A LOOOOOOOOOONG REVIEW. Make sure you have time to kill before reading
---scroll down to the bottom if you only want to read my negative points about CIV 5.---
A personal note (skip this):
I've been an avid addict of Civilization 3 ever since it came out in 2001. Civilization 3 improved various things where Civilization 2 failed. Civilization 3:Conquest of 2003 simply blew my mind. This one little expansion pack kept me playing the game religiously for 7 years, right up until the very release of Civ 5. No other game made me spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours of my life than Civ 3 Conquests, maybe aside from Hearts of Iron 2 and Hearts of Iron 2:Doomsday. I could go somewhere with my laptop with The Conquests installed on it and I wouldn't need any other game. This game along made me interested in history and made me read dozens and dozens of world history books as well as WW2 and 20th century history books. Regardless, my personal question here that I'm going to attempt to question here is whether Civilization 5 deserves to stand on par with Civilization 3..
Civilization 3: Conquests
Without a doubt in my mind, this game still holds the main pillar of turn-based strategy gaming. It has a legacy among turn-based strategy games in the same way that The Simpsons have a legacy among TV shows. Civilization 3:Gold Edition introduced about a hundred new maps including the mighty TETURKHAN world maps, filled with strategically based resources and historically placed civilizations. The Conquests brought us around 32 civilizations! That's right, 32! The Inca, the Mongols, the Koreans, The Zulus, The Songhai, The Abbasids, The Byzantines, The Hittites, The Summerians, The Carthage, The Celts, The Portuguese, the list goes on and on. Civilization 3:Conquests also brought us insanely interesting scenarios as well as an easy to grasp scenario editor. This scenario editor allowed you to practically do anything. You could customize the rate of movement on roads, the duration of the Gold age, alter the specifics of Communism and Fascism, make certain civilizations prone to Communism and Fascism, customize the units (for instance giving the Mongol Keshik a value of only one production shield per unit, ensuring that the Mongols have a great advantage over the bigger empire until the invention of gunpowder), you could even create new units and civilizations if you wanted to go further into animation and editing of Civilopedia entries. You could also view your cities from a bird's view. You could see the proper buildings and the proper Great Wanders you've built which only furthered the immersion of the game (Only in Civ 3 and Civ 3:Gold Edition). Sadly, Civ 4 and Civ 5 failed to capitalize on this simple feature.
The greatest civilization website civilizationfanatics.com has hundreds upon hundreds of user-created maps. There's a famous European mod, wherein there are around 15 historical European civilizations complete with their own advantages, new units and an over-hauled Tech Tree. There are two Great War scenarios, complete with the proper Army and Ship names. You could actually command Germany's individual ships that existed on the very eve of the First World War, a tech tree was also re-hauled. There's a famous Operation: Barbarossa map. There's The Zombie Island. There's an expanded Pacific Theater War, which feature a bigger map than the Original Pacific Theater war as well as new units. I remember expanding on the scenario and fast forwarding to August 1942 which the correctly placed naval warship locations and names. The most famous one is probably The Age of Imperialism. It is the only scenario to my recollection, that prevented the hideous AI city razing. That's right, upon capturing an enemy city, the AI could simply destroy the historically based city with everything in it, even with the Great Wonders built in it on occasion. This scenario placed a great wonder with minor benefits in each city on the planet, ensuring there would be no city razing. The scenario starts at the end of the 19th century. The British Empire is overstretched, the French Empire not so, the United States is about to become a great power, Russia rules most of Eurasia, Germany is able to capture most of Europe while other powers are too preoccupied with keeping their imperial possessions, it's flawless. So kudos to the guy who, no doubt, spent months creating this scenario for all to play.
The AI is smart, and not just "stacks of doom" smart. Once you're at war with someone and you see the enemy galleys approaching, you can BET that those galleys are carrying 4 military units. The AI is extremely good at launching amphibious attacks. I loved the fact that you could lose a city with all units garrisoned if an adjacent city had a far superior a culture. Your city could simply switch over to the other side. However, that could mostly be rectified by loading your autosaves a few turns back, placing your units outside the about-to-succumb-to-the-enemy city and retake it once it's lost. That however, would mean war, so that is a risk as well
In Civ 3, some of the ancient Great Wonders you've built would become obsolete as civilization progresses. And that does make sense, because some of the ancient benefits of great wonders were in fact rendered obsolete as time progressed, however, the great wonders would still become tourist attractions and generate some revenue. We see none of that in Civ 5.
