Civilization V

Let’s face facts - when you’ve got a game as big as Civilization V you don’t let just one person play and review it. After all, a single game can easily last 12 hours - and playing one game of Civ V and reviewing it would be like cracking out a single map on Quake 3 and basing everything you know off that. Instead, regular Strat/Sim reviewer Rohan Harris(rwh) and I have tackled the monumental task of Civ V together - both separately and in multiplayer games - to give you the most comprehensive review we can.

Joab Gilroy (JG): The 4X genre is dying. It’s been relegated to the indie games division of development, when at one point in time it was the AAA darling of PC gaming. The complicated nature of the game has pushed the number of 4X games coming out each year down to one or two - when at one point it neared 10.

The blockbuster nature of games these days (along with the slowed growth of PC gaming) has seen these slow, methodical games pushed aside for the ADD nature of the StarCraft 2s of the strategy world.

Where today’s PC gamer looks to break the fabled 100 Actions Per Minute (APM) mark, the default setting for timed turns in Civilization V is 60 seconds - that is to say, at the very beginning of a Civ V you have only 60 seconds to complete your first turn. The longer the game goes, the longer that time allocation becomes.

Rohan Harris (RH): That’s quite a good representation of Civilization V’s design principle: streamlining the much-loved Civilization gameplay back to its core - cutting off the fat, and in the process actually making it more intricate than its predecessors.

By pruning or simplifying much of the feature-creep that’s happened in the 3 official sequels, 1 sidequel and numerous expansion packs, the game gives us a much closer feeling to that of the original game.

Even once your figurative (or literal) timer increases later on in the game, you don’t find yourself bogged down in quite so many micro-management tasks.

JG: It’s not so much simplification though - more a case of refinement. A lot of things have disappeared from the series and while some might be missed, the game is better for it. The removal of religion from the game, for example, might be seen by some as a ‘dumbing down’ of the series - or an effort to appease the politically correct - but really, the removal of religion to me is more than made up for in the revamping of the Social Policy system.

Now, instead of simply adopting a new policy and going with it, you’re able to adopt multiple policies, each one at the cost of culture. These policies accumulate as you play, allowing you to build a nation with an extremely powerful culture - providing you with a huge range of bonuses to your civilisation, but also allowing you to try for a Cultural Victory - after you’ve completed five separate policy trees.

The player has a lot more range now in how they choose to play their game - military is still a viable option, of course, but more than ever now a country can focus on its own needs without having to dedicate cities to military. This is thanks to that other huge addition to the game - City-States.

RH: City-states are an enormous change. Easily the most important addition to the series since its start, at least in terms of how it affects gameplay. They’re essentially Civilizations that never grow beyond the one city.

At first that doesn’t seem like much - just filler for the game world. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that they’re some of the most important things to ‘find’ in the game. Sure, you could wipe them out to get a free city, but that’s not quite so easy as it used to be. It takes much longer to properly absorb another city, and there are distinct disadvantages to steamrolling your way through the game like you might have in an earlier Civ game.

Sure, you can select social policies to help run a big, sprawling civ, but sometimes taking more cities - either enemies or city-states, are less beneficial than keeping them as friends or allies.

City-states, when friends with you, give bonuses depending on their ‘class’. For example, maritime city-states give you food bonuses - a hugely useful thing if you want to, say, found cities up in food-scarce but mining-heavy mountain-ranges.

Playing your cards right by befriending certain city-states can be a game-winning decision - and so can attacking city-states who are integral to an opponent’s economic health.

JG: It definitely adds a lot to the dynamic of the game - especially in multiplayer it can be extremely important to work out what kind of game plan your opponents are working with. Two expansion-driven Civs will inevitably collide, and being caught in the middle, reliant on rapidly falling City States can be very scary.

Still, expansions always been my game in Civ, and I often find myself just installing puppet governments in City States I can’t be bothered appeasing. When conquering cities in Civ V you have three options - Install a Puppet Regime, Annex or Raze the city. The first essentially turns the city into an AI driven City State which is always loyal to you. It will build whatever it likes, and you will reap the rewards - but if you need them to build a barracks so you can build the Heroic Epic wonder, you’ll just have to wait.

RH: Which is actually a really neat feature, because one thing puppet regimes don’t do is blow out the time taken to unlock your next social civic - normally, the ‘goal’ you need to hit to unlock something gets harder the more territory and the more cities make up your empire.

Indeed, cities now grow to use surrounding tiles slower than before - but you are allowed to ‘purchase’ the tiles around your city, right from the start. No more complaints that the two resources you desperately need are just one tile too far apart!

It does go to show the importance of the size of your empire in this, however, and why installing a puppet can be a very good decision.

