Civ4 Warlords Review on Apolyton

[Thunderfall]

Apolyton has posted a lengthy Civ4 Warlords review written by Solver, who was one of the testers from the community for the expansion pack. The review analyzed the major features in detail and discussed their impact on gameplay. Unlike yesterday's GameSpot review, Solver's review focused on the additions to the core game and only spent a few sentences on the scenarios.

According to Solver, the weakness of the expansion pack is that it "doesn't really address the shortcomings of the original game, such as weak espionage, and it doesn’t improve the UN or add exciting diplomacy options, outside of vassalage". However, this doesn't mean it's a horrible expansion pack because the new additions are "consistently fun to play with" and don't break the game in anyway, even if they don't always create extra strategic choices. In the end, he wrote:

Ultimately, I think that Warlords is a good expansion as far as content quantity goes, and a good expansion for adding some flavour and fun elements to the game. Seeing, however, that it doesn’t change the grand strategy too much (vassalage is the only change to grand strategy in Warlords, and it won’t be that much of a factor in every game), I would say that, for the hardcore fans, it would make sense to wait for the price to drop instead of paying the full 30$. Fans of scenarios and the less hardcore players, though, will get their 30 dollar’s worth out of Warlords.

Thanks to Solver for sharing his insights.