Dutch geek/technology site Tweakers.net has posted two articles about
Civilization V based on their visit to last week's GamesCom: a preview and an interview with
Civ5 lead designer Jon Shafer. They also included 14 screenshots. The
preview focuses on the new combat model, explaining that this area of the game has become more tactical. A translation of one paragraph:
In Civ V it's important to encircle your opponent. Using the right tiles is crucial in an attack. The fun part is that ranged units can now fire over other tiles. This starts with Archers that you can build. They can shoot over a tile, and you can put melee units in front of them to protect them. Some canons that are available later on in the game can even fire over two tiles, keeping them out of range of the ranged units that can be produced earlier in the game. It's a matter of occupying as many tiles around the enemy as possible, so that your units get the bonus for being adjacent to each other and so that you can attack with as many units as possible. Here it's more important than ever before to put the right unit in the right spot.
The article continues to explain that cities can now defend themselves and are formidable forces, making city capture a challenge especially in the early game. The author then talks about the role of city states, noting it's more important to keep them as friends early on as they are difficult to conquer. If you build up the relationship, a city state ally will act much like a vasal.
The article then talks about the trade-off of annexing vs creating puppet states and briefly explain the new culture/social policies model. Author Paul Hulsebosch concludes that the game appears to be fine addition to the series and praises in particular the combat changes.
In the
second article, Hulsebosch interviews Jon Shafer about the game. When the former notes that
Civ5 seems to have taken a lot of elements from
CivRev, Jon is quick to explain the complexity of the game is on the same level as
Civ4 -- only some elements were taken from the console port, such as the simplified interface and the advisors, which should make it easier for newcomers to jump in. Another lesson they took from
CivRev was to make every unit truly unique and have its own specific role. When you research a new unit it's not just the same unit as its predecessor but with higher stats, it will offer entirely new capabilities.
Jon then talks about how
Civ5's graphical style is more mature than that of
Civ4 as the team now has more experience with building fully 3D games (
Civ4 was
Firaxis's first fully 3D title). With the leaders, the aim was to make them look heroic to create a positive view of history -- there are already plenty of dark games out there. Shafer continues to talk about the engine, catering to the tech-savvy Tweakers.net audience. The following is a re-translation of the Dutch translation of Jon's comments:
We started with a number of elements of the Civ Rev engine. We had a few programmers in our team that also worked on Civ Rev. The biggest part of the engine however was built specifically for Civ V. We built a new animation engine, a new particle engine and a completely new renderer. And because we're developing for the PC, we could take the latest hardware into account. For example, the game runs much better on quadcore than on dualcore. We also built the game on DirectX 11, that's the API we used as foundation and support for earlier versions was derived from that. Of course the game will run on DX9 and DX10 as well, but DX11 was our starting point. We also based our design on the latest Intel processors: Core i3, i5 and i7. With Civ IV this was less of a priority. That engine was not optimised to take advantage of the available hardware and hardly performed any better on a quadcore than on a singlecore. We just received a hexcore system and the game runs absolutely fantastic on that. The engine is job-based, where one of the threads is dedicated to assigning tasks to the other available threads. Together with the folks at Intel our programmers optimised the work load distribution. As a result, on our hexcore machine all six cores now run at 90% effiency, which is a very high score. I don't think any other game scores that high and we are very proud of that. That is also the main advantage of developing solely for the PC; we don't have to worry about making sure the game also runs on consoles.
The interview then moves the discussion back to gameplay: why hexagons? Jon explains that travel in all directions is now the same, that the borders of tiles are now much more obvious and it just plain looks better: a mountain now looks more natural, not as square as it did in
Civ4. On the other hand, technologically it's more challenging as path finding is more difficult, and it also has a stigma dating back to board games.
The next topic is terrain height. Jon explains that combat range now works the same way as line of sight: an Archer can't attack a unit if there's a forest tile between them -- unless the Archer is on a hill, in which case it can see/fire over the forest. When asked why city states don't expand and found new cities, the lead designer explains that they exist to offer new diplomatic options, not to potentially form a threat to the player. Asked about if Firaxis ever considered the 1UPT model before, Jon says no, he took it from Panzer General. Talking about Sid's response to the game, Jon notes that he did need convincing about the 1UPT rule, although it had been considered for
Civ2 as well. Eventually he came on board with the idea though, and it was Sid's idea that adjacent units should receive a bonus.
The interviewer wonders why the promotion options in
Civ5 are so limited, to which Jon replies that he wants the player to really think about a few major options, the decisions are more important now. Finally, when asked if it was considered to include any hero units in the game, Shafer says that he wants all units to be important. Players should get attached to the units they promoted a few times and that maybe only barely survived an important battle, not to units that the game designates as important. There is a Great General however, which is similar to the one in Civ Rev: it can give a combat bonus to nearby units or be used to build a citadel improvement inside your borders, which gives a massive combat bonus to units inside it, making it perfect for choke point defence.
As Dutch and Belgian readers may be aware, one of Tweakers.net's prime features is their Pricewatch, which tracks the prices of hundreds of thousands of geek products and the reputation of hundreds of Dutch webshops that sell them. The cheapest pre-order offer for
Civilization V is currently a mere €34.95.
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