Civilization is one of the longest running strategy titles around, and this game takes a surprising turn for the series. Each new version got more and more complex, but this one took a step way back. I would even go as far as to say that it is more simplified than the original game. This isn’t necessarily bad, but many long time fans may be a little disappointed.

The premise of the game is to become the greatest civilization in the world, plain and simple. There are many ways to accomplish this. A domination victory is earned by taking over everyone’s capital city. An economic victory comes from saving up 200,000 gold. A cultural victory is when you attract 20 of any of the following: great people settled in your cities, wonders of the world, or converted cities. A scientific victory results from building a space station and launching it to Alpha Centauri. Since your strategies are vastly different depending on which of these victories you are going for and each of the sixteen civilizations have unique advantages, the game is almost infinitely replayable. This is increased further by five different difficulty levels. Even if the main game gets old to you, there are a large number of historical scenarios that can be played.

The game starts from basically the beginning of recorded time. You start with one settler and nine squares on the map revealed. The settler allows you to found your first city and the game can go any direction from there. You can build a large army to try and quickly hunt down the other civilizations. This will leave your city’s development behind since all your resources are going to the army. Another option would be to build up you city in order to allow it to grow and bring in more resources. This will, of course, leave you open to and other civilizations that decided to attempt the first option. Then there is always the choice to build a wonder of the world, which will give you excellent bonuses but often take a long time to build. In addition to allocating your cities resources, you must also balance between scientific discovery and economic prosperity. Focus too much on one, and the other will fall behind and make victory more difficult. During all of this, you must also find time to explore the world, settle more cities, and fend off attacks from barbarians or hostile opponents. Battles are a numbers game. Each unit has a number for attack and another for defense. These number can be increased (and in a few cases, decreased) by several things: terrain of the land, experience of the unit, presence of support units, an so on. Since it is only a number that decides the outcome, it is possible for a well seasoned army of archers to kill a tank, which is funny to see but the system makes sense and works well. The number isn’t just a set-in-stone attack rating, but more of a chance of victory. This means a weaker army always has a chance to win, but the chance goes down the bigger the difference between the two units is. The game is turn based, so you will have plenty of time to sit and think about the best course of action. Each game will take anywhere from three to five hours to complete, more if you spend a lot of time planning your turns. This is definitely a thinking game, so action junkies will quickly get bored.

Although it is a very deep game, there are many corners that were cut and options left out that were in past games. The world is incredibly small in comparison and the size is always the same. There are always four other randomly chosen civilizations for you to go up against, unlike in previous games where you could choose from three to seven. Some other long running features are not really present. Keeping you people happy basically happens on its own and even when they aren’t, it really doesn’t affect much. Many of the statistics that could be tracked before, can’t be in this game. You used to be able to use spies to learn how big other civilizations armies are or what building and technology they are working on. Now, spies are merely for stealing minor things from enemy cities. Long term peace treaties are non-existent. The computer players will occasionally approach you and say they will leave you alone for five turns or so if you give them something they want. To make matters worse, there is no way you can place the same demands on them. There are a bunch of other minor exclusions that were in past games that would have been nice. If an enemy builds a city right next to one of yours and you take it over, you can’t get rid of it and both must share the same land squares. This hurts both cities and prevents them from growing as much as they need to. Also, old units cannot be disbanded. This isn’t a big deal since you don’t need to use resources to support them like in past games, but it is just a bit dumb to see your first ancient warrior unit you ever made protecting a city along side a tank. Nuclear weapons aren’t as present in the modern era of this game either. If you build the Manhattan Project wonder, you recieve one missle and no more can be built. You get one; that’s it. I may not like a lot of these design choices, but I do understand that they were made to make the game a bit easier to learn and reach a broader audience.

Another major gripe I have with the game is that the computer controlled civilizations seem way too war-like. In one game session, I was giving everything I possibly could to the Russians just so they wouldn’t attack me. After a few hundred years of them completely using me, they randomly decided to tell me that they had to ‘crush my puny civilization.’ Hell, even Ghandi declared war on me when I told him that I didn’t want to give him one of my technologies that he demanded without giving me anything in return. The other players can win with any of the four victory conditions as well, but every single one wants to destroy you. I also have yet to see any two computer players fighting each other. I’m sure they do, but they always seem to want to fight me first.

The graphics aren’t stellar, but they look nice. They are a bit too cartoony for my tastes, though. The 3D characters for the advisers and opponent’s leaders look great and are entertaining to watch. It would have been nice to have the option to view a 3D model of your cities with all of the buildings. The first few do appear clearly within the city, but after that it just turns into a jumbled mess of structure and you can’t really see specific things.

This game is best described as Civilization Lite. It’s the same game we know and love, just not as much of it. This is a great intro for newcomers to the series that would like an awesome strategy game that is more than just building a bigger army than the other guy (although that can be one possible strategy if you like). Longtime fans will probably look at this as simply a fun diversion rather than the next iteration in the series.