Civilization Revolution worked,

So is Civilization 5 a game we’d want for the 360?

And what’s new in the franchise?

by ChiefJimbolaya

© 2010 Aaron Klein

You start with a tiny group of settlers and dreams of a global empire. How you get there is up to you. Do you grab pointy sticks and conquer your neighbors?

Do you rapidly expand to control strategic resources in the hillsides? Do you come to the aid of neighboring city states when they are being bullied by your rivals? Do you construct libraries and universities to learn the secrets of space travel?

In Civilization you chronicle the story of your own empire.

Civilization is known as a 4X game. The Xs stand for the general tactics used to win the game, namely to explore the map, expand to new territory, exploit raw materials and exterminate the opposition. Its turn-based gameplay emphasizes strategy over twitch reflexes.

• Civilization V Addict

All games in the Civilization series have the same core rules and gameplay, but each iteration tweaks peripheral rules and gussies up the window dressing, sometimes to the dismay of long-time players.

So for this review I will give newcomers a feel for the game before offering a more nuanced critique for the Civ veterans. If you are familiar with the franchise, feel free to skip down to the “nitty gritty” below.

A brief introduction to Civilization

Like I was saying earlier, you start with a settler which you can use to build a city. Every tile of the map provides a mix of food, production and gold, dependent on the biome and any improvements you’ve built.

Food is used for population growth and results in more citizens to work additional tiles, and production is used to construct buildings and military units.

Citizens also produce science points, helping your society advance from the stone age to the space age by researching new technologies which allow new buildings, units and resources to be exploited.

But you’re not alone.

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Some of history’s most influential leaders are competing to beat you to one of several victory conditions. You can win the game by conquering and controlling the capitals of all your rivals, becoming a cultural powerhouse, being the first to build a star-colonizing spaceship, or by being elected as leader of the United Nations.

Every rival leader has personality traits that tend to lead them to play a certain way. For example, Julius Caesar and Montezuma tend to try for military victories while Gandhi and Ramesses II might take more peaceful approaches.

And you don’t necessarily have to work against rival leaders. You can trade strategic resources with them to improve relationships, enter research and defensive pacts with them, conspire to undermine a third rival and agree to extend open borders to units.

There is no single-player story mode in Civilization. Every game is played on a new map and competition to claim new lands and resources dominate the strategy, making every game different. Since you direct your entire experience, the resulting games are engrossing. You create your own objectives and the fun comes from formulating your own plan to meet them.

The fact that the series has had five core entries over the span of nearly 20 years speaks to the strength of the core gameplay. But despite wild critical success, the slower-moving, strategic Civilization titles have never enjoyed the commercial success of the high profile first-person shooters.

So is Civilization 5 for me?

That’s the real question. While Civilization 5 takes some steps to make the series more accessible to the masses, it still is not for everybody. First off, it generally requires a massive time investment.

It is perfectly normal to be up into the wee hours of the morning for “just one more turn.” A game on the “quick” setting can take eight or more hours to complete. Epic and Marathon matches will have you playing for days.

The freedom afforded the player to manage his empire is one of the series’ greatest strengths, but at the same time it is a barrier to entry for less patient players.

Firaxis and Sid Meier experimented with making the series more accessible with the release of Civilization Revolution on the consoles a couple years ago.

While it was easy to be skeptical that such a complex game could make the move from a mouse and keyboard to the controller, Civilization Revolution found a way to maintain strong strategy elements while easing the learning curve. The shift expanded the game’s appeal and exposed thousands of new players to the franchise.

If you enjoyed Civilization Revolution as your introduction to the franchise, you might want to check out Civilization 5. Especially if you were hungry for a little more depth and control in managing your empire.

If you have tried previous Civilization games, but thought they were too complicated, Civilization 5 has vastly simplified the interface and streamlined gameplay make it more accessible.

But if you are a Civilization veteran, your reaction to Civilization 5 will depend on how the changes affect your playing style.

