Civilization V

File: Civilization V's New Wonders DLC

Matthew Kato — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 17:30:00 GMT

Civilization V's New Wonders DLC

File: Civ V's Korean DLC

Matthew Kato — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 17:18:00 GMT

Check out this walkthrough of the new Korean DLC.

Wiki: Civilization V Guides

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 03:37:00 GMT

Guides for Civilization V

Blog Post: To everyone who enjoys building a magnificent Starcraft base, this is the game for you.

0vercast — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 19:14:00 GMT

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As a first time Civilizations player I was completely blown away by the depth and strategy involved and after logging over 35 hours have played one game. The game requires many hours for even a small map to be conquered and have yet to diplomatically achieve victory. I find that even after all this time there are still many aspects of the game I do not understand and at the mercy of while playing but, I love it.

I did not give it a 10 because I found the A.I. civilizations were extremely useless and very aggressive. I found the diplomatic approach useless because you quickly run out of land to improve and buying it tile by tile is impossibly slow making invasion the most feasible option.

To everyone who enjoys building a magnificent Starcraft base with impenetrable defenses this is the game for you. If you like sending you rush early and don’t have the patience or time to spend 10+ hours on a single map you might want to pass this one up but, keep it windowed in the background for a couple days and take your time. This game is amazing.

Blog Post: Standing the Test of Time: Civilization V

Saturos07 — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 02:04:00 GMT

It's difficult enough to make a successful game: time, funding and expertise aren't always in plentiful supply, but when these resources are available the game in development at least stands a chance. Making a successful sequel is another matter entirely: struggling against the natural depreciation of successive installments is an uphill struggle that has sunk many of our most beloved franchises. So how did the folks at Firaxis manage to make the most successful turn-based strategy game of all time even better? By condensing options, adding depth to diplomacy and policies, and polishing the entire package with an intuitive and friendly interface, Firaxis' flagship franchise has triumphed once again, withstanding the ravages of time like no other.

Having multiple options for victory is not a new concept for Civ; 5 has finally made them all viable and inviting. Options such as diplomatic and cultural victories were practically broken in 3, improved in 4, and now in 5 they have been brought up to speed with the tried and true method of steamrolling Montezuma's hut with a Panzer. Filling out 5 policy trees or eliminating all opposing capitals for cultural and conquest victories respectively are now cut and dry objectives, much improved over amassing legendary culture in 3 cities (has anyone out there managed that?) or occupying 2/3 of the landmass, stretching your resources to their limits in the process. Civ 5 has also decreased the variety of military units you have for a given time period, and in doing so taken away some of the emphasis on the conquest element of the game and given equal attention to aspects such as culture and commerce.

The methods by which you manage your empire have been simplified, but in a way that retains the sense of being in control while cutting out some of the more unnecessary, tedious decisions of games past. City placement was all-important in Civ 4: if you didn't position your settlement right next to an available water source, for instance, you'd be stuck at a low population for ages. Now with the option of buying tiles, you have more flexibility with which to plan your expansion, as well as making smaller empires a much more attractive option. Civ 5 has done away with the complicated city interface of 4, with all of its icons, bells and whistles, in favor of a streamlined sequence of menus that are simple and easy to make sense of. I was a bit disappointed at first that religion had been eliminated from the game, but after playing a few rounds I saw that the expanded diplomatic functions that have been included overshadow the religious system's significance by a wide margin.

The inclusion of city-states as minor civs is just one of these improvements to diplomacy. In the past, in order to represent minor civilizations, designers would have to classify them as barbarians (one example being the barbarian city of Dublin in the 1000AD scenario of Civ 4). The people of these minor civs (historically) were far from barbarians, and the option of making them city-states gives the player a way in which to interact with them as if they were other players, without overloading the game with competitors. They expand the political landscape of the game tremendously: sure you could conquer Warsaw for the gold resource on its plot, but if there's an aggressive civ on its other side it may be in your best interest to leave it be, perhaps even strike an alliance with them. As far as inter-civ diplomacy goes, there are plenty of new ways in which to interact, such as research agreements for tech advancement, secret alliances and assistance pacts, all of which produce a greater sense of inter-dependency. If you're too aggressive toward other civs or city states, they'll band together behind your back and surprise you.

