Sid Meier's Civilization IV

Sid Meier's Civilization IV, the fourth installment of the series, starts the player, like in the previous games, with a single village in the Stone Age and has them advance from there by exploring, founding cities, researching, exploiting natural resources and eventually trading or making war with neighbouring civilizations. While Sid Meier's Civilization III put cultural influence in the forefront, this time it is religion that is put forward as a new factor underlying many aspects of the game.

In addition, Sid Meier's Civilization IV attempts to streamline gameplay by removing some features (corruption, pollution) which slowed down the late stages of the game and making significant changes to the combat system so that tactical thinking plays a more important role. Units now have a single combat value instead of defense and attack values, have a special ability and can be further enhanced with experience in a player-defined way.

The game also offers some aesthetic improvements such as a detailed 3D map, environmental ambiance and animated units.

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NOTE ON EXPANSIONS: Civilization IV and its two expansions, Warlords and Beyond the Sword, each run and install separately as discrete games, though the expansions still require ownership of the base game. A quick guide to the content offered in each:

- Beyond the Sword: This is the final version of the game, comprising the most complete experience of the game as designed by the developers. It is the one to play if you don't have any specific preferences for the earlier two iterations. It contains the base game, plus all content added by the Warlords expansion except the 11 Warlords scenarios.

- Warlords: This contains the base game along with some additional content, including 11 scenarios that are *only* included in this version of the game. In practical terms, the only reason to play this version is either (1) if you prefer only the Warlords expansion content, or (2) if you want to play the added scenarios.

- Civilization IV base game: Run this to play the vanilla game without expansion content or rules changes.