Civilization V Review

The Civilization series has been a staple for PC gaming for two decades. At it's fifth iteration, Civilization V aims to continue the addictive, deep strategic gameplay that has captured the hearts and minds(as well as the time) of countless civilization fanatics. Civilization V announced just February of this year(nice change of pace to have a game released under a year the game was announced), introduces some big changes that makes it more of a reboot rather than just a graphical update. Lots of Civilization fans will be torn simply because of the fact that it completely reworks things they've become familiar with in Civ IV. Sometimes change is good.

As a testament to the boldness of its design, Civ V drops square tiles for hexes. This makes the maps look more natural and as I have covered in my Civ V notes, it reduces movement to 6 directions. I'm not going to waste my time going through the obvious things in Civ V, so let me get straight to the parts that I think make this a really good game. I'll start with how happiness now changes how you will play civilization.

No more individual city grinding to a halt because of unhappiness, instead unhappiness punishes your entire empire. To me, it feels like Firaxis has turned happiness into a resource. Happiness is still affected by things like city size, luxury resources you have, and in Civ V, the number of cities you own. The bigger your empire, the more unhappy your empire becomes. This makes having small empires more viable in Civ V. If unhappiness gets really bad, it penalises your army and even production in all cities.

To make a happy population you will have to build happy buildings(building that create happiness such as a theatre or circus) or trade excess luxury resources you have to other civilizations who have resources you don’t have. Like in Civ IV, each luxury resource type gives you one happiness and having extras of one type of resource just adds to your bargaining chips in diplomacy. You’ll constantly have to see if you have excess happiness(+5 happiness or so) before you declare a war so that you can annex or capture cities(you can make them puppets and take less unhappiness but give up the ability to manage the city) without crippling your empire.

You’d also(as a large empire) be more hesitant to declare wars on your major trade partners(if you get luxury resources from them) as a war will stop supply of luxury resources. You’d get hit with unhappiness and be disadvantaged. Civilization V certainly seems to put a downer for huge empires and makes it possible for smaller empires to win the game. That's not to say you can’t win as a large empire, you can, but you’ll have to have a solid strategy of offsetting the unhappiness from the very beginning.

Much of your strategy to offset unhappiness will be centred around building these happy buildings(circus, theatre etc) that will cost quite a bit of gold to maintain. This makes happiness and gold closely tied to one another. Things cost a lot more in Civ V and you’ll need to start taking into account the cost of running(roads cost gold to maintain now) your civilization. You can use gold to purchase units and even buildings right from the start of the game(you can even purchase tiles in your city screen that is outside your border). Due to the increase in maintenance costs, gold acquisition has become a necessity, which is unlike Civ IV where gold was never required all the time(you focused on what you needed for your strategy for winning) or at least never was as vital. In Civ V, you’ll always need to have gold and you constantly need to ‘balance the account’ and keep things in the black.

While they’ve upped the ante on the importance of gold, it comes to me as a surprise that Firaxis has ‘nerfed’ diplomacy. Diplomacy in Civilization V is vague and limited. You hardly know what the other AI leaders think about you, why they did what they did, and why they rejected what looks like a fair offer from you. It is all very unclear and mysterious as the internal logic and numbers under the hood are hidden from the player. Which I found to be odd since Civilization IV did a great job of showing you all the little details of why an AI civilization was friendly or hostile towards you. It seems Firaxis went with the approach of making the AI look more human and hints at you by the leaders facial expressions and choice of words(which is realistic but lets face it, Civ is a game).

In terms of new diplomatic options, there’s pacts of cooperation(which just improves relations), defensive pacts, and research agreements(you pay 250 gold and you and the AI faction gets a technology that each side doesn’t have when the agreement expires). They’ve removed world map trading(you’ll have to explore the entire world this time), trading technology(the only option is research agreements), and the biggest omission to me, they removed the ability to inquire what the AI thought about another AI faction.

Now you’ll have to guess what the AI thinks about each other based on their actions(whether they’ve signed pacts or declared war). To figure all this out, you’ll have to go into the diplomacy overview screen and look at their diplomatic history. I’ve always enjoyed aligning myself to the AI leader that was enemies with my enemies in Civ IV. They’ve just made it more tedious and harder for me to figure all of this out(you eventually will, but why they force you into this guessing game I have no idea). It also doesn’t help that they don’t show you what the AI leaders thought about you(the detailed tooltip telling you why a faction feel that way towards you is non existent in civ V). It’s a shame really since I love the new diplomacy screen and viewing the leaders in their setting.

