Do not play Civilization V
Premise
In Civilization 5, you play the leader of one of the great nations of the world. It’s your job to ensure that your nation grows and prospers throughout the ages. To do this you’ll start out in the ancient age, settle a city, build workers, scout around the continents, interact with other states, and manage all aspects of the creation and maintenance of a thriving civilization. Players can choose to win through conquest, technology, diplomacy, culture, or by simply scoring the most points by a certain year.
In order to progress, the player needs to advance in the technology research tree. Each new technology will give access to new buildings, new improvements that workers can build, new ways to make sure that your military has the pointiest stick, and eventually new ages for the entire civilization. New technology is critical in creating improvements like roads that open up trade routes and allow your units to move faster across terrain. Depending on how you play, no technology is useless.
Each nation has different strengths, weaknesses, and unique units that set them apart. Unique units are essentially just units already in the tech tree but with special characteristics, strengths and abilities. Nations get their unique units at different points in history. For example, the Persians receive their Immortals (spearmen that heal fast and are extra effective against mounted units) very early on in the game, while the Americans only get access to their Minutemen after gunpowder has been researched. Don’t think that you’ll be throwing units away once they’re obsolete—they can be upgraded as technology advances and different types of resources become available to your nation. That means that your Horsemen will eventually be able to become Knights, and then Tanks.
Each city in your nation can grow as general communities or become specialized hubs. For example, creating buildings that your military adviser recommends will boost military unit output, while building lots of gold generating buildings will make that city very wealthy. Choosing the actual specialization comes with the special menu for that city. When choosing the buildings, pay careful attention to your advisers, your surrounding resources, and the needs of your city.
Besides other nations, players will also be able to interact with City-States and barbarian tribes. City-States act like regular nations, except that they’re not playing to win the game—they’re in it more to survive and benefit themselves without expanding. This is evident in the fact that they need to often by given tributes in order to keep them appeased. It also doesn’t hurt to agree on a mutual protection pact of some sort with them. City-States can be very useful to crafty players as they make their decisions. Be careful, though, because if you declare war on too many City-States they will all eventually turn on you for your aggressive actions.
Barbarians on the other hand do nothing by try to raid your city, kidnap workers and antagonize all around them. These camps appear in unsettled areas of a continent and emphasize why it is so important to ensure that all areas are covered so that they don’t pop up. After some time they can actually take to the seas and try to attack your units. They cannot be negotiated with, and only see reason at the end of a sword. Different bonuses will be given for raiding their encampments such as gold, workers, or even finding advanced weaponry that immediately upgrades the unit that destroys the camp.
Leaders will find that they will need to keep their citizens happy to keep everything moving smoothly. Different cities will demand various resources like furs, wine, ivory, or even just food. Players will need to deal with these problems accordingly, whether it means building extra farms around the city or building quarry to get a steady flow of marble coming into the city. In order to deliver the resources to the citizens in the exact city that is making the demands, roads will need to connect the various parts of your empire.
Keeping your citizens isn’t always this easy though. During times of war, you’ll eventually conquer other cities with your troops. When you take a city this way, the citizens in this city will not be happy. If you choose to leave the city as a puppet (which doesn’t allow you to order it to produce certain buildings or units) they will be relatively satiated. Annex the city and they’ll be upset, but you’ll be able to control that city’s production directly. Of course, sometimes the best thing to do is just raze the city to the ground.
If you capture a city that was captured before by another player, you also have the choice of liberating the city—which will become an immediate ally with you and your cause.
Different social policies will also help the player to gain an edge as some, like Commerce, will greatly aid overseas trading while Tradition will help with defense against invaders. The social policy system replaces older government and religious systems. Instead of switching from a democracy to a dictatorship, your civilization’s global bonuses depend on which policies you adopt. Some are mutually exclusive, which makes the choice all the more difficult; if your civilization values culture-boosting piety and army-building autocracy, it won’t be able to embrace science-boosting rationalism and settlement-spreading liberty.
