Civ4 and CivRev comparisons...

First time to these forums in about a year or so. I checked the first page or two of posts to see if there were any comparison threads, did not find any. Apologies in advance if I missed one or two...

Anyways, I am a casual Civ 4 player. Own Civ4 and BtS expansion packs. Played Civ3 back in the day. I am an average player at best- never beat the game on any of the higher difficulty levels, don't know every intricate detail about the game (what to build, what unit is better against what unit, etc). However I do enjoy the strategy and the game itself.

From a previous thread, I found Civ Rev for the 360 on clearance for $14.98! Immediately purchased it, hoping that it is a good game. I went to gamespot and it gave it a 8.5 rating which is pretty darn good.

However, I would like feedback from Civ players instead of a game website that might not have given a "fair" opinion. For those of you who have played both Civ4 for the PC and Civ Rev... is it worth my time to play Civ Rev? Is it a decent game? Should I just return it and stick with Civ4?

I see some people have said Civ Rev is "Civ Lite"... to me, as long as the quality and strategy and difficulty is there, that is fine. But if it is a complete bare bones game (Wolfenstein 3D compared to Gears of War 2 for example) then I am not sure I want to invest the time.

Anyways, all feedback and opinions welcome! And thanks for your time

I'd say it's more like Call of Duty 2 vs Call of Duty 4 (or 5, your choice).

Civilization Revolution is a very good game. People who call it "Civ Lite" are the people who have never played the game, and are the people who did surveys that smoking doesn't give you cancer. (My bad, lame CNN joke.)

Essentially, Civ Rev is not anything like Civilization 4: Beyond the Sword. They are two different games. Civ Rev is more battle and expandsion orientated, while Civ 4 is more about trading and your economy.

I posted this in another thread. It explains what changes were made to Civ Rev:

1) Smaller Tech Tree. This means that simply there isn't as many techs.
2) Religion Free. There is no religion, the AI declare war on you no matter what.
3) No open borders.
4) No Civic options (But you can choose a Government type.)
5) No economical penalty for expansion.
6) Workers are no longer actual units, but are apart of the city.
7) Bonus tiles (Dye, Aluminum, Fish etc..) only require the tech to use them.
8) Units don't require any resource to create, only tech.
9) No UU or UB's.

Click to expand...

As well, I put things that makes the game better (opinionated):

1) Better Combat. There's over-all better combat in Civ Rev, which I'll explain more about. A) Over--Run Bonus. The over-run bonus is where you can 5* the enemies strength, where you automatically destroy their unit. This means that there's no pikeman vs Tank upset in this game. B) The more Units = No always better. In this game, unlike Civ 4, the more units you have, it may not always be better. It's more guerilla style in this game, more blocking off production, and less of just bringing your 100 units stack to the enemy city, catapulting all their units, then attacking.

2) Better Leader traits. In each different era, your leader gets a different trait, theirs one for the Starting Era, Ancient, Medeival, Industrial and Modern Era. This means that each leader is more complex and each one has a different playstyle then in Civ 4.

Click to expand...

Over-all I believe it is a game of its own, and shouldn't really be judged by Civ 4. I play Civ 4 when I feel like micro-managing the simplest little things, as well as when I have 3+ hours of free time, while I play Civ Rev when I only have an hour or so to play, and want to have fun dominating the world.

I certainly agree that civ 4 and civ rev are different animals.

Civ Rev was great when I first got it. I bought it for the DS (I don't own a xbox 360 or ps3) and I played the heck out of it for about 2 weeks. However, I've found that all my games follow the same path more often and not because the AI's aggressiveness forces you towards war (or at least a military build up to fend them off while you pursue another victory type - either way, your going to need to do some fighting). Due to that, and the fact that it's always the same map size, map type (generally 1 or 2 stretched out continents with some islands), number of AIs, and the same AI behavior (aggressive and war, war and more war). I also really miss the lack of depth as far as diplomacy. You don't really have alot of options (compared to civ 4) when it comes to dealing with the AI, and often their hard to deal with at all because they just want to go to war and/or demand things of you. I got bored of the game pretty quick and now I rarely play it aside from a game here or there when I'm traveling.

