(P)REVIEWS - Civilization IV: Warlords Review by Solver
New Trait Ratings
My opinion is that all of the new traits are fairly well balanced,
although Charismatic is a very powerful trait which, just like Financial, is
useful in any situation. Here’s my look on the trait trio.
Charismatic - a universally useful powerful trait. I’m hard-pressed to
imagine a situation where extra happiness is not useful. A free +1 happiness
bonus equals what you would get from founding a religion and having it in all
your cities. The second +1 from Monuments (which replace Obelisks from the
original game) is equivalent to having a Temple from a religion. Those Monuments
are a pretty high priority building in many starts, to expand your borders, and
having them double as happiness boosters is certainly a positive thing.
Most of the time, you are going to think of this bonus as a nice boost.
However, sometimes it makes the difference between having a good start and a
poor one. This is true in situations where you have no immediately accessible
luxury resources in the vicinity of your starting positions. In that case,
Charismatic makes the start survivable. The bonus from BroadcastTowers is, as you would expect, not very
useful – it’s a late-game building, by which time you should generally have
more than enough happiness unless you are at war.
The other bonus of Charismatic is also very useful. -25% XP needed for
promotions means that you can promote your units earlier. You still need 2 and 4 XP for the first and second promotions respectively (second promotion needing one less XP is hardly relevant) , but the third promotion
comes at 8 XP instead of 10, and the fourth one comes at 14 instead of 17. Over
time, I’ve grown to have a lot of respect for this bonus.
As I see it, the real bonus isn’t that 8 XP promotion. Sure, it’s nice.
For mounted units with a Barracks and Stable, you get 5 XP upon production, and
after two victories it’s probably going to promote. The real bonus, to me, is
the greater ease of getting highly promoted units. Units with four and five
promotions become really good – you can specialize them to be uber city takers,
or just the best all-round combat units for the battlefields. With the
Charismatic trait, you are going to have more of such elites, which is only a good
thing.
Of course, this also makes one trick that everyone loves easier.
Specifically, having City Raider III Macemen to upgrade to Grenadiers later.
With Charismatic, such Macemen should not be in short supply, and many players
have learnt their might when upgraded to Grenadiers.
Finally, the cheaper promotions are also useful for builders on the
defense. In this case, there’s a lot of pleasure to be derived from the ability
to have City Garrison III promoted units with only 8 XP. And I’m not even going
to mention what the combination of Protective/Charismatic can do defensively.
Charismatic, undoubtedly, is going to become one of the favourites of
the Civ4 community. [ ... Previous Page | Next Page ... ]
