Civilization 5 is out!

OK, I’ve had a lot of stuff to post that I’ve had for a while. But this will pretty much catch me up. As everyone who reads this blog knows (i.e. nobody lol), I went and purchased RUSE. I fully intended to finish the single player game there first before starting Civ 5. But this weekend I decided to try Civ 5 out and quickly got sucked in. In fact, I didn’t play RUSE at all this weekend and am no farther along than I had been before.


Civilization 5 is the latest installment in a tent-pole PC franchise. And it’s a doozy. Beautiful graphics and presentation, a very slick interface, and a compelling gameplay quickly make this version of the game really stand out. It’s not perfect by any means, and I’ve read some people who have complained about the game simplifying certain aspects of the game too much. But so far I’m digging it and the changes.

I LOVE the new hex-grid layout (they should have done this a LONG time ago). I like the introduction of city-states (an inspired, if ultimately BADLY flawed concept). The game is more user-friendly and brilliantly designed. And combat, once a rather annoying part of the series, becomes much more interesting with the removal of army-stacks and the emphasis on ranged combat and positioning. I especially love how the new game really makes holding defensible terrain important; enough so that it can really affect city location.

The game does suffer from some problems. I think that the pacing options are a little ‘off’. Standard IMO seems just a bit slow; while fast is too fast. I think there needs to be an intermediate option there somewhere. I think the tech tree seems a little thin too, though that might just be my memory thinking the older trees were more complex. Also, city states, while a great idea, really seem to suck. City States are hard and expensive to keep happy for long periods of time; and don’t seem to give you a huge advantage either. In fact, the game really seems to want to goad you into just conquering them outright.

Another problem is that the game has some performance issues (especially on large maps). I love large-maps, but after a while things really do slow down. Hopefully they’ll fix that with a patch. I also experienced a few crashes too. My father bought the game, and he’s having major problems playing it in Direct X 10 (even though he has a compatible card). That tells me there are some bugs to work out still.

And while some of the game systems (culture, religion) are much simplified, I don’t think it’s in a particularly bad way. Happiness, however, is the reverse…the generalized nature of happiness in the game is something I don’t like. Either your whole civilization is unhappy, or happy; there is no in between. And that is a bad thing. It’s not a deal breaker, certainly, but it is an example of a simplified game system being a little TOO simplified. And I think they completely took out pollution too, which is also a bad thing.

On the plus side, I believe that Civ 5 is designed to be just as (if not more) mod-friendly than past versions. Apparently there are going to be mod tools that will be released fairly soon, though they didn’t ship with the game unfortunately I’ll probably look at that whenever they get released.

So overall the game great and another win for Firaxis. And I’m looking forward to playing Civ 5 a lot over the next few months.