Civilization Network will allow you and your friends to band together to create the most powerful, wealthy, or most intelligent civilization. Think Mafia Wars, only with shifty Romans instead of shifty Italians. I suppose that's pretty much the same thing these days. Toss giant plumed helmets on the mobsters and off you go.

Sid Meier himself announced the upcoming app in the CivFanatics forums.

I wanted to let you know we'll soon be looking for beta testers to help us develop a unique new way to play Civilization. Ever since we finished Civilization® Revolution™ last year, I've been looking at ways of expanding the Civ gameplay experience to include solo, competitive and cooperative play to take advantage of the uniqueness of social networks. We're calling this project Civilization® Network™ and the full game will be available next year on Facebook. Civilization Network will allow you to join together with your friends to create the world's most powerful, richest, smartest, or just plain coolest civilization. You can coordinate your strategy to win great battles, share your technology to jump ahead of your rivals, lobby your family and friends to form your own government and win vital elections, manage and grow your cities to maximize production and happiness, spy on your enemies, and work with your friends to create the great Wonders of the World. The game will offer everything you enjoy in Civ in a fully persistent environment - you can play as much as you like, whenever you like, and it'll be free to play.

Thanks a lot, Sid. I still had a little free time left, and that was bugging the hell out of me.

As the man says, they'll be looking for beta testers soon. Your best bet? Head over the the Civilization Network Facebook page and become a fan. Might as well get it over with now.

Announcing Civilization Network! [Civilization Fanatics Center - Thanks Mike!]

The publisher has announced today the impending release of Civilization IV: Complete Edition, which will be out next week and which will combine the main game along with its two expansions (Warlords & Beyond the Sword) and recent spin-off title, Colonization.

The pack will sell for $40 and, if this kind of thing makes your day, will ship entirely without DRM.

Problem is, in going for a pure remake - as opposed to a sequel with big additions and/or changes – they’re also taking a big risk. A straight-up remake will beg the question: why bother? Why go to all the trouble of shoe-horning a 14 year-old game into a modern engine, changing some art assets and pushing it onto the market when the original was nearly perfect as it was?

LOVED
Nip and Tuck – Civ IV’s engine, though still good-looking for a game of this type, has had a bit of an upgrade, most obvious in the added detail of the settlements and the new water textures. Nothing OMG there, but hey, it’s nice to see.

Smallpox Blankets, Beads For Land – There’s a bigger emphasis on dealing with the natives in this version, as they’re both more numerous and more capable, acting as fully-fledged nations (you can negotiate diplomacy, enter into alliances, etc) on a par with the Spanish, French etc. This makes them a far deeper and more useful aspect of the game than they were in the original.

Not Broke, Don’t Fix – Aside from the natives, above, and the war of independence, below, most aspects of the game remain unchanged. Settlements, economy, war, diplomacy, it’s all pretty much as you remember it. You choose a European power, you settle the New World, you deal with the locals, you fight a war of independence. Seeing as the original got all those things right, it was a smart move not to attempt wholesale changes to the mechanics.

Civilization IV: Colonization – For the most part, the game’s resemblance to a regular game of Civ IV is a bad thing. But there’s two aspects that benefit. First is the national borders. The original game had no borders, so rival settlements would pop up throughout “your” lands. Very annoying. Now that it’s got Civ IV’s border system (generated by your liberty bell production rate), you can more easily stake out a patch of dirt, removing perhaps my only major criticism of the original. Second is multiplayer. First one had no multiplayer, so that's a big plus right there.

HATED
Civilization IV: Colonization – We were told this would be a standalone title. A “total conversion” of Civilization IV. Its not. It’s not just based on the Civ IV engine, it’s built entirely on top of it, even down to the fact it reuses most of the interface, as well as some leaders, units and even sound effects from Civ IV. Bit of a cop-out, when there are enthusiastic mod-makers out there who do this kind of thing for free. Would have been nice to see a bit more of an effort put into making the game stand apart.

