A Tale of Two Civilizations: Revisiting Civ II and IV
Civilization 7 comes out on February 11, 2025 (if you haven't heard), and it could well be the biggest launch of the year for me. So, in anticipation and celebration, I've revisited some of the earlier Civilization titles, and it hasn't gone quite like I expected.
For me, Civilization 2 is where the franchise began. It was released in 1996; the same year my family bought its first home computer. How I ended up with the game is unclear in my memory, but it's no surprise that I did, and I played it for hours and hours on end. It was, if I recall right, my first real strategy game obsession, and while I moved on to real-time strategy games like Total Annihilation and StarCraft by 1998, I still dipped into it frequently. I recall becoming very competitive in it for at least a few months, obsessing over strategy guides to try and beat the hardest difficulty (I didn't, but I like to think I got close).
Civilization 4 is a game that doesn't sit quite so close to my heart. I played it, but it came at a spotty era in my gaming history. I was in college, leaving me with a lot less free time to spend playing games, and my college PC was a ThinkPad laptop with an integrated AMD video solution that was better than nothing, but still not great. It was Galactic Civilizations II that hogged most of the time I did spend playing strategy games in college, but that's a different story. The point is: I didn't really play all that much Civilization 4.
Revisiting the games today, however, Civilization 4 is the game I have difficulty pulling myself away from, while Civilization 2 is a game I find hard to play for more than an hour.
Don't get me wrong: Civilization 2 has its charms. I like the way maps are generated in Civilization 2 (they feel, and AFAIK are, more random), and I like the easy-breezy speed of some things, like unit movement and combat.
But, loading them up today, Civilization 2 ends up feeling like a prototype for Civilization 4. It introduces a lot of familiar concepts. The terrain system, technology trees, unit movement and combat, and diplomacy are fleshed out greatly from the original Civilization and clearly inform the direction of Civilization 4.
But Civilization 2 is obviously far more straightforward. I notice this first and immediately with the wonders, which often simply replicate the effects of a particular structure, rather than providing a unique bonus (though there are exceptions). There are no great people in Civilization 2, there's no workers (settlers are used instead, something I forgot about), and the ways and means to change the terrain are fewer.
What's most notable of all, however, and what I miss the most when playing Civilization 2 today, is the lack of a culture and religion system. Civilization 4's game design is excellent in these areas. Both feel relevant and dynamic (though, from what I understand, the Civilization 4 "meta" agrees that it's really research that matters most). They are unpredictable in some ways, but provide relevant and important bonuses, and those bonuses are visualized on the map. Without them, the civilizations in Civilization 2 feel much blander.
And yet, at the same time, Civilization 2 and Civilization 4 are very obviously the fruits of the same tree. The terrain in Civilization 4 is more fleshed out, but at its core the value of tiles and the way resources work in the game feel like small expansions and tweaks from Civilization 2. The tech tree is very similar, combat is similar, the grid-based map design and unit movement are close to identical. All of this stands in contrast to Civilization 5 which, of course, made some rather huge tweaks to most of these things, with the arguable exception of research.
Now the question becomes: if Civilization 4 is the ultimate form of that style of Civilization game, do I prefer it to the newer style, represented by Civilization 5 and built up from there? Well, that remains to be seen...and perhaps I'll find some time to dive into Civilization 5 before Civilization 7 comes out.