Sid Meiers Civilization V is coming september 1, 2010. Civilization V will feature an entirely new game engine, as well as a hexagonal map instead of the square tiles of earlier games in the series.
The most obvious change is that the playable map is now made up of
hexagonal tiles instead of square ones. Hexes, or "a man's way to play a
strategy game" as I've described them, allow for some really
interesting tactical options and more things to worry about as you've
got six sides of your city to defend rather than four. It also allows
for more natural movement inside the environments, and as I saw in a
private demo of the game live in action, much better looking
environments too, with much more naturally sprawling forests and
mountain ranges snaking up around other patches of land.
And while the new game engine is promising DirectX 11 support for
cutting-edge graphics, they're also working on an unprecedented level of
scalability, too: the developers didn't want to commit to saying
they're planning on making it playable on the lowliest of Intel
GMA-powered netbooks, but maybe most full-size laptops (as well as this
latest generation of netbooks with somewhat higher-powered GPUs) could
be a really good target. It's silly to talk about a PC game's system
requirements this many months before release, so I left it at that,
comfortable that they're aware of how many Civ gamers playing on
low-specced systems.
They also love some of the community's mods, and while some of them
have gotten hundreds of thousands of downloads, that's still a drop in
the bucket compared to the total number of Civ players worldwide.
So to help facilitate this, they will include an in-game interface for
modmakers to put up their latest efforts and for gamers to grab them.
And to fully support the community, an in-game web browser will be
included so that people can pop to a recent forum thread about a
particular mod to discuss issues, new features, or just talk with the
author.
But there have been plenty of interface enhancements to go along with
the community features and new game engine. They've redone the
notification system and now pop up little bubbles that ask for your
attention when you get attacked, or a city goes into crisis, or any of
the large number of things that can go wrong in any bustling empire.
Dealing with the other civs is now much more immersive, too, as you'll
meet a larger-than-life George Washington in the Oval Office (and full
screen, too, not just in a window) or possibly someone like Napoleon out
on the battlefield for the first time. Some new alliance features will
be available, one of which shown to us was a research agreement where
two civilizations invest money in each other simultaneously to speed up
each other's research upgrades. This makes for some interesting
strategy, as pulling out of the agreement can be costly, so you won't
likely just break an alliance with a civ and declare war on a whim if
you've got a research alliance going.
War has changed a lot, too. Not only does the hex system make for a
more natural-looking battlefield, but the developers have put an end to
the unit "stacking" that has been a basis of Civ brute-force
tactics for a long time. Now, each hex can only be occupied by one
combat unit at a time, meaning you'll have to really surround a city to
take it over. But to make up for it, Firaxis is adding new tactical
options like the ability to use ranged-attacking units to fire from a
distance. City defense has been reworked as well, with hit point
upgrades now being the basis for a city's defense rather than the
stationing of troops inside the city. Ideally, you want to defend your
city before enemy troops even get there, so you'll see better results
when you actively defend your city with real troops stationed near it.
Other changes are coming, too. Religion and Espionage have been
scrapped and some elements will be rolled up into a new system of
peaceful victories. There will also be independent city-states that
have no civ attached to them, and you can ally with them, conquer them,
or use them as a reason to start a fight with a real civilization.
Roads are going to have an entirely different role in Civ V,
although we really don't know what yet - all the developers were willing
to give up was that we won't see the "familiar spiderwebbing" of roads
all over the place. And I noticed a little "Strategic View" button
hiding down in a corner, so as a huge fan of Supreme Commander
and its revolutionary Strategic Zoom feature, I had to inquire. The
answer I got was a sly one that pretty much gave up that yes, you'll be
able to zoom out to a planet-wide view and see the whole thing at a
glance, but it's just not something they're willing to show off just
yet. Yeah, it's just one little button, but dammit, consider me
excited.
From everything I've seen of Civ V, it looks like Firaxis is
taking the series in exciting new directions - that might be scary to
some, but the developers have done this before and come out just fine.
The interface has been streamlined to put the most common things there -
and this is to pull in the console-centric Civilization Revolution
players, but it only takes one more click to pull up all of the
fine-tune features and actions for cities and combat units, too.
They're clearly trying to unify all of the fans under one banner, and
from what I got to see, they have a damn good chance of that. Civilization
V is set for release on PC late this year.
