Information - Gameplay Concepts
Great People
| Barry Caudill, Civilization IV Senior Producer on Great People |
Throughout history, men and women have emerged to perform great deeds, thus having profound and lasting effects on the world around them. They are people whose genius, vision, and perseverance set them apart from the rest. The development team at Firaxis wanted to recognize the integral role these visionaries have played throughout history, so we added a new feature in Civilization IV called "Great People". There are five types of Great People in the game: Artists, Engineers, Merchants, Prophets, and Scientists. Each can have a profound impact on your Civilization, just as in real life.
Great People are created at the city level, as each city can generate "great people points" based on conditions and structures in the city. You can affect the amount of people points generated in several ways. One very dramatic way is through the creation of a great wonder. For instance, building the Pyramids will make it more likely the city will generate a Great Engineer, while building Stonehenge will make the city more likely to generate a Great Prophet. You can also generate more great people points by taking city population away from working the land and turning them into specialists. Certain Civics choices can work to make your specialists more productive and that can also have a positive effect on your great people point production.
All Great People share certain common abilities that differ somewhat based on the type of great person. All can be used to immediately research a new technology with the type of technology determined by the great person – Prophets would give you a religion technology like Priesthood, Artists may give you a technology like Literature, and Merchants would perhaps give Banking. All Great People can also settle in a city for a period of time and give a constant boost to that city’s production, based on their type. Finally, all Great People can be used to trigger extra golden ages for your Civilization, with each subsequent golden age requiring more Great People. Each use of a great person consumes that unit and it is removed from the game.
In addition to their common abilities, all Great People can also do one "really big thing," for lack of a better term. Each Great Person type has a specific ability and their effects can make an indelible impact on the game. Great Artists can make a great work of art that automatically gives that city a huge culture boost. Great Engineers can "hurry" the production in a city, giving you the ability to build a Great Wonder in one turn perhaps. Great Merchants can conduct a trade mission to a far away city and give you a quick and sizeable boost to your treasury. Great Prophets can create a religious shrine, but only in the city in which the religion was founded. Finally, Great Scientists can construct an Academy, a building which boosts a city’s scientific research and culture.
When Great People show up in the game, they are represented by a unit that is only visible to the player. For all but one (Great Prophet), there will be an ancient and a modern representation of the unit. To add flavor, each Great Person will be named after a great person of that type from history. So you may find yourself with the likes of: Shakespeare, Nichola Tesla, Leonardo da Vinci, Marco Polo, Marie Curie, J.S. Bach, or Chuang Tzu, to name but a few! The Firaxis team has been playing Civ IV for over two years now, and we’re all really happy with the new level of depth the Great People feature brings to the game. We hope you’ll like it too!!
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Depending on how your Cities perform, they may also generate something else: Great People. Great People come in five categories: Artists, Engineers, Merchants, Prophets and Scientists. They are regular units, but with a few differences. They are invisible to all units and have a movement factor of 2. The most important difference with regular units is that Great People cannot be built: instead they are automatically spawned in Cities, depending on what those Cities are organised. As the player uses Specialists they gain Great People Points in the city that is utilizing the Specialists. These points determine which Great Person is created. Wonders also contribute Great People Points. Cities that specialise in science will generate Great Scientists, Cities that specialize in Culture will generate Great Artists. In the same fashion Gold leads to Great Merchants, Religion to Great Prophets and Hammers to Great Engineers. Research in specific directions can also influence what kind of Great People are generated.
Another difference with regular units is that Great People are not generic units: they actually represent important historic persons, such as Plato, Michelangelo, Newton, Einstein, etc -- they all have a name. There are 165 unique Great People in total. Each Great Person you can use for one of four benefits. One benefit all Great People have is that you can trade a number of them in to trigger a Golden Age, which gives you a boost in Hammer and Gold output for a few turns (and you can do this more than once, unlike in Civ3). Another is that you can have them join a City, in which case they will become 'super specialists' that contribute a lot of resources to the City. They can also be traded in for a free Advance. The final benefit depend on the type of Great Person, see the table below. Each Great Person Unit can only be used once, after that it is consumed.
