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Figured I'd make a separate thread for this, since it's kind of long. Basically I've been paying too much attention to Civ V previews, to the point where I already have a strong opinion about it, so I though I'd share it.  I was going to post it on my site, but I'm lazy. This is easier.
Civ Vâs release is just a week away, and as a big fan of Civ IV I thought Iâd give an overview of why Iâm pretty excited about the next game in the series. To give you an idea of where Iâm coming from, I have to admit I didnât fully appreciate Civ IV until I encountered it being played multiplayer in the Realms Beyond forums. I still thought it was an amazing game, but after some number of plays where you pretty much always rush up the same tech path (mostly defined by Code of Laws, Civil Service, and Liberalism), and the AIs do the same stupid crap for the umpteenth time, it wore out its welcome. Multiplayer with no tech trading or spies changes all that, as the simple fact that your opponents arenât morons balances out a lot of the tech values. There are still some criticisms I have of Civ IV, but for the most part I love it all over again. Civ V has many similarities to Civ IV, so Iâll focus on the changes.
No Tech Trading
Yes, Civ V has completely removed tech trading! I am SO delighted about this, because I would likely have turned it off anyway, and the fact that the game is now designed around its absence is a great boon.
I think Iâm rather extreme in my hatred of tech trading compared to the average Civ player, so I may as well explain it. Basically, it massively warps the research mechanic from a game theoretic perspective. Once two or more players have a tech, if they canât arrange a cartel, itâs in both of their interests to trade it away to any and all for ANY amount, as their competitor can freely underbid them down to zero. Since the trading of a tech is a massive net positive for the involved civilizations, anything less than complete trading around is a market failure.
The main result of this that players observe is that they can massively outplay the AI, because it doesnât understand this basic concept and plays as though trading away a tech comes at great cost to the owner. In multiplayer, since all the players are aware of it, the results are even more stupid. In a game so centered on carefully improving your civilization, having the vast majority of techs be generated magically out of thin air by costless replication is a farce.
So anyway, Civ V has scrapped all that. Due to the extensive gameplay impact, itâs also added some other changes:
There are no longer any bonuses for being the first to research certain techs. That was handy in Civ IV to keep self-research relevant; without trading it would just have added more variance. Your benefit for being the first person to a tech is now... you get the benefits of that tech, and other people donât!
The tech tree no longer has optional prerequisites (and has no dead-end techs). This is a smart call, as it means youâll eventually have to research everything. This was sometimes a problem with no-tech-trading Civ IV games: you beeline past some crappy techs, and never get back to them later because what they provided is now useless. You can still do deep beelines in Civ V. Itâs just that researching stuff like Civ IVâs Archery or Divine Right is never a waste of time.
Finally, thereâs a new diplomatic option called research pacts, which you can enter into with another civilization. Basically, you each pay a lump sum of gold, and then X turns later (think something like 20) both participants get a free random technology. (The pact is broken by a war declaration and the gold stays lost.) I donât know about you, but this seems extremely dumb to me. Okay, I understand wanting some sort of diplomatic tech-related thing, but couldnât it be a research discount for techs known by the other civilization or something? I feel like they were working on some sort of more in-depth replacement, and it wasnât working out, so they just said âFuck it, weâll give them random techs.â Not exactly great for a strategy game, guys.
One other thing they did with techs that Iâm less happy about is the prevalence of techs with only a single benefit. For example, there are quite a few techs whose only effect is to unlock one military unit. This is basically because techs no longer unlock civics (a good reason) and because there are fewer improvements whose yields donât change much (which Iâm not happy about).
Gold, Science, and Culture
In Civ IV, there was commerce, which you could split up into gold and science as desired, and there was also culture, which was also technically commerce, but it was comparatively rather useless and only mattered for border disputes and cultural victory. Meanwhile gold was basically a proxy for stored science, as you could adjust your slider to easily boost one at the expense of the other, and your base gold-per-turn was quite negative due to maintenance costs.
Iâve always thought this was fairly silly. When I learned about the technique of binary research, that is, alternating 100% gold and 100% science to get maximum efficiency due to rounding errors, and due to delaying spending science as long as possible without delaying the tech, I realized it was extremely silly.
Good news! (Honestly, I canât decide if Iâm happier about no tech trading or this.) Civ V has completely removed the blanket concept of âcommerceâ. Gold and science are now completely different resources that arenât easily interchangeable. Gold, specifically, now tends to be collected in surplus every turn, and has quite a few uses, which Iâll have to get to one at a time or the number of things Iâm talking about at once will explode.
