Disclaimer: I have not yet played Civilization V. I am basing this entire post on forum posts, angry reviewers, and other questionable sources. That said, I feel I should explore my prejudices before I play the game for the first time this week (it’s finally out for Mac OS X on November 23rd!).
Each Civilization game from the first up through the latest expansion for Civilization IV (Beyond the Swords) has built atop the previous iterations. Each adds new technologies and units to discover. Improving and expanding your civilization’s territory and culture becomes more complex as additional layers are added in (additional diplomacy options, religion, espionage). What I find the most interesting, however, is what is removed with each new game. Civilization III removed Partisans from capturing cities (militant units from Civilization II that would emerge from and surround a newly captured city, owned by the civilization under attack). With each official iteration of the game, from the first through the fourth, Barbarians were downgraded from massive hordes that would surround your unit when discovered to just a few units that instead wander the land on their own or peacefully exist within their own cities. Civilization IV removed city revolts – replacing it with a simpler mechanic of happy/unhappy citizens, which itself changed the way it felt to have an unhappy city. Your unhappy city still wasn’t very productive, but it wasn’t on fire anymore. Which always made me question: “How unhappy were those people really? Maybe they’re just lazy”.
Every time the game has changed in mechanics and systems, the feeling of the game has changed. Civilization 1 always felt like a constant battle between my civilization and the barbarian hordes in the early game. My usual late game was defense – building as many units as I could support in each of my cities as I waited for the money and science to come in. Civilization 2 complicated this somewhat, and in Civilization 3 I finally felt like war was a worthwhile practice, at least midway through the game. I’d like to think I never engaged in needless battle in Civilization IV, but with a constant flux of culture (increasing the size of my civilization without needed to constantly build cities), border skirmishes became more common, resulting in the razing of people’s homes as I mentioned in the previous post.
So, Civilization V. As strategy gaming becomes less and less about managing unit statistics on hex maps and more about adopting eurogame style from board and card games like Dominion, Settlers of Cataan, and Puerto Rico, Civilization V moves towards a very specific type of wargame. By having single units (representing what, I’m not sure yet) on a hexagon grid the game becomes very much about the movement of pieces in patterns. I imagine that active, strategic war will be a very real thing in this game, something that up until Civ IV I’ve never had to give much thought to.
What has been removed since Civ IV is even more telling about what kind of game Civ V will be for me. For a game that is very much about moving pieces on a map (and knowing what the map of the world is like), map trading is gone. Tech trading is gone. Religion is gone. In fact, much about diplomacy that I loved (buggy as it was) in previous Civilization games looks to have been reduced. Because of this, I will be approaching Civilization V in a different way than the previous games. My naturally peaceful (yet greedy) play style will have to have teeth to get by. This might be why it’s taken me so long to play it.
not something I'm looking forward to (despite my pre-ordered copy)