Also, in Civ 3., unlike in Civ 5, in between waiting for your turn you could be met by one of the opposing civilizations, and you could either accept or reject their proposal. Not only that, you could also make some sort of a deal with another civilization, be it a tech, map, luxure or Contact-with-another-civilization exchange. In Civ. 5, if you do conduct some sort of a deal with another civilization, then the diplomatic window will automatically close and you'll go back to waiting for your turn.
We could also create scenarios with locked alliances. If you put the UK and the US into the same locked alliance, then they would never wage war against each other, which is pretty neat if you consider creating some historically accurate scenarios.
To this date, I can only find very few minuses with the game. On one hand, there is a heavy reliance on the LOAD and AUTOSAVE feature. You just don't want to be noob enough to lose a city if you could go back a few turns and change history. But I could never resist doing that, there simply is no good deterrent to it. However, The Conquests DID introduce the RANDOM SEED feature that would in fact enable random outcomes per turn. So you going back a few turns wouldn't necessarily save you.
Now the unit stacking, I could never think that unit stacking could be problematic enough to be removed in Civilization 5. In Civ 3, you had to take the AI seriously. The AI could be quite belligerent, if you weren't careful, and allowed a free passage to another civilization, then their rampant forces in your territory could trigger the AI to declare war on you and snag a few unprotected cities in one sweep. Even the smaller civilizations (city-states) would be able to defend themselves against stronger aggressors since the AI was prone to building many military units prior to developing his cities. You could try taking over the Magyars as Germans and be able to find yourself facing a similarly strong foe (with stacked units)who would be on the defensive. You just never knew which civilization could pose a greater threat to you. Which is why in the end it's always about economics and production. It's about the grand strategy, not about the minuscule tactical battles of two units, not just a few battles that can determine whether you are about to lose your city or not (Civ. 5). We all like reading about the romantic last stands, the few against the many defiance, the courage of the regiment on the field of battle, but in the end, it all comes down who can outproduce who, and was and still IS one of Third Civilization's strong points, its about taking your time to develop to be a greater military, diplomatic or cultural conqueror or building as many military units at the beginning and going for all or nothing battle for the undeveloped enemy cities.
Civilization 4:
This is where I'm gonna part ways with my fellow civilization brethren. Despite the fact that I own the original game and its two expansions, both failed to impress me. I remember the very first time I played Civ 4 and simply could not "get it". I had little desire to learn how to play it and I had little desire to micromanage my empire (this subject is debatable). I did not like what they had done with the graphics. The civilization series has never been about the graphics. It's about patience and strategic chess-like thinking. In Civ 4. there was just too much stuff on the screen for me to tolerate, I could never get used to scrolling left and right, I despised the awkwardly implemented idea of zooming in and out all the time, I did not like looking at all that crap in between the cities, the tiles just looked plain ugly to me, the inside-city overlay looked atrocious, the amount of unique units each civilization had just marred the gameplay. Despite the fact that Civ. 4 offered some nice scenarios, none of them succeeded in capturing my attention enough to play them beyond the 20th or so turn. The unit stacking system was disfunctional. In Civ 3:Conquests you had two simple buttons, one would allow units of the same kind to be moved out of the unit stack and another would allow the entire stack to movie- THAT'S IT, it was that easy to move about your armies.The constant confusing over holding of the SHIFT button to outline the particular units over holding of the CNTRL button to outline all the units always bothered it. It was nice for them to introduce the two terns per month system. That way, if you were playing a WW 2 scenario, then you'd have 24 turns per year instead of 12. In Civ. 3, you could set your turn count to either whatever amount of years per turn, or 52 weeks - that is 52 turns per year. I wish Civ 3 had the 24 turns per year feature, that way, some of the better WW 2 scenarios would be more interesting to play. 12 turns per year is too soon, 52 turns per year is too slow, 24 turns per year however is just right.
Overrall, I really can't say much about Civ 4. It never captured me. It doesn't mean that I won't be giving it another try again and again in the future to see if I've matured enough for it. If I do, then I might write a nice review about it.
Civilization 5
I gotta be honest. I was not excited when Civilization 5 was announced. I dont think I was even slightly excited. I knew I'd spend $ 50 bucks on it because I would just have to have it, but I didn't think that I would actually play it, not as much as The Conquest anyway. The cool thing is that if you buy the game through STEAM, then you can actually choose which educational program a part of your money would go it, and show me another games that does something similar.
