Sid Meier’s Civilization is a turn-based strategy game that challenges players to build and expand an empire.

Sid Meier's Civilization is a turn-based strategy game that challenges players to build and expand an empire, throughout all of human history, and become the most powerful ruler in the world. Choose one of 18 nations to lead and go head to head with some of the most famous leaders in history.

Each civilization has its own special characteristics - some are fairly peaceful, while others are expansionists and conquerors. You'll battle your foes with a huge arsenal of weapons, beginning with primitive archers and warriors, then catapults, knights and frigates, and eventually with modern tanks, submarines, mobile infantry, helicopter gunships, stealth bombers, and nuclear weapons. However, Civilization IV is more than just a great combat game: you can also achieve victory through diplomatic cunning, cultural or religious alliances, and technological dominance.
All is yours for the taking. Just dare!
Civilization IV delivers faster mid and late game AI turns, and offers greater control over your civilization's government and religions, while at the same time de-emphasizing the less fun micromanagement (cleaning up pollution, for example). And there's more! Civ IV has been designed from the ground-up to deliver fantastic multiplayer gaming options, as well as unprecedented modding tools - allowing you to create new units, game maps, scenarios, and even entire new civilizations!

Here are some key features of "Civilization IV":

· Civ IV comes to life! - Beautiful 3D world with dozens of fully animated units (including culturally unique units) and totally customizable armies. Detailed cities and wonders will appear on the map. Wonder movies are back!
· Greater Accessibility and Ease of Play - An easy-to-use interface will be immediately familiar to RTS and action game players, and newcomers to the series will be able to jump in and play.
· Multiplayer -LAN, Internet, PBEM and Persistent Turn-Based Server (PTBS or Pitboss) offer players all-new strategies and ways to play when competing or cooperating with live opponents.
· Team Play - Whether playing multiplayer or single player, team play offers a new way of setting locked alliances that result in shared wonder effects, visibility, unit trading and shared territory that delivers a plethora of new strategic and tactical options.
· Mods and Community Tools - Designed from the ground up for modability, the game contains a powerful map editor with XML and Python support.
· Choose Your Leader - Many Civs now have 2 leaders from which to choose, with each Leader having traits that provide various bonuses to the player and lots of replayability.
· Civics - With the discovery of new techs, civic options can become available. Freedom of speech or slavery? Hereditary rule or open elections? This creates endless government choices and possibilities!
· Religion - Now there are 7 religions in the game that are unlocked through researching. When unlocked, the religion spreads through a player's empire allowing them to use the religion to help manage happiness, gain gold and create Great Prophets.
· Great People - As the player uses specialists they gain Great People points in the city that is utilizing the specialists. Great People include the Artist, Tycoon, Prophet, Engineer, & Scientist. They can be used to get free techs, start Golden Ages, or join a city to increase its output.
· Promotions - Each unit has a promotion path that emphasizes specific unit traits. Promotions include bonuses to Attack/Defend on specific terrains/features, movement bonuses, sight/visibility bonuses and increased withdrawal chances.
· Tech Tree - Flexible Tech tree allows players more strategic choices for developing their civilizations along unique paths.
· More Civs and all new Units and Improvements to enhance and grow your empire.
· Faster-Paced Fun - Gameplay has been streamlined for a tighter, faster and more compelling experience.
· In-Game Movies - Civ IV will have over 70 in-game movies and animated sequences.


What's New in This Release:

