Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword

This is actually our biggest expansion pack ever - what we've added is 25 new units, 18 new buildings, 16 new leaders, ten new civilizations and eight new wonders.

One of the new wonders is the Apostolic Palace - this acts like a UN early in the game. If you found a religion and send your missionaries out to other cities and convert other nations to that religion, then you build the Apostolic Palace which will trigger global elections. That's really important - say you had Tokugawa next door to your Napoleon, these people aren't going to get along with you so you're going to have to focus on your defensive game - you're going to have to focus on your military. But with the Apostolic Palace, one of the things you can trigger is 'don't go to war with me' - so you will literally make sure that they'll take their weapons and put it behind their back - all the way until they discover communism. So it's not a permanent headlock but it holds them for a long time.

Some of the new units that we've added are the mobile sam and mobile artillery. The mobile SAM is a powerful anti-aircraft unit. We've also added tactical nukes - they're like regular nukes, except they're a lot cheaper but they're not as powerful. But they still produce the wonderful mushroom cloud that everybody loves.. .We've also added paratroopers. Usually if you're in combat with someone, they're going to line their borders with units. With a paratrooper, you can actually slip in behind enemy lines and take out a very important resource - if you take out oil, your rival can no longer produce tanks.

We've beefed up the espionage system which is based upon points and you can select which mission you want to do. You can do everything from supporting a revolution to poisoning the water supply. There will be some missions you won't be able to do because you won't have enough points but when you've earned enough points, you'll be able to pull of greater espionage missions. If the city is in revolt, you'll take out a large chunk of it's culture. Also, the more time a spy spends inside a city, the cheaper things get. A key thing we've added are corporations which kind of replace religion as the game goes on. If you have a corporation that you've founded, you can spread each corporation through an executive. The corporation is good because it's going to give your finances a massive boost but you have to be careful about who you're giving funds to. If you have an oil corporation and you support another corporation, you're giving them the ability to make tanks.

Yes. We've added loads of new leaders. We've got Abraham Lincoln, Gilgamesh, Justinian. He'll be annoyed with you as he plays but the opposite of him is Sitting Bull - he'll try to take you over culturally.

We've beefed up our space race. Typically in Civ IV, the space race works by building your space ship to immediately win the game. The minute you've launched your space ship, that person wins. Now, we've added complexity to it so while you may launch first you're not necessarily going to reach Alpha Centauri first. So if Napoleon just launched into space, I can focus on my thrusters and try to beat him there. Of course, he can send in spies after me and try and take me out that way.

We've added Random Events too, which you can turn off or on. They'll be a tsunami or earthquake which will suddenly appear but they'll be good things too - like a golden age or a wedding between two empires which will boost diplomacy between the two of them.

Yes. Advance Starts allow you to start later in the game, in a place like the industrial period. If people have a short time to play, the best thing would be to select and Advance Start in combination with a Quick Game which speeds everything up. You could play a full game of Civ in your lunch break, for example. Advance Starts are great in multiplayer - you usually start in the ancient period which hasn't been very interesting in the past. You can customise the game right from the start, drop a city wherever you want, add population, add culture, you can even draw out your roads. All of this costs money and you're given a pool to start with but ultimately the amount you spend at the start reduces your final total.

Oh yeah! The Final Frontier space scenario is almost like an entire remake of the game all over again. There's a brand new tech tree, loads of new units and a brand new terrain! We wanted to show the community who have been great, how crazy you can be with the scenarios. Final Frontier takes place 100 years after earth - after contact was lost with earth... as you play through the scenario, you'll find small clues about what happened to earth. It's a lot different to the base game of Civ. Instead of conquering the world, you're conquering all of space. Instead of building a city, you're colonizing a star system. You can go into each star system and plant buildings on each planet and assign population to them. Then there's Star Bases - they're kind of like satellite cities, they can harvest resources from an asteroid field, spread the influence of your city and they can also defend against attacking units. There's pop up hints which will tell you all about the new units and there's also the Civilopedia with an explanation on the concepts.

Possibly. There's nothing set in stone. We're always paying attention to the trends of the industry...