Iainuki Wrote:Were the changes well-thought out or did they have problematic side-effects like the later expansions in Civ3?
Some of both. The major additions are corporations, colonies, and espionage. All are a net positive IMO though not unflawed.
Corps definitely fulfill their goal of adding interest to the late game. They are effective, but at the cost of bullying other game mechanics off the playground. For a culture win, corp culture swamps traditional means of culture production. And in turn, the relative ease of the culture win marginalizes the lengthy space race victory. Also, corp food production overwhelms traditional means of food production. (Once Cereal Mills or Sid's Sushi are founded, you can pave over every farm and still have size-25 cities.) And corp HQ money renders religious shrines irrelevant.
Colonies are mostly just a means of approaching domination without the economic crash. (And a means for an AI to sabotage itself by lopping off half its empire.)
Espionage allows the player greater flexibility in acquiring information about rival civs. The active missions are rarely worth the effort and mostly useless, though the AI loves to annoy the human with them. Overall, espionage is essentially a win-more subsystem; whoever's bigger in other departments tends to also win the Espionage Point competitions. And it introduces a real gamey subsystem of tech stealing, the "spy economy".
Minor additions include a slew of modern units and promotions that I've never yet used. Also the usual incremental changes like extra wonders and leaders and civs, which aren't critical at all to the game, but once you start using them, going to an older version feels backward. Nothing nearly as game-breaking as C3C's Statue of Zeus, though.
Quote:Are there things I ought to know/look up/read when coming back to Civ4? In vanilla there was the Civil Service Slingshot, but here I'm not so sure.
It exists but is more difficult, since CS now requires Mathematics. It's very difficult to research both Math and Code of Laws before somebody else builds the Oracle. The standard way to attempt it is to run scientists for a Great Scientist to lightbulb Math, while researching CoL. Burning the first cheap Great Person on Math does carry considerable opportunity cost, as compared to an Academy or lightbulbing something bigger like Philosophy.
The Great Prophet version of the slingshot is gone; a GP will now always lightbulb along the line of Masonry - Monotheism - Theology - Divine Right rather than Civil Service.
