Civilization IV is an amazing game, one that easily qualifies as one of those "desert island discs" any strategy gamer could enjoy for the rest of his or her life. The very quality of the basic game must have presented a dilemma to Firaxis, though. How do you add meaningful features to a game that's already full-to-bursting with stuff, without breaking it? Their answer came in the form of Civilization IV: Warlords, an expansion pack filled with great new scenarios, six new civilizations, new civilization-specific buildings and units, and a new gameplay dynamic called "vassal states." The good news is that all of them are terrific additions that seamlessly blend in with the original game. The bad news is that, as a whole, the expansion pack has a "play it safe" aura that brings into question whether Warlords is really worth the $30 a gamer will be asked to plunk down for it.

The heart of Warlords is the new scenarios. These in themselves are almost worth the money. Each of them tweaks the basic game in interesting and unusual ways. The Peloponnesian War scenario, for example, focuses on the role of sea power as players are forced to ferry units around the islands of the Mediterranean. Chinese Unification, on the other hand, replaces the religious dynamic with one in which the player tries to bring together warring Chinese families by arranging marriages and spreading bloodlines. The tech tree in this scenario has also been reworked to allow for larger armies and a more elegant set-piece strategy closer to the feel of the era.


By far, however, my favorite new scenario is Omens. Omens is a pseudo-historical recreation of the Seven Years War. The player can choose to play as British General George Washington or French aristocrat Marquis Duquesne. There are also Native Americans, the Lenape, who are busy building up their own civilization. Omens gives players 150 turns to have 75% of the extant population (including the initially neutral Lenape) follow their state religion, either Catholicism or Protestantism. Since research plays a minimal role and both sides have powerful defensive units, it's very difficult to actually capture an opposing city, leading to an amazingly subtle game of diplomacy, skirmishes in the fields, and hordes of missionaries trying to avoid being slaughtered while they convert the natives to reach that magical 75%.

The one thing all of these scenarios have in common is how they take the original game and tweak it so its very feel is different both from the original and each other. Fighting to transmit a bloodline in the Chinese Unification scenario often reminds me of a classic game of Diplomacy in which power-blocs rub up against one another looking for that small weakness they can run a (metaphorical) tank through. The Mongol, Viking or Barbarian scenarios, on the other hand, are all about quick strikes and constant movement as the player tries to take down entrenched opponents. All of them are well-designed and can easily fill up hours of playtime when the player needs a break from the main game.