Information - Gameplay Concepts
Game World
 One of the main selling points of Civilization IV is the environment in which the game is set: a lush and vivid animated 3D world that is full of life: from up close, you can see the Buildings and Wonders in your Cities, rivers flowing through the landscape, smoke billowing from Factories, Windmills turning in the wind, Horses and Sheep grazing on a pasture, Workers constructing Roads and Mines... Units leave footprints as they move and combat takes place in the form of cutscene-like animations [see image to the left]. At sea, you can hear the waves, in a desert a dry wind blows. In the Globe View [see image below] you see the world from high above in space, and it looks like an actual 3D globe, with a clouds covering the planet (although the map is still a cylinder as in all Civ-like games). When you complete a Wonder, you are rewarded with (one of about 45) Wonder movies.
Wherever you are, you can rotate and zoom the camera in any way you like -- watch the game from the old-school isometric Civ2 view, top-down as in Civ1, or from close to the ground from the viewpoint of your soldiers. And you can zoom seemlessly all the way from far out in space to right in the middle of a City or field [see image below]. There's even a Free Camera mode with which you can soar across the map like a bird and view the game from any imaginable angle.
All of this provides nice eye-candy and serves to immerse you into the game, but it also has an actual impact on gameplay: you can tell by the animations which tiles a City is working and the various Buildings and Wonders that a City has constructed are also immediately visible on the main map. You can use the view-from-space to get a good strategic overview of your empire and that of your opponents (especially when combined with the various filters that are available in that view). The number of people in a Unit tells you how much hitpoints it has and the banners they carry indicate what Civ they belong to.
 
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