Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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.

Sid Meier’s Civilization Videogame Number V By Sid Meier is out on September 21st, as is the demo, as is our review, making it a grand day for Civilization fans. Until then you’ll have to play very a different game entitled Sid Meier’s Tantalization. You can play this game by watching the new two hour developer walkthrough video embedded beneath the jump. Alternatively, you could read Alec’s two part write-up of his time with the preview code, or my interview with lead designer Jon Shafer.

Some people might think that Sid Meier’s Tantalization is not a very fun game. Well, I have to say to those people, that, I mean. Well.
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