Brown Brown Brown – The biggest departure from the Civ IV engine is that, while Civ IV lets you game full-screen, menu buttons reduced to the periphery, for some reason ¼ of the screen in this game is occupied by an ugly brown menu system that could easily have been half the size, since it consists mostly of brown canvas and not, as you’d expect, buttons. An amateur mod wouldn’t have had something so awful in there, not quite sure why a retail product does.

Cold As Ice – The original was full of charm, the result of a passion for the history of the period and countless little touches. Your Continental Congress, for example, was represented as a literal congress, members seated within. The European management screen was literally a ship at the docks, your immigrants lined up on the jetty. This version has nothing but bland menu screens. It’s cold and lifeless, with these constantly-used menu screens looking more like a 1995 CD-ROM copy of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

War Of Inde-Oh We Lost Again – This new version seems a bit harder. Not the initial stages of the game, they’re just fine, but the revolutionary war aspect is a more daunting prospect, as your home monarch scales his army a little unfairly to keep ahead of your own. So for every soldier you build, the king will put 2-3 to stay ahead, resulting in a war where you’re unfairly outnumbered. Not only that, but in the original, upon declaring you were granted veteran units, which at least stood some chance against the European forces. You don’t get those here, and your rubbish militia stand little chance. It makes what should be the most enjoyable aspect of the game a chore, and is – perhaps damningly - a lot less fun than the war of independence scenario that comes free with Civ IV.

Look, don't get me wrong, there’s little that’s glaringly wrong with this version of Colonization. You've probably noticed most of the points above are fairly minor. If you’ve never played the original game, this is, new coat of paint aside, the same thing. Same goal, same mechanics. You’ll probably love it. But for me, a Colonization veteran, just replicating the nuts and bolts isn’t enough, and in choosing to remake the 1994 original they’re leaving this game wide open to comparison.

And, like most remakes, this is little but a facsimile of the original. It lacks the clarity of purpose, it lacks the little touches that made the original – and not this Civ IV-branded exercise – a truly unique, standalone product. If you’ve never played the original Colonization, try and track down a copy of it instead, because this feels more like a Civ IV mod than the standalone game a Colonization remake deserved.

Civilization IV: Colonization was developed by Firaxis, and published by 2K. Released on September 23 on PC. Priced at $30. Played to completion of war of independence on three difficulty settings.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Will this new direction bring all-night Civ sessions to the console crowd, or should it be put to bed early? Get the verdict from the reviewing public, after the jump.

Eurogamer
You can't play Civ Rev like Civ. The underlying systems are the same, if hugely (and at times brutally) simplified, but where its PC siblings could, to a certain extent, be played at your own pace, this sticks army ants in your bed. If you try to sleep, you'll be eaten alive. It keeps moving at all times, and if you don't move with it you won't get anywhere. That said, the lowest couple of difficulty settings are almost hilariously forgiving, but you'll very quickly want to graduate to a more challenging one. Even if you're specifically aiming for an economic, cultural or technological victory, be prepared to shed some blood along the way.

VideoGamer
There are drawbacks to the new approach. As we said the world map is small, but at times it feels way too small. It seems like an oversight that the game doesn't allow players to generate custom maps that are bigger. And despite the world being tiny, it's sometimes hard to get an overview of what's going on because the camera's distance to the action is fixed in place. It's kind of like only being able to play PES on the short camera view. Sometimes you need to switch it to wide in order to see more of the playing field.

1UP
If you're new to Civ's turn-based world, the abundance of information at the beginning of a game can be daunting — and even more so for your chosen civilization's different opening gambits. Revolution does a great job of appropriate hand-holding, with its array of cartoon advisers and "Civilopedia," which contains a wealth of strategic and operational knowledge, accessible at any time. So, when your first Settler unit establishes the capital city in the opening turns, you'll be in good shape for the Manifest Destiny that's to follow.

IGN
Civilization Revolution is a standout strategy console game that successfully straddles the line between hardcore and casual. But after spending many hours with the game, I found myself wanting just a bit more depth, which I suppose is the inherent pitfall of bringing one of PC gaming's deepest experiences to a console with both input and hardware limitations. True, I could get in and out of a game with relative ease, but I also didn't have the option to micromanage my workers (there are production settings, but they are quite basic) or embark on an epic campaign.