· Cossack gets only 25% bonus versus mounted
· Can no longer upgrade Marines and SAM Infantry to Mech Infantry
· Fixed MP Retire crash
· MP - Can no longer bypass the delay timer
· Pitboss fix for the bug where you would not get the free tech from the Oracle if you were not online
· Fixed forced specialist bug
· Fixed bug preventing AI from building ICBMs
· Fixed exploit allowing you to build unique unit of a different civ by saving it in your build queue from a different game
· Game no longer crashes when you load a save with the diplomacy screen open
· First strike combat bug fix
· Fixed transported unit gifting bug
· Fixed pop-rush rounding bug
· Widescreen Laptop video resolution 1280x720 is supported
· Fixed multiple missions exploit from the same Great Person
Changes
· randomized processing order when multiple players try to move on the same turn slice...
· only the host can set the admin password...
· Horseback Riding now a classical tech...
· Kremlin now gives -33% hurry production cost...
· can't airlift from foreign cities...
· expanded subject for PitBoss e-mail...
· lightened the color of some civs' text...
· mp retire fix...
· less hammers from chops the farther away from a city...
· reduced hammer yield from forest chops to 20…
· Mathematics increases forest chop yields by +50%...
· SDI cannot be built before the Manhattan Project...
· increased SDI cost...
· marines and SAM Infantry now upgrade to Mech Infantry...
· better AI-to-human diplo in team games...
· no more diplo penalty for helping to end wars...
· city production popups stay on city when entering/exiting...
· can now set units to Sleep and Intercept in wbs...
· Continents map script now produces large continents
· game options and victory conditions now saved in ini file...
· invalid buildings now removed from city queues...
· Free Trade: Medium Upkeep
· State Property: Low Upkeep
· Representation: +2 happy in X biggest cities
· Hereditary Rule: Low Upkeep
· Representation: Medium Upkeep
· Slaver: Low Upkeep
· Nationhood: No Upkeep
· firepower is now average of curr and max strength...
· Gunships now move faster over rails...
· No Cheating option renamed to Lock Modified Assets...
· city management no longer uses "forced" specialist states when not automated...
· Expansive: +3 Health
· Financial: No longer give production bonus for Banks
· Prompt for admin password when loading a game containing one in LAN, Internet, or Pitboss play
· Don't allow players to play non-playable civs in Pitboss
· Do not display SP only mods in Pitboss
· Allow hotseat/PBEM scenario host to select which civ s/he will play
· Force non-playable civs to be AI in Hotseat/PBEM games
· Allowing for AI slots in player defined scenarios for Hot Seat, PBEM, and Pitboss games
· Do not display duplicate buddy request popups from the same guy
· Peer address handling improvements
· Number keys perform leaderhead actions on Civilopedia leader screen.
· Custom game SP screen remembers difficulty level last played
· Reduced rounding error for population and land victory condition test
· Loading a multiplayer game as a PBEM/hotseat converts it to non-simultaneous turns
· When the city names of your civ are all taken, choose a default name from a random civ
· Timelines more uniform across game speeds
· Military Advisor shows Barbarians
· Tech chooser screen now observes CvGameInterface.cannotResearch() and shows the tech in a red pane if the function returns true
· Fixed American Revolution scenario to work with Pitboss
· PBEM password reminder popup no longer disappears when the game starts
· Wonder description on Wonder Movie screen more legible
· Top Civs screen no longer appears in online multiplayer
· Civilopedia main page sorted in columns rather than in rows
· Pressing escape when selecting goto points now cancels the goto waypoints
· Military advisor now works like foreign advisor: clicking on leader buttons clears previous leader selections unless you hold down the shift key.
· Teams in multiplayer once again share all the players' starting techs, not just the last player's
· Great person point generation from Wonders continues after Wonder has become obsolete
· quicksave doesn't prompt for overwrite
Fixes
· exploit fix that allowed multiple players to extract the same gold/resources from the AI...
· Don't set localhost address as public addr for peers on same computer
· fixed gunships capturing cities bug...
· game doesn't end on ties...
· fixed mp UN voting bug...
· Leaderheads on a radeon 9000 64mb - fix for strange skin shading.
· Fixed crash that happened when a spy sabotaged an improvement outside cultural borders.
· The full mod path is no longer stored in the save when the mod is installed under the user folder.
· Double-clicking on a save of a mod now loads the proper DLL.