One last detail I'd like to mention is the rule of one military unit per tile. It may seem like a serious limitation at first, but as you play it will start to make sense. Is it realistic for 20 units of soldiers to occupy one road? How about 10 battleships in one small section of ocean? By allowing only one unit per tile, combat and tactics have become rather more realistic, forcing the player to be creative in their strategy. Fortunately, with the hexagram series of tiles, there are two more ways from which to approach your target.

My complaints so far are very few. It seems ridiculous that 3 city states I've never even seen or heard of would declare war on me for bullying one nextdoor. The music is decent, but not quite as memorable as tunes of games past (like that modern era jazz tune from 3 or some of the classical from 4).

Overall, Civ 5 is a supremely crafted entry into the series, one that every Civ fan as well as strategy newbs owe it to themselves to pick up. I couldn't think of a single person, gamer as well as non-gamer, who wouldn't find this enjoyable. Civ 5 is most deserving of a 10.

Blog Post: In Sid Meier's We Trust

Mark Zufelt — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 15:02:00 GMT

OK folks, I apologize if this review is a bit rough, but its my first time and I've been playing this in every spare moment I've had since I picked it up at 10:01 sharp on Tuesday morning from Best Buy, so sleep has been fleeting. First, let me start off by saying that I'm fairly new to the turn based strategy party . Although I played Sid Meier's past amazing works, such as Sid Meier's Golf, Pirates, Alpha Centauri, and a few of his past Civilization's before, I was never a true fan due to the fact that I could never get past the endless amount of information that is at your finger tips. It became too overwhelming since I was used to the dozen of twitch shooters i was playing on a monthly basis. Now that I'm older and have 4 kids, I may still enjoy a good action game, but sometimes it's nice to stretch the old brain muscle after a days worth of Cartoon Network and kiddy board games. Which brings me to what really matters....this game is incredible, in every way, shape, and form possible.

Civilization V is just as complex and deep as I remember its predecessors, but this time it comes with a much more accessible game style for beginners. Every little nuance to the game comes with a form of explanation, which you can take at it's basic root definition or dive as deep as you want into how each part of the game works, how to make it work, and when best to use it. The first game I started I thought I would be in for the beating of a life time, but by the time I had reached 50 turns, not only had I developed a simple understanding of the main mechanics, but I can even say I was starting to understand how to mesh everything from the happiness of my population to the many different forms of diplomacy to adopt, as well as research and science to broaden my civilization's horizon's. Needless to say, after 307 turns and hours worth of eye strain, I have become a believer.

In my own opinion, this game has been polished to such a high shine my eyes hurt just looking at it. The graphics are fantastic for a genre that you can phone in graphics and most die hards won't care. The minutiae of the whales swimming off the coast, my ship's sails fluttering in the wind, or even the dust kicked up as my horse rode through my cities was just fantastic. The GUI was something of a marvel too, because with the wealth of information available, the menu system was a breeze to understand, and after about 25 turns I could build, research, buy, or command everything at my finger tips without even thinking twice about where I had to go.

In closing, all I have to say to the PC gamers out here on the Game Informer website, if your a fan of turn-based gaming, go right now, sell your kidney if you have to, and BUY THIS GAME. It took me mere minutes to become a gushing fan boy, and thats something in 26 years of gaming I have never been. This is one of a hand full of games, up there with System Shock, Star Craft, Diablo, and Fallout, that every PC gamer should own. Thanks for reading, and let me hear some comments on how I did so I can improve on latter reviews.

NOTE: I ended up buying the Special Edition Box Set that I believe Ben Reeves unboxed on the website. Although it is a hefty price, I for one found the $100 worth it. Now this isn't for everyone, I'll be the first to admit that. I have a large PC game collection, at almost 300 games, and I love a good Special Edition to put on display. This box set comes with a nicely designed black and gold colored art-deco style box with a large box sleeve to put over it. Inside you'll find 5 well designed miniatures of different units found throughout the game, a soundtrack of the beautifully orchestrated score, a behind the scenes DVD, the game itself, and my favorite part, the 180 some page art book. Alot of people, and rightfully so, won't find the price tag worth the content available. But if you have the money, or are a big fan of Firaxis and it's amazing game design, I say take the plunge and try to track down a copy. For all you collector's out there, you won't regret how it looks with the rest of your gaming prestige.

