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Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Firaxis
Genre: Turn-Based Strategy
Release Date: July 24, 2007
ESRB: Rating Pending
Expansion Pack for: Civilization IV
Developer: Firaxis
Genre: Turn-Based Strategy
Release Date: July 24, 2007
ESRB: Rating Pending
Expansion Pack for: Civilization IV
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{The Holy Roman Empire is one of ten new civilizations}
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Most expansion packs are content with giving you a couple of new sides/factions, and handful of units, and a balance tweak or two that should have been in a free patch. So it's positively mind-boggling the amount of stuff Firaxis is going to offer when Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword ships later this summer. For some quick and dirty by-the-numbers rundown, BtS adds something like 16 buildings, 10 civilizations, 16 leaders, six technologies, 31 units, 11 scenarios, and 14 Wonders. Phew. It would take pages upon pages of text to go through all of these improvements, so for now, we'll focus on the most significant ones that Jon Shafer, the lead designer of Civ IV: BtS, has shown us.
((A Change Will Do You Good))
"Civilization IV: Warlords was pretty combat-oriented, so for Beyond the Sword, we focused less on combat and more on a wide range of tweaks and changes for the late game," comments Shafer. Even though the bulk of BtS's changes affect later eras the most, there are a few significant tweaks that come up even earlier. For example, the art has been given a tweak where units don't all look alike anymore; there's a bit more uniqueness and individuality; you can recognize a Japanese archer as different than a Babylonian archer, for instance.
One of the first new BtS-specific additions is the Apostolic Palace Wonder. Consider it a medieval version of the U.N., where after researching Theology and establishing a State Religion, a player can construct it (which makes Diplomacy a lot more important early on). After construction, assuming the player who built it is sworn in as Resident of the Apostolic Palace (it's possible for another player to be Resident, depending on how the votes go). Much like the U.N., the Resident can then call for various Resolutions such as a "Force Peace" between two civilizations or even to return a conquered city back to its owner. Additionally, any civilization can officially Defy a Resolution that the Apostolic Palace passes (this can occur within the U.N. as well); Shafer joked that this was done "for that one guy who was against the Nuclear Arms Disarmament, but he is forced go along with the U.N. Resolution."
One interesting change that persists throughout all the eras is the addition of Events. Events are like the random stuff that happens in a SimCity game; sometimes bandits terrorize one of your cities or a plane goes down and you need to figure out how to take care of it. Events are totally random, and either come up as immediate Occurrences (make a decision and fix this right now) or Quests (do a series of tasks to get a reward). Solving an event often reaps a benefit, but if you don't like the unpredictability of Events, you can always disable them.
A nice late-game change is the use of Colonies. "Sometimes, players don't want to deal with juggling multiple cities across the world", says Shafer. When the micromanagement gets to be too much, designate a chunk of space that's not on your home continent as a Colony. Colonies will be treated as separate, AI-run civilizations, but you can still happily wander through the Colonial territory, and both the Colony and the mother Civilization it belongs to gain bonuses for the Colonial relationship. Of course, if you treat the Colony badly, it might decide to break off and pull a July-4-1776 on you.
Finally, if you really prefer to check out late-era stuff, you can perform an Advance Start. Meaning, you're given a blank slate and a pool of gold (depending on what era you want to start in), and you can construct a modern-era city in minutes, without the hassle of starting all the way back in 4000 BC. Gold gets eaten up by Cities, Buildings, Units, Improvements, and Technologies.
((Spies Like Us))
All those tweaks and changes are fine-dandy, but the one of the biggest changes BtS brings to Civ IV is how Espionage is now handled; "We've beefed up Espionage and made it more like Civ II," comments Shafer. Now, Espionage is handled by a new menu that lists every civilization you've run into, and how many Espionage Points you've allotted to each. Espionage Points are an extra item on your Trade Income slider, where you can dedicate a portion of your funds to producing Espionage Points. After each turn, Espionage Points are assigned to other civilizations either evenly, or based on how you prioritize them (i.e. you want 50% of your Espionage Points per turn to go to the Dutch and the remaining 40% to be allotted to the Khmer). These points are then used for both Active and Passive Espionage missions against other civilizations.
Passive Espionage simply means that after accumulating a certain number of points to a civilization, you can do things like see what your opponent is researching or even what's going on inside a city. The way to balance this is that if your opponent has more Espionage Points in general, he can reap the benefits of a Passive Espionage act earlier than you, and in fact, because he has more than you, the Point cost for you to perform Passive Espionage rises, and you'll have to fund more money to spy on him. In fact, when you allot a lot of Espionage Points on a specific civilization, you can reach a level where you can deny spies from that civilization to even cross the border.
Active Espionage spends points in order to do dastardly things like destroy buildings, incite a revolt, steal technology, or switch an opponent's Civics or Religion to whatever you're aligned with. Another interesting Active Mission type is Counter-Espionage, which doubles the cost of any Espionage mission that your target undertakes. To pull off an Active Mission, you need a Spy unit, which is available after researching the Alphabet (which moves Espionage up to an early game mechanic now).
Spies are invisible units that can zip around undetected to gather info, and perform Active Missions within an enemy city. If the mission succeeds, the Spy either survives to perform another one, or gets caught and killed immediately. Heck, the Spy might get caught anyways and the mission fails as a result. Even worse, in that case, your opponent might have interrogated the Spy before killing him/her and find out that the Spy is yours. Finally, with the right combination of Specialists and Wonders, you can also cultivate Great Spies to do dirty work for your civilization.
