Sid Meier's Civilization V

I don't know why I wanted to get Civilization 5, but eventually the game of the year edition came around on sale and I figured I'd pick it up. I had never played a Civ game before, which, considering there are people that are very attached to specific versions of the game, will drastically impact the outcome of this review, as I lack those preferences, or even the knowledge of the way the game has been done in the past.

RTSs, RPGs, and regular old strategy games generally aren't my forte, but I have delved into each in the past. Still, I wasn't quite prepared for just what Civ is. It is a far grander game in scope than any other type of strategy game I've played before, and that's because it's really an amalgam of different ideas. There is what is essentially a talent tree in the form of major scientific advancements, such as mathematics, sailing, flight, or atomic theory, each of which unlocks some useful new buildables or other nice options. Then there is the whole territorial expansion portion, where you increase your reach by growing your civilization, providing different structures that will keep your budding population happy, securing food, and improving tiles so you get more resources out of them. And, ultimately, Civ 5 is a turned based war game, wherein you'll need to learn about units strengths and weaknesses, upgrade units that are successful in battle, and bring the siege to enemy cities.

After this game I adopted a new rule of thumb: Any game that has a help menu that can legitimately refer to itself as encyclopedic should be avoided for complexity reasons.

Civilization 5 is a turn based strategy game wherein, according to the settings of the map, you take a civilization from roaming settlers all the way to futuristic superpower. You'll face rival civilizations, city-states whose favor you can purchase, and roaming bands of barbarians. You'll have to take your civilization through history, researching new technologies like steel so that you can forge better soldiers or physics so you can build trebuchets to destroy enemy defenses, advancing from the ancient era, to the classical, to the medieval, and continuing until you progress through the modern era and ultimately arrive in the future, assuming you survive that long. Treaties, betrayals, war, and giant death robots - the game is human history summed up.

Generally a match begins by providing you with a group of settlers and some warriors to defend them. After you decide upon a suitable location to found your civilization, taking into account things like the defensive bonuses of the surrounding terrain, proximity of important resources, and the respective benefits of locating near certain geological features such as ocean, river, or desert, you direct those settlers to establish your first city. From then on, during each turn, you'll take your units out to explore this new world, uncovering wonders, find ruins with delicious treasures, or stumbling upon a band a roving barbarians. You'll also be cranking out workers to improve the tiles within your territory, or buildings that will grant you bonuses to one of the various stats in the game, such as a city's production, science, or happiness. Oddly enough, that pretty much sums up the entirety of the game, though it is far from that simple.

During each turn you must give every unit an order, though some units you can automate, such as workers.

Of course there is more, that's just the basic premise. Units are limited in what they can do during a given turn by how far they can move, as determined by the roughness of the terrain, or the presence of things like railroads or streets. You can only move so far before all your other options, such a fortifying in anticipation of an attack, or to heal, are locked out. Essentially, each unit gets a certain number of actions per turn, and movement is one way to burn through it. Another is by attacking, and there is a whole defensive/offensive bonus system for your military units, which accounts for everything besides worker units and settlers, based on where units stand. Attacking someone in a fortified position on a hill is generally a bad idea for a melee unit, while attacking an unprepared unit on open ground is great. Since, as I'll explain later, Civ 5 generally devolves into a war game, you'll really want to get to know all those rules.

When you're not involved in combat, you'll be focused on things like upgrading tiles within your territory, building improvements such as farms on grassland to increase food, or mines on hills to increase production, all of which impacts the city associated with that tile, by upping it's production so you can build new units, buildings, or world wonders that have special bonuses faster, or providing more food to feed your growing citizenry. Additionally, there are special resources you'll want to exploit, such as silk or marble, that require specific upgrades, in this example a plantation or mine respectively, and provide bonuses to happiness or can be used to trade, rather than directly impacting base stats like production. Strategic resources are far more important to exploit, like oil, iron, or uranium, as those are required to build various more advanced units. There really is a lot in this game that is focused around development, but in the interest of brevity, or at least not writing a thesis on the topic, I'm blowing by things here, and that's because, if you so desire, you can really get involved with each city in your civilization at a micro level, upgrading tiles, constructing specific buildings, and then developing and allocating specialists with those cities to change the way it behaves. Basically, there are way more choices than any sane person needs, and even it you choose to let the game automate much of it for you, there is still plenty you'll end up doing yourself.