Anyways, onto the review.
Contrary to the popular opinion, there IS in fact religion in Civ 5. The thing is that it can be a part of your domestic policy, not your foreign one, unlike in Civ 4. Perhaps my favorite thing about Civ 5 is that you can have various domestic and foreign policies. I simply love it. You constantly have to generate as much culture as possible to get as many policies that bring you great bonuses as fast as possible. For starters, you might want to have a small advantage with one or two cities you have if you spend your policy point on improving your capital city. You might wanna reduce the time to build a great wonder by 33% (A MUST HAVE), later on, you might wanna choose the policy that would set a trend to your empire expansion, or otherwise. If you are landlocked and surrounded by the city-states, you might wanna develop policies that improve your relations with the city states so that you could slowly take them over from within.
This game IS in fact $exy. The interface IS watered down and simplified, which I have resented at first but I've grown to like it, sort of. There's less micromanagement than in two previous civilizations. Now I liked micromanagement in Civ 3 and I hated it in Civ 4, so that's just me. The notifications at the end of each turn about what you could still do is of great help as well. In Civ 3 you always had to make sure to double check everything before clicking the "NEXT TURN" to make sure there was no nasty stuff coming to your borders.
There are also Natural Wonders now that boost your empire's happiness. Which is pretty cool, if you're 12 or something, I don't know. The various Natural Wonders are pretty diverse so looking for them, or rather going after them once you know where they are will give you a small happiness boost.
The game is beautiful and it doesn't display useless junk on the map anymore (ahem Civilization 4,,,ahem). Now you can enjoy looking at the pastures, forests and the PROPERLY built roads. The whole game is an eye candy. And I'm glad that Civ 5 made graphics more or less a virtue in the game (there's even directx 10 and 11 mode). The music is great, the sounds indicating your completion of a project or of a technology have a nice touch, and there are shiny things on the map all the time (OOOO shiny things!!!!) But I dont judge the game by those things anyways.
One major point about civilization 5 is the absence of unit stacking. For instance, in Civ 3 you could have an army of 30 workers completing a mountain road in one turn, instead of 30 turns if you had one worker. Here it's different. The average work project for a worker is between 4-6 turns and that's quite tolerable. You just don't need as many workers running around. As a matter of fact, you don't really need as much of anything to run your empire, unlike in Civ 3. The role of cities has been elevated by a factor of 3 if not more. The number of tiles in between the cities has been raised to two instead of one as in Civ. 3. What Civ 5 has done is compressed the many things into few important ones, I just don't know how to put it better. There's less workers now, a little less resources than in the great TETURKHAN world maps, much less civilizations than in Civ 3. There's less cities now, but they are more important, but it is annoying that France only builds two or at most 3 cities on the continent even on the Big SHRIGGS earth map of the Legendary map with increased size of Europe for the sake of a more balanced gameplay. However, having more cities, especially at an earlier time will actually hamper your expansion rate, since you always have to make sure that you have enough excess gold to purchase building that produce happiness and be on the constant look-out for luxury resources.
Everyone has less units now so you HAVE to take care of your units and make sure to promote them in accordance to where they are on the map and whether they are being surrounded or not (there's a mod that adds some new seemingly obvious promotions or upgrades for your units, makes you wonder why the developers didn't include them there in the first place)
I'm still not sure about the overall total happiness of your civilization. How can it be equal for all cities if some cities may be built upon a luxury source which would give that city a boost of happiness, and some cities may not be built on luxury sources, or they might need a road and a harbor to have access to other luxury sources. This total happiness thing seems like a cop out to me. Perhaps they didn't want to add the already working Civ 3 algorithm of simple correlation of luxury to happiness in the cities that have those things and cities that don't. At least they differentiated the growth of the cities. Some cities may grow slowly, some may grow faster, depending the surrounding terrain and terrain improvements.
