Hi guys! Just got back from gamescom in Cologne where I had about two and a half hours of playtime with Civ V. I can only recommend going there. Most people are more interested in Mafia II at the 2K booth so there was always some room where 2K has set up around a dozen computers to play Civ V on. Unfortunately they make you stand while playing, but that's probaly because they know that you wouldn't leave if they provided you with comfy chairs.
Anyways, I played both as the Germans and as the Iroquois. The Germans I played for 100 turns and the Iroquois for around 60. Both were on Small Maps with 6 Civs and 12 City States on the second difficulty level, I didn't feel like fiddling around with the options. Why the Germans and the Iroquois you may ask, well it was because I wanted to test out their Special Abilities
GERMANS
They had the well-known barb thingy, where you get double gold (80) from barbarian camps and they have a 50% chance of joining you.
So there has been some speculation on these forums who joins whom here and I can assure you that once you have captured a Barbarian encampment there is a chance that you receive a unit of Barbarian Brutes which spawn next to where the encampment was. I say 'a chance' here because in my game I destroyed like 10 barbarian encampments and only got a free unit twice. Was a bit bummed, but maybe I just got unlucky. The bonus gold was more than worth it though, I was wallowing in gold and could buy tiles like crazy!
IROQUOIS
Well looks like Firaxis thought their Special Ability weak as well so they have tweaked it. In the version I played it gave you the following bonus: Forests and Jungle are treated like roads when they are within your territory. This means they give a bonus to movement and also help with setting up your trade network.
This sounded improved on paper, in the game though I was always expecting my units to move faster through forest while I was exploring. Of course this wasn't the case as very little forest was in my initial city radius. It was really neat to only have to build a few roads to get a trade route between my first cities though. You can accidentally destroy this though, since I build a plantation on a forest tile, which essentially destroyed my trade link. Bummer.
Othe than that I see a problem with the smaller culture area you have in Civ V as compared to Civ IV, which makes the Iroquis Special Ability not as good as it looks on paper, in my oppinion.
PLAYTHROUGHS
So as the Germans I wanted to play aggressive and make use of my Special Ability as much as possible. I mainly built Warriors but also had some horses (4 to be exact) near my capital, so I switched to Chariot Archers and Riders quite quickly. I was on a small continent with Alexander and five City States: Stockholm, Geneva, Florence, Ragusa and Budapest.
The first I met was Stockholm, whom I gifted some gold to increase my influence, it was only a measly 25 gold after all. Little did I know that it would rise to a whooping 250 as the minimum after that! Also City State influence degrades rather quickly. This depends on the City States attitude though. Some loose influence faster than others. Unfortunately I failed to check this for Stockholm but the influence seemed to fall really fast. On the upside you already get the bonus (+food/culture, military units) at Friendly so you don't have to go all the way to Allied.
This puts the Greek Special Ability in a whole new light and I would have loved to play a game as them as well.
The other City States went quite well, except for Geneva which I'll cover later. Most of them wanted me to bust the barb encampments, which was what I wanted to do anyway, so that got me to Allied status quite quickly. Later they will ask you for a specific ressource or even to build a wonder for them (Hanging Gardens), which I promptly did.
Since I was going all Military and Alexander was running around with his Unique Units I needed someone else to demonstrate my Military power on. Here comes Geneva. A tiny City State without any Military. So I get myself a Great General via the Honour branch and along with a Warrior I feel confident to defeat Geneva. My Military Advisor tells me that I need at least 4 units to take a undefended City, but what does he know? Well, a lot apparently. My Warrior got slaughtered. Not so much from the bombardment, which was alright, but once I attacked the city itself I got mauled bad.