Down to the nitty gritty

Civilization 5 is a great game. Despite my many, small gripes, I can’t stop playing it.

Seriously… I’ve been a zombie at work for two weeks.

Compared to past iterations, Civilization 5 feels unfinished. Maybe unfinished is the wrong word… it feels… unadorned.

While the developers made a number of awesome alterations, which I’ll go over below, they also left some nuanced aspects out of the game, which I’ll also go over, even further below. The result is a game that feels new, yet undoes some strategic layers that had been implemented in previous titles in the series.

The changes to Civilization 5 reflect the changing gaming public. Casual gamers are becoming more present in the market, and hardcore, legacy games are trying to walk the tightrope of attracting new players and remaining true to their core fans.

Civ5 might have fallen off the tightrope on the side of casual gamers, which would have suited inclusion on the 360 if they had wanted.

The excuse I’ve made up for the developers is that they felt comfortable taking some of the complexities out of the core game knowing they would reinstall certain aspects through expansion packs to appease hardcore fans.

At least I hope so, because I want to be appeased! Cynics will say that this exploits the franchise’s hardcore fans and their willingness to shell out more money for an expansion. But as plans for additional content are not yet revealed, this is pure speculation.

But I hope I am right here, because it’s hard not to feel like Civilization took a couple steps back in areas important to longtime fans while making progress in accessibility and graphics.

• Civilization V Walkthrough and Strategies

What’s New?

• The end of “Stacks of Doom.”

One of the most earth-shattering changes from previous games was the switch to a hex-based map that allows only one unit-per-tile.

The hexes allow for a more realistic-looking map, and the end of unit stacking draws fighting into the countryside and away from the city sieges. Along with this comes ranged attacks, so archers, cannons and ships can bombard enemies from behind melee troops on the front line.

Cities have hitpoints, and are able to defend themselves for a while until you can send reinforcements. These are positive changes, as they add a strategic element to warfare beyond the number of units in your stack.

• New user interface and empire management system.

The user interface has been minimized so as to be less intimidating, while still providing enough information to govern. But now instead of using a slider to decide how resources are allocated between science, gold reserves and culture, those decisions take more long term planning.

The relationship between gold, science, happiness and culture is determined by what buildings you build in each city. Buildings (and units for that matter) have a per-turn maintenance cost. So before building a structure, you have to decide if its benefits are worth the equivalent maintenance cost.

If its not, there is no way to demolish expensive buildings. The absence of a slider means that your civilization is less agile  to stockpile gold or spend gold reserves on research through deficit spending.

Focusing on gold or science production now has to be done by managing the citizens inside your cities. The resulting dynamic requires more conscientious building construction, and longer-term planning.

• Unit embarkation.

RIP Transport ships, I’ve always hated you. Now land units automatically turn into transport ships when they enter water squares after you research the appropriate technology.

Removing the logistical burden of getting your troops to foreign fronts makes fighting intercontinental wars and exploration much easier. This is a more than

• The rise of city states.

City states are single-city empires that are not competing to win the game. They exist as pawns that can be attacked or befriended. It is often more beneficial to become friends with them, as they dole out resources that help your empire.

While their inclusion is complimentary to the game, interaction with them is light. You can either spend gold or fulfill missions to gain their favor. But since the favor erodes fairly quickly, the cost of starting a war or a gift of gold can outweigh the benefit of a temporary increase to culture or food.

City states are a good idea that don’t feel completely hashed out for.

• Limited resources.

Certain units use up strategic resources, meaning if you want to field a large army of swordsmen, you will need to find multiple sources of iron.

The limitation adds an extra strategic layer that is most welcome.

• Happiness.

Happiness is handled in a way that is much more easy to understand and affect, but the simplification makes things much less realistic. Instead of each city having its own happiness level, happiness is calculated across your entire civilization.

So building a coliseum in one city will raise happiness across the empire. Excess happiness points speed along golden ages for you civilization, while negative happiness points hurt food production and even unit strength.