Another important thing is the sheer amount of mods out there. There's around 155 mods and counting. I did find a couple of mods that didn't allow me to load the save game so I spend hours trying to figure out which mods were in conflict with game files (so far the mods are: "America wins" . "Indirect fire" and "Canadian Broadcast stations") - I'd advice staying clear of those for now. Now, there is a greater strategy at building units and buildings. You can find yourself scratching your head by trying to figure out how to increase $ in your treasure when your gold starts going into the negative. That means that you either have a large military sitting idle, you have way too many undeveloped unhappy cities and that you've built expensive buildings without the proper solid economic base - you have to make sure to look for access for more luxuries, but even that may not save you. There are a couple of nice mods out there however that would set the unit and building maintenance to one gold per tern. That would allow for greater flexibility in expanding your empire.
A nice positive thing about the game is that I have yet to witness the AI raze a single city, maybe I've just been lucky so far, but yes, I have always hated the hideous city razing in Civ 3.
The Resource system is re-hauled now, for the better. Now, if you have, for instance, 5 Hardwood resources, then you can only build 5 Ships of the Line at a time. You won't even be able to queue your Ship of the line production because it won't let you unless you get more Hardwood. In Civ 3 and Civ 4, if you had 1 Iron or 1 Oil, then you'd be able to build your units that require those resources without a limit as long as you have those resources.
It's also nice that now you can actually perform some functions while waiting for your turn to end; you can still visit your advisers, manage to switch the city production and what not with some delay.
The Civilization leaders are pretty cool, although few in comparison with the amount of civilizations in the third and fourth game.
There is no map trading - bummer, you have to explore all the corners of the world by yourself, until you get the Satellites tech (a mod allows this tech to give you the entire map of the world). And there is tech trading, only it's not really tech trading. It's something different. Sometimes, another civilization will offer you a research agreement which usually doesn't cost that much. You both pay up, and in 10 turns or so, each of your civilizations get a free tech, which I think is pretty neat - better-than-nothing-neat I mean.
I love it how the developers attempted to balance out the Civilizations. Every civilization has two unique units as well as a bonus ability. I still think that England is the strongest, since if you have the Great Lighthouse and spend your culture points on your Naval Commerce policy, then you are guaranteed to be twice as fast as any other civilization in the seas. Not only that there is a relation between the amount of your empire's happiness and your empire's culture a combination of which counts as your culture points per turn which later allow you to get a distinct policy. There are many policy tress in the game, each distinct in itself and giving you various bonuses (this is perhaps the best thing about CIv 5 in my opinion), you can't choose any one of the Policy tress from the beginning, but some policy trees become available later on after you develop one or another technology, OR, you could simply use a mod that allows ANY policy tree to be researched from the start.
The minuses:
Well, if you made it this far, then you've probably saw me mention mods now and then. And I am pretty sure that I would give this game at most a 6.5 if it wasn't for the various mods out there that greatly enhance the gameplay. The sad thing is that half of the mods out there are actually necessary for the proper and balanced gameplay - that is, if you didn't want to only start developing gunpowder in the 19th century and what not. I'm not sure if Civilization 5 could be pre-released with a BETA version, but if it could, it would be a great opportunity to adds some of the user-created mods into the core gameplay and only THEN release the game.
1. I want to be able to load my units (most importantly settlers and workers) onto galleys and ferry them across the oceans to colonize new places, kill other indigenous population, steal their resources and exploit them for hundreds of years (oh wait, scratch that). Yes, no more of this settler automatically turning into a ship once The Optics technology is complete. I want to be able to stack my galleys, the ones with the units on and the empty ones for attack and defense and then be able to move onto new lands. Here, you cannot do that. Unless you are playing as England, unless you have The Great Lighthouse built and unless you are developing your "Naval Commerce" policy then your settler will only move on 3 ocean tiles per turn. Now I could tolerate that if I could actually have the settler move ALONG with a defending galley. But no, you can't stack units like that anymore (There is a mod however that allows unit stacking now), and if you aren't careful enough, then you can have your settler be killed by the barbarian camp on the coast who would shoot arrows at your settler only once and sink the ship.
2. A more or less minor inconvenience: I was not able to play Civilization 5 for about a week after it came out. Because I spent so much time surfing the Steam forums to see if anyone had trouble playing with the mods enabled. Eventually, I found out about the issue. It turns out that if you install Civ 5 on any other drive other than Drive C, then your mods located at My Documnets/My Games/Sid Meither's.... folder would not get properly unpacked. Every proud PC owner knows that littering your C drive with games is a no-no. The C drive is only for your desktop files, your windows files and your "My Documents" files. So anyways, what you'd have to do is manually unpack the mod files by using the 7-Z program into the folder they are in. After unpacking a few like that, the mods should start working when you download and enable them in the game itself. Thus, the only mod that I needed at the time to properly test the game was the "True starting locations" mod, which would allow me to play on the "earth" map with proper historic starting locations. I hate playing random, made up maps. Thus, this review could come a week earlier, but whatever.