· fixed Out-of-Sync from exiting to main menu...
· fixed anarchy/specialist resetting bug...
· fixed bug where environmentalism doesn't affect new cities...
· fix for missing head mission crash...
· fixed stack attack bug with groups of units with more than one move...
· fixed premature end-turn unit cycle bug...
· fixed State Porperty cumulative effect in team game...
· fixed plot list button scrolling for multiple resolutions...
· fixed some AI attitude issues for team games...
· Strip chat messages of color tags before displaying in Pitboss
· Fixed logic bug that determines the number of open slots in a Pitboss game
· Improving how the host determines if the game is full - number of connections rather than number of players - before, the host wasn't considering joining players when determining if the game was full
· Set status to CLOSED when a computer player dies in the game
· The full mod path is no longer stored in the save when the mod is installed under the user folder.
· Load proper DLL when a mod is specified in the ini file
· fix for tech chooser showing known techs as unknown
· Clear map data (like latitudes) when you exit to main menu
· Fixed error in combat calculations when a zero-strength unit was involved.
· Fixed bug in Info screen "rival worst" calculation
· End of game sequence plays correctly for hotseat/pbem
· Diplomacy screen no longer allows end-turn events to go through
· Diplomacy screen gold popups respond to ESCAPE and RETURN
· Right-click select-all no longer causes large stacks to slide off the screen
· No longer possible to attempt to take over unplayable civs in multiplayer scenarios
· Fixed PBEM infinite movement exploit
· Fixed rush production per population for game speeds other than normal
· GNP graph is now consistent with demographics table
· Fix Gunship being almost invisibile in Frozen mode
· fix mod name in progress bar
· New DX9 code takes screenshot without requiring lockable back buffer
· Fixed the vertically launching torpedo for the submarine unit
· Movie playback optimized
· Significant reduction in video and system memory usage
· Fixed some memory leaks
· Fixed crashes with modified SDK
· Fixed XML failures with non-default locale
· Many translation fixes
· Memory related crash fixes
· Fixed diplomacy crash fix (when expanding an empty tree control with space bar)
· Internet lobby -> LAN fix
· fixed pedia and menu buttons disappearing after leaving tech chooser
· PitBoss no longer crashes on victory
· can no longer see number of units in darkened tiles by moving the flag
· No more Archers holding all their weapons and Workers holding all their tools
· No more fog of war missing from the southern ice and from trees/jungle on the dateline
· Pushing "go back" while joining a mp game, no longer causes background music to disappear
· Wonder movie effect and zoom no longer happens when you have disabled Wonder movies
· City billboards no longer choke on text formatting
· Many tutorial issues fixed…
· Fixed checksum folder order difference between NTFS and FAT32 filesystems
· Many worldbuilder issues fixed…
· Fix: Black eye shadows
· Fix: Some leaderheads appear to have white eyes when the low-res textures option is on
· fixing crack in huge globe view maps
· fixes the problem where animals were not animating in the fog
· Prevent Terrain crash when reloading EarthMap twice
· fixed crash on too quick quickload
· fixed city yields being revealed in FOW
· fixed ability to see cities in FOW via defense modifiers
· ICBM no longer flips upside-down when fortified/awaken
· Fix for combat bug across a map seam
Additions
· PitBossSleep ini setting...
· unit cycling optimization...
· Africa, Europe, East Asia, Eastern U.S., and South America maps
· Fantasy_Realm, Fractal, and Shuffle map scripts
· unit health bar for plot list buttons...
· Require Complete Kills game option
· No Movies is now a graphical option (instead of an ini option)...
· Warn all users when a player with a different version of files joins the game
· Display a popup warning the host when a joining player has different versions of XML/Python files so he can make sure this guy can be trusted
· Indicate which players have an active turn in the Pitboss admin screen
· Synch Logging now an .ini option
· Able to load mods from the Pitboss
· Hotseat and PBEM scenarios
· Display name of peer you are contacting in join screen if available
· Saving DirectIP join address
· Added culture rate popup help to culture bar in city screen
· Added Admin password field in PBEM/Hotseat staging screens
· Added HideMovieBackground ini option for further movie speedup
· Added HideOutOfVRamWarning ini option
· Exposed many more functions to Python
· Hooked up modern whaling boats
· support for movies in customAssets folder