What a totally overwhelming and packed week this one has been! After the announcement of Civilization V, there has been a complete shed full of articles, previews and information released this week, mostly from the Game Developer's Conference in San Fransisco.

We started off the week with a fairly comprehensive preview from IGN and from there the news came in fast. As well as the IGN preview we had:
- Eurogamer preview on Civ5
- Eurogamer interview with Firaxis on Civ5
- Soren's keynote on theme and mechanics at GDC
- Kotaku, Joystiq, Gamespot and 1UP previewed Civ5
- Brian Reynolds keynote at GDC
- Kotaku at GDC on Civ5
- Gamereactor interview with Dennis Shirk at GDC
- A German preview of Civ5 from GDC
- WPC hit Facebook and Twitter
- Game Informer also interviewed Dennis Shirk
- More GDC Civ5 previews from VentureBeat, G4TV and The Escapist
- UGO, GameSpy and Shacknews also saw Civ5 at GDC
- GamePro looked at why designers are moving to Social Gaming
- PCGamer interviewed Jon Shafer and Dennis Shirk
- Giochi per il mio Computer revealed Civs 18 and 19
- GameSpy speculated that Civ5 is no longer for the hardcore
- The Kartel previewed Civ5 at GDC
- A full G4TV interview with Dennis Shirk from GDC
- PolyCast reviewed the Civ5 announcement and first preview information
- Just Push Start gave us the Strategic View button in Civ5
- Command Prompt discussed the announcement of Civ5
- GameSpot live-blogged Sid Meier's keynote at GDC
- 16 new Civ5 screens were released from GDC
- The Escapist reviews Sid's keynote
- PC PowerPlay finished the week with a 6-page comprehensive preview of Civ5


On the forums most of the discussion surrounded information for Civilization V including the all important Info Centre (wiki), Leader discussion and Civ 5's plot. In other areas of the forums the Civ 4 demo game and the SMAC demo game saw the action starting to warm up, whilst the SMAC Game of the Month for March got started, so get into that save game and get your results in before the end of the month! Some healthy discussion transpired in the Writer's Guild and of course, the Off Topic remained largely off topic for the week. :)

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The Australian magazine PC PowerPlay edition #176, April 2010, has an exclusive 6 page preview of Sid Meier's Civilization V. Included is a number of already seen images, but tucked up nicely in all the material are two new images confirming two of the Leaders/Civilizations being speculated: France (Napoleon) & Montezuma (Aztec).





Summary of new points:

• Jon Shafer - lead design.
• Dennis Shirk - Producer.
• Dorian Newcomb - Lead artist for Civ 5.
• Ed Beach - lead AI programmer (help program the Hubble space telescope).
• Chris Hickman - lead animation.
• Clearly specified that only one civilian and one military unit per hex.
• Units on high ground inflict more damage.
• Battleships will have long-range bombardment (not specified).
• Troop transports are gone! "But what about troop transports? They're being done away with. Instead, units instantly transform into makeshift floating transports, in a similar way to Empire Earth. While crossing any body of water, a sizeable army is going to take up a lot of tiles, and be extremely vulnerable. Any serious seaborne invasion will involve careful planning and tight coordination of the navy and air force, which gels with history".
• War-like Civs will have units with more experience and battle readiness, but suffer the war effects on culture, science and economy.
• Weaker nations will be able to hold off powerful invaders through the use of choke-points, high ground and rivers.
• City-states won't try to win, but to survive.
• Singapore confirmed as a city-state.
• Multiple Civs can gain the benefits off a single city-state.
• No multilateral diplomacy.
• Romans (Caesar), India (Gandhi), English (Queen Elizabeth), Mongols (Genghis Khan), France (Napoleon), Japan (Oda) all confirmed as Civs (Leaders).
• When you conquer a city you can form a Puppet-State. "The addition of puppet states is going to mitigate the tedium. Whenever you conquer a new city, you can choose for it to become a puppet state. This means that you reap the benefits of its research, culture and gold but don't get a say in what it produces."
• The interface will not change to reflect time period or Civ.
• The map will be split into regions, and each regions terrain graphics will differ subtly. EG: Savannah plains will look slightly different to Steppe plains.
• Forests will range from tropical to wintry pines.
• Caesar speaks in Latin, Oda speaks in medieval Japanese.
• Because of the resources and time to make one leader, only one leader per Civ.
• Leaders have flavours instead of traits.
• Genghis Khan more likely to attack when provoked. Queen Elizabeth will try to capture ports and build a powerful navy. Gandhi is a peace-nik, but if the only way to win is to nuke your capital he will probably do it FTW.
• There are currently 25 leader flavours.
• The author hinted at a hands-on play preview coming soon.

The Escapist has posted a full liveblog of the points of Sid's keynote address at GDC 2010 which explains to us why everything we know about game design is wrong.