I rescue my Great General and do a second try. Two Warriors and one Chariot Archer. Unfortunately Geneva lies behind a forest and a hill, so my Chariot Archers can't reach the city from afar and has to drive up to the wall. Meanwhile Geneva has invested in a Warrior of its own and mercilessly defeats my Chariot Archers. One of my Warriors gets shot down by the City and while I regroup I forget about the Two Movement feature of Warriors and loose my Great General. At least in the third attempt, two Chariot Archers with two Warriors and one Rider finally soundly beat Geneva into submission without further casualties. Finally I have my first Puppet State.
In the meantime I have settled two more cities, one of them fairly close to Alexander, which he doesn't like at all. He cancels our pact of mutual friendship immediatelly. This is as well, as I didn't really understand what effect it had when I made it after I first met him. The Secrecy Pact is well described by the tooltip (AI won't plot war against you, but rather at the one the Secrecy Pact is aimed at) but the friendship one is kind of unsatisfactory. Along with the fact that I couldn't find an overview over the pacts I have made with the AIs those two are the only gripes I had about the diplomacy. Research Treaty still gives a random tech at the end of it by the way.
The only other thing that happened in the German session was that I sailed across to the second continent and discovered the rest of my opponents. That and Natural Wonders, and lots of them. I found Mt Fuji quite quickly, then went on to Old Faithful (graphic looks good, geysir is running all the time though), the Grand Mesa followed soon after. I also discovered the Great Barrier Reef, which does cover two Hexes and also gave me two happiness for each hex I discovered. Don't know if that's intended or not. So I was wallowing in Happiness and was already at my second Golden Age before I quit.
On to Hiawhata. I mainly wanted to test his Special Ability, which I described above. I played on a Terra Map, on which I could also choose the size. It was really neat, I started in China of all places and quickly settled a second city in the south of it. A City State was where Siam was, Siam was somewhere in the Middle East, Persia roughly where it should be. Not a lot of new things happened in this playthrough beside the fact that I used the watering options that comes with Optics. Once you have it you can water your units, which is quite easy, you just move them off the land. It only worked while within my cultural territory at first, but after that I was able to rewater quite well. I staged a small invasion of Japan with one Archer and a Warrior, which was filled with two Barbarian Brutes and one Archer as well as a barb Trireme. Together with a Trireme I defeated them soundly. It was quite fun seein the Archers strike at each other from afar. Also Archers can shoot at ships as well and vice versa which really made for an awesome battle where everybody dealt and received damage a fair bit. In the end I was victorious and also ended that game as many more players were waiting to play.
SOCIAL POLICIES
They're there and as far as I could see there is no way to change them. Which also wouldn't make any sense, since some of them give one time bonuses, like the Great General you get through the Honour branch.
My impression of the Social Policies at first was that they are intimidating. There's a lot of possibilities and your choices matter a lot. You don't just fool around but have to plan your strategy wisely. I think this will make for really complicated decisions in a real game, as I was just testing I just dumped them somewhere to have it done with.
So I'll just assume you know what the branches are and what is known about them by now. If not check out Ariochs site: http://well-of-souls.com/civ/.
I looked at all the Policies and liked what I saw, unfortunately I won't be able to remember all of them though. I can think of those that I found most interesting though.
TRADITION has a policy that makes your units fight better within your territory, making this ideal for small empires who want to defend themselves.
The PATRONAGE branch there was one policy that will keep your Influence with City States above a certain threshold once you have reached it. This is welcome news as I found it quite hard to hold on to City States.
Und AUTOCRACY one policy gives you a flatout 10% increase in unit strength across the board. If you want to war, this is your policy.
RATIONALISM just gives you tech everywhere, one policy gives you +1 tech for every two citizens in every town that has a trade route to your Capital.
The rest really enforce the theme of each branch. So I find those choices you have quite daunting and interesting. Have a lot of land and want to grab it quick, take the Liberty branch and just expand away. Find yourself boxed in but with some decent spots, go all out on the Tradition branch and then add the Freedom branch later to really boost that Specialits Economy of yours. Have no land and a crappy starting position, just hang in there until you get to Autocracy and just warmonger your way to the top. Your units are 10% better than your enemy, even with equal tech you are superior, it will be quite hard to fight you indeed.
