Observations

I have been meaning to describe how the game actually feels like after Civilization III. My first impression was that the game has been sugar-covered into something like The Sims. Pastel colors, round shapes, etc. Luckily I have already gotten over it and to be honest it isn't that bad.

The city view has lots of stuff going on, which is pretty confusing at first. There is a large section reserved for listing the resources (silk, ivory, coal, iron, horses, ...) the city has an access to. Then there is the map with the yielding symbols (food, hammers and commerce) like before, but the people have new professions and some space has been reserved for handling them. Previously there were just scientists, tax collectors and entertainers, but now you have merchants, engineers and such. A nice addition is the production queue. I haven't tried completely automating the cities yet.

The 3D graphics are very nice and the fighting animations are fun to watch. Archers, for example, use knives to defend themselves but bows when attacking. You can zoom the camera out into the orbit or very close to the cities. The orbit view actually provides different commands to the closer view. You can use it to see the influence of religions, unit locations, and such. The cities actually expand over their tiles and you can literally see all the improvements in the city when you zoom in.

The units now only have one strength-value instead of separate attack- and defense-values. They have, however, been divided into logical categories such as mounted units, gunpowder units, melee units, etc. The siege weapons exist pretty much like in Civilization III. The units now have special attacks against different types of units. For example, pikemen excel against cavalry units, like they should. This is definitely a nice, intuitive update to the units. However, I'm not yet as convinced about another update, the promotions. The units can be updated in a role-playing fashion with promotions such as City Defense (which makes them better at defending cities, d'oh) or Amphibious, which enables them to attack straight from a cargo ship. Previously this option was only available for the Marine unit. I guess they do make the game more interesting and especially the Medic-promotion is useful, because it enables one unit to slowly heal others.

The technology tree has been expanded a lot, which makes it difficult for a newcomer to know what are the key technologies. You can also choose multiple paths to the same tech, which is interesting. There are, however, some techs that do not seem to have any prequisite techs yet they still have them. I haven't quite figured out the logic behind this yet. Maybe it's just that they need one of the techs that are on the previous "level" behind them in the tree, I don't know. You can still click on a tech and the game then automatically chooses to research everything that is needed for it so it doesn't really matter.

All in all the game is just as or even more addictive as the previous versions of the series, which is either a good or a bad thing, depending on the point of view. :) Also check out this Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword gameplay video I found from YouTube.