Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I am saddened to admit that I am not a Civilization player. My brain does not work in that way. No matter how much I try, I just bounce off the game, and then I’m pushed out the way by mean Civ bullies who mock my tactical and diplomatic failings. It’s like home economics all over again. But I’m a bigger man than those meanies, and don’t begrudge Civ fans the opportunity to see the new expansion pack, A Brave New World. And I don’t begrudge Revison3 the hits for the preview that I am shamelessy yoinking. Do click here, as that Sessler guy seems like a nice chap.
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How often do you find yourself looking at Civilization V and thinking, ‘all this science and culture is fine, but there simply aren’t enough deities knocking about the place’. If the answer is ‘very often’ you might already have bought the Gods and Kings expansion. If not you could read my thoughts on what it does for the game or you could even try it for yourself. There’s a demo on Steam and, brilliantly, it’s standalone; you won’t need the base game to try it. Handy that, for those who held off buying in the hope that an expansion might make the whole thing more appealing. Embarrassingly, I’m not actually sure how much the demo contains but I’d bet fifty pence that it sets a limit on how many turns you can play for.

Civ V is integrating with Steam Workshop with the intent of making the use of mods much more user friendly. Create mod collections, browse what’s available through Steam and then fall to your knees in anguish because Fall From Heaven is nowhere to be seen in this version of the game and never will be. I haven’t explored the modding scene for this one a great deal, although now is the time for revisitations with the Gods and Kings expansion pack due on June 19. I’ll be telling you wot I think about that in due course and might be tempted to dip into modland as well.

What happens when you play a single game of Civilization II across ten long years? Well, carpal tunnel syndrome and a lifelong fear of pixels smaller than than the size of a fist. Also, an in-game world which is “a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation”, riddled with nuclear fallout and caught in a terrible stalemate between three ultra-nations which have been at war for millennia.
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I liked Civilisation V, which sometimes causes long-time fans of the series to hurl detritus at me in the streets, but I would never argue that it wasn’t lacking features that I craved. Foremost among them was a decent application of the cultural and historical force of religion, so I’m extremely pleased to see that the just announced expansion, Gods and Kings, will bring all manner of theism into the game. Along with religion, there’s a focus on bulking out espionage and diplomacy. There will also be plenty of stuff. More details below.

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When we first heard about the Facebook version of Civilization a couple of years back, the prospect was enormously exciting – a persistent online Civ, played from any PC, any time. Of course, back then we perhaps weren’t fully aware of the route Facebook games were broadly taking – the pay/spam friends/wait model popularised by FarmVille. There’s absolutely nothing to say that model can’t be successful and entertaining, but it does mean that Civ World, as the now fully-revealed Facebook Civ has been retitled, is necessarily a very different prospect to Civ itself. In-game footage and dev commentary below…
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Wow! It’s a good day for passable games getting additional modes. Civilization V, which Alec and I both saw eye to eye about, will be getting updated with a hot seat mode within the next couple of months (hotseat being a multiplayer mode where several players take turns taking… uh, turns on the same PC). Which might seem like a long time to wait for a feature that appeared in Sid Meier’s Civnet way back in 1995, but presumably the technology behind it is now so old and irrelevant that nobody understands it anymore, like the tech behind the Apollo space program or the recipe for Greek Fire. Is that likely? I think so.

VG24/7 has word that a Polynesia Pack will be available for purchase for Civ V this Thursday, adding a new Civilization and a new scenario for the tidy sum of £2.99. Firaxis are releasing a free map pack on the same day, too. You’ll find all your precious details and some ukulele music after the jump.
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First the absurdly long walkthrough video, and now the whole bally manual for next week’s Civ V. If you want to get a head start on what path up the tech tree you need to take to build helicopter gunships and exactly how the no unit stacking combat thinger works, have a read on this. It’s got a complete unit breakdown for warlike types and buildings and wonders for the more constructively minded, but sadly the entire tech tree chart isn’t in there, nor is there any designer commentary. Should give you a decent sense of how the game does and doesn’t differ from its predecessors, though. All being well (i.e. if the build I’ve got starts behaving itself again) we’ll have Words O’Judgement for you on Tuesday.

25MB PDF here. Full colour, as they used to say when such things were rare. Download rather than open in a browser tab, unless you want long waits.