Blog Post: YEA!!!

Hobbeser — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 16:29:00 GMT

Can't wait!!!!!!!!!! we'll see how the changes effect the gameplay...

Blog Post: Civ V Review: Reforged Into A Masterpiece

Adam Biessener — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:46:00 GMT

Comparing Civilization V to contemporary strategy games is entirely pointless. Imagine if Modern Warfare had come out alongside Quake II. There is simply nothing comparable out there, not least because the strategy genre has become the province of indie developers and niche publishers. Civ V is a towering, AAA release with millions of dollars worth of polish in an era where questionably localized Russian titles are all that strategy gamers have to tide them over for months at a time. It's also a delightfully fresh take on a formula that has been slowly iterated on for more than two decades.[Excerpt]

The heart of the Civilization fantasy is unchanged. You still manage cities, developing them from rude collections of mud huts into gleaming modern metropolises. Vast armies and armadas are again at your command, waging global war for conquest, defense, or resources with everything from spears to nukes. The land must still be worked, the primordial wilderness tamed through your people’s sweat and blood. Your ultimate goal is yours to choose: Diplomatically unite the people of the world under your benign leadership, launch a viable colony ship into outer space, conquer the globe through force of arms, or create a glorious utopia through enlightened civility.

Civ V's genius lies in the way that Firaxis has aggressively chopped the number of decisions that a player has to make during the course of a game while taking away almost none of the meaningful ones. As a hardcore Civ player, I appreciate some of these ancillary aspects of the design, but the removal of all the fat is unquestionably Civ V's greatest accomplishment.

A perfect example of this elegance of design is the new concept of "embarking" units and removal of transport ships. In previous games, you'd build separate transport units, load your armies onto them, and send them across the ocean to land on foreign shores. As your military got larger, managing this became extremely cumbersome. The concept of land units being vulnerable and slow while embarked – the entire point of transport units – is perfectly replicated by Civ V's system of allowing armies to move across water on their own, albeit slowly and defenselessly.

Firaxis applied this sort of critical examination to legacy systems across the board. Some remained nearly unchanged, such as constructing improvements like farms and windmills on your land. Others were scrapped entirely, like Civ IV's religion system. Many others survived in altered forms, and I embrace the changes without exception. This is by far the most approachable game in the series, even edging out the stripped-down console entry Civilization Revolution, but Civ V's remarkable gains in accessibility have not come at the cost of strategic depth.

The major changes to the Civ formula may be hard for veterans to accept at first, but most will quickly realize that they haven't lost any control over their empire's development. The change to research and revenue looks drastic on the surface, but your input has merely been moved from the commerce allocation slider to managing citizens and specialists within individual cities. Religion's old role in spreading culture and affecting diplomacy is ably filled by the newly expanded role of gold, and creating a trading/financial powerhouse civilization is finally a viable path to victory. And as for combat…swallow your pride and your love for the old stack of doom, ladies and gentlemen, because the one-unit-per-tile new model is infinitely superior in tactical and strategic options while decimating the amount of time it takes to manage an active war.

The design focus on gold and resources is a fantastic approach that lends a lot of texture to diplomacy and opens up new possibilities for non-violent conflict – but it's a pain in the rear to fully take advantage of because the interface lacks a good way to track your incoming and outgoing resources and gold. Every time I want to sell off some cotton to Montezuma, for instance, I have to manually count how many I'm collecting myself, how much I'm getting in trade from other nations, and how many I'm already trading away. Stupid. Also, one specific early-game strategem nearly guarantees a win on its own: using the Great Library's free research advance to net the expensive Civil Service technology can double your growth rate, putting every other empire at a massive disadvantage.

Multiplayer is functional, but the only way I suggest spending any time with it is with friends playing cooperatively against the AI. For a number of reasons, including the Civil Service slingshot above, Civ V's design does not lend itself well to cutthroat human-versus-human play. That said, I didn't come across any technical issues that prevent playing with friends from being enjoyable.

