Victory or Defeat?
It all comes down to this: Achieving it against the AI earns you ego. Achieving it against another player earns you respect.
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The length of games will be reduced from 550 turns (as in Civ3) to 400. You will be able to start in any era you wish. The developers are also constantly working to even out the pace of the game, hence the speed options described below.
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The game still spans from 4000BC to 2050AD. That means you have 6,050 years to achieve one of the victories below.
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There will be three game speeds: Quick (mostly for Multiplayer, in Single Player mode (or SP) it is equal to Civ3's Accelerated Production mode), Medium (a bit faster than Civ3, 15-20 hours of game-play) and Epic (a bit slower than Civ3). All of the game speeds (Quick, Normal, and Epic) retain all the flavor of Civ itself. So even though the speed is different, the feel will not change.
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The different speeds of the game (Quick, Norma, and Epic) will have their Technology costs, Unit production costs, and Building appropriately tuned for the appropriate speed of the game.
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Most of the victory conditions have not changed from Civ3:
o The Spaceship Victory is reached when a player first launches a rocket to space (or Alpha Century).
o Conquest Victory is achieved when a player dominates all other civilizations in that game.
o A player is granted the Domination Victory when they have control over a certain percentage of the world.
o Cultural Victory is achieved when the player has three cities with a near-perfect culture rating.
o Diplomatic Victory occurs when the United Nations (UN) is built, and the player gets the majority of the votes from other Civilizations.
o A new victory type for Civilization IV is the Alliance Victory. At that time, a player can share victory with another player. Besides victory sharing, they also share "Line of Sight" (or LoS, when both players can share what each one sees), Wonder Affects, Research (that way players can get a tech twice as fast when two players are researching it), and territory. This mode is available both in Multiplayer (or MP) as well as Single Player (or SP).
o You can also achieve victory through Cultural or Religious Alliances, and Technological Dominance...
o ...Of course, if you do not achieve any of these, you still have a chance at 2050, the end of the game. At that point Score is gathered and the winner determined.
