Video Game / Civilization IV

Following

Civilization IV is the fourth title in the Sid Meier's Civilization series, developed by Firaxis and published by 2K Games on October 24, 2005 for Windows and June 26, 2006 for Mac. While making a return to the top-down perspective, it is nonetheless the first game in the series to make a leap into full 3D graphics. Multiple game mechanics were introduced such as Civics, which served as a set of modular bonuses that the player could mix and match to suit their needs; civilizations having multiple leader options, where they shared unique units but had different traits, allowing for more variety in gameplay; and a religion mechanic where various religions would compete for influences in cities around the world. In a first, the game's voice overs for technologies and the Opening Narration were provided by a guest, this one being Leonard Nimoy.

There are two expansions released for the game — Warlords and Beyond the Sword — that not only introduced new civilizations, leaders and units, but also various mechanics such as the institution of vassal states in Warlords and the random events in Beyond the Sword. In 2008, there was also a standalone Colonization remake using the engine and mechanics of Civ IV.

Also of note is that the menu theme of the base game, Christopher Tin's "Baba Yetu", would later win a Grammy Award for the arrangement used in Tin's Calling All Dawns, making it the first time that video game music had been given the award.

Followed by Civilization V.

Civilization IV contains examples of:

• The All-Seeing A.I.: Mostly averted, except that the AI negotiators know precisely what the relative values of various goods are, leading to weirdness such as knowing the value of trading world maps when they shouldn't know what's on yours.
• Anachronism Stew: The decision to use actual religions can lead to some interesting declarations of followers. Few announcements are funnier than seeing "Mao Zedong has converted to Christianity" or "George Washington has converted to Confucianism".
• Anti-Air: Certain units with Intercept (Fighters, Jet Fighters, Anti-Tank, Mechanized Infantry, SAM Infantry, Mobile SAMs and Destroyers) have a percent chance of attacking enemy air units, ranging from 100% (Fighters and Jet Fighters) to 20% (Mechanized Infantry and Anti-Tank).
• Army of The Ages: The theme for the box art of the Warlords expansion, depicting two opposing armies about to collide with one another◊. Both armies have forces from the entire span of human history, with the most ancient (two hairy cavemen about to bash each other with heavy rocks) in the foreground, and increasingly more technologically advanced soldiers and vehicles further into the background.
• Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: Nuclear power plants can randomly explode, with the same effects as a nuclear bomb. In real life, the way a nuclear bomb explodes and the way nuclear power plant reactor fails are completely different.
• Artistic License – Religion: All seven religions have monastery buildings which provide extra culture, science and can train missionary units. In real life, Islam explicitly forbids monasticism, while it's a very marginal tradition in Judaism and Confucianism is not a religion in the traditional sense and doesn't have a culture of asceticism and separation from the world. Hinduism and Taoism do have well-established ascetic traditions, although true, large-scale monastic retreats are relatively rare; Buddhism and Christianity are the ones whose monastic traditions work the most like what's depicted in the game.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Internet wonder grants you any tech known by three other civilizations. This would be awesome but for the fact that it's at the very end of the tech tree for most players, meaning that either it'll be built after it's needed or the AI will get it first. One strategy tries to circumvent this by ignoring all other endgame tech to get the Internet built early.
  • The Space Elevator gives you a big boost to spaceship construction. The problem is that it's expensive and requires a tech not needed for the spaceship—not to mention you have to build it in a city near the equator! You're usually better off building another spaceship part in its place.
• Bears Are Bad News: Bears are the greatest menace to early explorers... at least until the roving barbarians get their hands on bronze weaponry.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • Units speak short phrases in their native language. However, there is not as much of a bonus except for the odd idiom, as most of them are direct translations of what the English and American units say—although that can create a different bonus in the form of unintentionally funny unidiomatic translations. There is one small bonus though: Egyptian units don't use any form of the Egyptian language (corresponding to the relevant civilization), but rather modern Egyptian Arabic, and a Cairo dialect at that. This is roughly the equivalent of having Aztec units speak Mexican Spanish with a Mexico City accent. (In the game, Aztec units speak proper Classical Nahuatl; the voice actor's accent is clearly influenced by Spanish, but this is inevitable in today's Mexico.)