That said, for 15 bucks, you might as well keep your copy of civ rev. When you don't feel like an in-depth game of civ 4, it can be a nice break. I still play civ 4 far more then I do civ rev, but it doesn't make civ rev a bad game - just a game lacking replayability imho. (Also keep in mind, playing civ rev in MP might make replaying it alot more fun).

The Civ rev is adapted to play online MP. This is why its more action, A game only takes a couple of hours, and is less micromanagement.

How fun would it be to play MP if the other player took 10 min/turn to sort and fix little thing in his cities?

I would say this game is a mixture betweeen the old civilisations game, Command and conqurer (tiberian sun) and the old warcraft.

However I would love it if the next game Sid does will be more SP oriented with alot more micromanagement and a game could take weeks.

Rev is definately similar to CIV2 in appearance and play. I quite like it. Shame CIV 4 won't run on my PC with Vista on it.

Frelinder said:

The Civ rev is adapted to play online MP. This is why its more action, A game only takes a couple of hours, and is less micromanagement.

How fun would it be to play MP if the other player took 10 min/turn to sort and fix little thing in his cities?

I would say this game is a mixture betweeen the old civilisations game, Command and conqurer (tiberian sun) and the old warcraft.

However I would love it if the next game Sid does will be more SP oriented with alot more micromanagement and a game could take weeks.

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Well, Civ 4 games don't take that long. If you put a timer up, it should be fine. Generally when I played Civ 4, we'd have a 2 min turn timer, and I usually played the custom made Earth map. We'd usually get 9 people, and the game would last I'd say around... 6 hours? It was fun though.

1) Smaller Tech Tree. This means that simply there isn't as many techs.
2) Religion Free. There is no religion, the AI declare war on you no matter what.
3) No open borders.
4) No Civic options (But you can choose a Government type.)
5) No economical penalty for expansion.
6) Workers are no longer actual units, but are apart of the city.
7) Bonus tiles (Dye, Aluminum, Fish etc..) only require the tech to use them.
8) Units don't require any resource to create, only tech.
9) No UU or UB's.

Click to expand...

this sounds a hella lot like Civ 2(apart from the workers bit)

I have dropped Civ for PC entirely and go for this Civ. Civ for PC has been fun, but I always felt it was a lot of 'work'. I rarely entirely finished a game because moving units around is very very tedious. I understand the beauty and immersion of games that take weeks, but I don't want to invest in a game like that.

Having said that, I do think that Civ Rev can be a stepping stone to higher difficulties on PC. Civ Rev has taught me how to micromanage and think about tradeoffs. I can barely beat Prince in Civ4, but I think I might be able to handle Monarch or Emperor now. But I'd rather play another Civ Rev game than Civ4.

Civ Rev was a briliant idea on the part of Fiaxis, money wise. Now they're getting increased civ 4 sales because people like Rev and wanted to try the PC version.

Aside from that, it is a lot simpler than Civ 4, but like someone said, It's better for multiplayer.

One thing the game is lacking is AI. They are overly aggressive, demanding a tech or all of your gold for 5 or 6 turns of peace, and then they declare war on you afterwards. It's too aggressive and unvaried. Several times I've played games going for tech, or culture but winning conquest because they declared war on me and I crushed them

Also as a Civ 4 Prince player, I find it easy to beat Diety. One thing I noticed is that No mistakes you can make are really gamebreaking

I have also played the other civ games (civ III gold, civ IV and it's expansions, colonization, and now civ rev.) and i greatly appreciate the different game styles of each. The one thing i have learned over the years is that the firaxes team makes each of their new games different (in matters of required playing style) and that no one game is really bad, but the each game tailors to different people based on what they look for in a game. For civ rev, it tailors to people who like to be able to finish a game in a single night, who enjoy military expansion and war, and who love to play multiplayer games.

for those of you that say that the AI in this game are a lot of the same, then just play multiplayer, people usually are more intelligent and original than the AI. Besides i have played some wicked awesome multiplayer games, and what's awesome is that you can finish it in two hours. I personally find the limited amount of time needed to win a game and the great multiplayer to be the greatest attributes of the game, which make it a game that is well worth the purchase (even if you originally paid $60 for it when it first came out like i did.)