I have begun playing Civ 4. I've completed one game, am dominating a continent on Terra circa AD 1300 in another, and have taken a stab at multiplayer. It should not surprise anyone, then, that I am about to ramble on about Civ 4 for a bit. After all, I'm always thrilled to natter on about subjects of interest to no one but me.

The following lists will contain topics of discussion, and have not been placed behind a cut tag FOR GREAT JUSTICE.

THE GOOD

• Somewhat less micromanagement of workers. Upping their movement rate helped a lot.
• No more civil unrest. Spectacular.
• Cottages instead of roads (for increasing gold production).
• Religions.

THE BAD

• The revamped Civilopedia. Yech.
• The redesign of the tech tree diagram.
• The lack of different civs.

THE UNDECIDED

• The myriad civics.
• Varied unit promotions.
• The new Great Wonders.

Let's start off with the good stuff. The new worker management is, in a word, fantastic. Where in Civ 3 you couldn't afford to not micromanage every step your workers took pretty much until you had railroads, in Civ 4 you can successfully leave them to their own devices once you've got more than two (or three, depending on your expansion rate. This is playing on Noble, incidentally). They do a reliable job, for the most part. The inclusion of the "build trade network" order is spectacular, though I do wish they had included somewhat more specific automation orders. I'd like buttons to dedicate workers to, specifically, increasing production, increasing food, increasing commerce. But, on the whole, workers are much improved.

The removal of civil unrest accomplishes exactly what they set out to do: it gets rid of a portion of the game that was pretty much annoying to no particular benefit. I always found managing a dozen cities to be more of a pain than it was worth in this regard: that is, the benefits of tailoring a city's production were far outweighed by the costs of having to constantly check the details of each city each turn, or end up getting a nasty shock when a city went into shutdown. Now, of course, I still have to manage city improvements and whatnot to maximize efficiency, but I can afford to let an individual city slide for a couple turns without disaster.

Cottages instead of roads for commerce is more of a toss-up in my mind, but I think I come down in favor of it. It slows things down, of course, since you now need to build both a cottage and a road on a tile you want extra gold from...but the growth factor of cottages makes up for it pretty well. It does change improvement strategy somewhat, of course, since there's now a much greater incentive to work for commerce early, even at the cost of food or shields. And I intend to keep calling them shields, incidentally. This hammer business is for n00bs.

Religion is a great inclusion. I understand why they avoided it previously, but I think they did an excellent job making the religions almost entirely interchangeable without making it so even-steven that there's no point to them. Besides, there's endless amusement in getting a demand from Mansa Musa that says essentially, "adopt Buddhism or we'll kill you," or in seeing a message pop up saying "Berlin has adopted Judaism."

Civ 4 may be a great game, but they took huge steps backwards, in some ways. Most notably, the new Civilopedia blows goats. Big hairy goats. All of them. You have to know what something is before you can look it up: there's no complete index or search function. So the first time you see "can build a Workshop," for example, it's tough to figure out what that actually means. My first guess was that it was a building, which led to me not being able to find it. Once I took a guess at it being an improvement, instead, of course, I found it. But there's no reason it should be that difficult. Not to mention something like the top level of the units section, where you have to pick a unit from a list of icons. If you're looking for "Great Prophet," it's not obvious which one that is. Once you know it, of course, you can find it...but writing the help file for people who already know its contents is kind of silly.

Ditto the new layout of the tech tree. It took me quite some time to figure out dependencies. Using arrows to indicate "maybe necessary" is completely backwards. I know how to read a flowchart, don't go breaking the conventions. And certainly don't go breaking the convention by making the most important information—what techs I must have before getting a certain new one—the hardest information to extract from the diagram. Shame on you, Firaxis.

The only other bad thing I have to say is really fairly minor, and easily addressed if (when) they release an add-on. I had grown accustomed to the myriad civs available after getting PtW and Conquests for Civ 3. The list now just seems paltry in comparison...and they got rid of the Ottomans, my favorite civ (and one of the ones included in basic Civ 3).

Finally, there's some stuff I'm too up in the air on to really decide just yet. Biggest of these are the civics. I see a lot of potential in the concept, but I'm unconvinced at this point that it adds something to the game that's worth the extra tinkering required. To be honest, I'm on the very brink of saying they're great, but I'm just not quite sure yet. We'll see how that goes.

I'm much iffier on the unit promotions. In the early game, when you've only got a few units to deal with, the role-playing sort of XP/bonus thing is kind of neat, I guess. As you enter the middle and end game, though, I really don't think I like it. It adds an extra level of organizational complexity to a large army—now, you don't just have to get some warrior/horse archor/armored cav units to the target, you have to get specific units to the target. Add this to the upgrade path that units have via tech, and a large army becomes exceedingly difficult to keep effective track of. Now, it might be something I can just get used to, and I can certainly see how it could make a military force very effective...but I'm not at all sold on its net utility.

Finally, there are the new Great Wonders. I'm undecided on these, I think, only because I knew what the old ones did, and I fear change. I have to re-evaluate all my ideas of which Wonders fit with which overall strategies, and that's a lot of work. But that's just me being stuffy and old; the new Wonders are probably to the better.

On the whole, the game is fantastic.

assfingers' computer, not so fantastic.

But that's a different story.