Sometimes your cities demand a certain luxury resource, and acquiring it temporarily increases production.That would be the tiny box in the top center of the screen. The rest is just information to crit your brain.

A few other areas to touch on just to give you an overview of what this game entails: research, social policies, great people, and diplomacy. One stat you'll develop in your cities is science, which increases the rate you can complete research. I've touched on this tangentially, but this is the tech tree through which you unlock new buildings, units, and wonders to build, as well as how you progress from one era to another. You can only proceed a little bit in any one direction before you'll find you're being held back by those you skipped over, such as quickly advancing into the medieval era by researching the compass, which gives you naval superiority in only 4 upgrades, but being prevented from acquiring the next tier until you research 8 other upgrades. Ultimately you'll need every discovery to reach the end of the tree.

Social policies are similar to research in that you can foster culture in your civilization, and as you do so, you can adopt social policies. There are a total of 10 trees, of which you can have up to five, though several do not work together, such as piety and rationalism. Each tree consists of a number of different modifiers that helps to tailor your civilization to how you want to play, such as diving into liberty early to quickly expand, and negate some of the penalties of doing so.

Great People come in one of five categories: artists, merchants, engineers, scientists, and generals. These individuals are generated by accumulating points towards their production, which occurs based on some extremely fine details about the way your cities are managed, with the exception of generals, which come from doing well in battle. You'll want to use these great people wisely because of the bonuses they can provide you, such as turning a portion of territory adjacent to your civilization, even that of another civlization, over to your control with an artist's culture bomb, or increasing the power of nearby military units with the general. They also can all be sacrificed in order to generate an immediate Golden Age, which naturally occur in a happy civilization, and drastically increases your production for a period of time.

Finally, diplomacy. The size of the map determines the number of civilizations and city-states, which are useful as allies but do not function as a normal civilization. As you explore and encounter these other civilizations you'll find you can engage in a very limited form of diplomacy - make treaties, declare war, trade both luxury and strategic resources, or denounce one group to the rest of the world. It can be a useful method of creating pacts to attack or defend, or acquiring resources that aren't naturally occurring within your borders. It is also extremely limited when attempting to convey ideas, since you do things like demand another player stops settling near you, but I'll get into that more later.

Through diplomacy, I learned there is no group I trust less than the Iroquois. Though a betrayal from the Germans hurt too, at least that I expected.

There is a huge selection of different cultures you can take control of, and each one does things a little differently, as you're granted a unique ability and a few unique units. For example, should you be the Germans, any time you defeat a barbarian encampment there is a chance they will join your side, spawning a unit you can control. The Spanish gain large sums of gold when discovering natural wonders. Americans gain the Minute Men unit, which can move through rough terrain without incurring a penalty. While these are nice to have, unless they serve a purpose during the early game, they aren't particularly useful because you'll quickly advance past them. Barbarians will most likely get exterminated, the world will be uncovered, and you'll replace your Minute Men with mechanized infantry. You may find that a particular group fits your play style more, such as the Germans for early expansionism, but that's not to say you can't succeed if you'd rather have a large empire, but your character skews towards fewer cities.

One of the more interesting aspects of the game, and which I was particularly hopeful for, is the variety of ways you can win a map - a total of 5 in all. Default map settings include a game length limit, such that by the time you arrive at 2050, the game is over. Have the highest score at that time, which is determined by a number of things such as the number and size of your cities or the number of technologies you've researched, and you win. You can construct the U.N. and buy the favor of the various city-states so that they'll vote for you, because each civilization generally only votes for itself. For a science victory you'll build the various parts for the space ship of the future, which you then must assemble in your capital. A culture victory requires you to completely unlock five different social policy trees, and then construct the utopia project. The final way to win is simply to be the last civilization standing, and crush all other players. So basically, genocide.

