YouGamers.com

Reviews

Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword

Combat in the sea & skies

Beyond the Sword puts a completely new spin on naval warfare. You used to be able to mostly ignore navies, only building a few token ships to escort your transports. Things are now completely different. Ships can block work on water tiles of coastal cities, and with Privateers you can do that even without declaring a war.

Ships can also block lucrative intercontinental trade routes, assuming you can get naval superiority and blockade all ports of a nation. As an additional twist, Privateers also provide you gold when blockading enemy trade. As a result, a strong blockade can starve a civilization with lots of coast and poor naval capabilities. So, either you get your own navy and keep the seas under control, or you can forget about taking advantage of them in trade and production.

Sadly the otherwise improved AI seems to stumble with Privateers - it builds them, but can't seem to be able to use them at all. AI reactions to blockading Privateer also tends to be random, and in this regard the expansion isn't completely polished.

Interceptors are now far better in containing bomber stacks as they can intercept multiple units per turn.

Bombing your less advanced opponents back to the stone age still works, and air units also get promotions now.

Air combat has also received improvements. Air units can now get promotions, and there are a couple of new promotion types exclusive to air units. Air defenses now also work much better - a single fighter unit can intercept multiple times each turn, assuming it survives each round of combat. This means that overwhelming fighter defenses with sheer numbers is much harder.

Airports are also now more important. You are limited to four air units per city without an airport, so the old tactic of capturing enemy city and then moving in a huge pile of air units the next turn to carry on the assault is blunted, and carriers are now more useful as bases for rapidly advancing air offenses.

Spying for fun and profit

Spies have always been bit of a weak side of Civ, mostly allowing financially superior civilizations to buy up some nasty tricks against enemies. Beyond the Sword reworks the whole espionage side of the game, adding a separate Espionage slider for allocating resources to cloak & dagger stuff. Espionage resources can then be allocated between your friends and enemies, and spy units can then pull off missions consuming points from the espionage pool you have accumulated against the target.

You also get additional passive intelligence on enemy cities depending on the amount of points you have accumulated. This is very handy, as it's good to know what your enemy is constructing, or how many defensive units he has placed in each city - all without having to dash in spies all the time to investigate every city.

Spies themselves are now completely invisible to other civilizations, and they can also be used as invisible scouts. They can still get caught by passive defense, based on the number enemy espionage-related buildings (Security Bureau, Intelligence Agency and related wonders) and the amount of resources spent on espionage overall. Spies can also be stationed in friendly cities to boost this passive defense. The system feels odd at first, but once you get the hang of it, it adds a whole new front in any war. There are still some rough edges with it - most notably the "poison water supply" mission is currently tad over the top when used in Epic or Marathon length games. It's balanced in normal speed games, but the scaling is just wrong for longer games.

It's just business

Beyond the Sword introduces a new concept to Civilization - Corporations. On the surface, they appear somewhat similar to religions - you use a Great Person to set up a corporation once all the prerequisites (technology, access to some of the required resources) are met, and the corporation HQ is built in your city. This city (and your civilization) will then gain money based on the number of other cities your corporation spreads to. However, each corporate office also adds a considerable cost to the city maintenance while offering a bonus in food, culture, production or science. The bonus depends on the number of resources available, so there is a reason to capture or trade for multiple sources of one resource, assuming you have a corporation that consumes the resource type.

You can spread your corporation with the Corporate Executive unit - and assuming open borders, you can spread it to other civilizations, and once spread, other civilizations can then build more executives to spread it further. This means that their city gets the bonuses, foots the upkeep bill, provide the resources and the revenues flow to your HQ.

Corporations seem allow true economic warfare - set up branch offices in every enemy city to leech off that civilization's resources and upkeep, and if the other civilization tries to block you with State Property or Mercantilism, you can use spies to flip the civic back (preferably to Environmentalism, adding 25% to corporation maintenance). Nothing is more fun than forcing your lesser competitors to pay for your military upgrades without firing a shot.

Corporate balancing is bit of a question mark at this time - late game inflation twists the financial equation so at this time the corporate offices are far from no-brainer "spam everywhere" type upgrades. AI seems to be unaware of this fact, happily expanding corps to their every city - and sometimes flip-flopping between two competing corporations, wasting resources pointlessly. This points to possible bugs and balancing issues with Corporations at this time, but in any case they provide a fresh new aspect to the late game, when religions have all but lost their influence on the game.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: AI improvementsPage 3: Updates to combatPage 4: Diplomacy & ColoniesPage 5: Mods, mods and more modsPage 6: Conclusion & Scores

Related Stuff

Tags