Civ 5 expansion pack announced

The Game Room
1

This took a while and I’m quite surprised it’s here as I thought they’d moved to the DLC route at the expense of expansions.

http://www.2kgames.com/blog/civilization-v-expansion-pack-announced

It includes:

  • Religion
  • Reworked combat system
  • Enhanced diplomacy, with espionage
  • 27 new units
  • 13 new buildings
  • 9 new wonders
  • New civs
  • New city states
  • New scenarios

Looking forward to playing it. Unfortunately I’ve been really getting into the Nights mod recently and not looking forward to going back to the vanilla style rules.

2

“Enhanced diplomacy with espionage”? Two predictions:

  1. AI leaders are still gonna be really dumb.
  2. Espionage is going to suuuuuuuck.
3

Not much of a prediction, there. It’s sucked since Civ 1.
Come to think of it, I don’t know any 4X that ever got it right (except those where espionage is just that: hidden units with a decent field of vision).

4

There’s no way in hell espionage will work well.

On the other hand, maybe religion will. I am one of the few people who didn’t like religion in Civ 4 (it was just a race to see who got Hinduism and Buddhism first) and didn’t miss it, but if they’re making it a somewhat more dynamic thing, who knows, it might work okay.

I wonder who the new civs are. I hope one’s Canada, though it never is.

5

The problem with espionage is the the same problem with workers: they don’t work well that within the unit-and-tile system. You really need to be doing something like building espionage points every turn, with automatic and purchased actions based off of that. Automatic would be things like seeing a larger field of view and details on enemy units, while purchased might be destroying an enemy structure or improvement or stealing a unit.

6

It worked okay in MOO and MOO2, where the espionage was simply building spies and using them to either defend against other species or to try and steal technology or sabotage. No annoying units to have to move.

7

It worked okay in MOO in the sense that it wasn’t particularly unbalancing, but it was basically just a diversion of time and resources. You could have removed it from the game without loss.

“Spying” doesn’t really work for a global game on the scale of Civ for the straightforward reason that spying isn’t that important. We’re talking about a game that spans the development of whole civilizations. Developing writing is important; domesticating animals is important; horses as a method of waging warfare is important; iron weapons is important. Spying isn’t.

Where such games are better off simulating the effects of strategic intelligence (as distinct from espionage, which is a small part of intelligence) are in conferring benefits based on the technological advantages - e.g. giving you a greater line of sight when you get radio, letting you see the map when you invest satellites, and other large scale things. Military intelligence is extremely important in waging war but for the most part it’s carried out through very un-sexy means - reconnaissance, knowing the ground, good maps, good communications, research, stuff like that. The idea of a guy slipping into the enemy’s capital and coming out with YOU HAVE DISCOVERED COMBUSTION! is kind of silly.

8

1.) I’m kind of iffy about the whole religion thing. Hopefully it’s not as cheesy as it was in Civ IV, when you could send out one missionary and have the AI love you forever.

2.) Espionage shouldn’t have been taken out of the game to begin with.

3.) As far as a reworked combat system, hopefully they get rid of 1UPT and make it something like 5UPT, because the AI is absolutely HORRIBLE at 1UPT.

9

There’s a thread on the civ 5 forums about the expansion, various things people have dug up: http://forums.2kgames.com/showthread.php?118092-Gods-amp-Kings-Super-Sleuthing

some highlights:

Release date “late spring”, estimated cost $29.99

9 new civs

9 new wonders

27 new units, 13 of which are UU for the various new civs and some of which (maybe the rest of) are probably for the new “steampunk” scenario.

13 new buildings

A new era between renaissance and industrial

New city-state types, religious (gives +faith) and mercantile (gives unique resources)

Unit HP changed to 100 (from 10), apparently to make combat last longer and allow more room for strategy. Not really sure if unit damage is going to be changed or if it’s going to take 10 times as long to kill everything or what.

Embarked units can all defend themselves now, dunno what they are going to do with songhai (This change is probably because the AI is completely incapable of defending it’s embarked units, which kind of makes me sad)

Spies are not units on the board, you get 1 per era (starting in renaissance) and you attach them to enemy cities (including city states) to do various things like steal tech and rig elections. They can gain levels like other units, and if killed you have to wait a while before they are replaced.

Religions work sort of like social policies, you start out with a sort of basic polytheism and generate “faith” which lets you upgrade your religion to one of 11 possible choices, apparently each one has unique buildings and such but there’s not much known about it yet.

3 new scenarios: an unnamed medieval one, fall of rome, and a scifi steampunk styled one.

Supposedly upgraded diplomacy and AI… which I’ll agree is BY FAR the most important part because the AI right now can’t really seem to cope with 1 unit per tile at all rendering the biggest improvement to the game moot, and currently diplomacy is basically non-existent (every AI will eventually backstab you at some point so there’s no reason to ever co-operate with them past selling them your extra luxuries).

There’s lots more information on the linked thread so you should check it out, it certainly seems interesting and I’m starting to really look forward to it.

10

The release date for the expansion is set for June 19. I guess that’s still “late spring” - very late spring. I’m quite excited about the addition of religion. One of my favorite things to do in Civ IV was to spam my missionaries to the four corners of the globe, then get myself elected Pope for a religious victory. Some videos from PAX demonstrating the new features:

Civilization V: Gods and Kings PAX Demo - Part 1 - talks mainly about religion and Great Prophets; new units like composite archers, gatling guns, machine guns; new civs like Carthage, the Huns, Austria;

Civilization V: Gods and Kings PAX Demo - Part 2 - espionage, diplomacy, improved city-state interaction, destroyers act as melee units, Great War bombers and tanks