Originally published January 2016

The Civilization series has been a major franchise in the strategy genre of video games. It's been around since the early days of PC gaming and each major entry has garnered a fair amount of praise and success with its release, excluding Civilization: Beyond Earth. It's essentially been the same game with the same goal for 20 years, and all that's changed is the interface and the methods by which you win the game.

I played Civilization III, but at a young age and with a shorter attention span. So, I didn't really understand it or play it for long back then. However, I loaded up my copy of Civilization V from my Steam backlog, and now I get it.

I still haven't become a master of Civilization, but I've certainly sunk some time into it. Having played a tutorial session for a few hours and played and beaten the game with my Russian empire after some 15+ hours of playing at the time of writing this, I feel like I've finally figured out the mechanics, but still haven't figured out everything. Considering the fact that the game starts in 2000 BC, and I finished my first game in 1954 AD, there is an immense breadth this game has to cover. With that much gameplay and time to go through, there's a lot of information that goes with it, which the game fails at conveying very well, so I'll do my best to succeed where the game failed.

Since I feel that I still haven't played enough to give it a formal review, I'll give it my initial impressions and discuss the things I like and don't like.

Tutorial Troubles

Civilization V is a complicated game. Well, it is and it isn't. It's complicated in that there is a lot going on and many different factors to keep in mind. As the new ruler of a founding empire, you need to manage your food, productivity, revenue, maintenance costs, population growth, cultural growth, and resource management, among numerous other things.

It can be difficult to convey this information in a meaningful way for new players to understand it, especially when the gameplay is so pulled back from the action that is taking place over a vast period of time. It's not like the Dawn of War strategy games where you just need to learn the army's units, their strengths and weaknesses, and the buildings necessary to obtain them. Civilization V has dozens upon dozens of different military units, in addition to the numerous buildings, wonders, and tech trees available to you to as the leader of an empire that spans thousands of years.

Nonetheless, there is no excuse for the so-called "tutorial" of Civilization V. It sucks. It does nothing more than make you play a round of Civilization V in which you can't save your progress. The same tooltips and hints that it gives you in the tutorial can be turned on in the basic game. So, there is no tutorial. Just play the basic game and learn as you go; I certainly learned a lot more in my game than I did in their tutorial scenario.

I don't always feel like a tutorial is necessary in games. Action games and side-scrollers can usually forgo having to run the player through a series of specific scenarios designed to teach them how to play the game unless there is an important mechanic that can't be understood through experimentation. Games like Civilization V, however, need a tutorial and one that goes over the interface a lot better than what they provide. It needs a scenario where it goes in-depth with examples of why you might want to focus on the food resources of your city as opposed to always increasing your productivity or science. This is a strategy game, so it would be helpful if it taught its players some basic strategy essentials with its mechanics. All you get are pop-ups from your "advisers" who act as the Navi of the game. The info in their tooltips is certainly useful, but when there's so much reading about everything, without any examples through the use of the interface or gameplay, it can be difficult to consume and retain the information. The tutorial dialogue boxes may tell you everything you need to know about how to play, but just telling me without showing me makes it a lot tougher to remember everything.

The one thing I will say is that your advisers, while useless as a tutorial mechanic, are helpful in making decisions as a leader. They give you quick information on the status of your world and competition/allies. Plus, when ordering a city to construct a building or unit, it's helpful to have their icon next to the object they think is best to build next. At times, it helped steer my decision amidst the lengthy list of options.

Simple-ization

As complicated as a game that has you building an empire from the beginning of known history can be, the interface does its best to simplify it to make it more user-friendly. I realize I just complained about how the tutorial does a bad job of telling me how everything works and how it took me a while to learn the ropes, but having finally learned the basics enough to control half of my world, I think that the mechanics are a little too simplified to keep the player involved.

I know that I'm contradicting myself when I say that, but the point I'm trying to make is that the interface itself and the method in which you rule or make decisions is a little too simple for my liking, despite not understanding what it all means. The complication of Civilization V comes from the variety of tools and knowing what to build or why. Once the mechanics are understood, there's not much left for you to do. Sure, you can go to each city and tell them to focus on production, or wealth, or growth, but it's basically just clicking a bullet point to make your city better at particular resources. There's not a whole lot of ruling to be had afterward.