I encourage everyone, from strategy newbs who spend most of their time in online FPS matches to grognards who could teach me a thing or two about the optimal distribution of forces in hex-based combat, to give Civilization V a shot. As a hardcore strategy gamer who is no stranger to planning out my empire's production dozens of turns in advance, I've already turned to Civ V for my world-conquering needs – but at the same time, if anything is going to rear a new generation of strategy gamers like the very first Civilization did for me, it's this.

File: Gameplay walkthrough video

Adam Biessener — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 21:50:00 GMT

A look at the 4X strategy gameplay of Civ V.

Blog Post: Civ V Art Director Explains Art Deco Look

Adam Biessener — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 01:00:00 GMT

The first thing that strikes players on loading up Civilization V is the unusual (for the series) art deco style that permeates every facet of the presentation. Project art director Dorian Newcomb explains why that is in the interview below. He also sheds light on two of the new leaders in Civ V, what role classic LucasArts adventure Grim Fandango played in the game's early development, and how he and lead designer Jon Shafer "don't want to make a game for dumb people."[Excerpt]

If this is all gibberish to you, get up to speed on all things Civ V with our extensive hands-on report from Thursday.

Why is Civilization V so art deco?

It stemmed from a conversation I had with the interface artist on the project, Russ Vaccaro. I was describing how much I liked New York, and how New York had the feeling of the most important American city, and the sense that there's a lot of art history in the city. When you walk around New York, you can't help but see a lot of art deco influence in a lot of the Rockefeller Center area as well as midtown and downtown. I'd gone to school in New York, and I said, "Why don't we start off in New York, in the way that New York feels like a city of history, and a city that we're really familiar with?" Russ played a lot of Grim Fandango, a LucasArts game from back in the day, and that was very influenced by art deco and the Day of the Dead stuff. So my love of New York and his love of Grim Fandango pretty much took us down the first step in going toward an art deco look and feel.

Did anything beyond aesthetics inform those decisions?

I worked really closely with Jon Shafer early on; when the project started it was really just Jon and I for the first few months. We knew that we wanted to make the on-ramp a lot wider, for playing the game. So we talked a lot about "what are the barriers to entry that people have, as far as getting into a game of Civ?" Civ IV was a really highly acclaimed game, but we found internally that a lot of people would say, "Oh, this is a game for smart people. There's too much stuff going on." We said, "Well, we don't want to make a game for dumb people, but we want to make people who are smart feel smart as they play." We realized that we needed to drop a lot more satisfying feedback a lot earlier in the game.

|| "We don't want to make

|| a game for dumb people."

Aside from the art deco style, we wanted to make sure that people had a lot of feedback, and we wanted to eliminate some of the pop-up noise that happened with some Civ games in the past. So early on we decided on a messaging system, where we knew we wanted to have a lot of information at peoples' fingertips. We broke that down into thinking about how we wanted information in messages, where if someone really wanted to find out more about what was going on in the world, there'd be a lot of information at their fingertips. We knew we wanted some action information -- information that you would need to complete before you end your turn. That really had nothing to do with the style; that had to do with the fact that people had a hard time understanding what was going on in the early part of the game, and it was a barrier that prevented them from getting into the more complex, cool decisions of mid to late-game stuff.

That was probably the most important early stuff that we took, and then after Russ got involved a lot of his experience working on Civ Rev informed the streamlining process of the interface. Once he got involved, it was a good marriage of style and substance. We knew that we wanted to eliminate a bunch of the confusing stuff. We wanted the feedback to be clear. We wanted stuff to be color-coded well. Then once we started talking about color-coding, the design of the colors became important. So that's where the art deco polished aluminum or chrome look, some of the beveled edges, and the circles being a core part of the game's interface came to be. Really early on I wanted to make a globe minimap -- I wanted everything to be circular and round. As we talked more about it from a gameplay point of view, a globe minimap wasn't going to work for a lot of reasons, but the circle was key early on in our development.

Continue on to page 2 to see Newcomb's take on cartoon art versus realism and what his favorite part of the Civ V presentation is...[PageBreak]

What made you decide to portray leaders in a realistic fashion rather than Civilization Revolution's cartoon caricatures?

