There are three ways to play:

• Historical locks diplomacy and forces historical events at their correct times, like Germany always declaring war on Russia in June, 1941.

• There's also random historical where the dates of forced events are randomized. This one keeps you on your toes since, for example, Germany could now go to war with Russia at any point between 1940 and 1943

• Finally there's a sandbox mode where you can control anything. USA and Japan can ally. Germany can become a liberal democracy. You could take control of a random country like Hungary and see how well you can conquer your neighbors. Etc.

It's a fun mod if you want a militaristic Civ experience focused more on winning a war than anything else. It also advertises the unique opportunity for a single player hotseat experience. This allows you to control multiple civs at the same time, like all the Axis and Allied powers instead of just one. You could easily sink over 100 hours into a single playthrough of this.

There are also a few minor modmods that change the map, add more dates to play from, etc.

Final Frontier

This is Civ IV in space where you control spaceships and colonize star systems Aside from being just plain cool, being in space actually shakes up the Civ formula a bit. Whereas settlers can build cities almost anywhere in the normal game, colonies in Final Frontier can only be placed where stars are. This forces your civ to contort to what the map looks like and creates a more important race to the choice city spots, since now the "cities" can't go anywhere else. Star systems also contain multiple planets with every planet able to hold buildings. This allows even greater specialization than before, since for example your "science city" can now hold multiple copies of the same science building, instead of just one! This also makes star systems with more planets in them more valuable.

There's also a neat little story told through the quotes that come with each tech. It starts with near future Earth and tells how humanity became spacefaring before the Solar System suddenly vanished, leaving the colonies to fend for themselves as you see on turn 1. You don't learn the mystery of what happened to Earth until the end of the tech tree, so it's a kind of ambient plotline that keeps you interested. Like that sort of thing Dark Souls players are always going on about

This mod and one Road to War map actually come with the base Beyond the Sword (the last Civ IV expansion) install, and if it gets old after a few playthroughs, there's an expanded modmod created by fans.

On that note, Firaxis was really cool about mods in Civ IV. They actually worked with some of the mod makers and included many of them with Beyond the Sword, not just the ones Mega Homo and I mentioned either. You don't see that kind of community support much these days Civ V and VI never really developed the complicated modding community IV has, so that's undeniably part of the charm

Going back to the Rhye's and Fall mod, RFC has one of the most interesting 4X mechanics I've seen in its stability mechanic. As I mentioned in my Civ V comment, 4X games often get boring after a while because the player's faction will snowball and the save file becomes mop up for parts of the map you haven't painted yet. Many games over the years have tried to spice this up somehow. Sometimes they add something to the endgame, like crises from Stellaris or realm divide from Shogun II. Sometimes they add something that's supposed to modulate your growth from the word go, like city maintenance in Civ IV and global happiness in V.

Stability from RFC is one of the most complex I've seen, and also one of the most fun (if you like challenges that is) To put it simply, RFC keeps track of how stable you are based on a variety of factors. If your cities are unhappy, that's domestic stability. If you ran out of land to improve and your workers are just sitting around, that's economic stability. If you have weird civic combinations like fascism and free press, that's government stability. If there are more people living in subjugated areas than your core area (every civ has its own core, i.e. Rome's core is Italy) that's expansion stability. It goes on and on really

Instability can cause cities to secede from you. Total collapse costs you every city besides your capital! It's a harsh system, but it changes the meta like nothing else and I've always wondered what it would look like in a regular civ game

Most new players hate it, but it's usually a fair system when you stop and look at it, and like anything else in civ there are civics and buildings designed to help manage it. Understanding and mastering stability is an achievement that makes you proud of your large empire when you finally do learn to expand properly. In that way it definitely fixes the boredom of regular 4X growth

And there's nothing quite like watching your rival collapse like the Soviet Union

As for Civ IV itself, there's a lot to like about the base game that should really have come back for the newer games The micromanagement is good actually, and I like the specialist system.

Alliances and vassal states were cool and uniquely allowed teams of civs to form. This creates global blocs and conflicts. It also answers an obvious question with the diplomatic victory -- why would one civ ever vote for another to win?

The UN here lets you pass regular resolutions instead of being purely victory focused, plus you have the Apostolic Palace as an interesting medieval UN.

I like stacking units and being able to change my capital

I like seeing the timeline of a world's entire history when you win. Why did they ever get rid of that?

One BTS concept that I really love is corporations. I could write a whole comment about these honestly but I'm running out of space. To put it simply, corporations are powerful late game additions that change the meta and give you something to do going into the modern era, which also helps with lategame boredom. In an era where things are becoming increasingly settled, the corps force you to care about resources and race for great people all over again. The benefits they can provide are incredible. For example, the food corporations can be used to feed cities, so for once in Civ you can "send" food to a city to allow it to grow past the limitations of its surroundings. That's kind of how it works in real life after all, since it's not like Flagstaff, AZ or Anchorage, AK can be fed off their local environments. I've always wanted to be able to move food around in Civ and IV with BTS is the only one to really do it. And that's just one advantage of corporations. Not sure why they never came back

!g*mers !effortposters Here's an essay on Civ IV. Sorry for the double posts