  • The lyrics to Baba Yetu, the menu theme, are actually the Lord's Prayer in Swahili.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Bribing the AI is a very important part of the diplomatic strategy in this game. Getting someone to jump in on your side during a war (or begging them to stay out) can make all the difference.
• Cartoon Bomb: Used by Grenadiers in IV. Seeing as Cartoon Bombs are modeled after early cast-iron, black-powder grenades, this is not surprising.
• Challenge Run: In the "Always War" challenge, you are perpetually at war with every other civilization. In "Always Peace", no AI will declare war on you, but you can't declare war on anyone.
• City People Eat Sushi: In Beyond the Sword, Sid's Sushi Co, while giving less food when incorporated than Cereal Mills, gives a good amount of culture per turn, echoing the stereotype of sushi being fancier.
• Creator Provincialism: While the opening theme is in Swahili and the Ancient and Classical eras incorporate Asian and African-style music in the soundtrack, the Modern era's soundtrack is exclusively the works of US composer John Adams.
• Culture Chop Suey: The Native American civ. The Native Americans were never, at any point, a completely unified civilisation, and Native Americans do not even have that many similarities in language or culture to begin with.
• Darker and Edgier: In-game, the modern/contemporary era has a noticeably darker atmosphere, the soundtrack selection coming across as more brooding and ominous if not outright apocalyptic compared to the previous time periods. This is chiefly because the music selection comes entirely from the Minimalist music of John Coolidge Adams (b. 1947). Minimalism has an emphasis on the repetitive; this can go several directions, and Adams prefers to go for "hauntingly beautiful".
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: Due to how reduced Hit Points also reduce combat strength, it is relatively common for two or three low-tech units to gang up on and defeat high-tech units. This, however, is arguably superior to previous versions in which a single die roll determined the outcome of each battle.
• Easter Egg: You will occasionally get a random event about an In-Universe version of the Civilization game being developed. You can choose whether to sell it to your citizens as a popular video game, turn it into an educational program for your universities, or sell it away to foreign lands, mocking it as undeserving to your country and earn a general profit out of it.
• Facepalm: When conducting diplomacy, annoyed leaders tend to do this a lot, especially when a trade deal doesn't work out.
• Failure Is the Only Option: A lot of the diplomacy actions lean in this direction, if you want to avoid choosing sides. You'll often be presented with a request that will inevitably make either the requester or a third party angry. Next turn, that other party will make a similar demand in reverse. The price of neutrality (if you don't want to choose sides) is to be disliked by nearly everyone. (On the other hand, the price of joining up with one side is to be absolutely despised by the opposing side(s), losing most opportunities to do business with them and potentially joining your allies in declaring war on them.)
• Famous for Being First:
  • Being the first to research certain technologies makes the civ found a religion (such as Philosophy for Taoism), giving one a holy city that grants culture boosts.
  • The first civ to circumnavigate the world gets a permanent +1 movement bonus for all water units.
  • The first civ to research Liberalism gains a free technology.
• Gang Up on the Human: There's "Always War" option in specific game setups. It's hard fighting all the other civs off on higher difficulties, but it's the only way to play against the AI without being nagged and hassled by diplomacy screens. This is dropped in V. Note that "Always War", like the One-City Challenge, is quasi-Ascended Fanon: both were relatively common Self Imposed Challenges within the Civ community in the earlier incarnations of the game.
• Gender Bender:
  • Pre-industrial era spies are men in black robes, and transform into women in skin-tight catsuits upon reaching the industrial era. It's seemingly a case of Sweet Polly Oliver, since upon being captured, the "male" spies still sound female.
  • Your first view of the Russian leader is a dashing young cavalier in a tricorne and cavalry uniform. Then he turns around, and—she's the cross-dressing and attractive Catherine the Great, showing a naughty smirk. An instance of Shown Their Work, because the image is based on an actual contemporary portrait of cross-dressed Catherine.