It's those choices that make the game really interesting to me and I like how the Social Policies enforce this mindset. Of course it was nice to mix and match according to the situation in Civ IV and from a realims point it is utter nonsense, but I like the gameplay implications and really look forward to the different strategies and synergies during a full game.
TECHNOLOGY TREE
Maybe I'm just not used to Normal game speed anymore but man did those discoveries fly by. Most technologies were researched in under 10 turns and I didn't focus on science at all. With the slider gone it is hard to tell what you are focussing on though. Science just seemed to happen without me having anything to do with it. I actually even forgot to check where all that science is coming from. I easily had a situation where I had far more buildings to build than I could possibly complete within time, I remember in Civ IV on the lower difficulties I would run out of build options before I discovered the next tech. This did not happen here at all. I did build several units though, especially as the Germans, so maybe that was the case.
The technologies themselves are always quite useful. The ability to chop now comes along with Mining and you can build Watermills after you discovered the Wheel (they give +2 food in the city, the city has to be alongside a river though). So there's a lot to do with the early techs already. Calendar for plantations and Optics for the ability to water are reached very quickly if you compare it to Civ IV where both come a tad later. All in all I'm impartial to the technology tree, it has to be seen how you fare on higher difficulties with it.
IMPROVEMENTS
I think here I'll cover city management as well. Improvements are different from Civ IV in that they give far fewer bonuses initially, especially on ressources. Cattle improvement is only +1 hammer and farm on wheat is only +1 as well. So you won't see those initial 5 food tiles you're used to getting from IV. Fishing boats on fish give +2 gold (food remains unchanged at three) of all things. So this felt really new to me. There are several technologies and Social Policies that improve the output of farms and trade posts though. They add money or research to the Trade post or add food to the farm when it is connected to a fresh water source. On the flipside fresh water is not needed to build farms. Felt weird to just plaster that Dester Hill beside my capital with a farm. Looked much greener afterward.
So going from this I only had a few workers and didn't feel like loosing out all that much during my plays. In the end this also had to do with the fact that what your city does is actually quite cleverly hidden from you. Unless you specifically seek it out you can just not care about tile allocation for example. Once you get to it though I was further hindered by the new icons. We know about them for some time now and I think they look nice, but it is really irritating. So green stuff is food now and red/orange stuff is hammers and the blue stuff, which was hammers is now tech? I guess you just have to get used to it, but I really miss those little wheat icons and hammers as opposed to the new apples. It really made it hard for me to see at a glance what tile produced what. Maybe I'm just very unflexible.
Apart from that the City Screen is very well divided and let's you get to all the necessary things quickly, the queue menu is especially well made. Citizens use up two food each by the way.
LOOK AND FEEL
With the UI already mentioned with the improvements I'll move on to the general Look and Feel. The UI really is very streamlined without loosing the functionalities it had before. It was so streamlined that I completely forgot to check up on some things (what exactly is my science rate anyhow?) as everything was running smoothly and I was more focussed on killing barbs and over all enjoying the new game.
When you selec a worker it will show little icons (farm, mine, plantation, etc.) on the respective tiles where the game feels you should build said improvement. Along those lines a lot of hints are given to help along new players.
Animation and landscape looks nice and fluid. On the computer I was running you could often see a change in resolution though. Especially when the AI contacted you they would start of as low-res for a second and then move on to the actual resolution. So probably some kind of loading thing, sounds good for weaker machines, but would be a bit annoying on a regular PC.
And while the hexes are easy to use it took me some time to get a fell for the landscapes. Often I would expect hills where there weren't any as I hadn't gotten used to the new hex grid. I had to turn the overlay on to get a clear picture, whereas in Civ IV I am so used to the grid I see it even without the overlay.