• 10:31 Game design is a pyschological experience.
• 10:32 The more railroady a game is or the more piratey the game is the better. [referring to Meier's games Railroad Tycoon and Pirates!]
• 10:34 If you play Civ you are an egomaniac.
• 10:35 I've never received a letter that said, 'Hey Sid, I love the game but I win too much'
• 10:37 If you give something to the player, they won't question it and they'll believe it was because of their clever strategy. If something bad happens to the player, the game is broken and something is wrong.
• 10:40 Unholy Alliance is a term that I want to trademark. I missed uncanny valley. The unholy alliance is an agreement between the player and the game designer. The player is the star of the game and keeping them feeling good about themselves is the designer's responsibility. In return, the player promises to suspend his disbelief.
• 10:46 It's more satisfying to win against a bad and cranky Ghengis Khan, rather than one that cries for mercy for the women and children. For some games, it's important to remove the moral dilemma and provide moral clarity.
• 10:47 How many of you remember the Cold War? Let's hear it for the cold war. (jokingly asks for applause)
• 10:49 Style is a part of the Unholy Alliance. A game that starts out happy and cartoony, and then all of these horrible things starts to happen, it pulls them out of the game.
• 10:52 Meier told a story about how one player said that the odds of the battles in Civ felt off to him. The odds said the player had a 3 to 1 chance to win and he lost, which felt wrong because 3 is such a bigger number than 1. "How could I lose? I've got a 3!" Player psychology can be counterintuitive to mathematics and probability.
• 10:58 Civilization started out as a real time strategy game, but the player was too much of an observer. Like SimCity. As soon as it was a turn-based game, the player was the star.
• 11:00 Random events need to be treated very carefully because the player can have the worst and most paranoid response. If something awful happens to him, it can make him feel like the game is broken and unfun.
• 11:04 Facebook game, Civilization Network: Meier thought it would be cool to be able to allow players to give gold to each other. But that never happened in playtesting.
• 11:05 Use the player's imagination. Save money by letting players imagine elements without creating assets. Example: Civ Rev popup tells us that the sultan of zanzibar wants to curry favor with us by giving a caracvan with dancing bears. In truth, there was no dancing bear animation, but the player didn't need to see it in order to get the image.
• 11:09 Players project onto the AI because of the competitive nature of the game.
• 11:10 AI should not act like another player. When you play another person, you expect tricky manuevers and clever play. But if the AI does that same behavior, the player believes that it's either dumb or cheating.
• 11:12 The more that the AI provides feedback and the other leaders react to what your doing [in Civ], the more the player feels that they are in a living breathing world.
• 11:14 Meier has seen people play Civ where they save before each battle and reload it if they don't win. "That's not the game that I designed." So it's important to limit the accessibility to loading and saving. In Pirates!, you can only load and save in ports and that is a great way to add it to the story of the game.
• 11:17 Cheats in civilization led directly to the concept of modding. "Cheating, not so sure, but modding is definitely a cool thing." (shows a Fall From Heaven screenshot)
• 11:19 Listen to the player. Don't take what they are saying literally. They will often offer solutions, but that feedback often doesn't take into account how it may break other parts of the game, etc. But it's still important to look at the motivation for what that feedback comes from.
• 11:21 Wrap it up for you guys with the idea of the Epic Journey. I think I want to trademark this as well. I come back again and again to interesting decisions. By giving the player as many choices as possible, ones that can have far-reaching impact, is a way to get them to feel that they are on an epic journey.
• 11:23 Shoutout to World of Warcraft as a game that effectively shows progress with leveling system. It's important for the player to feel that they've accomplished something in the last hour or half hour.
• 11:25 By doing all of these things, you can create an epic journey for your players.
• 11:26 And now, you know everything.

IGN posted 16 new screenshots of Civilization V from the floor of the Game Developers Conference (mind you, IGN reports it as being 21 new screens, but 5 of them are actually old). You can watch them all in their full 2800x1600 glory on their website.

Updated: Our own image gallery has been updated with these as well now.

Gamespot has just announced that they will be live-blogging the first-ever keynote Sid Meier will give today at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). The talk is scheduled to start at 10:30 PST, or a little over 30 minutes after the timestamp on this post. You can follow GameSpot's description of the keynote, titled "The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong)", as it unfolds from the Gamespot GDC site.

Update: Keynote is over, you can find Gamespot's report at the above link. Later tonight we'll be posting an overview of what various sources all over the web have started to report on this event.

