#E X CIVILIZATION V HOW TO#

#E X CIVILIZATION V HOW TO#

It took a bit of practice to learn how to plan my troop movements to avoid slapstick-comedy traffic jams and bottlenecks, but once I got the hang of it I found it to be extremely nuanced. Plus, cities are now formidable combat units themselves with built-in defenses, and never give up without a fight. You've also got to take into account if you're attacking across a river, flanking bonuses (putting two of your units adjacent to an enemy unit), any bombardment units or aircraft in range and the huge impact of the presence of a Great General. Unit positioning matters almost as much as having the most technologically advanced military-and it's far more than just placing your spearman on a defensible hill or forest tile. This changes absolutely everything about the way war is fought, and almost entirely for the better. Civ V scraps that system in favor of something more like global-scale chess, where each space can only be occupied by one combat unit at a time, and some, like archers and artillery, can attack over a distance. In board game terms, Civ I through IV are like Risk, where you can stack all your armies on one space and march around the world conquering everything in your path. When nations collide, this is far and away the most tactically deep Civ ever. In reality, the most revolutionary renovation is warfare. Likewise, though I wasn't certain about it for the first dozen hours or so, the new super-friendly interface has grown on me quite a bit, despite its almost over-eagerness to move things along. In practice, this turned out to be one of the least transformative changes-after just a few minutes of ordering around my units I barely noticed the difference, and I never once found myself pining for the old squares. Some seem like a bigger deal than they actually are-going in, I'd expected the most dramatic one would be the shift from the traditional map of a grid of squares to Civ V 's honeycomb of hexagons. Under the striking visual layer are innumerable changes to the usual Civ gameplay. It's the most beautiful, lively virtual game board you've ever seen. Cattle, sheep, horses and elephants graze their respective tiles indicating sources of food, mounts and ivory, and in the hypnotically glistening ocean you can see whales breaching and schools of fish swimming beneath the surface. Zooming in on a tile with a fur resource shows a pair of foxes frolicking together. The painterly art style of the randomly-generated virgin landscape you see when starting a new game feels like Monet meets Google Maps, with bright colors and stunning attention to detail. Graphics may be superficial in a game like this, but it has to be said that Civ V is indisputably the best looking turn-based strategy game ever made. You begin with a single settler in 4000 BC, and over the next 6,050 years you lead your fledgling nation turn-by-turn as you found a city, research technologies, raise an army, build history's greatest man-made wonders, expand to a sprawling empire and finally make your play for world domination - all in competition with other nations. At a foundational level, it's very familiar.

E x civilization v