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To celebrate the pending release of the Civilization IV Complete Edition which will feature ABSOLUTELY NO DRM!!!, I just felt the urge to share what's been keeping my years-long interest in Civ IV fresh and vibrant. I speak to you of... mods.
First up is Planetfall, which has reached version eight as of this writing. Planetfall ambitiously attempts to recreate the feel (though not the exact gameplay) of Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri. While it has a ways to go, it's doing a great job thus far. Playing a few rounds of this mod reminds me of the late nights spent warring as the gentle Gaians against the greed of Morgan Industries...
Oh, as a bonus, if you own the original SMAC disc, you can copy the voices for techs discovered into your Planetfall installation.
Next up, we have Fall From Heaven 2. This is the mod that I spend the most time playing. It transforms Civ IV into an extremely well realised fantasy world, in which you play a tiny tribe that survived a long diaspora (which is actually recounted in Civ IV: Fall From Heaven - Age of Ice, which comes with the Civ IV expansion pack, Beyond the Sword.) and guide them through the rebuilding of society. FFH2 features alignments; a ton of special powers and conditions for each individual race; makes religions far more crunchy than they are in vanilla Civ; adds spells; new resources; a raft of new wonders; and generally feels like a nearly whole new game.
Then there's The BTS 3.17 Unofficial Patch. This doesn't make too many visible changes, but under the hood it's fantastic. It tries to rejigger Beyond The Sword into the game that Firaxis wanted to deliver with their final patch but didn't quite get the dev time to make happen. It also incorporates some very necessary fixes to the opponent AI so that it's no longer dumb as a box of hammers.
Lastly, I've just recently gotten into this Star Trek Mod, which takes a little getting used to, but is well worth the work. The sheer breadth of its scenarios makes it worth a look, but the core gameplay is very nicely polished. It's an outgrowth of the Final Frontier mod that comes with Beyond the Sword.
All of the above require Beyond the Sword patched up to version 3.17. Everything listed above also works with Civ IV running under Wine on Linux.
First up is Planetfall, which has reached version eight as of this writing. Planetfall ambitiously attempts to recreate the feel (though not the exact gameplay) of Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri. While it has a ways to go, it's doing a great job thus far. Playing a few rounds of this mod reminds me of the late nights spent warring as the gentle Gaians against the greed of Morgan Industries...
Oh, as a bonus, if you own the original SMAC disc, you can copy the voices for techs discovered into your Planetfall installation.
Next up, we have Fall From Heaven 2. This is the mod that I spend the most time playing. It transforms Civ IV into an extremely well realised fantasy world, in which you play a tiny tribe that survived a long diaspora (which is actually recounted in Civ IV: Fall From Heaven - Age of Ice, which comes with the Civ IV expansion pack, Beyond the Sword.) and guide them through the rebuilding of society. FFH2 features alignments; a ton of special powers and conditions for each individual race; makes religions far more crunchy than they are in vanilla Civ; adds spells; new resources; a raft of new wonders; and generally feels like a nearly whole new game.
Then there's The BTS 3.17 Unofficial Patch. This doesn't make too many visible changes, but under the hood it's fantastic. It tries to rejigger Beyond The Sword into the game that Firaxis wanted to deliver with their final patch but didn't quite get the dev time to make happen. It also incorporates some very necessary fixes to the opponent AI so that it's no longer dumb as a box of hammers.
Lastly, I've just recently gotten into this Star Trek Mod, which takes a little getting used to, but is well worth the work. The sheer breadth of its scenarios makes it worth a look, but the core gameplay is very nicely polished. It's an outgrowth of the Final Frontier mod that comes with Beyond the Sword.
All of the above require Beyond the Sword patched up to version 3.17. Everything listed above also works with Civ IV running under Wine on Linux.
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