Additionally, culture is now cool! In addition to expanding your borders (which happens more slowly, making extra culture much more relevant) itâs used as a second science-like currency for buying advances... but social advances, instead of techs. Specifically, theyâre called social policies, and they basically replace civics. They come in 10 groups of 6 policies each, which each have a little tree structure with a single root policy. At the start, three groups are available for use, and others unlock in later eras. A big difference from civics is that they are almost completely cumulative: you donât have to switch out of one policy to adopt another. I consider this better game design, even though it suffers a little bit thematically. There are still some branches that are incompatible (e.g. Liberty and Autocracy), and you lose the benefits of the one if you start taking policies in the other. This looks like it will offer a ton of options and interesting gameplay choices. And cultural victory now requires unlocking a certain number of social policies, which is an improvement because you actually get useful gameplay effects while pursuing victory, instead of turning off research and hunkering down.
City border expansion now happens one tile at a time, whenever the city reaches the next culture threshold. This tile is chosen automatically by the city in a predictable and somewhat logical manner. As this will probably not give you as many tiles as youâd like, you can also spend gold to purchase tiles (with the tiles that were going to be expanded to next anyway being the cheapest). Mostly because of the gold purchasing option, this seems like quite an interesting mechanic. It gives you a lot of options with unclear value relative to the other uses for that gold.
As a casualty of this simplified system, thereâs no more count of plot culture, and no more overpowering enemy culture to steal their tiles. While I think thatâs too bad, itâs also good that they got rid of one of the most opaque mechanics from Civ IV.
Rushing
So you know how Civ IV had a fairly broken Slavery mechanic? Itâs gone! In its place for emergency defense and quick improvement of new cities, rush-buying with gold is now available at the beginning of the game. (Specifically, you must pay for the entire unit or building with gold; it doesnât mix with production.) So thatâs one use for gold, and since you WILL have some gold surplus early, it should add a lot of options for early build orders. Obviously, theyâve balanced it so collecting gold and rushing will be quite a bit less efficient than mining production and building. The advantage of gold is its fungibility.
Chopping forests is still in (available with mining). However, lumbermills now come early, the chop hammers are only about enough to make a fifth of a granary, and it may be useful to keep your forests for cover. Weâll have to see.
Combat
Speaking of cover... military units are now limited to one per tile. (And theyâre hex tiles, I guess thatâs important too. Hex tiles are nice in that they reduce the types of adjacency to one, whereas with squares you have orthogonal and diagonal adjacency.) Military units are also more expensive (so youâll have fewer of them) and combat works quite differently. Where to start?
The main change is that units donât always die. Every unit has about 10 hit points and every combat seems to result in about 10 damage (disclaimer: the combat mechanics are not yet known! This is an observation based on seeing only a few combats!) being distributed between the two fighting units. If theyâre evenly matched, both units will take somewhere around 5 damage. If you have an advantage, your unit might do 7 and take 4. Thereâs still randomness - that 7 damage might be 6 or 8 - but as far as I can tell so far the variance is very low. So combat wonât need to have dozens of units participating before it stops being unpredictable
The second change is that thereâs more maneuvering: even basic warriors have 2 movement points; being attacked in open (non-forest/hill) terrain actually gives you a defense penalty; adjacent units give you a flanking bonus; there are ranged units (archers and siege weapons) that can bombard tiles 2 (or late in the game, more) tiles away (for, say, 3 damage) but will crumple if attacked directly... Iâm pretty sure itâs going to be quite interesting. The only flaw I see with it is that simultaneous turns multiplayer combat will be absurdly reaction-based, even more so than in Civ IV, as you must order your units one at a time.
By the way... archers shooting over the English Channel? Not realistic, yes. But combat in Civ has always been laughably unrealistic. What matters is how it works in gameplay. Limiting units to one per tile, along with the other changes, adds a lot of tactics to combat and also brings the fighting out into actual terrain., instead of mostly having stacks of units trying to attack cities.
Oh yeah, cities. They now have a combat strength (starting at more than a spearman), can bombard with 2 range, and have 20 hit points! This completely removes the silly openings in Civ IV where you leave your capital completely undefended - in single player because you know the AIs will not bother you, and sometimes in multiplayer because the rewards on taking that risk of losing the whole game are so great. Now, youâll need quite a bit more than a warrior to put a dent in your opponentâs capital.
AIs
Itâs impossible to say right now how effective the AIs are going to be. But the game sure seems to be designed in a way that would make them effective! The main change is that they are designed not as roleplaying civilization leaders, but as actual competitors in the game. This is great in my opinion - Iâve already seen how much better Civ IV gets when your opponents are trying to win too. The extent to which the Civ IV AI cared about pointless stuff like State Religions really pissed me off.