The following types of Great People exist in Civilization IV:
| Type | Graphic | Focus | Benefits |
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| Great Artist | ? | Culture | Help trigger a Golden Age
Join a City for +3 Gold and +12 Culture per turn
Create a Great Work that gives a City 4,000 Culture points
Discover a Cultural Advance |
| Great Engineer | ? | Hammers | Help trigger a Golden Age
Join a City for +3 Hammers and +3 Beakers per turn
Rush the production of a Wonder
Discover an Engineering Advance |
| Great Merchant |  | Gold | Help trigger a Golden Age
Join a City for +1 Food and +6 Gold per turn
Can create a Trade Mission (use in a foreign City for a Gold bonus)
Discover a Commerical Advance |
| Great Prophet |  | Religion | Help trigger a Golden Age
Join a City for +2 Hammers and +5 Gold per turn
Build a Shrine in a Holy City (one Shrine for every Religion)
Disvover a Religious Advance |
| Great Scientist | ? | Science | Help trigger a Golden Age
Join a City for +1 Hammer and +6 Beakers per turn
Can found an Academy in a City
Discover a Scientific Advance |
| Great Artists | Great Engineers | Great Merchants | Great Prophets | Great Scientists |
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Homer
Thespis
Ling Lun
Wang Xizhi
Valmiki
Virgil
Kalidas
Li Po
Du Fu
Jalal Aldin Rumi
Dante Alighieri
Yunus Emre
Amir Khusro
Ibn Muqlah
Michaelangelo
Raphael
William Shakespeare
Miguel de Cervantes
Rembrandt
Johannes Vermeer
JS Bach
Wolfgang Mozart
Johann Goethe
Ludwig van Beethoven
Victor Hugo
Vincent van Gogh
Johannes Brahms
Dvorak
Mark Twain
Claude Monet
Joseph Conrad
Frank Kafka
Louis Armstrong
Duke Ellington
Pablo Picasso
Miles Davis
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Imhotep
Archimedes
Heron
Cai Lun
Zhang Heng
Bi Sheng
Leonardo da Vinci
Sinan
Wilhelm Schickard
Blaise Pascal
Benjamin Franklin
Charles Augustin de Coulomb
James Watt
Joseph Marie Jacquard
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Willian Morton
Louis Daguerre
Ferdinand de Lesseps
John Roebling
Nobert Rillieux
Henry Bessemer
Nain Singh
Alexander Grahm Bell
Nikolaus August Otto
Nichola Tesla
Thomas Edison
Guglielmo Marconi
Alexandre Gustave Eiffel
George Washington Goethals
Henry Ford
Wilbur Wright
Orville Wright
| Harkuf
Hanno
Pytheas
Zhang Qian
Aretas III
Leif Erickson
Wang Anshi
Enrico Dandolo
Marco Polo
Ibn Battuta
Richard Whittington
Giovanni de Medici
Zheng He
Vasco da Gama
Christopher Columbus
Ferdinand Magellan
Jacques Cartier
Raja Todar Mal
Antony van Diemen
Sir Thomas Roe
Shah Jahan
Adam Smith
James Cook
Cornelius Vanderbilt
Sir Alexander Mackenzie
John Stuart Mill
Andrew Carnegie
John D Rockefeller
John Maynard Keynes
Coco Chanel
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Moses
Mahavira
Zoroaster
Ananda
Chuang Tzu
Mencius
Mo Tzu
St John
St Peter
St Paul
Rabbi Akiva
Mani
St Augustine
St Patrick
Abu Bakr
Shankara
Kobo Daishi
Atisha
St Thomas Aquinas
Mohammed Shah
Tsongkhapa
Jeanne d'Arc
Narak
Tipu Sultan
Ramakrishna
Narayana Guru
Sojourner Truth
| Merit Ptah
Xi Ling Shi
Nabu Rimanni
Socrates
Plato
Aristotle
Euclid
Ptolemy
Hypatia
Zu Chongzhi
Aryabhata
Al Kindi
Al Khwarizmi
Al Razi
Alhazen
Nicolaus Copernicus
Francis Bacon
Tycho Brahe
Johannes Kepler
Isaac Newton
Galileo Galilei
Rene Descartes
Antony van Leeuwenhoek
Gottfried Leibniz
Mikhail Lomonosov
Antoine Laurent Lavoisier
Carl Friedrich Gauss
John Dalton
Michael Faraday
James Clerk Maxwell
Louis Pasteur
Charles Darwin
Ernest Rutherford
Marie Curie
Albert Einstein
Niels Bohr
Werner Heisenberg
Enrico Fermi
Rosalind Franklin
Andrei Sakharov
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