Luxury resources and certain buildings can increase happiness, while population size and the number of cities are the main factors in reducing it. So managing happiness is an act of managing the cost of happiness-related buildings with the size of your empire.

Gone are the days when strong units were required to repress a revolt in a large city, or of having a city break away and become rebels.

While managing happiness was always vague and kind of frustrating in previous civilization games, the new system is so simple that it basically eliminates a layer of strategy.

• Puppet States.

They are aiding and abetting militaristic civilizations by preventing their conquests from effecting civilization-wide happiness. When conquering an enemy city, you have the choice between razing the city, annexation, or installing a puppet governor.

A puppet state does not contribute to unhappiness, but it does contribute to civilization-wide culture and science, but you can’t control what is built inside or what tiles are worked by its citizens.

When the puppet governor begins bleeding your treasury by building unnecessary, expensive buildings, it is time to annex it, at which point the occupied city generates excess unhappiness until a courthouse is built.

The system allows militaristic civilizations to conquest city after city without having to worry about conquered cities flipping, or their own civilization’s happiness. It’s a handy tool, but maybe favors militaristic civilizations a little too much, as they’re often the only ones left standing near the end of a game.

• Civilization V Gameplay

What is missed?

• Wonders.

They are still in the game, but many of them do not offer significant enough benefits to justify the construction time.

Some only add a measly one point each towards culture and great people generation.

When they are completed, their effects are often not immediately felt. They just feel underwhelming.

• Religion.

It’s non-existent in this game after a successful unveiling in the previous title. Religion was a tool that could shape diplomacy and bestow massive benefits to those who founded one.

It would be the impetus for wars, peace and alliances, and had to be accounted for in planning. Its absence removes layers of realism and strategy from the game.

• Culture.

It is less useful. While it still helps your city grow its borders, high culture will not flip enemy cities or significantly push back a rival’s border.

It used to be another passive-aggressive tool for pacifists. Now it’s usefulness is restrained to the pursuit of a cultural victory. This further imbalances the game in favor of warmongers.

• Governments.

In Civ 5 you spend culture points on social policies that boost various aspects of resource gathering and military power, among other things. But since they stack on top of each other, you never have to choose between two of them.

And since each policy has a positive effect, you never have to weigh the pros and cons of your selection against your situation and goals. There’s no wrong answer. The number of culture points needed to unlock new policies increases drastically depending on how many cities you control, making it more difficult for large empires to progress.

While it makes sense that large empires would be slow to enact social change (represented by a period of anarchy in past games), it does not make sense that change happens fast in prehistory and slowly in modern times (when your empire has grown by colonization and conquest).

The new system replaces a strategic choice with an idiot-proof one.

• The sweetness of the victory.

A lot of time is invested into each game of Civ. When a match ends, you need some time to unwind and reflect on your virtual accomplishments. Civilization 4 was great at this. It treated you to a short video based on your victory type.

It offered a bevy of information about your civilization in graphs, charts and a timeline showing empire growth on a map. Some data was even saved so you could revisit it later and compare matches. Not Civilization 5.

When a game of Civ 5 ends you are notified with a picture and an option to return to the main menu. Deflating.

• The sense of awe.

It is an intangible factor that draws on the depth of a game, and one that is weaker in Civ 5 compared to past games.

The reduction in ways to influence the world around you narrow the path to victory.

In Conclusion…

Congratulations! If you made it this far in my review, I will assume you are a Civilization veteran. You probably already made the decision to buy this game.

If you’re not happy with the game, I suggest playing it a little longer to see how it grows on you.

Civilization 5 is different. I went through three stages (awe, disgust, acceptance) of reaction before finally concluding that Civ 5 is a positive, step forward for the franchise.

Many of the omissions are ancillary, and only require an alteration to your strategies.

What is left is unmistakingly Civilization.

Steal It? YES!

© 2010 Aaron Klein

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