If you’ve been living under a rock and far away from civilized areas (We really need to stop these puns..), you may not have heard of the Civilization series of games. Touted as one of the most popular and successful franchises around, Civilization is renowned for its fantastic depth in building your own empire and reliving history your way. It’s a turn based strategy game that forces you to manage an empire, expand, deal with other opposing empires (whether diplomatically or with military action), and ultimately become the dominant civilization in the area. As you progress through the years, research new technologies and grow in economy and military power, the ages change and you’ll eventually turn from an axe-wielding barbarian to a (hopefully) sophisticated soldier of the modern era.
Combat has improved immensely.
None of these core mechanics have changed in Civilization V. The gameplay is tried and true and simply works, however Civilization V adds plenty of new and improved features to make management a lot easier and even more accessible than the previous title, Civilization IV. The most obvious improvement to us was definitely the games combat, which we personally found slightly lacking and slow in the previous titles. While combat in Civilization IV was based around unit stacking on tile movements, fortifying your cities with units and consistent tech upgrades and positioning, Civilization V removes tile stacking all together and focuses on pure positioning of units and flanking. Melee units in front of ranged units act as meat shields and covering fire for the ranged, so the other army has to first break through that line before they can hit on the ranged units. This adds a lot more strategy in the combat, rewarding players for playing things out cleverly rather than just stacking 500 tanks on one tile and overpowering.
Furthermore, cities don’t require a unit to be fortified within its walls to prevent it from being captured; instead they now have their own defence in the form of a long range catapult (which obviously evolves as the ages fly by) that can fend off and weaken units. Once the units do get close though, they have to whittle down the city with constant attacks before they can run in and either annex, burn or make as a puppet (puppet cities run on their own, so puppeting is good for when you want to lessen your work load). It’s all much more streamlined and less punishing than Civ IV, however we feel it works in favour for the game as it certainly enhances enjoyment and makes the game feel much more progressive in its play.
The visuals are a lot better too.
Apart from combat, there have also been several changes and new features added on the macro and economic side. Religion and belief has been removed entirely, which is either a good or bad thing depending on how you felt about it in Civilization IV, but it has been replaced with city states, which are neutral cities at the beginning of each game, but can quickly become your allies that supply you with specialised resources or units by gifting them gold, your own units and doing occasional missions for them. Each city state is different in that it could be more of a resourceful state or a militaristic, so their objectives are varied and can even oppose other city-states, so balancing things out can be a fair challenge.
Another rather significant change in Civilization V would be the Diplomacy area, which has taken some extreme make-overs both in functionality and in presentation. Conversing with world leaders from the game results in a full-screen conversation with a highly-detailed model of the leader that even speaks in their native tongue (we were amazed at Napoleon’s very French aura), and is now much more polished and streamlined so that diplomacy is easy and efficient. Trading technology is now non-existent in Civ V, and is instead replaced by Technology sharing, where two world leaders can put Gold into the research of a technology and then receive bonuses from the research.
Just one more turn..
There have been a lot of refinements, removals and additions in Civilization V, enough to argue that the game is no longer as ‘hard core’ as it used to be, though this same argument was brought up when Civilization IV was released. However, we see it mostly as a big upgrade and a much needed coat of polish to what is already a well established gameplay format that was starting to feel a little old. Accessibility has certainly been considered and the game may not be as hard core or demanding of your attention in every single area, but what is there is just as addictive as it ever was and is sure to please most Civilization fans. It’s visually very nice with little to no performance issues (though DirectX 11 mode can be a bit of a pain to run), has excellent production values particularly in its attention to detail in World Leaders, and also has a great musical score to back it up. So will Civilization V retain the series’ high standards and addictive nature? Considering we played till 5 in the morning on just the preview build alone, we’re probably going to go with a yes. And now to kill some time before the full version comes out..
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