Civilization IV

Full name

Sid Meier's Civilization IV (often Civilization 4 or Civ 4)^[1]

Developer

Firaxis Games^[1]

Publisher

2K Games (Take-Two Interactive)^[1]

Lead designer

Soren Johnson^[7]

Released

Oct 25, 2005 (North America), Nov 4, 2005 (Europe), for Windows^[1]

Expansions

Warlords (Jul 24, 2006), Beyond the Sword (Jul 2007); standalone Colonization (Sep 2008)^[22][14][24]

Engine

Gamebryo^[9]

Metascore

94 from 50 critics^[12]

Complete Edition on Steam

$29.99 list price, $5.99 in a sale ending Nov 19, 2026^[25]

Overview

Civilization IV is the fourth main game in Sid Meier's Civilization series, a line of turn-based strategy games that Sid Meier began in 1991.^[4] A player picks one civilization and its leader, founds cities, researches technologies, builds armies and wonders, and tries to win before the game ends, usually in 2050 AD.^[5] The game shipped to North American stores on Oct 25, 2005 at a suggested price of $49.99, and reached Europe on Nov 4.^[1] It was rated E10+ for players aged 10 and older.^[1] As of Nov 7, 2026 it is sold on Steam alone and as part of the Complete Edition with both expansions and Colonization, and Beyond the Sword holds an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating from 96% of 2,903 English-language Steam reviews.^[25][23] Steam's own count showed 1,127 people playing Beyond the Sword at 06:19 UTC on Nov 7, 2026, two decades after release.^[36]

12:15 An early Beyond the Sword game Footage of an early game in Beyond the Sword on an island map: the player picks the next technology, purple cultural borders spread along the coast, and a city completes Stonehenge.

Development

Firaxis Games, the Maryland studio founded in 1996 by Jeff Briggs, made the game with Sid Meier as its Director of Creative Development.^[1][2] Soren Johnson led the design; he later told PC Gamer that he saw much in Civilization III that needed improving, and that nothing from the earlier games was kept by default, so every rule was judged again from scratch.^[7] Johnson's afterword in the manual explains that corruption, the most common complaint about Civilization III, and waste were never coded at all.^[5] The team built the game as a multiplayer game first and played rudimentary multiplayer sessions in the first months of work.^[7] Halfway through development the project changed publisher: Take-Two bought rights to the franchise and signed a long-term deal with Firaxis on Jan 26, 2005, then bought Firaxis itself on Nov 7, 2005, two weeks after launch.^[7][2][3] The 3D world runs on Emergent's Gamebryo engine, which Firaxis had already used for Sid Meier's Pirates!.^[9] Leonard Nimoy narrates the opening and reads a quotation for each new technology.^[10] Johnson recalled in 2015 that he directed Nimoy's recording over the phone without ever meeting him.^[38]

8:27 Directing Leonard Nimoy by phone Soren Johnson, replaying the game in 2015, recalls that Nimoy recorded the quotes and intro away from the studio while Johnson gave direction over the phone, and that the opening line took about 15 takes of the word "civilization" to get right.

Gameplay

Play takes place on a map of square tiles, one turn at a time: cities work the land around them, workers build farms, mines and roads, and the player chooses what each city builds and which technology to research next.^[5] Production left over when a city finishes something carries into the next item instead of being lost.^[5] In place of corruption, each city costs a maintenance fee that grows with the size of the empire, which checks sprawling empires of small towns.^[5] The base game has 18 civilizations and 26 leaders, each leader with traits that give bonuses.^[5][1] There are several ways to win: conquest, domination of two-thirds of the land, three cities with legendary culture, a diplomatic vote in the United Nations, a spaceship to Alpha Centauri, or the highest score when the last turn ends.^[5]

0:54 How a city works A beginner's guide explains that the game drops older annoyances such as long anarchy and corruption, then shows how each citizen works a tile for food, hammers or gold, and how gold is split between science and the treasury with sliders.

Combat gives each unit a single strength value with bonuses for terrain and for matching the right unit against the right enemy, and units earn promotions as they win.^[1][5] Johnson's afterword names the old problem of the "Stack-of-Doom", a single huge stack that always has the best defender ready.^[5] His answer, borrowed in a softer form from the first Civilization, was collateral damage: siege units such as catapults wound every unit in a stack they attack.^[5]

12:14 Stacks and siege units The guide warns that the computer opens wars by dropping a large stack into the player's land, and recommends archers and longbowmen to hold cities and hills and catapults to wear down defenses and hit enemy stacks with splash damage.

Religion, civics and Great People

Three systems set the game apart from its predecessors.^[1] There are seven religions, each founded by the first civilization to discover the technology tied to it; a religion spreads across the map, helps keep cities content, earns gold and produces Great Prophets.^[5][1] 2K describes Civilization IV as the first game in the series with religions that spread across the map.^[37] Civics replaced the single choice of government with separate choices, so a player can mix options such as hereditary rule or open elections with free speech or slavery as new technologies unlock them.^[1] Johnson writes that the civics system was inspired by Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.^[5] Great People, which 2K says the game introduced, are earned by cities that use specialists; the base game has the Great Artist, Merchant, Prophet, Engineer and Scientist, and each can grant a free technology, start a golden age or settle in a city to raise its output.^[37][1][5]

Modding

Moddability was a stated aim before release: senior producer Barry Caudill wrote on Sep 20, 2005 that the goal was to make the most moddable Civilization yet, with three levels of tools.^[19] Rules and text are stored in XML, the interface and map scripts in Python, and the World Builder edits maps and scenarios.^[19] The game shipped before two promised pieces were ready, because the release date was moved up by almost a month, GameSpot reported; the software development kit with the source code of the game's core and the Pitboss server for long online games came later on 2K's downloads page.^[10][20] Johnson wrote in 2008 that the team saw the product less as a single game than as a general turn-based strategy engine.^[21] Fan work went into the box: Beyond the Sword ships with the fantasy mod Fall from Heaven and with Rhye's and Fall of Civilization, a history scenario on a map of the Earth, among its scenarios.^[6]

