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3 years ago
Feature: Location, location, location
As if 2016 didn't already contain a rich enough seam of strategy games, Firaxis announce today that Civilization VI will be released on October 21st. Development duties are in the hands of the team behind Civ V's expansions, Gods & Kings and Brave New World, and when we spoke to designer Ed Beach and associate producer Sarah Darney last week to learn all the details,…
Feature: Reconstructing Civilization
The last big official update to Civilization V [official site] came in 2013 with its second large expansion, Brave New World. Three years later, and almost six years after the game’s original release, there’s another big new release expected, but it’s not an official expansion. It’s the Community Patch Project (CPP; to be named Vox Populi on release), a community-made mod that overhauls and improves…
Feature: Sid Meier's Diminishing Returns, more like
When Civilization II came out, I spent an entire summer playing it for several hours a day. The only check on my binging was the fact that my parents would eventually come home and force me to pretend, for a few hours at least, that I cared about things other than Civilization II. I was a senior in college when Civilization IV arrived. I'd barely…
4 years ago
Feature: Games for new and lapsed gamers.
One day I'll write a Desert Island Discs about the games I'd keep with me until the end of days, given a choice of ten. It'll no doubt be a Desert Island Digital Downloads given the absence of physical media in my life. I live with the ghosts of entertainment. Rather than compiling the list of games I'd take to the Vault with me though,…
Oh, Civilization: Beyond Earth [official site], how sad you make me. You work so very hard to make me love you but... well, maybe you're fundamentally unlovable. The Rising Tide expansion, that was a good try. You became more alien, less like your dad trying to wear a spacesuit, but gosh, you made a pig's ear of Diplomacy, didn't you? Bugs and bonkers design decisions…
Feature: Rising fury
Rising Tide [official site] is the first, and some might say much-needed, expansion pack for Beyond Earth, the sci-fi Civilization V spin-off which met a somewhat muted reception. It's out tomorrow, but I've spent the last few days with it. It's so much better. It's so much worse.
Civilization: Beyond Earth – Rising Tide Trailer Intros New Powers
Here's the latest Civilization: Beyond Earth - Rising Tide [official site ] trailer talking about hybrid affinities, overthrowing dictatorships, and combining harmony and purity in a part faux-propaganda, part technical rundown of what the upcoming expansion has to offer.
Who'd win in a war: Pagan Min out Far Cry 4 or Gandhi? Sure, Min's great at murder and oppression and has a crack army and all that, but push Gandhi too far and nukes will fly. In Civilization V [official site], anyway. Custom civilisations are one of the more common Civ mod types, but I do like the look of a new mod adding…
Toward the end of February, Richard Moss documented the great AI wars that were sweeping through the Civ V [official site] community. If you haven't read that feature, you should do so immediately. I'd intended to follow the 42-player AI-only game as updates arrived but when I checked in yesterday, it was my first visit in a good while. And, to my horror, I found…
Feature: AI Showdown
A strange thing happened in the Civilization community r/civ on January 10, 2015. Inspired by similar, smaller-scale offerings by a Twitch.tv livestream and fellow redditor DarkLava (from whom he explicitly sought permission), user Jasper K., aka thenyanmaster, shared the first part of an experiment he was conducting wherein he put 42 computer-controlled civilisations in their real-life locations on a giant model of the Earth and…
Feature: SPACE BUSINESS
Offworld Trading Company is a combat-free, sci-fi real-time strategy game from the lead designer of the sumptuous Civilization IV. A great concept with a great pedigree – can it possibly be as good as it sounds? But enough about Snickers More Nuts, let’s talk about Soren Johnson’s new game, an Early Access version of which was released this week.
Feature: The joy of limitations
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. Scenario Generator is a tool that creates random restrictions, goals and startup settings for a variety of games, and it's the reason I've become happily lost in Crusader Kings II [official site] and Civ V [official site] again. Reinvent an old favourite with the click of a button, as you find out precisely…
The inimitable forces behind Colonialist Legacies have gone and Frankenstein-ed together something audaciously lovely: a fully animated, fully voiced 3D leader screen for their Civilization V mod pack. It's Australia's Henry Parkes and he didn't make his grand entrance on the Internet alone. No, the esteemed gentleman is just one part of their new and improved Australia mod.
5 years ago
A science victory in Civilization is awfully anti-climatic. Thousands of years of research, exploration, art, diplomacy, trade, war, survival, and human progress, and all you have to show for it is a little spaceship popping out your city then flying off the top of the screen. It's nice, but lacks drama. That's where Civilization: Beyond Earth begins, exploring what happens after humanity reaches the stars,…
Feature: Deadly colonisation
A whole new world. A new fantastic point of view. ...I'm so sorry. However, I am pleased to report that sci-fi strategy game Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth is not simply Civ V with green face paint on. It has the same hexes and it does have much of the same infrastructure as its historical-themed predecessor, but its transformation into something alien goes far more…
Feature: Of Civilization and its contents
While visiting Firaxis to play Civilization: Beyond Earth, I spent a couple of hours talking to members of the team and learning how the company works. As the current creators and curators of two of my favourite series of games, Firaxis rank among the most interesting studios in existence, and their history is also a large part of the history of PC strategy gaming. With…
Joking about booking time off work for a video game's release is awfully hackneyed, but I have known people to do it for two series: Grand Theft Auto and Civ. So, just so you know, Civilization: Beyond Earth now has a release date so WINK you might want to WINK book time off work or WINK consider laying the dramatic groundwork for a WINK illness…
Is... Is this E3 news? On day three, I can't tell anymore. Did Sid Meier swing on a trapeze across the E3 concourse to announce that Civilization 5 was now available on SteamOS and Linux? Did Aspyr gather the world's press in an art deco theatre to reveal that this was their first Linux port, after years of porting popular games to Mac? Or is…
Feature: Mohawks And Martians, Pt 2
Once upon a time, Soren Johnson was the main brain behind Civilization IV. Now he has a mohawk. An indie mohawk. Also, he's making a game about managing a crazy intricate (yet disarmingly accessible) economy on Mars. Last time around we talked about how a Mars economy simulator even works, boardgames, and the current state of strategy gaming, and today we continue that discussion with…
The release of Civilization V: The Complete Edition rather suggests we've reached end of the line for Firaxis' latest history-spanning strategy game, and thus can start drawing up our mental wishlists for Civ VI. Though if I've learned anything in this business, it's that there's any number of final-sounding suffixes left in the game names cupboard. Be braced for Civ V: Ultimate, Civ V: Director's…
