Civilization IV: Warlords Updated Impressions - Details on Two Newly Revealed Scenarios

If more is better, than fans of Civilization have some good news regarding Civilization IV: Warlords, the upcoming expansion to last year's hit PC strategy game. (Not to mention GameSpot's 2005 PC Game of the Year.) We recently got an updated look at Warlords, and we've learned that there's going to be more content than originally expected, including a cool new scenario that finally lets you play as the barbarians in a Civilization game.

As an expansion pack, Warlords will improve Civilization IV in two ways. Fans of the regular Stone Age-to-Space Age game mode will get new civilizations, new leaders, new Great Wonders, and more, which will flesh out the core game to a greater degree. For example, you can play as the Vikings; if you're England, you can get Winston Churchill as your leader; or you can build the mighty Great Wall wonder, which literally erects a wall on your borders to keep those pesky barbarians out of your territory.

If you're looking for a different challenge, you can play one of the eight new scenarios in Warlords, and yes, that's a bump up from the original six scenarios that were announced for the expansion. The first of these two new scenarios is Omen, which is an alternative history scenario in which Great Britain and France race to settle North America, yet strange and mysterious events occur along the way. As you can probably guess from the name, there should be a supernatural element in this scenario, which is a change of pace from the six original scenarios, all of which are historically based.

The second new scenario is Barbarians, which finally puts you in the position of those pesky barbarians that plagued you in all of the Civilization games. This mode begins just like any Civilization game, with a map being randomly generated and the artificial intelligence picking civilizations to play and taking their turns. However, after they're done with their turns, you can jump in as the barbarians. You'll start with a large amount of gold, which you'll use to purchase and upgrade military units, such as swordsmen, trebuchets (one of the new units in the expansion), horsemen, archers, and more. After you've selected them, your units will appear on the map from their main base and begin to look for cities to sack.

As a barbarian, your ultimate goal is to wipe out all civilizations from the map, and you'll do so by taking enemy cities and burning them to the ground. You won't be able to take over cities and govern them yourself, so the name of the game is pillaging for gold, which can be used to purchase more units. As the game progresses, you'll get more advanced units to keep up with the civilizations. What's really cool about this mode is that it offers a different play experience each time, because the map and starting conditions are randomly generated at the start.

The other scenarios may not be randomly generated, but they're designed to offer unique play experiences just the same. Each scenario is basically an extensive modification of Civilization IV, offering new units, new tilesets, new technologies, and new rules. For instance, in the Viking scenario, your job isn't to conquer the world, but to amass a certain amount of gold in a set number of turns. This means that you can use your Viking units to seize and pillage cities or take them over, like you can in the regular Civilization game, but there's also a new option as well: ransom. You can ransom back a captured city back to its owner for a good amount of gold, at which point your units will depart and the city will revert ownership. However, you can do this only once per city, because if you capture and try to ransom it back again, its owner will know better than to trust you.

Another way to make money in the Viking scenario is to hunt for treasure. The way it works is that you "research" a treasure map, like you research any technology. Once you've researched it, a tiny indicator on the minimap will tell you where to look, and you'll receive a text clue as well. At this point, you get a special treasure unit that you have to use to search the general location of the treasure. Once he comes across the treasure, you must then make sure that the treasure unit travels safely back to your capital, or else you can't cash in. You can imagine how this will play out, particularly in a multiplayer game as other players battle to intercept the treasure unit. And, yes, that does also mean that the scenarios will be playable as both single-player and multiplayer games. So in the Chinese unification scenario, which takes place during the tumultous times chronicled in the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, up to seven different factions battle for control of China, and you can have up to seven human players in a game.

We can expect the other scenarios to offer as much variety as the Viking scenario, which is exciting, since it's clear that they offer gameplay that's different from Civilization as we traditionally know it. Of course, if you're looking for traditional Civilization gameplay, you'll get that as well, only with a lot of new stuff to play with. Either way, Warlords looks solid, and the good news is that it's almost done. The expansion is on track to release around the end of July.