So first things first. The pacing on Civ IV towards the late game is horrendous. I’ll come back to this point, because it’s a biggie.
So what does Civ IV do right? Does it deserve its hallowed classic status? Is the game still fun? Is it better/ worse than Civ V?
The answers are: Lots, absolutely, I lost sleep from it, and its complicated.
On a very basic level we all know what Civ IV gets right. Moment to moment you are always doing something, planning things that ripple through out the course of a 25 hour campaign. ‘Just one more turn’ is a meme for a reason. Every time you press the End Turn button, watch things play out, you are given a new set of tasks. New options to explore. You always feel that you are just a few turns from doing something big. Be it getting the settler built, a new technology, having a city grow, finishing a resource tile, and so on. Each press of that little red button opens up new options, a new set of choices. And in the early game those turns fly by in a matter of seconds. Centuries pass by in minutes, and growth happens quickly. What you lack in city management, you make up in sending your scout exploring. Hey! A goodie hut! Maybe I’ll get writing from it!
There is also an insidious aspect to the one more turn phenomenon. After you end turns, it automatically brings up the build queue for a city that has an opening. By mid game nearly every turn has one or more cities completing something.
You can not save until after completing these tasks. This is a surprising way to push more turns, to be honest. I realized that, as I was playing, that I would be planning to quit for the night, and would end turn and go to save. But I’d have to manage my cities real quick, and at that point the turn is already nearly over (barring being at war), may as well finish this turn too. Oh, hey, I need to manage this city before I can save, but now the turn is about over… and so on. Making city build queues un-exitable is a design choice that helps feed more turns.
But turn by tun it is easy to keep going. There is a never ending stream of short term tasks that you can feed into long term goals. It is rare, once you get your second city up, to have nothing to do for a few turns, no goal to achieve. You are also given lots of small levers to manipulate the growth of your Civ. Most to small effect, but they add up over time. Tweak your research output here, dabble with specialists there, small adjustments that, over the course of 100 turns, make an impact.
It is a wonderful system to give the tools to provide exactly what you feel you need at the time. A city that lacks hammers? Put a few specialists instead to give you some.
It also breaks down once you reach a certain scale, suffering the same malaise that the late game in general does…