• Gender Flip: All Great People are represented by male units, although a significant number of them are actually women. Among other things, this gives Joan of Arc quite an impressive beard.
• Human Resources: The Slavery civic allows the player to sacrifice population to rush production.
• Irony: Although the game doesn't have city-states and the diplomatic victory involves manipulating the AI into casting their votes for you, prior to the Beyond the Sword expansion, it was possible to control 60% of the world's population but not the 60% of land area needed for a Domination victory and have enough votes to win a "Diplomatic" victory all by yourself, even if all the other civilizations hate your guts.
• It Will Never Catch On: Napoleon providing a Real Life example is the quote for steam power in IV. Added on to in V before Brave New World: Napoleon gets free culture per turn until Steam Power is discovered.
• Let's You and Him Fight: The AI loves to manipulate you into fighting its enemies for it. It goes like this: A friendly AI civilization declares war on an enemy. They invite you to join the war and then once you're involved and have moved all your troops in, they'll quickly sign a peace treaty with the enemy, leaving you to keep fighting alone, weakening you both and making you look like a Jerkass. Of course, if you don't agree to join in the war with your 'ally', it's a diplomatic penalty. And they'll hardly ever help you if you ask them for aid, except when you are so strong that you could probably win the war by yourself anyway.
• Look on My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair: The Construction tech discovery quote is "And on the pedestal these words appear 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!"
• Medium Awareness: The AI will never trade away any techs required to build spaceship parts, because "we'd rather win the game, thank you very much."
• MegaCorp: In the Beyond the Sword expansion, you can found corporations and spread them throughout the world, potentially fulfilling the requirememts for this trope if you've managed to conquer most the planet and spread your corporations in every single city throughout your empire.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Dreadnought tank and Juggernaut in the Next War scenario included with the Beyond the Sword expansion.
• Natural Disaster Cascade: There are world climate meters, with your actions in the game having the potential to affect the chances of storms, volcanism, river floods and/or droughts occurring due to Global Warming.
• Neutrality Backlash: If you try to stay neutral in a war between two other countries, your points with both countries will go down.
• New Tech Is Not Cheap: IV uses this as part of their approach to the series' traditional tech tree. While you don't have to research all of the prerequisites for certain technologies, doing so reduces the research costs.
• Non-Standard Game Over: In the Next War scenario in "Beyond the Sword", the world will "crack open" after twenty nukes total (including rivals).
• Nuke 'Em: The "Next War" scenario in Beyond the Sword features biological missiles. They can wipe out almost entire stacks of units, even when they're sufficiently fortified. Ironically, however, they can't affect cities, neither do they warrant a worldwide declaration of war on you when used, thanks to how the game's system works.
• Overt Rendezvous: In the intro to Beyond The Sword, an image of Lincoln giving the Gettysburg address Match Cuts to his memorial, where two spies are passing along photos of Soviet missile sites.
• The Power of Rock: Rock 'N Roll is a constructable Wonder of the World. It even plays Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll" during the movie (and Leonard Nimoy reads a line from the song when you research the Radio technology that makes the Wonder possible). Thanks to the Tech Tree, it usually gets finished around the same time a Diplomatic Victory becomes possible (the UN requires the Mass Media technology of which Radio is a direct prerequisite). Since building it allows you to export "Hit Singles", you can build global good will by giving them away for free right before elections are held, thereby literally winning the game via The Power of Rock.
• Privateer: The Privateer is masked to allow the player to beat the tar out of enemy ships while remaining on good terms with them.
• Puppet State: In the Warlords expansion, any sufficiently powerful civ can make any sufficiently weak civ into their vassal state. If the vassal grows powerful enough (there are exact numbers), it can regain independence.
• Random Event: The expansions include random events. A lot of them are just random things that affect improvements and tile output (mine collapses, tornados, striking a deposit of jade), while others can change your relationship with your neighbors, such as a politically-arranged marriage collapsing or a high-ranking intelligence agent defecting. Other Random Events depend on your government, such as your hereditary dynasty dying out or an election being too close to call and being settled by the courts, giving you an incentive to try out as many Civic combinations as possible.
