![]() ![]() The best new system is trade routes, which are present from the ancient era on and a significant source of income. ![]() Cram it in wherever it fits and if you can’t find any such place, cram it in anyway. Just as religion was like another social policy tree, now ideology is like another religion system. ![]() Leave it to Firaxis to think it’s a good idea to stick more lists of random improvements under forced theming. You choose an ideology and then arrange tiers of skills by unlocking slots and…oh, whatever. As if the social policy tree and the long religion lists weren’t a bad enough idea, now there’s a DIY tree in the Industrial Era, tucked into a corner of the social policy tree. Ideology is a skill tree inside a skill tree, which is something I’ve never seen before. The late-game diplomacy depends heartily on a new system called ideology, which is a textbook example of Firaxis flailing around clumsily with a new system that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere, so, what the heck, just stick it in this box over here. So what if the AI is too dumb to understand it and the interface is too rickety to manage it? It’s a little more flavor for your cities and it’s something new to click and pick through the endgame that isn’t a space race. The Great People were housed in cities and could be kidnapped by spies. It reminds me a bit of how Firaxis made Great People more interesting in Civilization: Revolution. But then you find something and bring it home to your museum, much like monks carried relics back to your temples in Age of Empires II. It’s still blatant busywork and the interface is as bad as it’s ever been, but it gives you something to do as you trot your artifact hunters around continents ravaged by improvement graphics, trying to pick out the archaeological sites from all the visual noise. Here are some ancient American beads in my museum, alongside Klimt’s The Kiss. In the late-game, you can send archaeologist units out into the world to pick up artifacts that you can add to your artwork. It’s a cool gameplay mechanic whatever Firaxis calls it. But I like the idea of works of art being used as weapons to counter the cultural pull of other countries. For instance, I don’t have to travel to Spain to read Don Quixote, to the Netherlands to see Van Gogh’s paintings, or to Italy to hear Rigoletto, so it’s rather silly to put those things under the rubric of “tourism”. This doesn’t make any real world sense, but it demonstrates that Firaxis might still understand that doing things for gameplay reasons should trump doing things for realism reasons. Your tourism stacks up against other civilizations’ culture in a new kind of culture war. Move artwork and artifacts around among the slots on your civilization’s tourism paper doll, which is a bit like equipping pauldrons, earrings, and off-hand weapons in an RPG. ![]() The idea seems to be that Civilization V needs more clicking and picking when you’re not fighting a war, which the AI is incompetent at doing, so you probably shouldn’t be fighting wars. Instead, click, pick, and next turn your way through what passes these days for “interesting decisions”.īrave New World crams more of these decisions into the game, mostly at the mid- and end-game, when the pacing has stalled. If you care enough about strategy games to peer closely, you’ll see an absolute abomination. Now more than ever, Civilization V is a Frankenstein monster of clumsily stitched together gameplay under a thick layer of pancake make-up production values widely mistaken for game design. Add to all this some crass DLC and it’s enough to send you screaming back to Civilization IV. The difficult part about having a strong military isn’t the upkeep. Civilization V is a ramshackle collection of astonishingly dumb tactical AI, half-baked diplomacy, a godawful mess of social policies, an even more godawful mess of religion, a precarious interface, and a Keystone Kops routine of armies, navies, workers, generals, and now artists stumbling over each other one hex at a time. ![]()
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