52 of 56 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars Don't waste your money 27 Jun 2012
By Yuki
Fun: 2.0 out of 5 stars
So here it is: The long-awaited expansion to Civilization 5 and I can't say I'm impressed. There was plenty that went wrong with the original that could have been put right, but unfortunately this hasn't happened.
Upon playing, you may be a little confused by the title "Gods and Kings", because although religion has been reintroduced into the game, there doesn't seem to have anything added in the realm of empire governance and the only other major feature to have been added is espionage. The failure to mention "spies" in the title is somewhat appropriate, as they're almost completely useless (more about *that* later).
The religion in Civilization is probably the most significant addition and it works as follows: You build various temples and wonders in your cities to generate "faith" points. Once you've got enough of those, you can add new traits to your pantheon, enhance your existing religion, or purchase a great prophet and found a new religion. Normally, the traits and enhancements come in the form of bonus gold or culture from owning certain tile improvements or resources, which to be honest does add something to the game and is worth going out of your way to pursue. Having said that, I've heard it claimed that civilizations of a different religion are more likely to declare war on you, although I've seen no evidence of this in practice; the other civilizations seem to be as unresponsive to differing religions as they do to differing social policies.
There are also a few new units, buildings, wonders of the world, civilizations and city states to play with, too. Some of the unit requirements have also been changed - thankfully, you no longer need aluminium to build a nuclear sub (which was a stupid requirement in the first place). Instead, you don't need anything at all (huh?). And I'm still puzzled at why you need a constant supply of uranium to keep an atom bomb in your arsenal, or why twice as much uranium is needed to build a nuclear bomb in its place.
As for everything else in the game, it's either not worth mentioning or hard to talk about in a positive sense.
Espionage has been reintroduced, although it's only worthwhile purpose seems to be for stealing technology, which you can only do if you're lagging behind your rivals. No longer can you sabotage production, poison enemy cities or damage strategically important tile improvements. The intelligence reports your spies come out with are less than useless: "So-and-so is plotting against you", "So-and-so is about to launch a sneak attack against you" my spies warn me every few turns, which sounds all very exciting, except that I've yet to see any evidence of any these monstrous conspiracies taking place. No sneak attack. No declaration of war. Not even increased troop movement. Reports of invasion plans continued turn after turn - none of which ever happened. As for the other aspects of espionage, getting my spy to launch a coup in a city state sounded exciting at first, until I realised that it didn't actually grant me any sort of control over the city state - it merely made it my ally, which it almost was anyway. What a waste of time.
Another unwelcome introduction to the game is this rather silly "zone of control" concept. You see, your units aren't able to use their full set of moves if there's an enemy unit in an adjacent tile, nor can you attack afterwards and it doesn't seem to matter what the unit is, what it's armed with, or where it is (this rule even applies to naval units). I don't know what exactly this adds to the game or what real life mechanism it's supposed to represent. Why couldn't I move my riflemen to outflank my enemy's swordmen? I'm the one with the guns: I'm not in their "zone of control" - they're in mine.
Other than that, not much has changed. The AI is so lacking in tactical finesse it makes Leeroy Jenkins look like Napoleon (failing to spot obvious weakpoints in my defences, failing to capture a city after it had reduced its defences to zero when it was perfectly capable of doing so. Sometimes, it also seems to have difficulty placing embarked units back on land.) And then there's the diplomacy system, which seems to have been programmed by Cristina Kirchner (A city state declared war on Spain, who I'd recently signed a defensive pact with. I then got nasty messages from two other civilizations warning me that they didn't like my "acts of aggression" against this warmongering city state. Trying to make trade deals with supposedly friendly civilizations is ridiculously expensive, nor do they ever seem to offer you assistance at any point).
All in all, Gods and Kings isn't worth buying, not when there are so many free (and arguably superior) fan-made mods for original.
cheap shot i know.