• Reduced Resource Cost: A city with a stone or marble quarry in its area of influence gains a production speed boost to build certain Wonders.
• Revisiting the Roots: Downplayed. IV is the first game since the very first one (and as of 2025, the last one) to make use of an overhead square grid for its map, in contrast to II and III using isometric projection and V onwards using hexagonal tiles.
• Russia in Ruins:
  • The "Broken Star" scenario revolves around a modern-day Civil War in Russia, which is divided into eight mutually hostile military districts. Aside from reunifying Russia, they fight to take possession of nukes on its territory; to win, you can either take control of seven nukes out of all ten available or convert four owned nukes from unarmed to armed, which takes a lot of time. To make matters more difficult, there are also the UN forces, who initially guard the nukes, and the rebels, who just seek to get in everyone's way.
  • In the "Next War" scenario, the world is divided between four huge superpowers. Russia is not one of them and is instead part of Europa, except for its far east, which belongs to the Pan-Asiatic People's Cooperative.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: There's a demographics section, and most of it is alright. However, the size in square miles is ridiculously low compared to what it should be. For instance, in an Earth map that ships with Beyond the Sword, you can own all of China, Mongolia, Korea, Siberia and Afghanistan, and it'll give you 441,000 square miles. In real life, that's only the size of Colombia. Population amounts shown in the demographics tend to be fairly low as well.
• Shout-Out:
  • If another leader is pleased with a trade, they may respond with "Did I ever tell you that you're my hero? You're everything I wish that I could be." Or, "You are the wind beneath my wings, !".
  • If you've been at war for a while, one of the "War Weariness" descriptions is "WAR... What is it good for? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!"
• Stealth Pun: The Tech quote for "Machinery" is "A god from the machine".
• Sweet Polly Oliver: In Beyond The Sword, the ordinary spy in earlier ages is a woman disguised as a shepherd with a fake beard. In later ages she drops the act and dons a Spy Catsuit.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Deity difficulty. "Muahahahaha! Good luck, sucker!"
• Useless Useful Skill: Some of the Civics are notorious for being worthless—most notably Environmentalism, which grants a bonus for a resource (forests and jungles) that you've more than likely eradicated by the time you become able to use it. Environmentalism becomes far more powerful in the Beyond the Sword expansion.
• Video Game 3D Leap: This is the first 3D entry in the series. Given the top-down perspective, it was largely a Presentation Upgrade, though there were a few gameplay benefits to the switch to 3D, such as being able to zoom in and out of the map.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Until it was patched out late in the game's life, razing a city in Beyond the Sword came with a high chance of spawning a stack of state-of-the-art enemy units on a nearby tile, with an event message saying that the surviving dwellers of the destroyed city have formed a militia to avenge their hometown or die trying.
• War Elephants: War elephants become available when you discover Construction, but you also need access to Ivory.
• Water Source Tampering: Having a spy poison a city's water supply slaps them with a massive health penalty for a time.
• We Will Have Perfect Health in the Future: Every Future Tech increases the civilization's health and happiness. If you get enough Future Tech your citizens will have perfect health and a massive grin.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Beyond the Sword's "Next War" is basically Nineteen Eighty-Four with another state added for balance.
• Writer on Board: Some of the Civics descriptions are a bit... odd. They all attempt to list the pros and cons of each civic. The one for Pacifism basically denounces it as hypocrisy. And guess what the one about Universal Suffrage says. Slavery has its advantages. Notably, they couldn't think of anything good to say about the caste system.
• Zeppelins from Another World: Zeppelins are unlocked by the late-mid-game Physics tech, while heavier-than-air ships are unlocked later via the Flight tech (not that far after Physics, but some turns' worth). Depending on the game's tech progress, these might not go out of style for a long time. Unit-wise, Airships can only bomb ground and sea units for a bit of damage, which is helpful given how strong garrisoned units can be, though it's not much damage (only able to reduce them to 80% of their max HP), and have no counters (short of taking the city they are based in) before Flight (and if only you have that...).