I lost this one several times due to the 2050 time limit until I developed nukes to devastate the enemy's population. Coincidentally, I had been trying to achieve a diplomacy victory.

The last thing worth covering quickly is the map customization, which is incredible. It is one of those features that most people will never mess around with, content instead to select one of the defaults and see what the map generation comes up with. I however, do recommend you mess around with this, as you can do everything from limit the types of victory conditions allowed, start at any era you choose, change the type of map, the abundance of resources, the pace of the game, and so on. It is useful because you might find yourself jumping straight to the future era in an earth like map with few resources and hot wet weather, or choose an archipelago style map with a high sea level, resulting in a decent amount of variety, and the ability to tailor everything to the kind of experience you want to have, such as changing the pace down to quick instead of marathon.

Civ 5 is a pretty complex game, as this general overview should convey. Yet it is not without issues that diminish the experience. There is an assortment of bugs that do things like lock up your screen when it is not your turn, preventing you from viewing your opponents moves, which occurs when they attack you, or split your units over two turns, such that you command several units at first, instruct the game to proceed, and then are kicked back to other units it didn't tell you needed orders. There is the AI, which can be problematic in two forms. The first is when it is supposed to be working for you, as you can automate certain units, thinking specifically of workers. Auto workers will only improve a few tiles around your city, rather than expanding, and seem to have problems completing roads or railways, which can be queued up using a path to command, such that if you want to finish a road, or build it as the crow flies rather than pathing all the way back to your main city and then to this new city. The other way the AI can be a problem is through the sheer idiocy of enemy civilizations, which have a tendency to denounce you for founding a city near their boundaries, which were only established after they moved halfway across the map to grab the one oil resource that was right next to your borders, or that question your motives when, during a peace treaty that was established after they attacked you, you have built up an army so as not to be caught off guard again. There is also the annoyance of having to give orders individually, rather as a group, such as is often the case in a RTS, which becomes more of an issue during some of the special scenario missions, thinking in particular of one that has you rushing to conquer England, when you are granted 10-20 units at once.

Yes, a group select would be nice here.

Perhaps my largest issue with this game though, is that it seems to be played best as a war game, rather than an exercise in diplomacy, and so, ultimately, the best way to win requires knocking out as many enemies as possible, placing their cities under siege and either razing them, making them puppet states, or annexing them. Peace only gets you so far, which usually means until an aggressive civilization can focus on you, even if you've had extremely good relations in the past. I have been caught flat footed by groups I thought were allies, as we fought side by side to destroy the expansionist forces in the game, until they suddenly and without warning turned on me. That was the point in this game where I realized peace is for suckers, and you should build your armies up as large as possible, stationing aircraft and bombers, submarines and nuclear missiles around the map, ready to strike in order to, at the very least, lower your opponent's score in anticipation of the 2050 deadline, which ultimately ends up being the determining victory condition rather than any of the other options, resulting in a situation where there are supposedly this grand array of choices, but none of them ever get utilized.

Well, that was quite a rant. Despite all of that, Civilization 5 is an interesting game, one which is quite possibly the most complex thing I've ever played. You'll want to set aside plenty of time for this game, because it can take quite a while for even the simplest matches - lasting several hours. I put in over 54 hours before I decided I had enough, which is good, but frankly the time wasn't as enjoyable as some other games I've played, though still a positive experience, one that had me questioning multiple times where the last 14 hours of my day went. It would be interesting to see what the Gods and Kings expansion adds to the game, and I may one day find out. Look for the game of the year edition at $15 or so, though with the expansion out now, I wouldn't be surprised if it was at $10 during a major sale, because while the game does have an extremely large amount of content, it is only above average in it's execution - 6 out of 10.

So, the final breakdown:

Score: 6/10

Suggested Price: $15