JG: Annexing and Razing the city are fairly straight forward by comparison - Annexing is a straight coup, and Razing is burning the city to the ground. The decision between doing any of the three isn’t easy, and it relies on quite a few factors.

Your Civilisation usually takes a hit in happiness when you Annex a city - part of this is to do with the additional city/population (Civs get unhappy with too much of either, unless you push for the right Social Policies) and part of it is because you just injected a huge group of unhappy people into your population. To stop them from being unhappy you have to install a Courthouse before you can get them to do anything else - putting that city out of commission for usually about 15 turns.

When you Puppet them the only hit is the population and city number increase - you’ll still have unhappier people, but the population won’t all be a part of that number. You still get all the benefits of having them in your Civ, you just lack direct control.

When you raze a City you get a mad hit to your unhappiness for a turn or two... and then they’re gone. It’s like the city never existed - no territory, no city, no accidental gain, nothing. Unless you’re particularly vindictive you probably won’t raze many cities until near the end of a game where your Civ has had a long history of violence - when you own most of the world it’s illogical to do anything except with cities which have a lot to offer - better to wipe them out and move on.

RH: If you are that kind of vindictive wannabe-dictator, however, they do have some useful civics to help with that. There are civics to provide happiness when you garrison units in your cities (much like the old bonus for being a Monarchy in the previous game) and others to minimise the negative impact of having a huge sod-off civilization.

There are still limits, though. No matter what civics you select, more often than not bigger civilizations will end up being much slower to implement new social policies - which I think is a pretty good reflection of how things tend to be in real life. It’s usually the smaller nations in Western Europe and Scandinavia that seem the most progressive.

Another big difference in Civilization V when running wars is the way you raise armies. If you have the cash, you can buy units - one per turn, per city - without disrupting your construction queues of, say, that nice shiny new University or Hanging Gardens. This means that you don’t actually need to keep (and pay maintenance on) a standing army of any significant size as long as you don’t mind being a little slow to get going.

Complimenting this nicely, cities themselves are now capable of defending (and even firing at range when units get too close). No longer are you likely to get a city ‘taken’ by a single scout unit if you neglect to keep a unit defending the position. Sure, it can help to have an archer nearby or in the city proper, but you’re no longer obliged to do so to keep the barbarian hordes at bay.



JG: Becoming a militaristic nation is definitely a defining decision in Civ V - much more so than it ever really was before. If you conquer a nation before the Industrial Age it will take significant effort to make up the ground that route will rob you of come United Nations voting or the others, and that’s ignoring the impact suddenly increasing your civilization’s size has on your culture.

Still, combat is the biggest improvement to the game - in no small part thanks to the new hexagonal tile system - and the fact that military units can’t share hexes.

Military units can’t pile on top of each other - meaning the old military strategies are now defunct. It was previously too easy to just occupy one area with your forces, march through the middle of a nation and then effectively blitzkrieg your opponents - the defending force had no choice but to spread its military thin attempting to protect its cities.

Defending is so much easier now, actually - and it pays off in making the military aspect of the game that much more satisfying. As previously stated, cities can defend themselves without help, and as they get bigger and your civilization advances further. The larger the city’s defense value, the more effective their ranged attack becomes.

Hexes too force players to revise strategies - diagonal moving is out of the picture (in a sense) thanks to the new shape, which allows for more options in defence (again). If you take coastal territories you’re able to better control the movement of your opponents as well, by owning the coastal hexes and refusing open borders.

RH: The hexes certainly make quite a difference. There’s a reason they’re used for all serious wargames - they’re the most elegant shape for simulating movement that doesn’t give one ‘angle’ a benefit (moving diagonally moves more effective distance than straight on a square playing board).

Then there’s the bigger effect that terrain type has on combat. Previously, your choice of where to build a city made little difference defence-wise. You’d get a boost for building on a hill, but that was about it. Now the right city placement (and placement of a few defensive forts in some cases) can allow a city with just a few military units to withstand a prolonged siege from a superior force of units.

Ranged combat is now quite different. From the moment you discover the technology to develop archers, you’re in a complete different situation, combat-wise. The ability to have a row of archers behind your front-line fighters, perhaps on hills to give them that extra range, means that the choice of where to fight means more than it ever did before.

In short: the Civilization series has never been known for its complex and involving combat system, nor the wide array of tactics you could use in combat - one of my biggest complaints with the earlier titles was the way combat devolved into unit-stacks butting heads until somebody conceded.

That’s just been turned upside down - an experienced tactician can now take a smaller force and do incredible damage by knowing the strengths and weaknesses of his force, and the terrain he’s going to be fighting on. The latter is very important as the perks you take when units gain experience are now often terrain-specific - no more flat 10-20% strength increase when you level up. If you want your units to be good combatants on level terrain instead of difficult terrain, you need to pick that pretty early on.

