Civilization V Gods and Kings (PC DVD)

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.

The following remarks are aimed at CIV hardcore enthusiasts who were disappointed that vanilla CIV 5 was so bad...

This expansion does not improve it much although it does reintroduce religion into the gameplay but not in the way you were used to in CIV IV. In addition, espionage to has been reintroduced but, again, does not work as previously. You can use it to sabotage production and the like. What is worse is that the warnings issued by the spies appear to be designed to just add a bit of excitement but not have an effect on the gameplay as the reason for their warnings never came to fruitation.

All in all a poor effort to redeem a game that is broken and better off ignored IMO.

First, some background: I started out with Civilization I as a kid way back when. I've played every single game in the Civ series since then, spending hours and hours playing around with Civilization IV, for example. When I heard Civ V was coming out, I was tremendously excited.

Then I experienced the Civ V demo, which stuttered and barely worked and I thought to myself, I'll let this wait for a bit, so they patch the game and get it in order.

About half a year after release I tried vanilla Civ V. It was as bad as the reviews on Amazon and other gamers experiences had led me to believe and I dropped it.

Then along comes the expansion, again I wait a few months and this time I see some positive reviews on Amazon. I hear from some people that enjoyed it and I think to myself, "ok, let's give it a shot."

The conclusion in one sentence: this game is not only still not worthy of the name "Civilization", it is still barely worthy of being called a game.

A lengthier overview:

0. Steam - not spending time discussing this or DRM, up to the gamer.

1. Interface - the interface is a clunky, oversized hodgepodge. The new Gods & Kings interface clashes with the vanilla interface and does not use a consistent GUI. In particular, both the religion and espionage interfaces are strange, unintelligible list based scroll-fests. The city overview becomes unmanageable in the late game with the painful profusion of units and buildings requiring long periods of scrolling. The notifications on diplomatic, game and city-states events is clunky and messy, occupying a massive amount of screen real estate, while conveying very little of value to the game. The various overviews and demographics are very unenlightening compared to previous incarnations of the game. The way the game skips from unit to unit automatically seems to be completely random and is very confusing when trying to coordinate an army. In particular, I could not find a "next unit" keyboard shortcut, which meant I had to continually switch from mouse to keys and back. Using the mouse - the next unit command is on the right side of the screen, while the unit information is at the bottom left - I often ended up moving the wrong unit to the wrong destination, simply because it was not clear which unit was selected. The units themselves are difficult to distinguish, all of them resemble large masses of little men, so you need to pay attention to the little icon floating above them, at certain zoom levels, however, this little icon is halfway into a neighbouring hex. The animated combat feature seems completely superfluous and slows down gameplay ridiculously. I could go on, but suffice to say the user interface is not user-friendly, big, bubbly icons and buttons to notwithstanding.

2. Gameplay - gaming is a complex form of play where the player has to feel like he or she is making effective choices that determine outcomes. On many gameplay fronts, Civ V continues to be a hopeless cludge. One particular horror is being unable to end a turn while there are still units without orders. I could not figure out how to do this in approximately 30 hours of play, which indicates a ridiculous failure of interface design.

2.a. Expansion - growing your civilization, which is what the Civilization franchise always stood for, has become more or less choice-free. City placement does not greatly affect how productive cities will be. Terrain is mostly irrelevant, there are no bad terrains or locations any more (for example, building a city in the middle of a fetid jungle works just fine). Improving terrain has little effect and can be automated (and ignored). Further, the only "growth" constraint in the game is an arbitrary whole-empire happiness that affects all your cities at once - which is rather strange.

2.b. Military - Enemies are a joke and do not check expansion, being feeble and incapable opponents - so long as you remember that they will always randomly and for no reason attack you. So, to expand, the formula simply involves building a basic army and then ignoring all the other civilizations. The strategic AI is absolutely inept. But oddly aggressive. The main thing I found was that I was loathe to get into a war because it was so boring. While the interface jumps from unit to unit at random, I would have to move them all. One by one. Every unit. Every turn. Because the pathing is so bad, that if something occupies a destination tile, the unit suddenly stops. I found myself hating wars, because they were boring. There was no chance or choice, the AI is so poor that I knew I would win the conflict, if I took the time. I often did not want to, because it was simply boring and slow.

2.c. Diplomacy - one of the most painful parts of the game, still. The AI players seem completely arbitrary and as soon as you begin to do well, they refuse to trade with you any further. In one particular game, I finally took down a bullying neighbour who kept reneging on our deals and finally attacked me. I destroyed the enemy and took his cities - and the game punished me! My empire was crippled by punishing unhappiness and all my cities stopped producing. And there was nothing I could do to fix it, except wait. In another game, I had a long history of "declarations of friendship" and "defensive pacts" with one neighbour against two others. Finally, in a war they started against my ally, I decide to destroy them. My ally promptly disowns me and hates me, because I am a bloodthirsty warmonger ... well, thank you. That's gratitude.

2.d. City States - these little "NPC" civilizations are a horrible cludge in my opinion. They are basically annoying little space hogs whose requests are basically unimportant to the game of civilization. In the long run, they play no effective role, neither as allies (inept military AI) nor as ... well, I don't know what they are supposed to do. I do know that I would regularly get 6-8 messages per turn regarding something they "wanted" and about which I could not care less.

2.e. Economy - the economy is completely out of your hands, your only role is to plop cities around and use money to buy buildings, because the rates of production are so ridiculously slow. There are still no empire wide controls for managing your empire, but this is mostly irrelevant, since unless you play at higher difficulty settings where the AI opponents cheat (faster production, etc.), there is no need to pay it any attention.

2.f. Religion - faith is yet another resource that gets produced and bolts on to the rest. Yet another resource that you acquire more or less easily and which has no major impact on the game.

2.g. Espionage - the most horrible, clumsy implementation of espionage into a civilization game I have yet seen. It basically does nothing for game play, the interface is horrible and it adds yet more pointless popups. And, if you are more advanced than your opponents, there's not much to do. You can look at their boring cities. You can't plant bombs or poison the water supply or try to stir up a rebellion.

2.h. Rewards - finally, the biggest general problem. With any game you except rewards for success, whether big or small. Unfortunately, this game does not deliver them. You build a world wonder, a little music plays, you get a picture and almost no game effect. It hardly seems worth the effort. You found and spread your religion, the same story. You plant your spies and they don't have anything much to do apart from clutter your interface with more inane messages. You defeat an enemy and ... nothing much happens, except that if you take over their cities, your empire collapses - so you have to call them "puppets" and leave them to AI governors. And, finally, you win the game ... and a little music plays, you get a picture and then get to see a list of the game messages that annoyed you throughout the game anyway. Or a few demographics. Or some graph lines. And a little score saying you ranked as highly as this or that character. The game does not make you care. I actually used nuclear weapons on some opponents just because I was fed up, they had been consistently rude and belittling to me for no reason for half the game and I wanted to see a flashy animation. Well, the units were damaged, the bomb flashed, the city was reduced in size and some fallout spread out. Yay.

3. Fun - however, even a game with a funky interface (I'm looking at you, EU III), can be fun. Even a game with clumsy gameplay can be fun (can't think of one quickly). This game, however, is not fun - at least if you're a strategy gamer it's not. As I mentioned, one of my biggest gripes in the interface was not being able to find a way to end turns more quickly - because they were so boring and all my choices felt so irrelevant!

I'm going to repeat what many have already said: if you want to play Civilization, stay with Civ IV.