{The Modern Era is now more complex thanks to stuff like Espionage and Corporations}
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((Putting Money In Your Pocket ))
Corporations are an interesting twist for the lategame era. After researching the general Corporations technology, you then have to research a further topic (such as Medicine to open Sid's Sushi Co. or Mass Media for Civilized Jewelers Inc) and then use a certain type of Great Person (i.e. a Great Scientist for Aluminum Co. or a Great Engineer for Mining Inc.) to establish a Corporate headquarters (considered a Wonder) in a city. Once built, a Corporation will incur a maintenance cost, but will also provide a number of resource bonuses to counter it. Additionally, you can build Executives to roam the world, establishing new Corporation buildings in other cities.
One interesting thing to note is that while the Corporation benefits the civilization that found it, the individual city it's built in is the one that gives the Corporation the resources it requires. To this end, Shafer specifically points out a jerk tactic of sending your Executive to build a Corporation in another civilization's city. This means that you reap the benefits of said Corporation, while the city itself (in your opponent's hands) has to pay the expenses. Of course, to counter such a dastardly move, you can adopt either the Mercantilism or the State Property Civics, which will nullify the effect of any foreign Corporation.
((Mad Mad Mods))
In both an example of both how moddable CivIV is, and should provide awesome support for their mod community, BtS includes a host of historical scenarios and three "out there" scenarios: "Fall from Heaven: Age of Ice," "Afterworld" and "Final Frontier." Or, to be more precise, a fantasy scenario, an X-Com style scenario, and a space conquest scenario.
Fall From Heaven: Age of Ice is a popular Civ IV mod, and by being an official part of the BtS expansion, it's been upgraded with spiffy graphics and effects. Basically, you play as Kylorin, who is out to re-assemble the Godslayer sword and take down the God of Winter. Besides the overall fantasy look, tweaks to gameplay include a massive blizzard that can mess with parts of the map, hero units like the sorceress Epona who can fling fireballs around, and tamable wildlife (such as the giant spiders or mammoths lollygagging about on the map).
The world map is, alas, a fixed map with defined places for the fragments of the Godslayer, such as an island that requires the player to have defeated a zombie pirate beforehand so that s/he can sail the zombie ship over. Obstacles such as Taranis, a powerful enemy hero who remains locked up on an island, are fixed as well. Shafer shows us the White Dragon, which is basically a "rampage timer". Once the White Dragon shows up, it will start ending every city and unit it comes across, so you have a limited amount of time to assemble the Godslayer and take out the God of Winter. Which, by the way, looks pretty cool once you finally do it.
Afterworld is the most drastic mod, as it's a squad-based tactical scenario. Basic premise is that scientists went in to research some weird stuff, they haven't been heard back from in a while, and you play as a squad of mechanized soldiers called the "Gravebringers" to find out what happened to those scientists. Shafer jokes that "all we basically did was remove stuff like cities, leaders, diplomacy" in order to scale Civ IV down from an empire-builder to a squad-based game.
{This is CivIV?! Yes, yes it is.}
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With its intimate focus on five units, special abilities and promotions for each unit have been more fleshed out. Examples include the construction of a forcefield to close off passages and force the enemy to funnel down specific halls to you, or the ability to control enemy units for a short time, or a simple detonation aura which blows up anything around you (one of the first times we've seen an individual Area-of-Effect spell in a Civ title). Your Gravebringers get to use all of these neat abilities and weapons on what are essentially space zombies. It's pretty amazing that an X-Com-ish scenario of mechs versus space zombies is a random extra bonus in BtS.
Finally, Final Frontier might be our favorite mod in BtS, as it turns Civ IV from a regular epic terrestrial empire game into an epic space game. When Shafer first started describing Final Frontier, we wondered if it would be like Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which already was a sci-fi treatment on the Civ formula. Then the scenario actually loaded, and we saw a starmap instead of a planetary one, and realized that Alpha Centauri still centered on a planet, while Final Frontier lets you zip around the stars. One of the immediate changes we noticed is that while solar systems are the heart of your "city", you can designate which planets within a system get which buildings—hence you make an all-military production planet and a farming planet within a single system.
Shafer commented that an accurate depiction of space would actually be boring, since it would mostly be…empty space. To that end, the galaxy is populated with asteroid fields (can provide defensive and resource bonuses), impassable nebulae, dangerous radiation fields, and ultra-dangerous black holes. Additionally, since there are vast reaches of space between solar systems, the way you spread your borders and culture is via starbases; not only do starbases establish borders, but they also house military units to defend said borders. Military units range from battleships, carriers, fighter/bomber squadrons to "delta" or even "omega" level upgrades for each unit. Finally, since you're already in space, the "space flight" victory condition has been replaced with "Human Ascendancy", which translates into creating dimensional warp gates (instead of a space shuttle). Keep an eye out for the Final Frontier-specific demo to go up on FilePlanet next month.
{Possibly our favorite mod is Final Frontier's space treatment of the Civ formula}
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After seeing how staggering the list of changes and additions are to Civ IV: BtS, our main concern is this: it might be too much. Civ IV is already a pretty complicated game, and adding additional management layers (via Espionage and Corporations) and dealing with so much new stuff might simply be a bit overwhelming for even diehard Civ IV veterans. Then again, "too much stuff" isn't a bad thing to complain about. Keep an eye out for both the Final Frontier demo, and our definitive feelings on Beyond The Sword in our review after it hits stores on July 24th.
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