New features
Overview
This page lists all the features added since the last extension, Beyond the Sword.
Smart and balanced technology tree
- New technologies
- The technology tree has been heavily reworked to be well balanced between usefulness, historical accuracy, research costs, buildings, civics and units delivered. The optional realistic timescale algorithm ensures that great discoveries are more or less in line with their real historical dates. Countless new technologies have been added.
- New and redesigned units
- Hunt lions with the new early slinger, control the oceans with the attack submarine, charge your foes with the mounted cavalry, or launch a hydrogen bomb. Every unit is designed to be useful, not superfluous.
- New buildings & wonders
- From the early apiary to the vertical farms, develop your cities and please your people with new buildings. Draw in the Lascaux Caves, found the Hanseatic League, or create the Olympic Games; everything is possible in A New Dawn!
- Totally rebalanced via community feedback
- New buildings, civics, units and wonders have been discussed, modified and updated to try and find the perfect balance. The mod remains in active development and will continue to evolve.
- Disable what you don’t like
- If you don’t want to play in the new futuristic era or don’t appreciate your painstaking city development being vapourised by nukes, you can disable these and many other features.
Revolutions
- Empire stability
- Every decision you make regarding civics or acts of war has repercussions amongst your own people and could lead to such actions as strikes, revolts or even demands for independence. Will your iron fist be strong enough to hold up against your people’s will? Will you be a kind and loving ruler?
- Minor civilizations
- The game can be started with only minor civilizations where everyone is at war and no diplomacy is possible until the discovery of writing. Then, you can try and make peace with your evolved peers, although the conflicts can leave lingering effects.
- Barbarians evolve!
- Barbarian cities can emerge into minor civilizations as the game progresses. Don’t underestimate them, as they are quite capable of attaining your technology level and may one day become the world’s dominant civilization.
- Dynamic civilization names
- Depending upon the civics chosen by their leaders, civilizations can acquire new names. You might meet the Abyssinian Great Kingdom, the English Principality, the Arabian City-state of Mecca or the Mayan Rebels. [Currently only works for English and French]
- Absorb your vassals
- If a vassal becomes too small to evolve, even with their overlord’s help, it might ask to be absorbed by the master civilization.
Advanced diplomacy
- Diplomacy pushed to the limit
- New depth and realism makes the diplomacy more important (and dangerous) than ever. The AI is fully aware of all the new diplomatic options and will use them in negotiations.
- Establish an embassy
- An embassy is a vital first step that must be taken before open borders or any form of alliance can be made with another civilization.
- Sign a right to pass
- Rights of passage are a limited form of open borders which permit only trade and non-combatants.
- Use contacts as a commodity
- Players can trade their contacts with other civilizations.
- Cease all relations with
- Players can pay other civilizations to cease all contact with an enemy nation, which is more effective than an embargo.
- Pay war reparations
- Players can pay war reparations to help rebuild relations with former enemies.
- New trading options
- Workers and heavy military units, such as aircraft, ships and siege machinery, can be bought and sold to other players. You can even buy and sell corporations’ headquarters.
- Foreign policies
- Choose a foreign policy civic. Will you avoid enemy contact, pay tithes to appease powerful warmongers, donate gold to weaker civilizations or even intervene in their wars? YOU decide, but be aware of the consequences.
Brand new AI
- Smarter AI
- The Civilization IV community has put a lot of work into the game’s artificial intelligence. Thanks to all these bugfixes and enhancements, NPC civilizations benefit from a greatly improved ability in areas such as coordinating actions and making economic decisions, providing an overall increased challenge for the player.
- New AI memory
- The AI will know when you backstab a good friend or manipulate other nations into wars. Don’t expect them to easily forgive your dirty tricks. However, deciding NOT to declare war when asked to by another party may grant you better relations with the targeted civilization.
Brand new graphics
- Cultural diversity
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Each civilization has its own history and traditions. Cultural diversity is a module that graphically reflects these variations.
- Terrain textures
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Are you bored by the default terrain textures? This mod compiles the best texture sets ever created for the game and lets you choose which of the five to use: Original, A New Dawn, Blue Marble, Sparth and Vincentz.
- Formations
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Do you feel battles are a little too quiet? Activate the formation setting to replace the usual three graphical units with an entire horde.
Adaptive difficulty
- Flexible difficulty
- The optional flexible difficulty algorithm sets handicaps for the humans and the AI relative to their score; low score civilizations will get bonuses and those with high scores will receive penalties. The game difficulty will thus dynamically adapt to your skill to ensure you will get a challenging but balanced game throughout.
- Ruthless AI
- The optional ruthless AI will be manipulative and harder to beat than normal. It will use techs and gold to hire war allies, often sparking small border disputes into raging world wars that ultimately will work to their advantage. It will always hit where it hurts.
- Do you want more of a challenge?
- We have been thinking of you! Three new options can make your game a challenge: Final Five removes the civilization with the lowest score every fifty turns; High to Low will put you in control of the lowest scoring civilization the first two times you achieve the highest score. You win if you manage it a third time; Increasing Difficulty raises the difficulty level every fifty turns until you reach the ultimate level, Deity.
