In fact, this is a city management game with some tactical additions causing a multicultural chaos.
I have to admit, the new graphics is really good, the map of your own country is awesome, the look of your cities is unique, you always know where you are and remember your terrain. The city management is also superb, you have to pick your location carefully and individually take care of each of your cities. The tech-tree is not extremely revolutionary, though, but it is solid, the unit types remained nearly the same. So far so good. The fun for me was great, but it ended here and the gameplay become quite soon routine without any significant challenges (forget the UN or the space ship).
Here I would like to list some of the major flaws which spoil the game and some of them are as old as the series itself.
- A swordsman beats a tank. I suppose, this is the most annoying shortcomming, haunting through the whole series. And the programmers were unable to deal with it. Shame on you Sid Meier!
- The whole combat system ist poor, outdated and based on standards anno 1991. As I remember, there were thousands requests from old civ-players on the webpages of Firaxis and Civ3 pleading for changing the combat system based on "one toy soldier versus another toy soldier". Nothing happened. Instead of you have weird giant figures trampling on the map like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputs without any feeling of strategic or tactical conquest. This could be an option for 10-years boys but not for gamers who since 1991 played lots of strategy games with sophisticated combat system. Also the scale of the units is chaotic, it looks odd when a galeon is bigger than a destroyer.
- No sense for reality: This is a paradox, because Civ 4 is a game which proclaims to introduce the players into the history of the mankind but on the other side it produces many extreme absurdities. How the hell it is possible that the Mongols can build the Statue of Liberty, the Indians Versailles, the Greeks Taj Mahal or Americans Pyramids??? Why can everyone produce the typical English longbowmen or the typical Greek Phalanx? Why are all tanks (except German) of the same Sherman type? Or how can, for example, just Germans or Arabs convert to judaism? Is this all some kind of political correctness or simply stupidity? Like already mentioned by readers before, the sense for reality in Civ 4 is a catastrophe.
- Unitarism and stereotype: The whole game suffers extremely in its replay value, because there are no real differences between the nations. Everyone can build everything, the advantages of the leaders (Bismarck, Ghandi, Elisabeth etc.) are too marginal, the only difference is one ridiculous 'special' unit. There are even no differences in the building style anymore. The AI offers more possibilities indeed and shows various types of behaviour, but it is good only for trade, unrealiable as an ally. The same for an opponent - unable to act challenging, only placing its cities at most impossible squares (ice, tundra, dessert) near your borders.
In summary: The great and only advantage of the game is its very good ballanced city building management and a appealing interface, but for standards of 2005 it is simply obsolete. All in all is Civilization 4 a wild and chaotic mixture of the taste of sugar, salt, chocholate, roast beef, sushi and spaghetti in one. This taste may be interesting for a while, but it makes you quickly saturated.