There are two big components of that. One is my personal preference, the other is a desire to differentiate. Whenever you're making a title, you have a choice of whether to embrace the style of the past incarnation of it. You can say, "Well, Civ Rev did really well and it was cartoony. Do we push that look and try to out-do the cartooniness of Civ Rev, or do we try to do something different and try to differentiate and make people want to play this game?" I didn't think that we could do a significantly better job than the cartoony style of Civ Rev. I think that hit the mark well. So that allowed me to push my preference. I started watching a lot of historical film stuff: Ridley Scott, Master and Commander, even some older films like the epics of the '50s. Whenever you would meet a great leader of one of those civilizations, there's a feeling of power and influence and authority.

|| "When you best Napoleon,

|| there's a sense of satisfaction."

One of the taglines we had early on with the leaders is we wanted to have worthy adversaries. So as you play the game and you met leaders, we want you to feel like when you conquer them, you're besting someone who is at the top of their game. One of the things I think the cartoony leaders did was to make the game inviting, but I think it downplayed the importance of a leader. If Napoleon is really goofy, when you beat him, you've beaten a goofy Napoleon. While if Napoleon is fierce, and on a horse, and a commander and a general, when you best Napoleon there's a sense of satisfaction that's very different. We wanted to push that.

Were there any surprises when you were researching the leaders before putting their scenes together?

As I worked with Jon, there were two leaders that he wanted to put in the game -- Ramkhamhaeng and Askia -- that I had never heard of before in my life. I said, "Oh, goodness. How are we going to make these guys stand out?" People are going to be meeting these characters, and they're supposed to be famous historical figures, and I don't know who they are. I found both of those guys very interesting to research and interesting to get to know a little bit better. They both had huge impacts in their regions of the world, and I just didn't know about them. When it came to finding out more about Askia -- he's a western African leader -- finding out about how organized and powerful his empire was, but also how there was a tendency for brutality, especially toward people in his inner circle. That's what influenced him burning his own city -- purging his own city of the evil that he found there. That was interesting. Ramkhamhaeng, who is a Siamese leader, is someone that was massively grand in the scope of being peaceful and a cultural leader, and someone who if he was your president you'd be thrilled to have him. That was cool to see: someone who was fiercely brutal, and someone who was fair and honest and had a lot of integrity. Balancing those extremes off of the better-known guys like Caesar and Elizabeth was fun.

Is there one thing that stands out to you that you're particularly proud of in Civ V?

We've just been wrapping up lately, and it's given me a chance to play the game a lot. So not only have a seen the game a lot from an art point of view, but I've been playing the game a lot now and I'm starting to see it as a gamer -- which are two very different things. The thing that I'm really happy with is the way that the landscape has been reading. When you enter into the world, the world feels appropriately big. A lot of that has to do with the right scale and the right light, and there's a set of programmers that made that happen as well as Steve Eggry, who is our terrain artist. I think it's got a really nice, inviting, large-enough feel where it feels like you're playing in a very large world, and when you travel you're really traveling over a vast distance. That was something I was worried about: getting people to feel like the game was huge, and the game world was as diverse as the world that they know. After watching things like Planet Earth, the BBC program, you get a sense of scope that I didn't want our game to fall short on. I'm really proud of the way that the terrain brings you in and invites you to find out where the mouth of the river is, to find out where the next continent might be. I find that surprisingly compelling as I play the game, and I think that turned out really successfully. And then I'm also very proud of the way the interface has turned out. I'm continuing to write notes down on things that we can do better, because Civ V is a game that I hope has a lot of reach and I hope that people will play it a few years after they buy it, and I want to make sure that we continually make things better. But I'm really pleased with the way the interface puts all these complex things in ways that are very accessible.

File: Hands-on shots

Adam Biessener — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:51:00 GMT

Hands-on preview screenshots

File: Hands-on shots

Adam Biessener — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:51:00 GMT

Hands-on preview screenshots

File: Hands-on shots

Adam Biessener — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:51:00 GMT

Hands-on preview screenshots

File: civv1.jpg