Fully customizable interface
- Redefined interface
- The fully customizable interface is the accomplishment of the community BUG project, bringing the Civilization IV interface to a new level. Advisors in this mod are now particularly helpful.
- Still not enough?
- BUG adds tons of customization options so that you can add any information you want to the advisor screens.
Translated into several languages
The game currently supports many languages, although not all are fully translated:
- Complete or nearly complete translations:
English, 
French & 
Polish. - Partial translations (more than 50%):
Chinese, 
Finnish, 
German, 
Hungarian, 
Italian, 
Japanese, 
Korean, 
Russian & 
Spanish. - Partial translations (less than 50%):
Czech & 
Portuguese.
The game has been reworked to support a lot of new languages: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, Filipino, Gaelic, Gallego, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Lao, Lithuanian, Latvian, Malaysian, Maori (Ngai Tahu), Maori (Waikoto Uni), Norwegian, Nynorsk, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Samoan, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Tongan, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
Thanks to a special translation platform it is now easy to contribute to the game by translating text into your native language: Read instructions on the forum. We need YOU to translate into these languages.
Many other enhancements and options
- Units per tile: Tired of the dreaded ‘stack of doom’ from Civ IV ? Based on the acclaimed feature of Civ V, it is now possible to enjoy a fully working units-per-tile limitation. You can play down to 1 unit-per-tile, but beware of the massive warfare.
- New leaders: No fewer than twenty-six new leaders are part of this expansion including Cleopatra, Charles V, Hirohito, Henry VIII, Nebuchadrezzar, Lenin and many more.
- New civilizations: More than 100 new civilizations are available with the installation of an additional module. Check this page if you are interested.
- New events: Sir, our herbalists have discovered a new plant that holds great promise for health treatments. However, tests on human subjects are required to find the right mixture. Should we try it?
- New speeds: If games tend to go by too fast for your liking, you might love the new snail speed. If you want a quick game, then try blitz.
- New map scripts: Several new map scripts have been added, from the inland sea of Mediterranean to the Smartmap Generator. Every map will be different!
- Multiple production & research: When research or city production has been completed, any surplus lightbulbs/hammers are used on the next queued technology or item.
- Realistic culture spread: Culture spreads based on the terrain, faster on clear lands and slower over peaks, deserts and dense vegetation.
- Technology diffusion: Knowledge of discovered technology is gradually diffused through borders and commercial routes to those without the understanding. The more civilizations that have discovered the technology, the faster the flow.
- Hunt for food and glory: During the ancient era, try to hunt as many animals as possible and gather them in your empire to generate new resources and to delight your population with new myths and legends that will aid the development of your civilization.
- Great commanders: Great generals can transform into great commanders to give your nearby army some bonuses in the field.
- Barbarian generals: The strongest barbarian hordes will get great generals to terrify their neighbours.
- Dynamic experience gain: Units now gain experience relative to the difficulty of the battle they’ve fought, making combat more interesting.
- Advanced cargo mod: Modern ships can now carry guided missiles and rockets whilst modern carriers can load all types of aircraft except heavy bombers.
- Defender retreat: Defending units with a withdrawal chance may eventually retreat to a safe tile.
- Fixed borders: Use forts to generate culture and claim frontier lands, or protect your territory with zones of control to force the enemy to siege.
- Assimilation: When a city is captured it retains the personality of the former owner, so his unique unit and building are constructed their in place of the conqueror’s own.
- Usable mountains: The discovery of mountaineering permits the crossing of mountains, allowing critical strategic possibilities for early discoverers.
- Guilds: Guilds are the medieval variant of corporations and can spread all around the world.
- Modern corporations: Modern corporations expand the amount of corporations in the late game, giving new opportunities to economically surpass your rivals.
- Caravans: Use your caravans to transfer food and production to other cities, or send them on trade missions with your neighbours.
- Resource depletion: Just as in the real world, resources aren’t eternal. Mineral resources can run dry through exploitation, but the probability of discovering new ones has been increased.
- United Nations: You can now play the game with the United Nations without having the diplomatic victory option active.
- Fine-tuned automations: Many new automations such as automated patrol and protect borders reduce the need to micro-manage your empire.
- Mastery victory: Mastery victory is the ultimate victory condition. Players must survive to the end of time and spread their culture, religion and power over the world.
- AIAutoPlay: Ever wanted to let the AI play your empire? Or wanted to start with a settled empire? Let the AI play on your behalf for a while and then take back control.
Technical features
- Savegame compatibility
- Created by the C2C mod team, a reliable algorithm ensures save compatibility after updates; your savegame will be forever compatible with past and future releases.
- Improved game performance
- Also from the C2C mod team, the graphics paging option removes virtually all MAF errors seen in Beyond the Sword and heavyweight mods, whilst also dramatically increasing graphical performance in the later stages of games.