Mar 2010 10

Changes abound in Civilization V 2

Posted In PC

Civilization 2 was probably one of my favourite games of all time, I spent a good few years of my life taking over the world via various means and the experience keep my megalomania at bay. I’ve since lost interest in the franchise, I found 3 a bit blah and 4 a highly specced yet poor man’s cop-out of Total War. After all, grid based warfare is so 1990′s, isn’t it?

However, Firaxis have decided to tweak the game a little to enhance the Civilization V experience beyond being just a clone. Kotaku’s Stephen Tolito managed to get a hands-on at GDC and goes into depth in his preview of the game posted this morning, spotlighting some of the updates in detail – namely the more realistic graphical style and the hexagon-based grid map (moving away from the square-based one of former games). There is also a neat notification system, which alerts them to important new events such as a new bit of research being completed or a scouting party being attacked. Clicking on the alerts that appear on the right side of the screen, when relevant, warps the player to the location of the event.

Changes have also occurred on the player’s civilization’s influence zone. According to Kotaku, now players will see the colored border representing the limits of their people’s reach expand in more realistic ways. Turn after turn, the computer will automatically expand a player’s civilization into areas that have relevant resources, say forest instead of desert, early in the game. Players can spend gold to speed the expansion.

Combat has been revised – units now take up one space and cannot be stacked, with each unit acting as a cluster of soldiers rather than a single combatant. The inclusion of ranged combat also lends itself some interesting opportunities, allowing capable units to fire over one hexagon away.

Despite these slight changes the game (unsurprisingly) remains a turn-based single or multiplayer experience like other Civilization games. Thankfully, the core goal is also still the same: to lead one tribe from the founding of a city to a position of global leadership, via military or peaceful means.