Kotaku
...the game can be too short, and too small, and in some cases a little rough, but what Firaxis needed to do if this game was to ultimately succeed was take that core Civilization experience – the discovery, the advancement, the combat, the diplomacy – and ensure that even a streamlined version of the game still had you up at 3 in the morning, telling yourself you'll just have "one more turn". Which it does.

Looks like many more sleepless nights are in order.

Trying to shoehorn an RTS like Command & Conquer onto a console is one thing, but Civilization? The fanciest bottle of good booze on PC strategy gaming's top shelf? It's an impossible task, some will say. Or one that even if it is possible, just shouldn't be done. Under any circumstances. Lest the ensuing offspring (see Civ II on the PS1) be such a crime of nature, such an abomination, that the good Lord himself descend from the heavens and strike down all involved in its creation.

That's what die-hard, myopic fans of the PC series will tell you, at any rate. And as one of those myself - having lost what must be thousands of hours to the series over the years – when a copy of Civilization Revolution for the PlayStation 3 turned up at my door, I greeted it with not just a signature, but a healthy dose of scepticism.

Loved:

It Works: Yes. Civilization on a console works. Nearly everything about the game – from controls to tech tree progression to unit and building production has seen radical changes (more on that to come), but at its heart, this is still Civilization. It still feels like Civilization, it still plays like Civilization.

Charm: This is a charming game. Not since the full-screen portraits of the very first Civilization has the game managed to present your opponents and advisors as actual, in-game characters as opposed to AI mouthpieces. Makes for a pleasant break from all the menu-clicking and world-gazing.

Streamlining: Many aspects of the game have been trimmed to work better on console, but turn out to be beneficial to the series as a whole. The tech tree and city building options have both been shrunk to more sensible, manageable sizes, while certain technologies and rewards are offered via in-game achievements (amassing a certain amount of gold, etc) instead of having to research/build them.

Controls/Menus: Wisely, 2K decided against simply mapping keyboard commands to the control pad. Instead, the game's menu and command system have been completely overhauled, and while it'll take a few hours for Civ veterans to come to grips with it, it suits the simplified, pared-down tone of the game well.

Hated:

Whoops: Some minor, yet necessary elements of the game seem to have been overlooked during the overhaul, such as the ability to auto-assign building orders in a city (meaning an endless crawl through build screens at the beginning of each turn towards the end of a game). Other parts seem downright wrong, particularly progression through the eras, which can have you entering modernity without having discovered the printing press.

Too Small: Concessions obviously had to be made considering the control scheme. One of the biggest is that the size of the world is locked. The map is tiny, and you only ever compete against five civilizations. Obviously this decision was made with the simpler control scheme (and console gaming habits) in mind, but at least some map customisation options would have been nice.

Too Fast: Because the map is so small, games are played out very quickly. Expect to play a full game in around 2-3 hours. It's great having that option, but I think a lot of people (and this goes back to "Too Small") would have preferred the option of a longer, more drawn-out experience.

Little Rough: Maybe the framerate's better on 360, but the PS3 version I played often slows to a crawl, something I would not expect of a game that looks worse than Civ IV (a game from 2005). As such, some of the most important parts of the game – like navigating the camera around the globe – are a lot slower than it should be.

Successfully porting the Civilization experience from the PC to consoles was always going to be an exercise in compromise. The entire package was never going to make the jump, so Firaxis' development has basically boiled down to the unenviable task of deciding which parts of the PC game got to stay, and which parts of the game had to either be modified or be thrown out entirely.

For the most part, they've made the right calls. Sure, the game can be too short, and too small, and in some cases a little rough, but what Firaxis needed to do if this game was to ultimately succeed was take that core Civilization experience – the discovery, the advancement, the combat, the diplomacy – and ensure that even a streamlined version of the game still had you up at 3 in the morning, telling yourself you'll just have "one more turn". Which it does.