On this week episode of IGN's PC gaming podcast Command Prompt, the hosts spend about thirty minutes talking about Civilization V. Podcast host Steve Butts is the author of the recent previews of Civ5 on IGN and visited Firaxis's offices last week. In the discussion the panel mostly rehashes the information from said previews, but it's interesting to hear these guys talking about the game in an informal manner. Some of the highlights:

• AI testrig: Firaxis is running a lot of games on a huge continent without humans but with all the normal game rules and features to monitor how the AI behaves.
• Flavours are numbers from 1 to for among a variety of characteristics: naval warfare, mobile warfare, science, expansion, city growth, commerce, etc. Each leader has a predetermined value in each of these categories, but at the start of the game this value can be adjusted up to 2 points in either direction.
• Example of flavour: Catherine of Russia has a very strong expansionist flavour, she will always try to build a large number of cities. If she's stuck on an island though, she will focus on navy instead, but 'go back' to being expansionist as soon as she discovers other landmasses.
• City States can give resources or techs are bonuses to allies. The benefits of allying with city states outweigh the benefits of conquering them. If city states like you enough, they essentially act like vassals: they'll go to war with the same civs you're at war with, etc.
• Each Iron resource right now lets you build 5 Swordsmen (but this is subject to balancing). Researching certain technologies can increase this number.
• At the end of one hallway at Firaxis's offices is a giant ugly (according to Steve Butts) artist's rendering of a forest landscape. This was meant to look like it came out of a video game, but didn't end up looking like that.

You can download episode 78 of Command Prompt from IGN (the Civ5 talk starts five and a half minutes in).

Just Push Start have posted a GDC report on Civilization V. The entire article is here but a quick summary of the couple of new details from the report are:

• Sidon, another city state.
• City States can loan you military units if allied.
• Mystery Button - "Strategic View" mentioned.
• Advisors and in-game help to assist new players to Civ.

Thanks to Alexander for reporting the article.

Not that you had to be told. The eighty-eighth episode of PolyCast, "Absolutely Have to Listen", features regular co-hosts Daniel "DanQ" Quick, Stephanie "Makahlua", Philip "TheMeInTeam" Bellew and Lisa "qnl" Bang with first-time guest co-hosts Carl "God-Emperor" Perkins and Timothy "Steiner-Davion" Seifert.

The summary of topics is as follows:

- 03m06s | General
Civilization V been publicly announced, scheduled for release this fall.
- 08m39s | Hexes
For the first time in the Civ series, one of its titles will be hex-based instead of square-based.
- 15m15s | Combat
What CivV's combat system is set to bring.
- 20m11s | Graphics
How much shiner can the graphics get?
- 24m45s | Engine
What's to be under CivV's hood.
- 30m38s | Civilizations
Confirmation and speculation on the civilizations and their leaders.
- 32m45s | Diplomacy
Stepping up the diplomacy system.
- 37m07s | Resources
Getting ready for resource limits.

- Intro/Outro | Miscellaneous
Have you heard the good word, responding to certain naysayers and a guest may have landed himself a rovering reporter position.

PolyCast is a bi-weekly audio production in an ongoing effort to give the Civ community an interactive voice on game strategy; sibling show ModCast focuses on Civ modding and RevCast focuses on Civilization: Revolution.

As always, enjoy.

Industry veteran Adam Sessler of G4TV interviewed Civilization V producer Dennis Shirk today at the Game Developers Conference (GDC). In it, Dennis says that the team has been working on Civ4 for two and a half years, ever since completing Beyond the Sword. As in previous interviews, Dennis also talks about the new graphics engine and how the switch to hexes affects the game and the new combat model (1UPT, ranged combat) implying in the process that, as in Civ4, mountains are not passable in Civ5. He explains that the Conquest victory now only requires enemy capitals to be conquered.

On the subject of city states, Shirk explains that they can ask for help defending not only against Barbarians as previously announced, but also against other major civs. Militaristic city states might even request players to attack other city states on their behalf. Finally, the game's producer addresses diplomacy, nothing that AIs will call you out when you mass units on their borders, expand too close to them or even when you explore too much right next to their borders (under the assumption that that means you're scouting him out for a possible attack).

Watch the full 6m21s video interview in SD below, or in HD (or SD) on the G4TV website.

Gaming site The Kartel has posted their preview of Civilization V based on a demo at GDC. Some of the more interesting points from the article:

• Research agreements will give players +15% science for 10 turns in exchange for a lump sum of gold to be paid by both players. Requires Writing.
• The dialogue of leaders speaking in their native tongue will be subbtitled.
• Washington when you declare war on him: "You have mistaken our love of peace for weakness, you will regret this."
• Unit upkeep costs will be higher than in Civ4.
• Units still have one strength rating, and receive terrain and promotion bonuses. The promotions are supposed to be more unique this time around, not just numerical upgrades.
• The handy battle-odds calculator is still here, but prettier.
• The game "still boasts the straightforward python xml scripting and customization".

Read the full article for more info.

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