Sid Meier's Civilization V

[IamLEAM1983]

I'm trying to write up something like a review for Civilization V and I can't quite find the right terms to describe my experience with the game. I've played the last two Civ titles as well, but not so deeply as to consider them as my prior references for 4X games. I've already mentioned Endless Space and how it tried to combine a serious UI design, honest effort in its overall development, along with humorous touches that felt somewhat out of place. I've already gone over the gist of this game genre, too. You expand, exploit, exchange resources or exterminate your rivals until there's nobody left on the playing field but yourself. It's essentially a set of board game-like rules that benefit from the more granular control the PC platform offers. It's easier to keep stats when you've got a glorified calculator doing it for you.

Civ V is exactly that, but it lacks Endless Space's stumbling blocks. This is turn-based strategy in its most engaging form – at least from a personal standpoint – and it's perfectly distilled, both visually and mechanically. All I've got to reproach to its designers involves the absence of one or two mechanics that weren't all that central to Civ IV, in any case. Not that it matters, as of the time of this writing, the Gods and Kings and Brave New World expansions – yes, not DLC; honest-to-God expansion packs – take care of these weaknesses. For the sake of providing a good description of the game's “gateway” status (as in unmodded), I'll focus on the vanilla gameplay. If I get around to buying one or more of the expacks, I'll try and slip addendums in.

First off, you'll realize this game is more akin to an enriched and deepened Settlers of Catan than to, say, StarCraft II. Major-league traditions and concepts like APM or knowing your macros and hotkeys don't apply, as you aren't trying to outpace an AI opponent. Well – you are, but the tense nature of real-time strategy doesn't apply here. The board game comparisons start here, as everything unfolds on a turn-by-turn basis. Each turn could last anywhere from a few seconds to several real-time days, as there's absolutely no penalty or danger to mind if you choose to simply go AFK or to minimize the game's window and focus on supposedly nobler pursuits. Similarly, the game's adjustable scale enables you to prepare world-spanning bouts that last anywhere from eight hours if played consecutively to several months. A game of Civilization is something that's meant to be played like correspondence chess : at your own damn pace, and at your absolute leisure.

So what are you trying to do, exactly? Quite simply, you're one of several historically significant rulers, from George Washington to Napoleon Bonaparte to, say, Otto von Bismarck (because slipping in the other Chancellor would have spelled commercial suicide). The panel of rulers and conquerors from Antiquity and earlier stretch out to include Alexander of Macedon, Darius I, ruler of the Aechemenid peoples in ancient Mesopotamia – all the way back to Queen Elizabeth, Temujin AKA Ghengis Khan; and some lesser-known figures like Shaka of the Zulu tribesmen or that one Thai ruler the Western world knows of, thanks to the berjillion renditions of The King and I. Each monarch brings its own buffs and weaknesses to its civilization, spicing up the otherwise standard and unified gameplay experience. A world map of varying size, shape and constitution is generated based on parameters you select; and it's up to you to do what Pinky and the Brain try to do every night.

Pretty simple, right?

Yes – and no. See, StarCraft and its other real-time alumni pretty much ensure that the only way to win is to steamroll your opponent in a game of high-speed chess in a game that demands you keep all of your possible cards in your hand and that you know your terrain so well as to be able to make an educated guess of your adversary's incoming attacks. You absolutely can do this in most Civ games, and there's nothing quite like watching your plate-wearing knights reduce that Pickelhaube-wearing walrus' Panzers to smithereens. Anachronisms for the win! The thing is, though, it's not the only way to win.

Think of Civilization as a sort of expanded take on SimCity, with remaining touches of Catan. Steamrolling all that you see is one way to victory, but your people will still demand various resources from you. They'll ask that you exploit the land you settle on, that you find or generate happiness-ensuring luxury goods or research projects and that you ensure that your lands remain peaceful and productive. To that end, each city you'll found will require amenities, while your notoriety strongly depends on how many Wonders you build. Wonders are transplants of the real world's defining landmarks and are accessible to anyone, provided you have the resources to build them. They aren't gated by your starting faction, so you can dream up a version of Tokyo where Big Ben, the Louvre, the Statue of Liberty and Stonehenge are all of Nippon make and are all part of Oda Nobunaga's starting capital. Again – anachronisms for the win.

Through the management tasks associated with each of the cities you'll find, you'll realize that the pen can indeed be mightier than the sword. Cultural Victories are won when Culture Point-generating structures and accomplishments give your civilization the highest Culture score. Diplomatic Victories are obtained by emerging as the leader of the World Congress – the game's take on the United Nations – by 2050. Scientific Victory is assured by being the first civilization to launch a manned flight into space. From the Bronze Age all the way to the surprisingly Giant Mecha-friendly future envisioned by the game's developers, you'll be trying to stay ahead in one or more of these categories.

