Review: "Civilization 5"

I'll be frank: there's really nothing much to review about Civilization 5. That's why there isn't a review of it until now when I decided that it deserved one. When a sequel held on to the foundations that made it's predesessors good, it will end up just as good if not better...most of the time anyway. So this review will be rather short and will be a nice breather for me from my work and the painful upcoming review I'm still writing about Dragon Age 2.

Civ5 has changed quite a bit from 4. It seems less number crunchy, much more aggresive and more streamlined in general. Graphics were better but I think they are still using the read/write method to advance the game, causing end turn wait time to increase progressively. I guess it's asking too much from them to change their engine for future installments of the game.



The game is thankfully much more aggressive and combat is thankfully less nonsensical. You can no longer stack units in one grid so no more giant tower of doom or giant pillar of defense. Ultimately, this mechanic nerds both attackers and defenders, espacially defenders. It's not cool when your city with one unit is surrounded by 6 units.

The grids are also changed to being hexagonal. This make mug more sense from a designer point if view as square based grids can be problemetic when taking into consideration diagonals. Culture growth is also less nonsensical. Each growth now only gain one tile instead of one radius unit (which is an exponential increase). This also forces people to be more aggressive in expanding. Culture also give you points to spend on tech trees for your entire city. Call it biased or whatever but I loved the idea of skill trees so I obviously support this change.

There are other minor changes such as City-States which are basically neutral cities you can take over or persuade to aid you. The game also seemed more streamline now; no more missionaries to spread religion for example. Upkeep is also added to prevent nonsensical flooding of units if the city has nothing more to do.

Overall, I loved all the changes made to the game. What can I say? Sed Meier did it again. If you are a fan of previous civ games, I highly recommend this. It's lost a few things that made civ4 great but the new mechanics added do more than enough to compensate.