Moving units is very intuitive as well. There's also the possibility to have units switch places, even over a distance. I once moved my warrior two tiles right on top of my Chariot Archer (which I didn't see as my Great General was on that tile as well) and the Chariot promptly moved two tiles to the position my Warrior was in. So handling your units works fine even with the 1 UPT. The only time it got a bit annoying was when I attacked a barb encampment on a narrow peninsula. But then it is supposed to be harder to navigate chokepoints. If the barbs had an Archer along with their Brute it would have been quite hard to take them out!
One last mention goes to the Civilopaedia. It's just ginormous, serously! The Game Concepts page alone probably takes two days to read in its entirety. And the history sections are just amazing. I checked out Germany and you could scroll down like four to five pages where they told you everything, from the barbarian tribes, to the Romans, to the Holy Roman Empire, to the Reformation, to the Napoleonic times all the way up to the present. So if you want to have a history book along with your game Civ V seems a good choice.
MISCELLANEOUS
- Great Generals can build a Citadel, which gives 100% defense bonus and damages all units adjacent to it by 3 each turn.
- Spearmen have a 100% defense bonus against horse units.
- Trade Routes, which come with roads, seem to only give money. At least in my German game, my second city Hamburg was immediatelly able to build horse units, although there was no connection to Berlin, in whose radius there were horses. No sea route either, as Hamburg was landlocked without a river. Don't know what to think about that one. I hope there's still a possibility to deny access to ressources, wasn't able to test this out further.
- Swamp gives a -33% defensive modifier. So units are more vulnerable whe they are attacked in swamps!
- Coast is not tied to the coastline of the continents as strictly as it is in Civ IV. It will often stretch two or more Hexes out into the ocean. Which was the reason I could discover the second continent with my Trireme and also scout around City States, as you loose Influence with them if you enter their territory and are not Allied (Or Friendly can't remember exactly).
I could go on and on but this is some wall of text already. So I'll probably add some details about the technology tree, Social Policies or the general Look and Feel at a later stage. If you have any questions in the meantime feel free to ask, maybe I can answer them. I really enjoyed playing though and can't wait to get the full version!
Anyways, I played both as the Germans and as the Iroquois. The Germans I played for 100 turns and the Iroquois for around 60. Both were on Small Maps with 6 Civs and 12 City States on the second difficulty level, I didn't feel like fiddling around with the options. Why the Germans and the Iroquois you may ask, well it was because I wanted to test out their Special Abilities
GERMANS
They had the well-known barb thingy, where you get double gold (80) from barbarian camps and they have a 50% chance of joining you.
So there has been some speculation on these forums who joins whom here and I can assure you that once you have captured a Barbarian encampment there is a chance that you receive a unit of Barbarian Brutes which spawn next to where the encampment was. I say 'a chance' here because in my game I destroyed like 10 barbarian encampments and only got a free unit twice. Was a bit bummed, but maybe I just got unlucky. The bonus gold was more than worth it though, I was wallowing in gold and could buy tiles like crazy!
IROQUOIS
Well looks like Firaxis thought their Special Ability weak as well so they have tweaked it. In the version I played it gave you the following bonus: Forests and Jungle are treated like roads when they are within your territory. This means they give a bonus to movement and also help with setting up your trade network.
This sounded improved on paper, in the game though I was always expecting my units to move faster through forest while I was exploring. Of course this wasn't the case as very little forest was in my initial city radius. It was really neat to only have to build a few roads to get a trade route between my first cities though. You can accidentally destroy this though, since I build a plantation on a forest tile, which essentially destroyed my trade link. Bummer.
Othe than that I see a problem with the smaller culture area you have in Civ V as compared to Civ IV, which makes the Iroquis Special Ability not as good as it looks on paper, in my oppinion.
