I've read several articles on Civ V recently. Here are the highlights:
http://kotaku.com/5489814/civilizati...ig-differences
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The current minimum spec Firaxis is hoping to accommodate are 256 MB video cards and dual core processors.
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Players get a notification system this time, which alerts them to important new events such as a new bit of research being completed or a scouting party being attacked. Clicking on the alerts that appear on the right side of the screen, when relevant, warps the player to the location of the event.
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Advisers are back in Civ V, characters who pop up to offer tips, Rival civilizations are now being programmed to fight with noticeably distinct artificial intelligence styles. (Less consequential to gameplay is the introduction of full-screen animations of rival leaders such as George Washington or Napoleon, set in character specific locales).
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New city states appear on the map. These are always controlled by the computer. Players can enter pacts with them, trade with them, or even attack them. This complicates the relationships among the major civilizations, as an America that is friends with Budapest might be drawn into a war if it tries to free a besieged Budapest from the French. The city states were described by one developer showing the game as elements that "are there to make things happen."
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A great civilization's area of influence used to spread evenly in Civ games. In the new one, a player will see the colored border representing the limits of their people's reach expand in more realistic ways. Turn after turn, the computer will automatically expand a player's civilization into areas that have relevant resources, say forest instead of desert, early in the game. Players can spend gold to speed the expansion.
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Players will no longer be able to stack units onto one space and then carry that offensive stack to war. Each unit — which still represents and is depicted by — a cluster of fighters, can only occupy a space on its own. New ranged units can fire from afar (an extra hexagon away for the archers, according to the demo this week). And cities, which now have health bars, can fire back.
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The developers said great civilizations can now agree to commence a research agreement, instead of just establishing trade or declaring war.
http://kotaku.com/5489834/civilizati...road-spaghetti
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During a theater demonstration here in San Francisco of this fall's Civilization V that I witnessed yesterday (and chronicled in depth), I asked where the roads were.
I was being shown a civilization that was advanced enough to amass armies to attack other great civilizations. Yet all I saw was a single, nicely-paved road. It looked nice, but it didn't look like Civ.
It turns out, one of the developers of the game, told me, that the game's creators are re-thinking how roads are implemented and displayed in these games. The idea the creators at Civ studio Firaxis are going for is, they said, that "roads will mean something" this time. As in: Even a single road will have relevance and feel as special as a key highway does in the real world.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news...rategic-Combat
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Gone are features like Civ 4's religions
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Units are no longer destroyed if they lose a battle, which means that civs can spend much more resources on maintaining their armies as opposed to cranking out new units. The combat that we saw took place completely outside of a city, and positioning and terrain are much more important. "In the past, combat revolved around stacks [of units], which our fans affectionately call 'stacks of doom,'" Shirk said. "We wanted to pull combat out of the cities, and make every unit important." No two units can occupy the same tile, even friendly ones, so positioning on the battlefield becomes very important. Ranged units, like archers, are used to soften up the front lines from up to two hexes away, but they are vulnerable to attacks from melee units. The result is an emphasis on battlefield tactics instead of most Civ games which favored the civ that was able to crank out the most units.
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The resource system supports that concept. In Civ3 and 4, once your civilization gained access to Iron, each of your cities could pump out swordsmen and there was no limit to how many you could make. In CivV, gaining access to one source of Iron allows you to make one swordsman and that's it. You can't make another swordsman unit unless that one died or you gained access to another Iron source.
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A new addition is city-states. "City-states are small NPCs that are scattered throughout the world. They're not trying to win the game, they never grow beyond a single city. But they make stuff happen in the world," Shirk said. For example, Budapest was a city-state in the demo and by talking to them, you had the option of helping them out against barbarians with gold or units. Doing so raises your friendship level which means that they might gift you with units or aid in scientific research. "Different city-states grant different things," Shirk said. A more militaristic city-state might ask you to attack a neighbor or a weaker state might be attacked and ask you to defend them. Of course, there's always the option to simply take them over and add the city to your civ.
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Civ V will boast the most extensive modding tools ever available. Firaxis realized though that not many casual Civ fans know that such a vibrant mod community exists, so they are adding a way to browse for mods directly in-game. The mod browser will allow users to scan for mods by popularity with a built-in rating system, as well as give Firaxis the ability to feature mods on an ongoing schedule. Modders will be able to solicit comments and questions by linking to their fan pages on CivFanatics through an ingame web browser.