Civilization Revolution was developed by Firaxis, published by 2K. Available on July 8 on PlayStation 3 (version played), Xbox 360, Nintendo DS. Played 5 single player games to completion (one on each difficulty). Unable to test multiplayer due to connection issues/lack of players.

He wouldn't confirm, of course, any plans for a Wii version of Civilization Revolution but his positive response should be encouraging, at least, to Civ fans.

He was also asked about the possibility of a Civ MMO:

I'm exploring lots of exciting ideas right now. A Civ MMO is a really intriguing idea and we're spending time thinking about how we could make it the fun addictive experience Civ players expect. Beyond that I have some new ideas that are quite different from games I've made in the past – and that's all I'm able to tell you right now. Stand by for more information in the near future!

10 Questions: Firaxis' Sid Meier [GameDaily]

It'll be available in Fall 08, and the announcement says the 1994 title is being rebuilt from the ground up to take advantage of the Civ IV engine, adding new graphics, interface and features.

You still lead one of four European countries in conquering the New World, dealing with natives and the other nations and all that wonderfully bloody business. Here's hoping for smallpox blankets? Full release and screens after the jump!

2K Games Announces Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization™ for Games for Windows®
Sid Meier's Classic Colonization is recreated as a new stand-alone title in the Civilization IV� universe

2K Games Announces Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization™ for Games for Windows®
Sid Meier's Classic Colonization is recreated as a new stand-alone title in the Civilization IV® universe

New York, NY – June 9, 2008 – 2K Games, a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO), announced today that Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization™, the next offering in the award-winning Civilization IV® universe, is currently in development at 2K's world-renowned Firaxis Games development studio. Conceived from the ground up to take advantage of the Civilization IV engine, Colonization will be available fall 2008 exclusively for Games for Windows®.

"We've received many requests from fans over the years to bring back Colonization and now seemed to be the perfect time to do that," said Sid Meier, director of creative development at Firaxis Games. "The Civilization IV engine provided a fantastic foundation for a new Colonization experience and allowed us to create something great for both new players and long time fans of the game."

In Colonization, players lead one of four European nations on a quest to conquer and rule the New World. Players will be challenged to guide their people from the oppressive motherland, discover the New World, and negotiate, trade and fight with both the natives and other nations as they acquire power and fight for freedom and independence.

As a complete reimagining of the 1994 classic, Colonization is a total conversion of Civilization IV that combines Civilization's addictive "just one more turn" gameplay with all-new graphics and features that add more depth to the franchise. New features, such as a brand-new interface, improved diplomacy options and the included modding tools ensure that Colonization will be the next great title from gaming's premier strategy game developer.

Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization for Games for Windows will be available fall 2008 and has not yet been rated by the ESRB. For more information, please visit www.civilization.com

* Colonization does not require the original Civilization IV product in order to be played.

Huge laughs from the audience. Damn there are a lot of dorks in the audience...present company included. Through the hour-long interview, Meier divulged all sorts of not-so-secret secrets, admitting his geek fetish of still programming his own titles. Here were some of our favorite things he said, organized for your easy digestion...

On Casual Games
"The word 'casual' is kind of a tough game to pin down...I'm not that interested in doing simple games, but, if you look at the budgets, games we made 10 or 15 years ago are 'casual' by that measure."

On Civilization 1 Addiction
"We hadn't made a game up to that point that had that addictive quality...kind of scary when we first realized...here was a portent of the future, how games could really become something people really wanted to spend a lot of time playing."

On Railroad Tycoon And Games Of Yore
"A lot of what we did was trigger your imagination...we just did a little bit, but the player added a lot of the experience...imaginations are still around today."

On Why He Programs
"I'm more willing to waste my time that somebody else's time."

On How You Design Civ
"The temptation with Civilization is to throw everything into it...computers can handle that, but humans can't."

On What He Plays (Tact Edition)
"I guess it's like, you do something all day, you want a change of pace. I haven't really played any other strategies."