Expansions and editions

Warlords, released on Jul 24, 2006, added six civilizations, 10 leaders, vassal states and the Great General, a new kind of Great Person.^[22] Beyond the Sword followed in July 2007 with ten civilizations, sixteen leaders, five wonders, corporations, an expanded espionage system, the Apostolic Palace, advanced starts and 11 scenarios.^[23][14] It includes the new rules of Warlords, so it needs only the base game.^[6] Johnson had left Firaxis in April 2007 to work on Spore at Electronic Arts, and Alex Mantzaris and Jon Shafer were credited as lead designers of Beyond the Sword.^[30][31] Colonization, released in September 2008, is a separate game rather than an expansion: a reworking of Sid Meier's 1994 Colonization on the Civilization IV engine, in which a European nation settles the New World and fights for independence.^[24][31] The Complete Edition, with all four, reached stores in May 2009 at $39.99.^[29] Beyond the Sword's last patch, version 3.19, arrived on Steam on Jun 11, 2009.^[27]

0:48 What Beyond the Sword added IGN's video review tours the expansion: the larger espionage system that lets peaceful players disrupt rivals, the Apostolic Palace that gathers civilizations of one faith into a voting bloc, and corporations, which the reviewer finds the weakest addition.

Reception and sales

Civilization IV holds a Metascore of 94 from 50 critics as of Nov 7, 2026.^[12] GameSpot and IGN both scored it 9.4, and IGN's review opened by saying the only reason to stop playing was to tell others how good it is.^[10][11] GameSpot listed Nimoy's narration among its strengths but found the interface rough in places.^[10] By Mar 16, 2006 it had sold over a million copies worldwide, GameSpot had named it both PC and Strategy Game of the Year, and the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences had named it Best Strategy Game.^[4] The add-ons scored lower: Warlords 84, Beyond the Sword 86 and Colonization 83 on Metacritic.^[13][14][15] The game's standing has lasted. In a 2015 PC Gamer reader survey it came second, with 21.6% of votes, behind Civilization V.^[34] In September 2025 Kotaku's Zack Zwiezen called it the pinnacle of the series and wrote that it runs easily on any modern PC.^[33]

1:35 Firaxis looks back at the awards Firaxis's own 2024 retrospective shows GameSpot's best games of 2005 page and a headline announcing that Civilization IV won a Grammy.

Music and Baba Yetu

The title theme, "Baba Yetu", is a setting of the Lord's Prayer in Swahili by Christopher Tin.^[17] Johnson asked Tin to write it; the two had been roommates at Oxford, and Johnson recounted that they met again at a class reunion while he was working on the game.^[18][16] It was first sung by Talisman, an a cappella group from Stanford.^[16] The piece won two Game Audio Network Guild Awards in 2007, had its concert premiere at Video Games Live at the Hollywood Bowl in 2006 and became a regular of that touring show.^[16] Tin later included it on his 2009 album Calling All Dawns.^[17] At the 53rd Grammy Awards on Feb 13, 2011 it won Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s), and GameSpot reported that Tin was the first composer to win a Grammy for a piece written for a video game.^[17][16]

Support today and legacy

Online play first ran through GameSpy; after that service closed, 2K moved the Steam version to Steamworks on Jun 5, 2014, saying the game worked as before except that the Direct IP option was removed.^[28] Aspyr's 32-bit Mac version was among the games it stopped selling on Jun 17, 2019, ahead of macOS Catalina, and Steam says online multiplayer on the Mac version is no longer supported.^[32][26] On Nov 7, 2026 Steam listed the Complete Edition at $5.99, 80% off its $29.99 price, in a promotion ending Nov 19.^[25]

Civilization IV was the last main game in the series on square tiles with unlimited stacking.^[8] Jon Shafer, a Beyond the Sword lead designer who led Civilization V, moved that game to hexes and one military unit per tile, expecting the change to be controversial.^[8][31] Shafer later told PC Gamer that he did not think the one-unit system worked very well either and that a stack model was probably better suited to the scale of Civilization.^[8] Its spies are still a reference point: PC Gamer's review of Civilization VII in February 2025 missed the sabotage of the older games and named Civilization IV in particular.^[35]

2:16 Stacks on a square grid A guide shows a basic stack of units moving across the map as one, contrasts it with Civilization V, where each military unit needs its own tile, and explains that battles are decided by the counters each stack holds, such as a chariot against an archer.

Timeline

1. 2005-01-26 Take-Two buys rights to the Civilization franchise and signs Firaxis to a long-term publishing deal.^[2]
2. 2005-10-25 Civilization IV ships in North America; Europe follows on Nov 4.^[1]
3. 2005-11-07 Take-Two buys Firaxis Games.^[3]
4. 2006-03-16 2K announces Warlords and reports over a million copies sold.^[4]
5. 2006-07-24 Warlords is released.^[22]
6. 2007-07 Beyond the Sword is released.^[14]
7. 2008-09 Colonization, a standalone game on the Civilization IV engine, is released.^[24]
8. 2009-05 The Complete Edition reaches stores at $39.99.^[29]
9. 2009-06-11 Beyond the Sword's final patch, 3.19, arrives on Steam.^[27]
10. 2011-02-13 "Baba Yetu" wins a Grammy Award.^[17]
11. 2014-06-05 Online play moves from GameSpy to Steamworks.^[28]
12. 2019-06-17 Aspyr stops selling its 32-bit Mac version.^[32]