Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
BANGER · Strategy · 2007
Steam Deck UnsupportedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $9.99.
- Length
- 30.9h
- Value
- $0.32/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Runs on Windows, macOS.
Sid Meier's Civilization IV®: Beyond the Sword is the second expansion pack for Civilization IV - the 2005 PC Game of the Year that has become a worldwide hit.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $2.49, set in January 2013. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 40 in the 14 years tracked, about 11 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 12 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 11 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 70 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Sid Meier's Civilization® V ($29.99, scores 97) beats it on value, while it beats Sid Meier's Civilization® IV ($19.99, scores 87).
On this data it would still be a BANGER at $41.57. It costs $9.99.
Critics scored it 86. Players sit 10 points higher at 96 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
This site sampled 380 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 1 was written by a buyer who refunded it, sampled from reviews written April 2020 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 81 percent of the 125 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 3 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 30.9 hours; clearing it takes 86, which is 2.8 times the campaign.
Still 1.4K concurrent players, 19 years in.
Players
1,395 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I only play this for the Fall From Heaven 2 mod and that's pretty much all I will ever need. I can't even begin to tell you about the base game because the last time I played the base game was when I was maybe 11. But I can fully, 100% support the game with the FFH mod which you should absolutely try and play for yourself!
Check out Fall from Heaven 2 Make sure to install mods to the internal folder "Beyond the Sword/Beyond the Sword/Mods" There's a mod folder in the first BTS folder but it's the second you want.
Probably the best Civ game. Great strategic depth with lots of ways to play and win.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword scores 96/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/8800/civilization-iv-beyond-the-swordThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 1, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.