To complicate matters for you in Civ V, independent city states are now added into the game. These are cities that you can ally with to give you a bonus. They have their own traits that will give you unique bonuses, for example, militaristic city states will gift you units when allied. On top of that, they also quite frequently give you quests to do. Completing these quests will improve your relations with them(other than gifting them gold , this is the other way to improve relations with them) and you might just get them as an ally. I found that the city states were quite annoying after a while with their constant pleas for help to complete these quests. But they add a nice dynamic to the game that may play into your relations with other nations. Wars might break out because of a city state as another nation was allied to it or guaranteeing independence of it.
 
Resources in Civ V are now divided into luxury and strategic resources. Luxury resources are the ones that give your population one happiness and strategic resources are resources that allow you to build armies and certain buildings. Strategic resources such as iron, horses, uranium, oil are limited now. You don’t get to build countless number of swordsmen(if you produce two iron, you can only produce two swordsmen). There’s some interesting strategic decisions players will have to make due to scarcity of resources. If you lack iron or uranium and your neighbour has these resources, you might even declare war just to get the city that will give you that resource. Denying your enemy strategic resource like iron will in effect stop them from training swordsmen and if they have swordsmen on the field, they will fight with a significant penalty. Literally the new change has added the ‘strategy’ in resources. 

Civilization V introduces social policies as a replacement to the old civics system in Civ IV. It’s basically a tech tree with multiple branches which gives you bonuses if you chose to unlock them. Much of your decision on what social policy tree to adopt will depend on your set strategy for that game. Honour gives bonuses to your army, rationalism on science, piety on happiness, liberty on happiness of a large empire and so on. You can adopt a new social policy every time your culture grows to a certain amount(so the more cultural civs will be able to adopt social policies faster).

You start out with the option of three social policies and you can unlock others when you reach the right era for that policy. These social policies are how you define your empire/nation and can(often is) turn to be a key factor in your victory in a Civ V game. I felt the social policy system were an interesting addition that gives more options for your to fine tune and customise yourr empire as even under a certain tree, there are branches of other type of bonuses. NOTE: You can change social policies that you have selected, but you will have to pay a hefty penalty.

The rethinking of how combat works is perhaps my favourite new system in Civilization V. Hexes together with one unit per hex(no stacking) give Civ V a more tactical feel to unit management that was not present in all the previous Civilization games. You will now have to think where you are going to place defenders and how to maneuver units around the terrain in an attack(keep in mind there is now ranged attack and units like archers can attack over 2 hexes). The terrain plays a much bigger role in your tactics and you could(to a certain extent) hold out against a stronger force with careful positioning of troops. Use isthmuses as natural chokepoints, plan where to build forts or use great generals to boost the effectiveness of your troops(they give a bonus to troops near them). You could spend hours strategising your attack or defensive plan and watching it work flawlessly(or not so flawlessly) is extremely satisfying. Which leads to my next point…   

Artificial intelligence in Civilization V has issues with the new tactical elements. AI nations are poor in combat as they will often attack your firmly entrenched position(on top of a fort etc). This isn’t so much of an issue as I don’t expect a super smart realistic AI. It wouldn’t be much fun if the AI is flawless in its tactical movements. There should be some element of randomness in its tactical decision making(with the AI making some good and bad tactical maneuvers). The biggest problem for the AI however is in the naval game. The AI has no idea how to protect troops embarked in the sea(units in Civ V automatically turn into ships, troops transports have become irrelevant), since units embarked in the ocean are super weak, you could slaughter them all out in the ocean. It is regrettable that Firaxis didn’t polish this element of the game especially when there is a much stronger emphasis on the tactical combat in this game and the combat system they’ve built is brilliant.
 

I have to give big props to Firaxis for being bold in rewriting the rules of this series, especially in a time when sequels often mean just prettier graphics and more of the same gameplay. Civ V breaks apart the series and is reworked from scratch(they chose not to follow through on previous design ideas), and it certainly feels that way. While any studio could have easily ruined a great series by trying something new(read Prince of Persia), Firaxis nails the new mechanics down very well. It’s not perfect, and its minor faults with the AI and diplomacy withholds it from being a classic(which I hope will get rectified in patches), but Civilization V is a very enjoyable and addictive game. It still lives up to the pedigree of the Civilization series. Just one more turn…


Pros:

• Still as addictive as ever
• Changes to combat add more tactical gameplay & depth
• Very clean user interface
• Excellent tutorials
• The addition of advisor and pop up hints throughout the game make this very easy to pick up and play for newcomers
• Pretty graphics
• The pace of a standard game feels perfect
• Gold is more important this time as it should be
• The first Civilization game that will make you scan the terrain to build defenses and plan your military strategy
• Military units now feel more realistic as seige weapons are important for attacking cities, pikemen counter cavalry, and ranged archers are placed behind you main infantry for ranged attacks
• Has the best modding tools for any game out there

Cons:

• Weak tactical AI. Needs more work
• Diplomacy is a bag of mystery. Not transparent

Verdict : Schedule 1 Controlled Substance