The end result is gameplay that feels as deliberate and yet as unpredictable as long-term politics. My one and only playthrough as of this writing – I mean, this stuff is eight hours long at its shortest, guys – started with my forging an alliance with Hiawatha of the Iroquois. We were in late Antiquity, I'd just jumped slightly ahead of the other civs by developing Philosophy before they would. The initially affable Redskin immediately offered a research agreement, by which we'd divvy up the total progress on any researched items for the next fifteen turns. Seeing as this slightly speeds up research time and I wanted to keep my scientific headway, I agreed. That deal followed me through to the Modern Era, at which point I made the mistake of keeping some of my WWI-era riflemen just inside Hiawatha's borders. Because I forgot to ring him up pre-emptively and renew our contract before it expired, our previously friendly rapports apparently didn't mean squat anymore. The affable Redskin wasn't so affable once he put me through a full Nelson of F15s. My wee little riflemen that probably had just seen Dunkirk or the Boers' War got pounded into fine dust.

I was playing as freaking Washington. Freaking George Motherfucking Washington, and Hiawatha beats my ass.

Anachronisms – yeah, you get it. I couldn't decide if I had to giggle or ragequit.

The game is chock-full of moments like these, essentially gleefully insane what-if scenarios that might involve the Mahatma recruiting Einstein and having the Atom Bomb invented, in order to reduce his impossible contemporaries (like Alexander or Darius) to smithereens. Or it might involve the Information Age being spearheaded by a guy who still greets you from atop a horse and with his toga on, during peace talks. Or you might end up with a version of Oda Nobunaga who pretty much goes “Sengoku? Sengo- what, now?!” and who becomes the modern world's premier instigator of diplomatic relations on the seriously fucked-up international scene.

Napoleon's still short, though, and Bismarck is still fat. Some things never change. Fuck, Bonaparte even has the nerve to speak to you using the informal French pronouns! I'm freaking Kamehameha of the Hawaiians, dude! Have some respect, I invented giant killer mecha before anyone else!

As that's one of the fun little touches in the game's excellent presentation. Every ruler speaks in his native language, or in his language's modern descendent. Montezuma threatens you in Nahuatl, Hiawatha uses Mohawk as an Iroquois linguistic stand-in (dunno why), Napoleon looks down at you from his horse and dribbles sheer contempt in my native tongue – while Augustus Caesar is all distant and proper in Latin and Elizabeth and Washington each wield their English vernacular. They're all subtitled – or rather, the gist of what they're saying is reduced to a clear textual indication just above the Diplomacy screen's main window. It's amusing, as you get the sense that some rulers are distinctly wordy. I don't speak a lick of German, but I kept feeling like Bismarck felt forced to shove the glorious attributes of his fledgling nation down my throat with every agreed-upon contract we exchanged.

Emperor Suleiman of the Ottomans looks awesome, though. He's North's dark-haired and dark-bearded cousin and he's my bro. Insofar, the computer-controlled Ottomans I've had the pleasure of dealing with have been surprisingly tolerant and cooperative with my nerdy and peace-loving self. It's totally the Bizarro World's version of The History Channel.

“Tonight at six : My Two Big Fat Ancient Rulers. Kamehameha brought some kava leaves for tonight's football match, but Suleiman schlepped his hookah! Who will win the Epic Battle of Casual Intoxication?”

Silliness aside, however, the UI is absolutely legible, even though a Civ game involves a lot of time spent processing heaps of visual information before even choosing what to do with your turn. Seeing as you can only move two units per turn, every bit of info counts. Will you move your Warrior two hexes to the left and bar the way to Shaka's warmongering idiots, or take a serious risk and move your Worker in that spot, so you can reap that tile's offered benefits? Each tile generates Food, Productivity or Gold – and sometimes all three at once – and your job is to snag enough grub to make your cities grow, along with enough resources to be able to spread your empire's reach or glory. Gold can be used to immediately buy new units from a city's available pool or to buy new hexes along your territory's margins, effectively extending it. The trick is knowing when and where to make your empire reach out, and in what way.

However, one of the game's first few problems involves the boring ease behind Cultural Victories. Pump a steady Culture farm with a few cities that happen to be well endowed in places of learning or constructed Wonders, and you'll quickly be told you need to set what the game calls a Social Policy for your civilization. You start with five of ten policies available, and each policy contains a tree of various passive buffs you can inherit. Unlock and obtain five policies and you earn the option to construct a Utopia Project at one of your cities. If nobody stops you or reduces that city to rubble, you'll be automatically be declared the winner within an amount of turns that changes with the game's overall set difficulty.

Because of this, high Culture civilizations have an almost unfair advantage. You can be peace-loving and have the smallest, least impressive armed forces on the map or have an utterly awful intellectual or commercial track record – and you'll still be winning by default. Spam Wonders and you're absolutely guaranteed an easy victory. Yawn.