On Vocation
"My hobbies are [in] music, but there's no money in music."

On The Era
"It's kind of a golden age, I think, for gaming."

On Civilization Revolution
"It's really kind of a designer's dream to repair a path...go back in time with a lot more knowledge and a lot more experience."

On Making An All-Encompassing, Career Highlight Game Like Spore
"No."

If you've got a hankering for some Canadian history and have a copy of Civ III, you can download the mod for free at the official HistoriCanada site. You can even score yourself some free MP3s of the game's soundtrack. Sorry, no Rush OR Bryan Adams. Michael McWhertor

2K donates Canada-specific Civ III mod to students [GameSpot]

Computer and Video Games has posted wan interview with Soren Johnson, the lead developer for Sid Meier's Civilization III & IV at Firaxis, in which he praises Nintendo for the innovation they've brought to the industry.

Obviously, there will always be a place for a traditional console like the 360 and the PS3, but people forget so often that videogames are capable of almost anything. No one's imagination is ever big enough to grasp all the new ways people can play electronically - and great rewards are waiting for companies that actively seek them out.

He also touches on some interesting points regarding PC games, including the fact that most major developers are console focused as of late, the potential of the Games for Windows label to make computer games more consumer friendly, and the importance of digital distribution for the future of PC gaming. It's an interesting peek at the gaming industry through the eyes of an accomplished insider. Michael Fahey

State of play: Firaxis [Computer and Video Games via Blues News]

Sid Meier is going to be inducted into the Walk of Game at the failing Metreon in San Francisco on March 16. While Meier is very much worthy of the honor, I think the truly interesting part of the evening will be the post induction Firaxis party which will detail the company's official 2006 game line-up.

EXCLUSIVE chat with Firaxis, the development team of Civilization IV!" [Xfire]

Take-Two Interactive opened their wallet and put Firaxis Games (makers of Sid Meier's Pirates! and the Civilization-series) into their pocket. 2K Games helped market Pirates and Civ IV so for Firaxis the move seems logical. What fruit will this new relationship bring? We'll see.

All of our fanfare and our excitement over Civilization IV is well documented. Finally, with just a simple exchange of cash for goods at your local game store, you can walk home with Civilization IV today. As sequels tend to be, this one is loaded with upgrades from the previous iterations. My favorite new addition are the new religions you can find - these can increase how much gold you earn. Religion makes you money? Who would've thought.

Sid Meier Answers Slashdot Queries
Civ IV Site Launches

In Firaxis upcoming, hugely anticipated, oh-my-god-buy-on-day-one title Civilization IV there's the usual basket of new features. Firaxis is promising unprecedented level detail, revamped doohickeys and extra wutzits. Sequels always do. On the feature list, however, the Takeover AI function for multiplayer stands out.

In multiplayer, if someone is going to leave the game, a player can turn on Takeover AI, this allows the computer to pick up where that player left off. So if the wife has a quick chore for you, your opponent can turn on Takeover AI while you're refinishing the bathroom floor and when you are ready, you can reassume control of your armies.

Takeover AI could be a prewview of AI that actually learns from players. The NFL 2k series experimented with adaptive AI by constructing unique player profiles based on playcalling tendencies. These profiles were supposed to replicate player behavior, but overall, they didn't function too well. Maybe Firaxis is looking at the future of multiplayer gaming, with AI that learns, adapts and scales according to who it is facing.

This all sounds very Terminator I'm going to see if John Connor is OK.

It doesn't get much better than new screenshots and information leaking to my email box about Sid Meier's Civilization IV. The contents of these latest tidbits concern Civ IV's deep customization and modification options.

Simply building an empire from the ground up wasn't enough this time around. Sid Meier and Firaxis built in-game toolsets that will allow players to customize almost every aspect of the game. Want to play God and reshape the world? Does a city need an additional river flowing to it for resources? Need to decide who the Aztecs should be at war with? It's all going to be customizable in Civilization IV.

Conquering the world was never really enough for me anyway, maybe playing God will be. More heavenly images after the jump.