Gameplay
The Civilization franchise has always been an extremely cerebral game in that each of your moves requires a lot of thought. In this way, it combines the balance of Starcraft, the versatility of Age of Empires and the strategy of Risk, since many players will take the military stance on finishing the game. The gameplay changes and is dependent on various factors: player experience, maps used, the amount of players in the game, technology tree progression, number of wonders held by the players, resources that are available, nations used, etc.
Perhaps the biggest single change to the gameplay is the fact that the map grid is no longer dominated by squares but instead by hexagons. This means that unit movement can be much more fluid and that attacks can happen on many more fronts than before. If you don’t think this is such a big change, think about a chess board and why the Queen (the new Hexagons) is so much more powerful than the Rook (the old squares). More movement means more strategy and opportunities for flanking, retreat, and setting up a front.
Single Player
In single player, players will be taking on a number of AI controlled nations who will vary in personality type based on many different variables. For example, if Catherine the Great of Russia approaches you and sees that your army is very measly then she will probably not want to be allies with you and will even threaten you at certain points. In my experience, Catherine continually did this to me until I sent a slew of Persian Immortals and Horsemen into her front doors in Moscow. The sad thing was that she only had one large city, opposed to my three large cities.
The AI isn’t particularly smart, and can sometimes be difficult to negotiate with. The diplomacy functions are limited to mutual defense/research pacts, trading resources, and waging war. Hopefully in a future version of the game, there will be other ways to negotiate and work out deals with other leaders vs having to give them lots of resources while they only give you a measly 75 gold per round.
Multiplayer
In multiplayer, your enemies are human beings, much smarter than the AI. Combat and movement animations are cut out in order to allow for speedier gameplay across networks. Players have around 40 seconds to complete their turns, with the length increasing as the game goes on. Additionally, different players will be able to take their turns simultaneously with up to eight players moving at once. More are possible but stability can be a concern. On my three-year-old PC, I had to set the game to its lowest graphic settings for best performance in multiplayer. Negotiating can be very interesting in multiplayer because you are dealing with real people vs an AI controlled player-
Graphics
Though the graphics aren’t amazing, they are still very good for what amounts to a depiction of a large, complicated board game. The visual aspects of the game, like unit animations and city details, can be totally eliminated in the strategic view which renders the game as a flat 2D board providing avatars/symbols for each type of unit or resource available. The latter will not always be appreciated by players but it can sure be useful at times.
Sounds
Sounds are similar to the older Civ games. The music is brilliantly composed and the sounds of war are better than games like Starcraft 2, spanning from the caveman-like weapons of the ancient age to the giant mechanized infantry o the future age. Perhaps the best part is the voice acting from the leaders of the various nations, of whom only George Washington and Elizabeth I speak English. Coupled with excellent diplomacy window animations, Civ 5 does an excellent job of making them very lifelike.
Replayability
Providing your computer can handle it, Civilization 5 will have near endless replayability. Even in the single player mode, players of the game will be satisfied constantly experimenting with different maps, different nations, and different starting ages. The game can teach players how to refine their strategy and city placement when facing real-life opposition. An open modding system is available to further customize the game, but at the time of this writing no significant Civilization 5 mods have been released.
Conclusions
Overall, Civilization 5 is a game that is bound to win awards later this year. The graphical updates along with the levels of versatility and balance that each nation gets will have veterans and noobs alike complaining less and playing more. City-States are perhaps the biggest new feature that make gameplay in the long-run quite interesting as alliances change throughout the ages. The addition of social policies also allow each nation to grow into their own unique world power and further give players no excuse to complain about balance factors. All problems with Civilization 5 are easily negligible except for the fact that the game is not available on Mac or iPad—which is a shock considering that I got it through Steam. Either way, players of all levels will enjoy the game and keep coming back to it.