This is a huge benefit for people who prefer to head toward a diplomatic or space victory, like me. A few decisive battles can make a violent nearby AI change his mind about fighting you, and has more than once resulted in, after just a few turns of fighting going noticeably my way, and have him begging for mercy.

If things go well enough, taking or sacking just one city can trigger an AI civilization to offer you gold, resources, and even a few of his cities just for peace.

That said, the AI isn’t exactly perfect.

JG: The AI is easily the biggest weakness in Civilization V - it has been five years since Civ IV, and yet we’re still dealing with the same extremely simple AI. Rival civilizations still follow a very particular set of habits - habits which are extremely un-human like.

Civs and City-States alike are bound by a system of wants (not needs) with what appears to be diminishing returns - the more you give them over time the less effect it will do. Aggressive civilizations will always push into your territory (Gandhi is still a land-grabbing prick in this game) and most of the time it comes down to luck - is the Civ closest to you Russia or Egypt, because Egypt expands while Russia just conquers.

Naturally all of this disappears in multiplayer - and multiplayer is mostly hits (with a few tiny misses).

RH: Multiplayer is a huge deal for lots of Civ players. While a good bunch will be happy playing single player, the ability to butt heads with your friends or other digital dictators on the internet is something that’s become the most important feature of the series.

Indeed, when Civilization 3 didn’t ship with multiplayer out of the box, it stopped a huge chunk of civ-players bothering to even buy it.

Well, it’s certainly included here, and with limited exception it’s everything you’d hope. All the usual features from Civ IV are there - auto-saves every few turns, the ability to reload games that are taking place over numerous nights, letting players join in and take over AIs at later points.

JG: The slight hitches in the multiplayer seem to be more from a lack of attention to how MP is progressing in other games. The big one is the inability to alter game settings from within the host menu - if you don’t choose an option upon creating (say, timed turns) you have to quit out and start over. It’s a goofy little hitch - no doubt something they’ll rectify quickly with a patch (or someone else will fix with a mod).

The other issue is the lack of a VOIP system in-game - we’re talking about a game with only a very small max player cap and a lengthy play-time (my longest single MP session was five hours, and we only got halfway through a game. And we were playing ‘quick’).

It’s a long time to go with no conversation - especially with the small attention spans of people these days. It’s all too easy to set-up Skype or Ventrillo to chat with your other players, so it’s not a huge loss, but it is a notable oversight.

RH: Well, I’d call it a minor oversight at most - the use of third-party tools is pretty standard now days, and they’re invariably more useful than the in-game stuff in most genres.

But in a turn-based strategy game like this, all you need is regular voice-chat from anything, even just steam, if you even want that. Sometimes, simply using the text interface the game provides may actually work better for the feel of a game - less xbox-live-style trash talk and more direct conversation between rulers.

Speaking of which, the interface is another thing worth noting. While it’s very serviceable (and the art-deco style is quite pretty) there are a few places where it doesn’t see quite as usable as the Civ IV one. It can take some players a bit more time to engage in such things as city management than it might have before - at least in terms of the micro-management of workers.

But these are very minor complaints on an otherwise spectacular revision of a great franchise.

JG: Absolutely - Civilization V is exactly what I wanted, exactly when I wanted it - well... almost. The lack of progress with the AI continues to be an anchor on the series, but on every other count the game is an outstanding experience, well worth the money.

RH: The developers have done a stand-up job of assuring the game will be a great investment. It may be ‘missing’ features (usually for the better) but not only is the gameplay a hundredfold more elegant than previous titles, but they’ve kept a huge emphasis on allowing fans to mod the game.

You don’t even need to leave the game to find mods any more - there’s a ‘mods’ option from the main menu which lets you browse the latest and greatest player-made addons to the game.

So if you’re still upset that they changed the strength of some random unit, or really wish they’d finally added in the flying, pink blonko-raptor as a buildable unit, just give it time - and if somebody else doesn’t make it, dive in and do it yourself.

JG: The 4X genre might be dying, but like Alexander the Great on King difficulty or higher you can bet your arse it won’t go down without a fight. And Civilization V is the shot in the arm the genre needs - a superbly refined, wonderfully crafted and beautifully evolved sequel - a PC game with outstanding scalability, playable with Direct X 11 graphics for those with beasts and with matte black Hexes as your fog of war for those playing on 3+ year old PCs.

It’s a title anyone with a PC can play and that anyone with a PC should own. Where it has stagnated in only one area, every other element of Civilization V is evolutionary for the series - and for its genre.

RH: Just one more turn?