Also, one specific early-game strategem nearly guarantees a win on its own: using the Great Library's free research advance to net the expensive Civil Service technology can double your growth rate, putting every other empire at a massive disadvantage. Every time I want to sell off some cotton to Montezuma, for instance, I have to manually count how many I'm collecting myself, how much I'm getting in trade from other nations, and how many I'm already trading away. The design focus on gold and resources is a fantastic approach that lends a lot of texture to diplomacy and opens up new possibilities for non-violent conflict – but it's a pain in the rear to fully take advantage of because the interface lacks a good way to track your incoming and outgoing resources and gold. And as for combat…swallow your pride and your love for the old stack of doom, ladies and gentlemen, because the one-unit-per-tile new model is infinitely superior in tactical and strategic options while decimating the amount of time it takes to manage an active war.
Religion's old role in spreading culture and affecting diplomacy is ably filled by the newly expanded role of gold, and creating a trading/financial powerhouse civilization is finally a viable path to victory. The change to research and revenue looks drastic on the surface, but your input has merely been moved from the commerce allocation slider to managing citizens and specialists within individual cities. The major changes to the Civ formula may be hard for veterans to accept at first, but most will quickly realize that they haven't lost any control over their empire's development. This is by far the most approachable game in the series, even edging out the stripped-down console entry Civilization Revolution, but Civ V's remarkable gains in accessibility have not come at the cost of strategic depth. Many others survived in altered forms, and I embrace the changes without exception. Others were scrapped entirely, like Civ IV's religion system. Some remained nearly unchanged, such as constructing improvements like farms and windmills on your land. The concept of land units being vulnerable and slow while embarked – the entire point of transport units – is perfectly replicated by Civ V's system of allowing armies to move across water on their own, albeit slowly and defenselessly.įiraxis applied this sort of critical examination to legacy systems across the board.
As your military got larger, managing this became extremely cumbersome. In previous games, you'd build separate transport units, load your armies onto them, and send them across the ocean to land on foreign shores. As a hardcore Civ player, I appreciate some of these ancillary aspects of the design, but the removal of all the fat is unquestionably Civ V's greatest accomplishment.Ī perfect example of this elegance of design is the new concept of "embarking" units and removal of transport ships. Your ultimate goal is yours to choose: Diplomatically unite the people of the world under your benign leadership, launch a viable colony ship into outer space, conquer the globe through force of arms, or create a glorious utopia through enlightened civility.Ĭiv V's genius lies in the way that Firaxis has aggressively chopped the number of decisions that a player has to make during the course of a game while taking away almost none of the meaningful ones. The land must still be worked, the primordial wilderness tamed through your people’s sweat and blood. Vast armies and armadas are again at your command, waging global war for conquest, defense, or resources with everything from spears to nukes. You still manage cities, developing them from rude collections of mud huts into gleaming modern metropolises. The heart of the Civilization fantasy is unchanged. It's also a delightfully fresh take on a formula that has been slowly iterated on for more than two decades. Civ V is a towering, AAA release with millions of dollars worth of polish in an era where questionably localized Russian titles are all that strategy gamers have to tide them over for months at a time. There is simply nothing comparable out there, not least because the strategy genre has become the province of indie developers and niche publishers. Imagine if Modern Warfare had come out alongside Quake II. Comparing Civilization V to contemporary strategy games is entirely pointless.