand, are boring. Yet the latter type dominates in Civ IV. More dramatic and diverse Wonder effects could keep each playthrough from being basically the same as the last one.

Anyway, so you send your units out into the world. Eventually you encounter other civilizations, and that means talking with rival leaders. One of the big downgrades from Civ I to Civ II was that the jabbering heads of Abraham Lincoln and company were replaced by gyrating generic emissaries standing in front of the leaders' portraits. The heads were brought back in III, and now they're a lot more expressive and have accompanying animations. Queen Isabella, for instance, now examines her manicure in the middle of your negotiations. Incidentally, if you needed any proof that "make it pretty" was one of the chief directives for this update, Exhibit A is Catherine the Great, who seems to have dropped about 45 years and 100 pounds between the Civ III version and the Erichsen-inspired Civ IV supermodel. In fact, all of the female leaders other than Victoria have received similar makeovers to bring them to ahistorical levels of pulchritude. The gender politics here are kind of dodgy but somehow I can't manage to bring myself to complain that the women in this game are too cute. What I can say is that as nifty as the animations are the first time you see them, there just aren't enough of them; I laughed out loud the first time I saw Isabella yawning, but by the 50th time I was grumbling about how short her animation loop was. Really, though, what the game needs is not so much more animations as more leaders to animate. I know there have been a couple of expansion packs, but Europa Universalis has spoiled me — I want to see hundreds of civs, thousands of leaders, so many that I can play the game a hundred times and still see new ones popping up.

I realize that coming up with all this art would be expensive. On the other hand, text is cheap, yet the conversation menus in Civ IV are very samey. And not only do all the leaders sound the same, with the occasional exception of an personalized opening remark, but the tone of the writing is annoying. Napoleon quotes Bugs Bunny as he attacks you, Montezuma suggests a round of "Kumbaya" upon signing a peace deal... yes, games should be fun, but this one would have been more fun had the designers taken the diplomacy conversation more seriously.

I've also always wondered about the way that in the Civ games the leaders stick around for six thousand years. Yes, it's somewhat amusing to see Abraham Lincoln wearing a horned hat and Genghis Khan in a business suit, but consider the alternative. Civ IV borrows from Alpha Centauri and lets you select not only your type of government but also your economic system, labor relations and so forth... 3125 combinations in all. Shouldn't at least some of these pull up different leaders? One of the Civ IV expansion packs, for instance, adds Stalin to the list of Russian leaders. Shouldn't he come up automatically when Russia switches to Police State?

At least the different leaders have had their music brought back. I have to say, I've probably learned more about classical music from playing computer games than from the music appreciation courses I've taken. I was surprised to find that I recognized some of the Civ IV soundtrack from Europa Universalis II: "Hey, isn't that La Spagna? Oh, and there's the Miserere!" The timeline of this game, of course, extends past that of EU2; reach the modern era and suddenly the entire soundtrack is by John Adams, whose name I'd heard but whose work I'd previously been unfamiliar with. I like it! It really does add something to the process of building spaceship engines to have it accompanied by Common Tones in Simple Time. Now if only the music were customized according to the direction taken by your civilization. Maybe you get John Adams when you complete the Manhattan Project, for instance. Choose SETI instead and you get Vangelis.

So, to sum up: having neat stuff to see and do makes a game playable, and in this respect Civilization IV is great. But what makes a game replayable, at least for me, is combinatorial explosion. And on that count the game is less successful.

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