After reading so many review sites (except the codex of course) praising Civilization 5 turned into a playable thing after two expansions (not gamespot and shit, but some reputable review sites), and with the new fal patch just came out a week ago, with great scepticism, I gave the game another try. Before this, the last time I played it was three years ago, given up on the vanilla version due to reasons just like everyone else: no religion, stupid diplomacy, hard to get used to 1UPT, and just overall dumbed down.
Now I have just woke up after spending my whole Sunday with three extra midnight hours into Monday on it and sadly must have some sleep. I find it to be good. Really good. Warning, below text may involve blasphemy.
The expansion packs introduced a lot of new gameplay elements and changes to the vanilla version that makes the game play nothing like the vanilla anymore. The new religion, tourism ("offensive culture"), world congress, ideology and other things give the game well deserved and previously lacking of complexity post early game, and they are in fact better done than Civ4, which was something I really didn't expect until I started played with them hands-on. The most important thing is, with the support of these new features, the originally perceived dumbed down core of the game, has suddenly become very interesting and fun to play.
Things that I really like of Civ 5, especially post expansions:
- 1UPT and hex makes unit movement and warfare much more interesting. Some people hate it, even I was worried that the game might turn out into "300 units clicking for one turn" nightmare. Turns out the game really doesn't allow this to happen due to the game's balancing, and it turns out the actual required clicking for troops each turn during warfare is more or less the same as before in Civ 4. The good thing of course is how troop composition, positioning, maneuvering and use of terrain have become very important. Even a 5*5 battlefield will require a lot of thinking, especially if the fight involve with complex terrain, rivers, and siege. Cities built by rivers are in particular hard to siege against. Sadly, the AI isn't really good at managing 1UPT, and I often see weird things like enemy archers not shooting while they could.
- The new policy system is very well thought and require strategical thinking to use. Unlike Civ 4, in which policies are tools that you can rush for by beelining its tech, and can be switched around anytime once become available, in Civ 5 policies require you to make choices from the get go and it will grow naturally over time. In most playthourgh it's impossible to pick even 50% of the policies, and each minor choices in the policy tree can make major impact on the game play, not to mention the ultimate benefits of unlocking a whole tree. It's almost like playing an RPG or an Euro boardgame, in which you must carefully tinker your choice of skills or resources right from the start instead of "that sounds cool I'll pick it" in order to specialize yourself for one of the victory conditions.
- The new religion system introduced in G&K is awesome and very complex. Instead of Civ 4 in which all the religions are the same, and they're just simple tools to make happiness and mess your diplomacy up, in Civ 5 religion can be customized (which can be critical if you want to rely your strategy on it), have a new and complex model to spread/use it, and even introduced a separate resource for it. Religion alone actually won't affect that much if you don't develop a strategy around it (which may require well planning from the start), but with the right choices of religion perks, policies and wonders, it seems to be able to become a powerhourse for fueling your happiness, tech, and even troop production.
- The new tourism, world congress and ideology introduced in BNW seems to be able to make major impact in the late game. I've no idea on the actual impact now, because my last playthrough has just reached the part to pick one ideology, and this playthrough isn't aimed at cultural victory either (so no focus on tourism).
- The civilopedia of Civ 5 is really well written and a good read, with tons and tons of text everywhere. Definitely more interesting to read than Civ 4.
All in all I must say post two expansions and the patches, Civ 5 turned out to be much better than I expected than vanilla. Whether it's as good as BTS or even better than it is debatable. For example some people absolutely hates 1UPT, while some people are more than glad of getting rid of Stacks of Doom. But gameplay wise, both vanilla and the expansions introduced a lot of new features that make the players need to think and ponder a lot in areas that Civ 4 never have (religion, combat, long term policy, etc.). Detail wise Civ 5 strangely lacks quite a few things that Civ 4 did so much better, such as unit confirmation voices with their own language, and dynamic music. Civ 5 plays almost silently when compared to Civ 4, which is weird since Civ 5 is supposedly more eye-candy friendly.
I would say to anyone who gave up on it before give it a try again.
(actually, they did eventually, but that didn't make them ANY LESS ANNOYING)
