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 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.Ī perfect example of this elegance of design is the new concept of 'embarking' units and removal of transport ships. 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.Ĭiv 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. The land must still be worked, the primordial wilderness tamed through your people’s sweat and blood. Vast armies and armadas are again at your command, waging global war for conquest, defense, or resources with everything from spears to nukes. You still manage cities, developing them from rude collections of mud huts into gleaming modern metropolises.

The heart of the Civilization fantasy is unchanged. It's also a delightfully fresh take on a formula that has been slowly iterated on for more than two decades. 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. There is simply nothing comparable out there, not least because the strategy genre has become the province of indie developers and niche publishers. Imagine if Modern Warfare had come out alongside Quake II. Comparing Civilization V to contemporary strategy games is entirely pointless.

Game civilization 5