PLAYTHROUGHS
So as the Germans I wanted to play aggressive and make use of my Special Ability as much as possible. I mainly built Warriors but also had some horses (4 to be exact) near my capital, so I switched to Chariot Archers and Riders quite quickly. I was on a small continent with Alexander and five City States: Stockholm, Geneva, Florence, Ragusa and Budapest.
The first I met was Stockholm, whom I gifted some gold to increase my influence, it was only a measly 25 gold after all. Little did I know that it would rise to a whooping 250 as the minimum after that! Also City State influence degrades rather quickly. This depends on the City States attitude though. Some loose influence faster than others. Unfortunately I failed to check this for Stockholm but the influence seemed to fall really fast. On the upside you already get the bonus (+food/culture, military units) at Friendly so you don't have to go all the way to Allied.
This puts the Greek Special Ability in a whole new light and I would have loved to play a game as them as well.
The other City States went quite well, except for Geneva which I'll cover later. Most of them wanted me to bust the barb encampments, which was what I wanted to do anyway, so that got me to Allied status quite quickly. Later they will ask you for a specific ressource or even to build a wonder for them (Hanging Gardens), which I promptly did.
Since I was going all Military and Alexander was running around with his Unique Units I needed someone else to demonstrate my Military power on. Here comes Geneva. A tiny City State without any Military. So I get myself a Great General via the Honour branch and along with a Warrior I feel confident to defeat Geneva. My Military Advisor tells me that I need at least 4 units to take a undefended City, but what does he know? Well, a lot apparently. My Warrior got slaughtered. Not so much from the bombardment, which was alright, but once I attacked the city itself I got mauled bad.
I rescue my Great General and do a second try. Two Warriors and one Chariot Archer. Unfortunately Geneva lies behind a forest and a hill, so my Chariot Archers can't reach the city from afar and has to drive up to the wall. Meanwhile Geneva has invested in a Warrior of its own and mercilessly defeats my Chariot Archers. One of my Warriors gets shot down by the City and while I regroup I forget about the Two Movement feature of Warriors and loose my Great General. At least in the third attempt, two Chariot Archers with two Warriors and one Rider finally soundly beat Geneva into submission without further casualties. Finally I have my first Puppet State.
In the meantime I have settled two more cities, one of them fairly close to Alexander, which he doesn't like at all. He cancels our pact of mutual friendship immediatelly. This is as well, as I didn't really understand what effect it had when I made it after I first met him. The Secrecy Pact is well described by the tooltip (AI won't plot war against you, but rather at the one the Secrecy Pact is aimed at) but the friendship one is kind of unsatisfactory. Along with the fact that I couldn't find an overview over the pacts I have made with the AIs those two are the only gripes I had about the diplomacy. Research Treaty still gives a random tech at the end of it by the way.
The only other thing that happened in the German session was that I sailed across to the second continent and discovered the rest of my opponents. That and Natural Wonders, and lots of them. I found Mt Fuji quite quickly, then went on to Old Faithful (graphic looks good, geysir is running all the time though), the Grand Mesa followed soon after. I also discovered the Great Barrier Reef, which does cover two Hexes and also gave me two happiness for each hex I discovered. Don't know if that's intended or not. So I was wallowing in Happiness and was already at my second Golden Age before I quit.
On to Hiawhata. I mainly wanted to test his Special Ability, which I described above. I played on a Terra Map, on which I could also choose the size. It was really neat, I started in China of all places and quickly settled a second city in the south of it. A City State was where Siam was, Siam was somewhere in the Middle East, Persia roughly where it should be. Not a lot of new things happened in this playthrough beside the fact that I used the watering options that comes with Optics. Once you have it you can water your units, which is quite easy, you just move them off the land. It only worked while within my cultural territory at first, but after that I was able to rewater quite well. I staged a small invasion of Japan with one Archer and a Warrior, which was filled with two Barbarian Brutes and one Archer as well as a barb Trireme. Together with a Trireme I defeated them soundly. It was quite fun seein the Archers strike at each other from afar. Also Archers can shoot at ships as well and vice versa which really made for an awesome battle where everybody dealt and received damage a fair bit. In the end I was victorious and also ended that game as many more players were waiting to play.