Civilization V is a complicated game in its theories and strategies. It has a lot of mechanics that it does a poor job of teaching you how to use and why you would want to do one thing versus another. Yet, the interface itself is so user-friendly, it takes a lot of the involvement out of the gameplay that I would like to have. This is probably why I'm more drawn to the Total War strategy games. I enjoy controlling my empire on the map, but there's still a lot of micromanaging to be done for my regions and my military. For that reason, I think that once you understand the mechanics of both Civilization and Total War, there's still a lot more to learn and challenges to be had in Total War, while the main challenge of Civilization is just figuring out how everything works together.

Historycal

I'm full of puns today.

I'm a fan of history and historical science so the idea of founding a group of people from the tribal years and progressing them through the ages to the modern era is exciting to me. There's not a whole lot to be learned from playing Civilization V, as it doesn't inform you much about what your nation you chose, or what this nation was doing during each era, but it nonetheless provides a tasteful backdrop to the gameplay.

I found myself crafting my own sort of diluted historical story as I built up my empire. When I clicked the Play Now button, I was assigned the role of Catherine of Russia, who came with the benefits: a focus on high production and military strength. While I was totally intending to play the friendly diplomat with a focus on science, I soon learned that my neighbors were Genghis Khan and Montezuma. Obviously, this was not historically or geographically accurate by any means, but the developers still took into account the personality of these historical figures. I knew that with these two warlords next door, I needed a military.

Fast-forward a few ages, Khan and Zuma are dead, their cities annexed into my nation: an entire continent under my control with the largest, most advanced military force on the map. On top of that, I inadvertently chose to focus my culture on Liberty, Knowledge, Honor, and Order. Liberty is a cultural path that leads towards having many cities and happy citizens, while Honor and Order are military and production, with Order being the path toward Communism. The irony was ever-present in the back of my mind while I maniacally laughed as I crushed Germany, France, and China with my military might and erected puppet states from the bleak remnants of their dead civilization.

Satisfaction

Despite the fact that the tutorial sucked at teaching me anything, and the mechanics proved to be too simple and uninvolved for my preference in a strategy game once I actually figured them out, I still have an immense desire to go back and play more.

A fair amount of the satisfaction I got from playing Civilization V was the fact that I was able to adapt to the changes that were taking place in the game and react accordingly. When I found out I was direct neighbors with Montezuma and Genghis Khan, I boosted my military effort immediately and was able to destroy their forces before they became a real threat. Montezuma had managed to secure more than 5 cities before I went to war with him and he surely would have proved a major threat had I not the military force to counter his backstabbing bloodthirst.

I was also proud of my strategy employed to buy land from Germany and China in strategic positions to prevent them from spreading into areas that I wanted to secure for myself. I even let Germany do some of the heavy lifting against France before coming in and stealing the territory for myself. Bismark was attacking Napoleon in his HQ of Paris; he was chipping away at their defenses, but making little progress and losing a lot of his forces. Napoleon then made the mistake of attacking my neighboring city-states as a taunt against me. I declared war and quickly took over his city with my advanced troops once Germany had exhausted its efforts.

I'm fairly certain that I was playing on an easier difficulty, despite just clicking the Play Now button which I thought would give me something in the middle range, but that's okay. I had a lot of fun with it and now that I have a better understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of where a city is placed and the resources available to it, I'm confident I can handle a more difficult and bigger scenario.

This is a rare game where, after being sucked down the rabbit hole, beating it does not make you immediately sick of Wonderland. Due to the fact that there are so many different nations you can play, with their own strengths and weaknesses, I'm deeply curious as to how I might play the game as the ruler of civilizations like India, China, or Greece, that have much less focus on military might than Russia did. Hopefully, my neighbors won't be warmongers either, forcing me down the path of military defense.

Next...

I'm going to go back down the rabbit hole as a different ruler with a different scenario. Hopefully, it will play out as I expect with the strategy and focus being completely different based on who I play and who I'm up against. Once I've exhausted my taste for the rising and falling empires and feel I've gotten a grasp on everything Civilization V has to offer, expect a Late Bird Review or Completion Report.