I’m not one of those typical Civ players who can’t manage to keep track on time despite having the ever useful mechanic of keeping track in time in these games. I usually could able to stop at three hours a time anyday without knowing that I wasted the whole day much less than the whole afternoon. Ever since my return with Civilization 3, I realize that game wasn’t as bad as when I played years ago. I mean, I remember having difficulty playing Civilization 3 especially the fact that even with its difficulty level set on the easiest, I still get eliminated by any Civ especially by the Japanese or Indian which it isn’t a no-brainer especially since Gandhi is a pain to wipe out and the way the gameplay works is quite annoying.

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Like many other people criticized the gameplay system due to the fact that something like a spearman could kill a 21 century tank, although it could be the fact that spearman is a veteran but that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever despite having a promoted spearman against a tank. Although compared to Civilization 4 which I am currently playing right now, I think that Civilization 3 has more useful features than this game and its expansions. The fact that your workers could build colonies outside your borders is quite a plus, just drag your worker to a resource (I.e Iron) that of which is outside of your border and could you able to tap into that resource, if your have a road connected to it ( I think). It’s quite a useful advantage if you want to put something like a swordsman earlier your rival opponent rather than waiting for a damn settler to build where the Iron resource is or when your culture is expanding. When your city’s culture is expanded to this colony, it disappears but you could still tap into that resource.

Now, I am really digging into Civilization 4 and its expansions, I cannot get Civilization 5 to run due to my crappy computer and was really surprised that Civilization 4 could run on this machine because it did not work earlier when I installed this. Out of all the expansions, Warlords, the Colonization remake and Beyond the Sword, I still like the regular, vanilla one better specifically because the fact that Babu Yetu song and expansions like Beyond the Sword felt too complex because of it’s focus on adding spies and the fact you could see what other Civilization’s production queues in their perspective cities and such. That doesn’t mean that the regular Civilization 4 doesn’t have it but with this expansive you could build spies earlier like in the Renacaisse Era or something and it’s really a jerk move earlier rather than later in the modern era to have built a Security Bureau so the chance of their spies could sabotage your production queue. You could have spies to counter-act those spies by waiting on tiles and cities but the longer they stay on that said tile, the lower chance they got on actually sabotaging your opponent’s base and the added fact that whenever your spy successfully sabotages their production or developed tiles, they return back to your capital city.

At first I really dig into Warlords due to it’s introduction of Great Generals to improve the quality of your soldiers and you could either promote the whole stacked army and have your general attached with your soldier unit with added bonus, make him a great person inside a city or could build a military academy that of which acts like a special barracks and get a added bonus every time you build someone like an archer to a Modern Armor. Having played hours of this game, I still think having a Military Academy is quite better than having stacked with other units even though having a upgraded stack of units could be your advantage when other Civ declare war on you. I also like the fact that when you siege a city, they add a siege tower that shoots arrows everytime you attack a city and it just looks a nice feature. It’s also nice to have a Great General with a stack of Knight which I always like to build and pillage and capture cities and with of course, stacks of catapults/trebuckets. Furthermore, each Civ, aside from special units, you could also get unique buildings that are like the improved versions of a specific building like a stable could get +2 experience while as a Mongolian Ger Stable could get you +4 experience and that’s a great initiative if you wanted to build armies of Knights and such. I just love the perks that each Civ get with these buildings and how they look like. Like every expansion they also add more Civilizations like the Celtic to just more leaders to a specific existing choice from the first one.

In Beyond the Sword, like I said, they put emphasis on spies and you could be able to get Great Spies that are better than regular spies in a way that you could also infiltrate and sabotage the production and development of other Civilizations. They could also build Scotland Yard which is quite weird considering you could build numerous of these national wonders. But nevertheless, the neat addition of this game that I love is the skins of each Civilization making it more different to build everytime you build a unit, I mean seeing an spearman to a crossbowman that doesn’t look like another Civilization is quite great. Like for example, archers and earlier game units from the Chinese Empire looks different from India which somewhat has the same skins than the Arabian Empire but I still find it weird that the Chinese, Korean and Monglian Empire has a samurai knight skin rather something different.

For Colonization, it’s just a different game from the rest, you don’t start up with a settler, just like the name implies, you start sailing to the new world from your boat to find land and settle there and the local tribes that would basically harass you with aid and demands of stuff. Unlike the previous Civs, any unit could establish a settlement rather than waiting to built a settler which in the hours that I played I never encountered you ever building a unit like a Dragoon, only production and other buildings. But with this new world you settle in, you have to either tap into what resources you have when you establish a settlement or have your ship, ship back to Europe to either get more immigrants in professions (i.e a experienced fisherman that would greatly benefit and tap seafood resources to blacksmith and such) and get/purchase more resource and supplies there to ship back to the New World. When you have these units with professions, you could add them into a city and the city has a separate feature where you could drag a professional unit to a production building or a resource nearby in your city or next to it. For example, dragging a fisherman to tap more into the fish resource or having a cotton planter with the cotton resource to dragging a statesman into a politician building where you could get more liberty bells. This is the objective of the game, get the most liberty bells until you get a prompt to either still side with your motherland or become a nation dependant (GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH OPTION) which will madden your motherland.

But before that when you settle along the coastline of the New World, in times you have to either suck it up or pay your motherland gold or reject. In the New World you also encounter treasures which you could transport these to the motherland/Europe and get a stack of gold which will also improve your relationships with your King. The settling aspect is also quite important to the game since there are numerous of tribes when you settle in an area, if you attempt to settle close to them, you have to either paid them to build on their land or demand to settle there and anger them. I don’t think through the hours of playing that I ever gotten the other tribes to ever go to war with me. Although the nice feature of getting your King to bitch at you is where you settle where there isn’t any food tiles that you could tap into despite having something like furs resource in abundance there. Other than that, there are too many features to be said about this game.

So far the reason why I did not update my blog regularly is due to me playing too much Civilization even though I could find time to not go on playing in days and the fact that other people could play this game non-stop is confusing to me and have piles of pizza boxes with them.