SOCIAL POLICIES
They're there and as far as I could see there is no way to change them. Which also wouldn't make any sense, since some of them give one time bonuses, like the Great General you get through the Honour branch.
My impression of the Social Policies at first was that they are intimidating. There's a lot of possibilities and your choices matter a lot. You don't just fool around but have to plan your strategy wisely. I think this will make for really complicated decisions in a real game, as I was just testing I just dumped them somewhere to have it done with.
So I'll just assume you know what the branches are and what is known about them by now. If not check out Ariochs site: http://well-of-souls.com/civ/.
I looked at all the Policies and liked what I saw, unfortunately I won't be able to remember all of them though. I can think of those that I found most interesting though.
TRADITION has a policy that makes your units fight better within your territory, making this ideal for small empires who want to defend themselves.
The PATRONAGE branch there was one policy that will keep your Influence with City States above a certain threshold once you have reached it. This is welcome news as I found it quite hard to hold on to City States.
Und AUTOCRACY one policy gives you a flatout 10% increase in unit strength across the board. If you want to war, this is your policy.
RATIONALISM just gives you tech everywhere, one policy gives you +1 tech for every two citizens in every town that has a trade route to your Capital.
The rest really enforce the theme of each branch. So I find those choices you have quite daunting and interesting. Have a lot of land and want to grab it quick, take the Liberty branch and just expand away. Find yourself boxed in but with some decent spots, go all out on the Tradition branch and then add the Freedom branch later to really boost that Specialits Economy of yours. Have no land and a crappy starting position, just hang in there until you get to Autocracy and just warmonger your way to the top. Your units are 10% better than your enemy, even with equal tech you are superior, it will be quite hard to fight you indeed.
It's those choices that make the game really interesting to me and I like how the Social Policies enforce this mindset. Of course it was nice to mix and match according to the situation in Civ IV and from a realims point it is utter nonsense, but I like the gameplay implications and really look forward to the different strategies and synergies during a full game.
TECHNOLOGY TREE
Maybe I'm just not used to Normal game speed anymore but man did those discoveries fly by. Most technologies were researched in under 10 turns and I didn't focus on science at all. With the slider gone it is hard to tell what you are focussing on though. Science just seemed to happen without me having anything to do with it. I actually even forgot to check where all that science is coming from. I easily had a situation where I had far more buildings to build than I could possibly complete within time, I remember in Civ IV on the lower difficulties I would run out of build options before I discovered the next tech. This did not happen here at all. I did build several units though, especially as the Germans, so maybe that was the case.
The technologies themselves are always quite useful. The ability to chop now comes along with Mining and you can build Watermills after you discovered the Wheel (they give +2 food in the city, the city has to be alongside a river though). So there's a lot to do with the early techs already. Calendar for plantations and Optics for the ability to water are reached very quickly if you compare it to Civ IV where both come a tad later. All in all I'm impartial to the technology tree, it has to be seen how you fare on higher difficulties with it.
IMPROVEMENTS
I think here I'll cover city management as well. Improvements are different from Civ IV in that they give far fewer bonuses initially, especially on ressources. Cattle improvement is only +1 hammer and farm on wheat is only +1 as well. So you won't see those initial 5 food tiles you're used to getting from IV. Fishing boats on fish give +2 gold (food remains unchanged at three) of all things. So this felt really new to me. There are several technologies and Social Policies that improve the output of farms and trade posts though. They add money or research to the Trade post or add food to the farm when it is connected to a fresh water source. On the flipside fresh water is not needed to build farms. Felt weird to just plaster that Dester Hill beside my capital with a farm. Looked much greener afterward.