The diplomatic options have been upgraded to fit this new model. In addition to actual mechanical deals you can make like trading gold or open borders, you can form pacts of cooperation (basically a mutual promise to be friendly) and pacts of secrecy (a mutual promise to be unfriendly towards a specific third party). While thereâs no game mechanic enforcement of these, the AI should be able to judge your actual actions (e.g. later on, refusing to help a friend in need with some gold, or refusing to declare war on the specified party) compared to what you promised and shift its attitude and trust towards you accordingly. I think this will be a reasonable proxy for being able to communicate with human opponents. Though deals will not be able to be as complicated as with humans, there should be enough depth thatâs itâs fun (and for some, just the right amount, actually!), and AI-to-AI vs AI-to-player interactions will be on equal footing. Those two pacts arenât the whole story: you can also ask the AI not the settle near you, and if one player asks another to declare war, the latter can ask for a 10-turn preparation time instead of just being able to say yes or no. Overall, Iâm optimistic about the diplomatic options, though of course I doubt theyâll be far from perfect. Itâs a good foundation though, and I expect that if nothing else, modders will be able to improve on it quite a bit.
The one potential problem with AIs playing to win is dogpiling the leader. There was a little of this in Civ IV, but I imagine it could be much more significant in Civ V. Weâll just have to see how they dealt with that.
To make the diplomatic scene a bit more interesting, and retain the ability to ally with powers who actually like you and are not just trying to win, there are now City States - minor, single-city civilizations that basically just win by being alive at the end of the game. As such, their AI rightfully cooperates with players that help it out. You gain their favor by giving them gold, donating units, and defending them militarily, and thankfully the way this works is completely nonrandom and transparent. With enough favor you become their friend or even ally, which means they give you free culture, food, or military units, depending on their specialty.
Itâs quite an ingenious concept. The various levels of interest and commitment that players (human or AI) have in various city states should lead to much more complex diplomatic situations between the players. It also makes the UN diplo victory actually work: every civ and city state gets one vote, and the civs will vote for themselves unless they were literally saved from death by another civ, so what matters is being the favorite of the city states. And other players can stop this by killing said city states! In Civ IV, the diplo victory made no sense, and so the AI players had have their voting behavior make no sense or it wouldnât work at all. Now, it works. They can also emulate stuff like Egypt supplying grain to Rome, or proxy fighting in the Cold War.
Tile Yields
I have to say, I was quite disappointed initially, though now Iâm less sure: there are fewer different base tile yields, fewer resources, and fewer improvement types than in Civ IV. For base yields, how it works is that forests are 1f/1h; unforested hills are 2h; and for unforested flatland, plains is 1f/1h, grassland is 2f, and desert has nothing. Riverside tiles all get +1 gold.
Farms add 1f to a grass, plains or desert tile, as long as itâs flatland and/or riverside; mines add 1h to any hill; lumbermills (available a bit later) add 1h to any forest; and trading posts add 2g to pretty much anything.
The only early improvement bonus is that from Civil Service in the medieval era (only a few techs in), riverside farms give an extra food.
The only food resource is wheat, and it only gives +1 food.
What all this means - I think - is actually that plains arenât so bad any more. This is because +2f farms are twice as productive as mines when looking at grassland vs plains, so youâd prefer to get all the food you need from farms and all the hammers you need from base tile output.
Unlike in Civ IV, there are no ridiculous food resources: the best you get is a riverside (+1) grass (+2) wheat (+1) farm (+1), and itâs only 1 better than a standard riverside grass farm.
So Iâm thinking theyâve added a little bit of depth by balancing the value of different land types a bit better, but Iâm also disappointed at the lack of improvement variety. There are no improvements that give science or culture, only gold! I think this is a big missed opportunity given the split of commerce into three separate currencies.
Overall
Iâm pretty sure I forget a whole bunch, but thatâs a lot of words and I think I got most of the stuff I found particularly relevant. In sum, Iâm super excited about Civ V, because they actually fixed ALL the mechanics I was unhappy with in Civ IV. (Ha, I didnât even mention: no more espionage/corporations.) My complaints right now are
1) Research pacts sound dumb, and
2) Lack of improvement variety.
And seriously? I can change those things in a couple days once they release the SDK, if they really bother me. The large number of changes I consider to be ridiculously positive shows me just how much I align with the designersâ vision for this game, and Iâm pretty sure Iâll love it.
One last thing I wanted to mention. I got to play a demo build at PAX, and at the start of the game, I was delighted that I had no idea what to do. Scouts are probably good, since goody huts (er, Ancient Ruins) are always beneficial now, and being the first to meet city states gets you extra gold. But warriors also move two spaces (though scouts can double-move through rough terrain while warriors are stopped) and have higher strength, and can thus more easily defeat barbarians. Workers, meanwhile, don't stop growth, but there aren't any ridiculous improvements (like farms on irrigated corn) you need to build ASAP. Or I could build a monument, which gives +2 culture, and that could actually be the right choice! And then, gold. I can quickly buy some extra tiles to be able to work better ones. I can save up to buy a unit or building. I can get writing and try to get a quick research pact with another player. Or, I can save up to give a bunch of gold to a city state and start getting free stuff from them. Guys, there is a whole new system to figure out and optimize. It's going to be great!
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