3. Renaming cities. I want to rename cities according to where they are placed on the map, thank you very much. It's a very simple feature. If I am building a city in the very south of Africa, then I want it named "Cape Town", not "Yorktown"
4. I want to be able to turn off certain if not all animation moves. In Civ 3 you could turn off the displaying of your manual moves, automatic moves, battles, the moves of your enemies and foes. THAT way, the wait between the turns would be much shorter, and I wouldn't have to view the warring nations fight each other the same way back and forth. Maybe it's just me, but it was never about animation in Civilization as I mentioned before.
5. I want more cities, I'm sorry. I want cities to be more numerous, even if undeveloped. To hell with that. We got thousands of years to develop them. So make the AI build more damn settlers, not too many though, just enough to feel like I am competing with actual empires and not just three big cities occupying half of Europe with their puny culture.
6. I can't say that I particularly like the way archers are able to shoot arrows over one tile in the ancient times, considering that the real scale would be something like 100 miles. The cannons and modern artillery are more tolerable though.
7. The nonexistence of the shield conversions. What I mean is that your city is committed to building a Great Wonder, and then some other civilization builts in, then you'd expect your excess shield production to be allocated to another project. That worked swell in Civ 3. If you were outrun by someone with a Great Wonder you wanted, then you could at least build a simple city improvement in one turn. But here (for the purposes of realism or something), all the shields you've accumulated while working on the wonder are wasted if someone builds it first. This it's the same as if your capital city produced virtually nothing for 10 or 15 turns or so.
8. You know what? I want the stacking back, which is why I'm using the mod that allows me to do so. There is no reason why ten warriors should take up the entire tile that in real life could be 200 square miles. This isn't Civilization: Revolutions for the console boys now, or IS IT????
9. Asking and pleading for peace. You can be at war with someone for 100 turns and they'll never want to make peace with you unlike the standard or so 15-20 turn wars in Civilization 3. But I dont know, that could be a good thing. Remember the 100 years war? of course you don't
10. Why are the cities defending themselves? Why do I have to spend time aiming my arrows at the Barbarian gallows 200 miles away every turn? (uhmm, I mean two hexagons away?) It's tedious and it doesn't add anything to the game with the exception of having to feel like noob for arrowing your enemies from afar because you didn't build a military unit or a galley.
11. I miss the governments. Even though, I'd like to point out that the so-called government have been implemented into your policy tress, so you can still be a Commie Russkie Swine or a Fascist German Dog - only on paper so to speak. But there is no actual official government to speak off, unlike in Civ 3 and Civ 4. So the government has been swept under the rug of the policy tree just as religion was.
12. The intro video is disappointing. Its loud and annoying and it doesn't show much ancient goodies. I had to disable it by going to My Documents folder and setting the intro video to = 0, I think. Seriously, I expected a more grandiose Intro video that can actually be skipped. You can't skip the intro video because the game is still loading when it's playing. But I prefer starring at a black screen and waiting a few seconds for the game to load rather than listen to the old man for 100th time. He is boring, die already.
13. I'd like to be able to sell buildings. In Civ 3. selling buildings you've spent several turns building would bring you very little money, but, in the moment when you need that one spearman, you could sell some building to have enough money to hurry the production and save your city.
14. On numerous occasions my musketmen were overrun by enemies' pikemen and spearmen - that's completely retarded. It's Civ 5 and they still can't figure out how to make the unit that fire bullets infinitely stronger than units that use spears and arrows?
Currently I am working on the Age of Imperialism map. I'll see how long it takes me to create one....
on the final note, I consider myself a Civilization veteran, albeit a Civilization 3 one - still old school. This game doesn't feel old-school per se, but it doesn't really have to, I understand that there is a new generation of gamers out there, however, most of them play run-n-shoot/button masher xbox titles - they don't play such PC exclusives as Civilization 5. But what's done is done. I still consider this a good and addictive game, the only thing I wonder about is whether it will stand the test of time - that is, whether I'll still be playing it everyday after work in 2011.
Now ask yourself that question....