So going from this I only had a few workers and didn't feel like loosing out all that much during my plays. In the end this also had to do with the fact that what your city does is actually quite cleverly hidden from you. Unless you specifically seek it out you can just not care about tile allocation for example. Once you get to it though I was further hindered by the new icons. We know about them for some time now and I think they look nice, but it is really irritating. So green stuff is food now and red/orange stuff is hammers and the blue stuff, which was hammers is now tech? I guess you just have to get used to it, but I really miss those little wheat icons and hammers as opposed to the new apples. It really made it hard for me to see at a glance what tile produced what. Maybe I'm just very unflexible.
Apart from that the City Screen is very well divided and let's you get to all the necessary things quickly, the queue menu is especially well made. Citizens use up two food each by the way.
LOOK AND FEEL
With the UI already mentioned with the improvements I'll move on to the general Look and Feel. The UI really is very streamlined without loosing the functionalities it had before. It was so streamlined that I completely forgot to check up on some things (what exactly is my science rate anyhow?) as everything was running smoothly and I was more focussed on killing barbs and over all enjoying the new game.
When you selec a worker it will show little icons (farm, mine, plantation, etc.) on the respective tiles where the game feels you should build said improvement. Along those lines a lot of hints are given to help along new players.
Animation and landscape looks nice and fluid. On the computer I was running you could often see a change in resolution though. Especially when the AI contacted you they would start of as low-res for a second and then move on to the actual resolution. So probably some kind of loading thing, sounds good for weaker machines, but would be a bit annoying on a regular PC.
And while the hexes are easy to use it took me some time to get a fell for the landscapes. Often I would expect hills where there weren't any as I hadn't gotten used to the new hex grid. I had to turn the overlay on to get a clear picture, whereas in Civ IV I am so used to the grid I see it even without the overlay.
Moving units is very intuitive as well. There's also the possibility to have units switch places, even over a distance. I once moved my warrior two tiles right on top of my Chariot Archer (which I didn't see as my Great General was on that tile as well) and the Chariot promptly moved two tiles to the position my Warrior was in. So handling your units works fine even with the 1 UPT. The only time it got a bit annoying was when I attacked a barb encampment on a narrow peninsula. But then it is supposed to be harder to navigate chokepoints. If the barbs had an Archer along with their Brute it would have been quite hard to take them out!
One last mention goes to the Civilopaedia. It's just ginormous, serously! The Game Concepts page alone probably takes two days to read in its entirety. And the history sections are just amazing. I checked out Germany and you could scroll down like four to five pages where they told you everything, from the barbarian tribes, to the Romans, to the Holy Roman Empire, to the Reformation, to the Napoleonic times all the way up to the present. So if you want to have a history book along with your game Civ V seems a good choice.
MISCELLANEOUS
- Great Generals can build a Citadel, which gives 100% defense bonus and damages all units adjacent to it by 3 each turn.
- Spearmen have a 100% defense bonus against horse units.
- Trade Routes, which come with roads, seem to only give money. At least in my German game, my second city Hamburg was immediatelly able to build horse units, although there was no connection to Berlin, in whose radius there were horses. No sea route either, as Hamburg was landlocked without a river. Don't know what to think about that one. I hope there's still a possibility to deny access to ressources, wasn't able to test this out further.
- Swamp gives a -33% defensive modifier. So units are more vulnerable whe they are attacked in swamps!
- Coast is not tied to the coastline of the continents as strictly as it is in Civ IV. It will often stretch two or more Hexes out into the ocean. Which was the reason I could discover the second continent with my Trireme and also scout around City States, as you loose Influence with them if you enter their territory and are not Allied (Or Friendly can't remember exactly).
I could go on and on but this is some wall of text already. So I'll probably add some details about the technology tree, Social Policies or the general Look and Feel at a later stage. If you have any questions in the meantime feel free to ask, maybe I can answer them. I really enjoyed playing though and can't wait to get the full version!