On the flipside – and this is actually good – having the bigger stick doesn't mean you'll automatically win. A Neolithic-era spearman can effectively down modern aircraft if he's the one unit to make it to the end of said plane's overall life bar. The game's reliance on hexagonal pieces means you can't necessarily stack units forever and simply hope to win out of sheer numbers. Seeing as hexes touch on multiple sides, you have several flanking or encircling opportunities to consider, and can set up slow, if carefully planned assaults. Manage your units carefully and your Flintstones-worthy axemen will stand up to the worst of all laser-spewing giant mechas in full confidence.

I'm reminded of a line from a classic Beast Wars episode. Dinobot lays dying and almost defeated, while a gloating Megatron asks him what he intends to do now that he's nearly scrapped.

“Improvise,” the saurian Transformer replies, before chucking a makeshift axe at Megatron. Flank your enemy, make sure you have backup, and be prepared to fight on several multiple fronts, and the game should become moderately more manageable. In a sense, while stats are adjusted accordingly and while any tank will eat Hoplites for breakfast, there's still a way for individually tiny bee stings to amount to something.

Is it for everyone, though? Not really. If you've grown up on WarCraft or StarCraft, you're probably more familiar with a fast-paced and occasionally hectic take on gameplay. Civilization V comes complete with an on-board encyclopedia, so it's both a testament to lovers of serious strategy board games and historical accuracy. It's slow and it plods along so you have all the time in the world to digest absolutely everything that's going on. The aim of the mechanics is to present more or less every move as a master stroke in the making – and that comes across flawlessly. Being only able to issue one distinct command to two units or one complex command to a single unit puts some emphasis on what's happening right now, as opposed to the real-time habit of trying to think ahead. I like that, personally, but others will find that the gameplay is lacking that specific hook, the sense of peril that comes from needing to move fast, to think fast.

This is definitely a game for Slow Thinkers – not stupid people, mind you, but people who like to weigh their options and to play games not as twitch-fests or emotional roller-coasters, but as a testament to the abilities of basic human logic. Seeing as you're trying to leave the greatest legacy out of all of the world's cultures, that feels rather apt.

Otherwise, I'd mention the multiplayer suite as another slightly problematic point to consider. Someone at Firaxis apparently thought that you couldn't just hook up via Internet or at least through a LAN – but nope. You'll need GameSpy's Pitboss application to coordinate matches, which brings back memories of QuakeSpy. The odd thing is that Pitboss actually wants to hook onto your incoming email server as opposed to your direct IP – so the comparisons to correspondence chess are even more obvious. Your opponent's moves are effectively emailed to you, Pitboss intercepting these and interpreting them as rendered moves in your game. It sounds archaic and in a sense, it really is; but it also cuts back on the upload glut that so many online games tend to generate. Seeing as the whole thing is turn-based and absolutely nothing that isn't cosmetic in nature happens until you press the End Turn button, it's a cost-effective means of hooking two players together on the long term. You could prospectively play games on the Marathon setting – averaging in real-time months of total play time – but spend those months casually and carefully chaining turns, like two board game players judging one another's strategy at their own pace. If you're up for something closer to real-time, though, you're better off playing on the Quick scale and with something like Skype to complement the overall experience.

The thing is, upstream and downstream data flows are pretty cheap, nowadays. Game states are already saved every so often, so why couldn't you just play over a regular Internet connection? It isn't like Civ V generates gigabytes worth of data!

Speaking of, the 4X formula is a nice change of pace, as you get AAA-quality content at a fraction of the hard drive footprint. Civ V is the first game I've had the pleasure of installing that required less than six gigs in at least fifteen years! In fact, an install of this bad boy only sets you back two gigs – something that's unheard of in an age where most hardcore titles are beginning to consider shifting to installs requiring more than a dozen gigabytes. Better still, Civ V looks absolutely gorgeous on that small footprint, the verdant hexagonal hills and wide seas rendered in wonderful lighting and detail. The only visual blemishes I could think of would involve some texture work on the rulers' various garments. Even at the highest quality level, Nobunaga's hitatare still looks a tad muddled...

If you wanted to get nitpicky, you might mention the game sometimes being at odds with its established tone, as the portentous opening and ongoing narration provided by William Morgan Shepperd clashes with the occasional sight of a quirky tooltip message. Win the game, and the victory screen includes a button that reads “But – just... one... more... turn...” in case you hadn't realized just how addictive and time-consuming the process of building armies or staying ahead of the race for technology and new standards of living can be.

As this is really the main problem with Enemy Unknown's predecessor – the fact that it's just so damn good you'll want to sink days and days and days into it. It's a simple formula executed with utter panache with minor hiccups along the way; but it's still absolutely worth it. Standing as an excellent entry point into strategy gaming, Civilization V is something I'd recommend to just about anyone.

[IamLEAM1983]

Sid Meier, you nerdy swine, you. :)

Civ5LovecraftRef.jpg (13 KiB) Viewed 2791 times

I dicked around the game for a while, this afternoon, and found this little beauty in Steam's Achievements list...

Lovecraft Reference for the win! Specifically, a Nyarlathotep reference.

Darius is way cooler in terms of Civ rulers, though. The Persians are badass.