Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword Review

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So, the second expansion pack for the fresher-than-ever strategy stalwart, and as observed in our review of the last one, Warlords, it's hard not to go at it without a certain preconception along the lines of "hang on, exactly what in this game needs expanding?" Especially as Warlords has already redressed its parent's accidental bias against military victory.

The Final Frontier scenario - almost makes you forget the rage you feel for EA jealously hanging onto the Alpha Centauri license.

Well, what makes Beyond the Sword arguably the Civ series' finest expansion pack is that you don't really notice it's there. You play Civ 4 more or less as you've always done, and most of the extra bits slot in so neatly and logically that it seems they've always been present. They're so exact a fit, in fact, that were they not included in the vanilla game of any future Civ 5, Firaxis should be made to go and stand in the same corner of money-grabbing ignominy as Maxis have skulked for several years now.

Traditionally, an expansion pack is like a benign tumour for its host game, a new lump crudely grafted onto a spare bit of exposed skin. Beyond the Sword, by contrast, is more like a new organ. It's a third lung for Civ 4, allowing it to breathe more easily - and you to craft a slightly more unique victory. 'Beyond the Sword' refers not really to the expansion having a slight modern-age bias, but to Civ IV now being less war-centric than ever.

There are piecemeal tweaks throughout (for instance, far-flung colonies can secede from an Empire and set up shop on their own, while a space race victory now involves waiting for your rocketship to reach Alpha Centauri rather than simply building it), but the three most obvious additions are espionage, corporations and random events.

A world without corporations is a beautiful thing. Too late - Sid's Sushi Co wants a piece of global pie.

This former is a ramping up of the fairly basic spy games in Civ IV vanilla. Rather than laboriously and expensively sending spies across the land to gather intel on your rivals, you can now gear a city or your whole civ towards espionage in the same way you can towards culture or production. With enough relevant buildings and manpower, you'll start automatically receiving info on what the other empires are up to, and can even choose to concentrate your efforts on a certain nations. Thus if Egypt are getting dangerously close to researching nukes, you might find out enough in advance to launch a pre-emptive strike (or desperately shower them with gifts in the hope their radioactive gaze falls from you). Of course, all this subterfuge will eat into your R&D, so the degree to which you favour intelligence over brawn or commerce can affect your game enormously.

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