Civilization V Review

It's always great when you've been anticipating the arrival of that hot new installment to your favorite series; the excitement on the day of its release after years of long waiting while being teased and tantalized by that little bit of information the developers leak to the public or its obligatory booth at E3. The next Civilization game is definitely one of those titles and one that's been waiting in the wings for a while: 5 years. Promises of nifty hidden units, updated graphics, new combat system, hex-based grids, overhauled ui and a myriad of new features kept anticipation high for months and now finally we have Sid Meier's Civilization VPersonally, while I don't think that Civ 5 is necessarily a superior product to the previous installment Civ 4; I do think for the most part old Sid and Firaxis has made a step in the right direction. Immediately, I would say Civilization 5 does a lot of things right and fixes some age old difficulties with the system, but it also unfortunately suffers from some pretty big release flaws, essentially problems that are common to games in the same category on release.

Combat
By and large the most important thing that Civ 5 has done for the series is combat. Gone are the days that an enemy spearman would throw himself under my advancing tank, avoiding its crushing tracks and thrusting his spear into the soft underbelly and causing a catastrophic explosion killing the armored behemoth instantly, or that wood club wielding warrior from 3000 BC manages to club the fuel line of my low flying helicopter and causing it to explode. So far, technological difference in combat matters more then it has in the past. Those bronze age units you've had since the first 50 turns of the game are far less likely to succeed taking down your modern units, not so much because they are more advanced, but because city defenses can no longer be stacked ridiculously high turning him into a god-incarnate of destruction that can continue to put up a viable defense into the information age. You'd think that maybe this would make it difficult to defend cities but now cities have very powerful natural defenses that usually trump most units on strength for a good portion of the game which leaves you free to have your units actually, you know, doing something.

This is where the new combat system of Civ 5 gets good. What are those other things your units can be doing while your knee-deep in a quagmire of a war? First off, you may no longer stack more than one unit into the same hex which has two key effects: superior numbers doesn't guarantee victory since they can't all stack attack from the same hex and lining your units up to block and or deter your nemesis is intuitive since you can't stack them up. In addition to the usual counters, you can also get bonuses for flanking enemy units or having allied units sitting in an adjacent hex which all-the-more stresses the importance of good positioning. In past Civ games while positioning did have an effect on combat such as what terrain you were standing in it was always about concrete numbers but where you actually were wasn't such a big deal and now positioning is everything. Positioning also determines how you'll use the new ranged units in Civ V. Keeping your ranged units, who are usually vulnerable to melee, protected behind your battle line is important to ensuring they are causing maximum damage instead of dying after two turns of conflict.

The new combat system though is also at the center of what may be Civ V's biggest flaw, the AI. With this new and robust combat system in place the computer AI is being found somewhat lacking, so while online in multi-player players will be continuing to outwit each other with new and creative tactics the people who stick mostly to single player will be finding themselves very disappointed with the computer AI. The AI of Civ V seems to not really use the unit counters in the game or take advantage of positional benefits. Mistakes such as: sending the archers out in front of warriors when we were at war, targeting a fresh barbarian unit with ranged attacks that entered its city borders instead of my horde surrounding the city, offering a peace ridiculously good peace settlement of upfront payment, continual payment, and two resources (them paying me) -after- I lost all my units attacking its city and it had me outnumbered two to one. The heart of the problem probably lies in the fact that Firaxis is still using a mostly similar style of AI for combat that it did with previous games; the only difference is that its no longer effective with the lack of stack attack since having the economic advantage means the AI can flood you with units but doesn't really take advantage of having superior numbers. I also suspect because the AI for combat, diplomacy, and economy is supposed to be handled separately, the right hand doesn't talk to the let if you will, and while the diplomacy and economy ai knows that they are at war they don't build or negotiate properly for a wartime civ. If you're the aggressive-type who is practically never in peacetime and loves to play multiplayer or the builder-type who avoids war like the plague in any format, you probably won't care about how much the AI falls short.

Some other less important bits
On the non-combat changes end of things, Civ V removed the old cultural border/influence system and replaced it with a system where your accumulation of culture points allows you to select permanent bonuses much like the civic/social engineering system of previous games. There is no longer any culture flipping of cities or cultural borders; culture victory involves adopting a certain number of social policies. The classic city radius is also gone instead you get an irregularly shaped city radius which you can expand by buying new tiles around the city for gold which really impacts gameplay allowing you to easily play with fewer cities than you normally might in previous iterations. A variety of leaderhead choices with common traits has been replaced with giving each civ a particular leader with an exclusive feature which changes the game play from the previous game slightly by encouraging you to choose a civ which plays to your style best rather than selecting a civ and choosing among the leader heads to suit your style.

One more big flaw
Another unfortunate but glaring flaw of Civ 5 is the lack of information about other civilizations. You tell what resources they have by trading, you know what era they are in if you've met them because it tells you when other civs reach a certain era, and you maybe can tell how they feel about you based on leader animations, but gone are concrete lists of what techs they have, resources they have, relations with other civilizations and etc. This is hugely annoying, not so much that your denied the information but that they don't give you many options to discover it at some point during the game. The new graphics and graphic themes are, however, very nice. The increase to the graphical representation of unit numbers and seamless terrain really do a lot to increase immersion.

Who should buy it
I feel that anyone who likes a strategy game can buy this one. If you're a old fan of Civ you'll enjoy the revamped combat system and the new culture system while if you're new to the series the changes to the interface and game play make it the easiest of any civ game to get into besides perhaps Civilization: Revolution.

Final Thoughts
The two biggest flaws in Civ V, AI and diplomacy interface, I fully expect they'll fix it with a patch at some point but really takes the experience down a bit at launch, but overall I like the game and look forward to see where they go with it in the future and I think it retains its value as an investment of your time and money.