Another collossal waste of time, incoming

Civilization IV is coming out a bit later this year. Read the interview with Barry Caudill, the senior producer for Firaxis Games:

Long a favorite of turn-based strategy fans, Sid Meier's Civilization franchise has gone through quite a few incarnations since it was first released almost 15 years ago. Each new version of the game and each new expansion built upon the core premise of leading your civilization throughout history, from the founding of its first cities to its eventual colonization of other planets.

Though we've known about an upcoming sequel for some time now, the folks at Firaxis have been pretty tight with the information. Now, mostly because they're tired of me calling them every day and are probably worried about making me cry again, Firaxis's senior producer Barry Caudill finally consented to answer our questions about the game.

IGNPC: Sweet Civilization. You realize I have to quit my job once this game comes out, right?

Barry Caudill: Yes we do, that's why it's good we work here at Firaxis...or we'd all be on the dole J Oh...was that rhetorical?

I've spent many, many hours of time playing the various games in the Civilization series, although I have to admit that Civ III never grabbed me as much as earlier games. Perhaps it's just my basic lack of gameplaying ability, but I have never been able to get as involved in the newer game, despite its much better interface and better-developed concepts. Perhaps Civ IV will reverse that trend for me.

The one thing I've found with Civ III is that the game is much more blatant about cheating against the player: I've lost count of the number of times my country has stumbled for lack of critical resources. No matter how large my civilization became, I'd usually find that Saltpeter, Coal, and Oil resources were just outside my reach, typically in the territory of formerly friendly, but now hostile nations. The game tries desperately to force you to military solutions, just when the military balance of power has shifted dramatically away from you (you can't obtain gunpowder weapons without a source of Saltpeter, for example).

As a former wargame addict, I'm not averse to launching invasions or repelling 'em, but when the enemy is toting muskets and cannon and your forces are still swinging swords and using catapults, the outcome is rarely in doubt.

I can certainly understand why programmers take shortcuts like this: even today, the average gamer can easily out-think the program's strategy choices so that the program needs a simpler set of rules to compensate. But there have to be better ways of accomplishing it.

One of the most interesting changes is in the way governments are configured:

There are no set governments anymore. In Civilization 4, you can choose from various civics and combine them to make the type of government you want. For example, you may have a Theocratic Police State that also has Universal Suffrage or you may have a Pacifist Slave State with Hereditary Rule. The Civics are divided into five major areas — Government, Legal, Labor, Economy, and Religion — and each of those has 5 possible choices depending on what you have researched. In addition, AI leaders will have certain favorite Civics and they may ask you to either switch to theirs or stop using the one that offends them.

This will sound stupid, but I've always had issues using some of the more dictatorial forms of government (I think I've only ever used "Communist" once, and that was in a war I was losing from the get-go). This new concept sounds much more palatable.